Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Next, Fedorine bathed Poupchette in the tub. My darling clapped her hands and slapped the hot water, laughing and shouting, “Li’l fish! Li’l fish!” I took her in my arms, pressing her against me, as wet as she was, and kissed her soft, warm, naked skin, which made her laugh all the more. Behind us, at the window, her eyes raised to the distance and the white immensity of the valley, Amelia hummed her song. Poupchette started struggling, and I put her down. She scooped up a handful of suds, ran to her mother, and threw them at her. Amelia turned and looked at the child but kept right on humming. Her dead eyes settled for a few moments on Poupchette’s pretty smile, and then she stared out at the whiteness again.

I feel weak and useless. I’m trying to write things down, but who’s going to read them? Who? I’d do better to take Amelia and Poupchette in my arms, sling old Fedorine across my back, along with a bundle of provisions, clothes, and a few nice keepsakes, and go far away from here. Start over. Start all over again. In the old days, Nösel said this was mankind’s distinguishing feature: “Man is an animal that always starts over.” Nösel spoke in slow, cadenced, spellbinding sentences, his two hands flat on his wide desk, and after each pronouncement he left a great silence, which each of us could fill as he chose.

“Man is an animal that always starts over.” But what is it he’s always starting over? His mistakes, or the fragile scaffolding whose construction sometimes allows him to climb close to heaven? Nösel never said, maybe because he knew that life itself, the life we hadn’t completely entered yet, would eventually make us understand. Or maybe because he simply had no idea, or because he was untroubled by doubts, or because he’d fed on books for so long he’d forgotten the real world and those who dwelled in it.

Last night, Schloss brought me my hot wine and then sat down uninvited at my table. I knew he wanted to say something to me, but I had nothing to say to him. I was too absorbed in what Father Peiper had told me. Moreover, I wanted to drink my glass of hot wine and feel the fire reviving my body, and that was all. I wasn’t looking for anything else. My skull was teeming with unanswered questions and hundreds of little pieces of a big mechanism I had to invent so that I could put it together.

“I know you don’t like me too much, Brodeck,” Schloss suddenly murmured. I’d forgotten he was there. “But I’m not the worst, you know.”

The innkeeper seemed even bigger and sweatier than usual. He was twisting his fingers and gnawing his plump, cracked lips. “I did what I was told, that’s all. I don’t want any trouble, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking … Look, I’m only a simple man. I’m not as intelligent as you are, but whatever you might think, I’m not vicious, either. I’m not the worst. It’s true that I served drinks to the Fratergekeime while they occupied the village. But what did you want me to do? Serving drinks is my business. I wasn’t about to get myself killed for refusing to serve a glass of beer. I’ve always regretted what happened to you, Brodeck, I swear, and I had nothing to do with it, you can believe me … and as for what they did to your wife … My God …”

I nearly spat in Schloss’s face when he referred to Amelia, but what he said after that stopped me.

“I loved my wife, too, you know. Maybe that seems strange to you, because as you may remember she wasn’t very beautiful, but now she’s not here I feel like I’m living only half a life. Nothing’s important anymore. If Gerthe had been here during the war, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have served the Fratergekeime . I felt strong in her presence … Maybe I would’ve spat in their faces. Maybe I would’ve grabbed the big knife I cut onions with and stuck it in their bellies. And then, if she’d been here, maybe … maybe the Murmelnër would still be alive, maybe I would’ve got myself killed before I let anything happen to him under my roof…”

I felt my stomach churning. A touch of nausea. The hot wine didn’t agree with me. It wasn’t warming my insides, it was nibbling at them, like a little animal in my stomach, suddenly trying to get a bite of everything within reach. I looked at Schloss as though I’d never seen him before. It was as if a bank of fog had dissolved, bit by bit, and behind it an unsuspected, oddly harmonious landscape was visible. At the same time, I wondered whether Schloss might be trying to fool me. It’s always easy to regret what happened after it happens. Regret costs nothing. It allows you to wash your hands and your memory, to cleanse them thoroughly and make them pure and white. But all the same, what Peiper told me about confession and the sewer — that was really something! All the men of the village must have passed through his confessional eventually, and Schloss probably wasn’t the last of them. And then I remembered too clearly his attitude and his face on the night of the Ereigniës— he hadn’t exactly hung back. He didn’t seem then to disapprove of the crime committed within his walls, whatever he might say to me now. He hadn’t looked like a man seized by the terror and horror of what had just taken place.

I wasn’t sure what to think. I’m still not sure what to think. That’s evidence of what is, without a doubt, the camp’s great victory over its prisoners; that is, over those it didn’t kill. The others, the ones who came out of it alive, like me — all of us still carry a part of it, deep down inside, like a stain. We can never again meet the eyes of other people without wondering whether they harbor the desire to hunt us down, to torture us, to kill us. We’ve become perpetual prey creatures which, whatever they do, will always look upon the dawning day as the start of a long ordeal of survival and upon nightfall with an odd feeling of relief. Disappointment and disquiet ferment in us. I think we’ve become, and will remain until the day we die, the memory of humanity destroyed. We’re wounds that will never heal.

“Maybe you don’t know we had a baby before the war,” Schloss went on. “It was when you were far away, studying at the University, and maybe Fedorine didn’t write you about it. The baby didn’t live long — four days and four nights. It was a boy. The midwife, old Paula Beckenart, may she rest in peace, said he looked just like a little Schloss. She helped him out of Gerthe’s belly on the seventh of April. Outside the birds were chirping and the larch buds were becoming as big as plums. The first time Paula placed him in my arms, I thought I wouldn’t know how to hold him. I was afraid I’d squeeze him too tight or smother him with my big hands, and I was also afraid of dropping him. I imagined him breaking apart like crystal. Gerthe laughed at me, and the little one hollered and waved his arms and legs. But as soon as he found Gerthe’s breast, he started sucking her milk and didn’t stop, as if he wanted to empty her completely. I’d had Hans Douda make a cradle from the trunk of a walnut tree. It was a fine piece of wood he was saving to make a wardrobe, but I put the gold coins on his workbench and the deal was done.”

Schloss had big, dirty fingernails. As he told me about his child, he made an effort to clean them — without even looking at them — but they stayed black.

“He really occupied that cradle. He beat the bottom of it with his little feet as hard as he could. He made a pretty noise, like the sound of ax blows coming from deep in the forest. Gerthe wanted to call him Stephan, and I preferred Reichart. To tell the truth, we’d been caught off guard; we’d both persuaded ourselves that the baby had to be a girl. We had a name ready for the little girl who never came: Lisebeth, because Lise was my mother’s name, and Gerthe’s mother was Bethsie. But when the little man made his appearance and the midwife held him up in the air, we had no name for him. Throughout the four days of his short life, Gerthe and I squabbled constantly over his name, laughing the whole time. I’d say, ‘Reichart’; she’d reply, ‘Stephan.’ It became a game, a game that ended in hugs and kisses. And so when the child died, he didn’t have a name. He died nameless, and I’ve blamed myself for that ever since, as though it was part of what killed him.”