Philippe Claudel: Brodeck

The mails have been quite unreliable since the war, and I think it will be a long time before the postal service functions smoothly again. I hardly ever receive money anymore. I have the impression that I’ve been forgotten, or that they think I’m dead, or indeed that they no longer need me.

Alfred Wurtzwiller, the postmaster, makes the trip to the city of S. and back on foot once every fifteen days — he’s the only one who can go, because he alone has the Genähmigung , the “authorization”—and sometimes he gives me to understand that he’s brought back a money order for me and doles out a few banknotes. I ask him for explanations. He makes big gestures I can’t interpret. Sounds ground up like meat come out of his mouth, which is creased by a large harelip, and I can’t understand the sounds, either. He bashes a receipt three times with a big rubber stamp; I take up the crumpled, illegible document and the little money that comes with it. That’s what we live on.

“We’re not asking you for a novel.” The speaker was Rudi Gott, the blacksmith. Despite his ugliness — long ago, a horse’s hoof crushed his nose and shattered his left cheekbone — he’s married to a beautiful woman called Gerde who’s forever posing outside the forge, as if in eternal expectation of the painter destined to do her portrait. “You’ll just tell what happened, that’s all. The way you do in your reports.” Gott was clutching a big hammer in his right hand. His naked shoulders burst out of his leather apron. He was standing near the hearth. The fire burned his face, and the steel head of the tool he held gleamed like a wellpeened scythe blade.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell the story — that is, I’ll try. I promise you I’m going to try. I’ll write in the first person, I’ll say ‘I’ the way I do in my reports, because I don’t know how to tell a story any other way, but I warn you, that’s going to mean everyone. Everyone, you understand me? I’ll say ‘I’ but it’ll be like saying the whole village and all the hamlets around it, in other words, all of us. All right?”

There was a hubbub, a noise like a draft animal relaxing in its harness and grunting a little, and then they said, “Agreed, do it like that, but be careful. Don’t change anything. You must tell the whole story. You must really say everything, so that the authority who reads the Report will understand and forgive.”

I don’t know who’ll read it, I thought. Maybe he’ll understand, but forgiveness is another matter entirely. I didn’t dare advance this point of view openly, but I thought it in the deepest part of myself. When I said yes, a sound filled the inn, the sound of relief, and fists were unclenched. Hands were removed from pockets. It was as though a crowd of statues had become men again. As for me, I was breathing very hard. I had come within inches of something. I preferred not to know what.

This was at the beginning of last fall. The war had been over for a year. Mauve autumn crocuses were blooming on the slopes, and often in the morning, on the granite crests of the Prinzhornï, which border our valley to the east, the first snows left a fresh, dazzling white powder, soon to melt away in the hours of full sunlight. It was just three months, almost to the day, since the Anderer arrived in our village, with his big trunks, his embroidered clothes, his mystery, his bay horse, and his donkey. “His name is Mister Socrates,” he said, pointing to the donkey, “and this is Miss Julie. Please say hello, Miss Julie.” And the pretty mare bowed her head twice, whereupon the three women who were present stepped back and crossed themselves. I can still hear his small voice when he introduced his beasts to us as though they were humans, and we were all dumbfounded.

Schloss brought out glasses, goblets, bowls, cups, and wine for everybody. I was required to drink, too. As if to seal a vow. I thought with terror about the Anderer ’s face, about the room he lived in, a room I was somewhat familiar with, having entered it at his invitation three times to exchange a few mysterious words while drinking some strange black tea, the likes of which I had never drunk before. He had several books with obscure titles, some of them in languages which aren’t written the way ours is; they must sound like sliding scree and clinking coins. Some of the books had tooled, gilt bindings, while others looked like piles of bound rags. There was also a china tea service, which he kept in a studded leather case, a chess set made of bone and ebony, a cane with a cut-crystal pommel, and a quantity of other things stored in his trunks. He always had a big smile on his face, a smile that often substituted for words, which he tended to use sparingly. He had beautiful jade green eyes, very round and slightly bulging, which made his look even more penetrating. He spoke very little. Most of all, he listened.

I thought about what those men had just done. I had known them all for years. They weren’t monsters; they were peasants, craftsmen, farmworkers, foresters, minor government officials; in short, men like you and me. I put down my glass. I took the butter Dieter Schloss handed me, a thick slab wrapped in crystal paper that made a sound like turtledove’s wings. I left the inn and ran all the way home.

Never in my life have I run so fast.

Never.

—

hen I got back to the house, Poupchette had fallen asleep and Fedorine was dozing beside the child’s bed, her mouth slightly open, exposing her three remaining teeth. Amelia had stopped humming. She raised her eyes to me and smiled. I couldn’t say anything to her. I quickly climbed the stairs to our room and dove into the sheets as one dives into oblivion. I seemed to fall for a long time.

That night I slept only a little, and very badly. I kept circling and circling around the Kazerskwir . The Kazerskwir— that was because of the war: I spent nearly two long years far from our village. I was taken away like thousands of other people because we had names, faces, or beliefs different from those of others. I was confined in a distant place from which all humanity had vanished, and where there remained only conscienceless beasts which had taken on the appearance of men.

Those were two years of total darkness. I feel that time as a void in my life, very black and very deep, and therefore I call it the Kazerskwir , the crater. Often, at night, I still venture out onto its rim.

Old Fedorine seldom leaves the kitchen. It’s her own private realm. She spends the nighttime hours in her chair. She doesn’t sleep. She declares that she’s past the age of sleeping. I’ve never known exactly how old she is. She herself says she doesn’t remember, and in any case, she says, not knowing didn’t prevent her from being born and won’t prevent her from dying. She also says she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t want death to take her by surprise; when it comes, she wants to look it in the face. She closes her eyes and hums a tune, she mends stories and memories, she weaves tapestries of threadbare dreams, with her hands resting on her knees in front of her, and in her hands, her dry hands, marked with knotty veins and creases straight as knife blades, you can read her life.

I’ve described to Fedorine the years I spent far from our world. When I returned, it was she who took care of me; Amelia was still too weak. Fedorine looked after me the way she’d done when I was little. All the movements came back to her. She fed my broken mouth with a spoon, bandaged my wounds, slowly but surely put the flesh back on my bare bones, watched over me when my fever mounted too high, when I shivered as though plunged into a trough of ice and raved in delirium. Weeks passed like that. She never asked me anything. She waited for the words to come out of their own accord. And then she listened for a long time.