Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Viktor turns up at every party and every wedding. He’s the only person in the village who knows music, and also just about the only one in possession of a working musical instrument. I believe there’s a piano in the back room of Schloss’s inn, the one where the Erweckens’Bruderschaf meets, and there may be some brass instruments in there as well. Diodemus affirmed that there were, having seen them, he said, one day when the door wasn’t completely closed, and when I teased him about being so well informed, declaring that he must know the room very well and suggesting that maybe he was, in fact, a member of the brotherhood, his face darkened and he told me to shut up. Viktor’s accordion and his voice are also a part of our local memory. That day, he made the women weep and the men’s eyes turn red with his rendition of “Johanni’s Complaint,” a song about love and death whose origins are lost in the mists of time. It tells the story of a young girl who loves but isn’t loved in return, and who, faced with the prospect of seeing the ruler of her heart in another woman’s arms, prefers to step into the Staubi at twilight on a winter day and lie down forever in the cold, moving water.

When de abend gekomm Johanni schlafft en de wasser

Als besser sein en de todt dass alein immer verden

De hertz is a schotke freige who nieman geker

Und ubche madchen kann genug de kusse kaltenen

Sometimes Amelia comes with us. I take her arm. I lead her. She lets herself be guided, and her eyes gaze at things only she can see. On the day of the conversation I want to record, she was sitting on my left, humming her song and moving her head back and forth in a gentle rhythm. On my right, Poupchette was chewing a sausage I’d just bought for her. We leaned against the biggest of the columns supporting the entrance to the covered part of the market. In front of us, a few meters away, old Roswilda Klugenghal, who’s half madwoman and half vagrant, was digging around in some garbage, looking for vegetables and offal. She found a twisted carrot, held it up for inspection, and talked to it as if it were an old acquaintance. At that moment, the voices coming from the other side of the column became audible, voices that I recognized at once.

They belonged to four men: Emil Dorcha, a forester; Ludwig Pfimling, a stableboy; Bern Vogel, a tinsmith; and Caspar Hausorn, one of the mayor’s clerks. Four men already quite overheated, as they’d been drinking since dawn and the market’s festive atmosphere had done nothing to lower their temperatures. They spoke loudly, sometimes stumbling over words, but the tone of their conversation was very clear, and I quickly realized who its subject was.

“Did you see him? Like a weasel, he is, always sniffing around at everything,” Dorcha declared.

“That fellow’s nothing but rein schlecht , ‘pure bad,’” Vogel added. “Mark my words — bad and depraved.”

“He doesn’t hurt anybody,” Pfimling pointed out. “He takes walks, he looks around, he smiles all the time.”

“Outside smiles hide inside wiles — you forget the proverb. Besides, you’re so stupid and nearsighted, you wouldn’t see anything wrong with Lucifer himself!”

The speaker was Hausorn, and he’d spat out his words as though they were little pebbles. He went on in a milder tone: “He must have come here for some purpose. Some purpose that isn’t very clear and doesn’t bode well for us.”

“What do you think it is?” Vogel asked him.

“Don’t know yet. I’m racking my brains. I don’t know what it is, but a lad like him is bound to have something in mind.”

“He writes everything in his notebook,” Dorcha observed. “Didn’t you all see him a little while ago, sitting in front of Wuzten’s lambs?”

“Of course we saw him. He stayed there for minutes and minutes, writing stuff down and looking at the lambs the whole time.”

“He wasn’t writing,” Pfimling submitted. “He was drawing. I saw him, and I know you say I don’t see anything, but I saw him drawing. And he was so absorbed in what he was doing that you could’ve eaten off of the top of his head and he wouldn’t have felt anything. I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.”

“Drawing lambs?” Dorcha asked, apparently addressing Hausorn. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How should I know? You think I’ve got all the answers?”

The conversation came to a halt. I imagined it was over for good, not to be taken up again, but I was mistaken. After a while, a voice resumed speaking, but it had become very low and very serious, and I couldn’t identify it. “There aren’t many lambs around here, not among us, I mean … Maybe all that stuff he draws is a bunch of symbols, like in the church Bible, and it’s a way for him to say who’s who and who’s done what and how recently, so he can report it when he goes back where he came from …”

I felt the cold running over my back and rasping my spine. I didn’t like the voice or what it had said, even if the exact meaning of his words remained obscure.

“But then, if he’s using that notebook for what you’re talking about, it mustn’t ever leave the village!”

It was Dorcha who made that last remark; his was a voice I recognized.

“Maybe you’re right,” the other voice said. I still couldn’t make out whose it was. “Maybe that notebook should never go anywhere. Or maybe the person it belongs to is the one who can’t leave, not ever …”

After that, nothing. I waited. I didn’t dare move. Nevertheless, after a few moments, I leaned to one side and sneaked a look around the column. No one was there. The four had left without my hearing them. They’d disappeared into the air, like the veils of fog the southern breeze snatches off our mountain crests on April mornings. I even wondered whether I’d dreamed the things I’d heard. Poupchette pulled my sleeve. “Home, Daddy? Home?”

Her little lips were shiny with sausage grease, and her pretty eyes gleamed merrily. I gave her a big kiss on the forehead and put her on my shoulders. Her hands held on to my hair and her feet beat against my chest. “Giddyap, Daddy! Giddyap!” I took Amelia’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t resist. I hugged her against me, I caressed her beautiful face, I planted a kiss on her cheek, and the three of us returned home like that, while my head still resounded with the voices of the faceless men and the threats they had made, like seeds that asked nothing but time to grow.

Gustav Dörfer eventually passed out on the table in the café, less from drink than from weariness, no doubt: weariness of body, or weariness of life. His kid and I had long since stopped talking about the Anderer and changed the subject. It turned out, to my surprise, that the boy had a passion for birds, and he insisted on questioning me about all the species I knew and described in my reports to the administration. And so we talked about the thrushes and their close relatives the fieldfares, and about other birds as well: the March grays, which as their name indicates return to us around the beginning of spring; the crossbills, which abound in the pine forests; the wrens, the titmice, the blackbirds, the ptarmigans, the capercaillies, the mountain pheasants; the blue soldiers, whose unusual name comes from the color of their breast feathers and their propensity for fighting; the crows and ravens; the bullfinches, the eagles, and the owls.

Inside that head of his, which was covered with lumps from paternal beatings, the child — he was about twelve — had a brain filled with knowledge, and his face lit up when he talked about birds. By contrast, his pupils became dull and lusterless again when he turned toward his father and remembered his presence, which our conversation had made the kid forget for a while. Hans paused and contemplated his parent, who was snoring open-mouthed, with one side of his face flattened against the old wood of the tabletop, his cap askew, and white saliva oozing between his lips.