Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

“When I see a dead bird,” Hans Dörfer said to me, “and I pick it up in my hand, tears come into my eyes. I can’t make them not come. Nothing can justify the death of a bird. But if my father croaked all of a sudden, right here, right next to me, I swear I’d dance around the table and buy you a drink. I swear!”

—

’m in our kitchen. I’ve just put the marten fur cap on my head. I’m also wearing the slippers, and I’ve slipped on the gloves.

An odd sensation of warmth comes over me, bringing with it a comfortable drowsiness, like the state you enter as you drink a glass or two of hot wine after a long walk on a late-autumn afternoon. I feel good and, of course, I’m thinking about the Anderer . I’m not claiming that wearing clothes meant for him, items that he himself ordered (how did he manage to meet Stern, who comes to the village so rarely? and how did he know that Stern could sew animal skins?), has made me capable of seeing into his thoughts and penetrating the little world of his mind, but having said that, I still feel that I’m approaching him somehow, that somehow I’m back in his presence, and that maybe he’ll give me a sign or a look which will help me learn a little more.

I must confess to being totally at a loss. I’ve been charged with a mission that far exceeds my capabilities and my intelligence. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a police officer. I’m not a storyteller. The present account, if anyone ever reads it, will prove I’m not: I keep going backward and forward, jumping over time like a hurdle, getting lost on tangents, and maybe even, without wishing to, concealing what’s essential.

When I read the pages of my account thus far, I see that I move around in words like tracked game on the run, sprinting, zigzagging, trying to throw off the dogs and hunters in hot pursuit. This jumble contains everything. I’m emptying my life into it. Writing’s a relief to both my heart and my stomach.

With the Report that the others have ordered me to write up, things are different. My tone is neutral and impersonal. I transcribe conversations almost verbatim. I pare everything down. A few days ago, Orschwir informed me that I have to present myself in the village hall next Friday at sunset. “Come see us Friday, Brodeck,” he said. “You can give us a reading …”

He came in person to my house to tell me that. He placed his great bulk on the chair that Fedorine had pulled up for him without thanking her or even greeting her, took off his cap of otter fur, and refused the offered glass. “Don’t have time, thanks. I’ve got work to do. We have thirty pigs to slaughter this morning, and if I’m not there, my workers are liable to make a mess of them …”

We heard steps above our heads. The stepper was Poupchette, who was scurrying around up there like a little mouse. Then there were other footfalls, slower and heavier, and a distant voice, Amelia’s voice, humming her song. Orschwir cocked his head back for a moment, and then he looked at me as if he were about to say something, but he changed his mind. He took out his tobacco pouch and rolled himself a cigarette. A great silence, hard as stone, settled over us. Having announced that he was needed at his farm, Orschwir, for no apparent reason, chose to linger. He took two or three puffs on his cigarette, and an aroma of honey and old alcohol permeated the air in the kitchen. Orschwir doesn’t smoke just anything. He smokes a rich man’s tobacco, very blond and finely cut, which he orders from far away.

He gave the ceiling another look and then once again turned his appalling face to me. No more sounds could be heard, not the footsteps, not Amelia’s voice. Fedorine was ignoring us. She’d finished grating some potatoes and was rolling them in her hands, shaping them into little pancakes called Kartfolknudle; later she’d fry them in boiling oil and strew them with poppy seeds before serving them to us.

Orschwir cleared his throat. “Not too lonely?”

I shook my head.

He seemed to reflect, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and began wheezing and choking. His skin turned as red as the wild cherries that ripen in June, and tears filled his eyes. At length the coughing subsided.

“You need anything?”

“Nothing.”

Orschwir rubbed his two cheeks with one big hand, as if he were shaving them. I wondered what he could possibly be trying to say to me.

“All right, then, I’ll be leaving.”

He pronounced these words hesitantly. I looked him in the eyes, hoping to see what was behind them, but he quickly cast them down.

I heard myself responding to him, but my words sounded so strange and threatening that they hardly seemed to come from me: “It’s really convenient for you to act as if they don’t exist, isn’t it? As if they’re not here, neither one of them. That suits you just fine, right?”

The effect of this sally was that Orschwir fell completely silent. I saw him trying to ponder what I’d just said, and I could tell that he was turning my words over and over in his mind, taking them apart and putting them back together, but his efforts apparently came to naught, for he suddenly leapt from his chair, grabbed his cap, jammed it down over his skull, and left the house. The door closing behind him made its little noise, a high meow. And all at once, thanks to that simple little sound, I was on the other side of that door and it was two years ago, the day I came home.

From the moment I entered the village, all the people I passed stared at me goggle-eyed and opened their mouths wide without producing a single word. Some of them went running to their houses to spread the news of my return, and all of them understood that I must be left alone, that they mustn’t ask me any questions yet, that all I wanted to do was to stand before the door of my house, put my hand on the knob, and push the door open, to hear its little noise, to enter my home once more, to find there the woman I loved, who had never left my thoughts, to take her in my arms, to squeeze her so tight it hurt, and to press my lips to hers again at last.

Ah, the vision of those last few meters, culminating in that embrace, how often had I gazed upon it in my dreams! That day, when I opened the door, my door, the door to my house, my body was trembling and my heart was pounding as though about to burst through my chest. I couldn’t catch my breath, and I even thought for a moment that I was going to die there, that I was going to step over the threshold and die from too much happiness. But suddenly the face of the Zeilenesseniss appeared to me, and my happiness stiffened and froze. It was a little as though someone had shoved a big handful of snow between my shirt and my naked skin. But why, at that precise moment, did that woman’s face come floating up out of limbo and dancing before my eyes?

In the last weeks of the war, the camp became an even stranger place than it had been before. Unceasing, contradictory rumors shook it like windy blasts, alternately hot and cold. Some recent arrivals murmured that the conflict was nearing its end and that we, who walked bowed down and looked like corpses, were on the winning side. This news restored to our eyes, the eyes of the living dead we had become, a gleam long since extinguished, but the fragile light couldn’t last. The guards let their confusion show for a few seconds before they quickly and brutally dispelled it: apparently determined to affirm that they were still the masters, they attacked the first one of us they got their hands on, kicking him, beating him with truncheons and rifle butts, and driving him down into the mud as though trying to make him disappear. Nevertheless, their nervousness and the constantly worried expressions on their faces led us to conclude that something big really was happening.