Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Schloss fell silent and bowed his head. He stopped moving entirely, as though he’d ceased to breathe. My mouth tasted like cinnamon and cloves, and the gnawing in my stomach hadn’t let up.

“Sometimes I dream about him at night. He reaches out to me with his tiny hands, and then he leaves, he goes away, like there’s some force carrying him off, and there’s no name I can call out, there’s no name I can say to try and hold him back.”

Schloss had lifted his head and spoken those last words with his eyes fixed on mine. His eyes were big, overflowing; they took up too much space; I felt as though they were crowding me out. He was surely waiting for me to say something, but what? I knew well that ghosts can cling stubbornly to life and that sometimes they’re more present than the living.

“One morning I woke up and Gerthe wasn’t in bed anymore. I hadn’t heard anything. She was kneeling beside the cradle and not moving. I called her. She didn’t reply. She didn’t even turn her head toward me. I got up and went over to her, crooning the names, Stephan, Reichart… Gerthe leaped to her feet and pounced on me like an animal gone crazy, trying to hit me, tearing at my mouth, scratching my cheeks. I looked into the cradle and saw the baby’s face. His eyes were closed, and his skin was the color of clay.”

I don’t know how long I stayed with Schloss after he told me that. I also can’t recall whether he kept talking about his child or just sat there in silence. The fire in the hearth died down. He didn’t add more wood. The flames went out, and then the few embers. It got cold. At some point, I stood up and Schloss accompanied me to the door. He clasped my hand at length, and then he thanked me. Twice. For what?

On the way back, my head was buzzing, and I had the feeling that my temples were banging together like cymbals. I found myself saying Poupchette’s name aloud, again and again: “Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette …” It was like throwing little stones into the air, pebbles of sound that would bring me home quickly. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Schloss’s dead baby, about all the things he’d told me, about the few hours the child had spent in our world. Human life is so strange. Once you’ve plunged into it, you often wonder what you’re doing here. Maybe that’s why some, a little cleverer than the others, content themselves with opening the door a crack and taking a look around, and when they see what’s inside, they want nothing more than to close that door as fast as possible.

Maybe they’re right.

—

want to go back to the first day, or rather to the first evening: the evening when the Anderer appeared in our village. I’ve reported his meeting with the oldest Dörfer child, but I haven’t described his arrival at the inn a few minutes later. My account is based on the statements I took from three different eyewitnesses: Schloss himself; Menigue Wirfrau, the baker, who’d gone to the inn to drink a glass of wine; and Doris Klattermeier, a young girl with pink skin and hay-colored hair, who was passing in the street when the Anderer arrived. There were other witness, both in the inn and outside, but the three named above related the events in almost exactly the same way, except for one or two small details, and I thought it best to rely on them.

The Anderer had dismounted to speak to the Dörfer boy and he walked the rest of the way to the inn, leading his horse by the reins while the donkey followed a few paces behind. He tethered the animals to the ring outside; then, instead of opening the door and entering the inn like everyone else, he knocked three times and waited. This was such an unusual thing to do that he had to stand there for a long time. “I thought it was a prankster,” Schloss told me. “Or some kid!” In short, nothing happened. The Anderer waited. No one opened the door for him, nor did he open it for himself. Some people, among them young Doris, had already gathered to observe the phenomenon: the horse, the ass, the baggage, and the oddly attired fellow standing outside the door of the inn with a smile on his round, powdered face. After a few minutes, he knocked again, but this time the three blows were harder and sharper. Schloss said, “At that point, I figured something out of the ordinary was going on, and I went to see.”

So Schloss opened the door and found himself face-to-face with the Anderer . “I nearly choked! Where did this guy come from, I thought, the circus or a fairy tale?” But the Anderer didn’t give him time to recover. He lifted his funny hat, revealing his very round, very bald pate, made a supple, elegant gesture of salutation, and said, “Greetings, kind sir. My friends”—here he indicated the horse and the donkey—“and I have come a great distance and find ourselves quite exhausted. Would you be kind enough to offer us the hospitality of your establishment? In exchange for our payment, of course.”

Schloss is convinced that the Anderer said, “Greetings, Mr. Schloss,” but young Doris and Wirfrau both swear that this was not the case. Schloss was probably so stunned by the strange apparition and its request that he lost his bearings for a few moments. He said, “I didn’t know how to answer him at first. It had been so many years since we’d had any visitors, except for the ones you know about! And besides, the words he used… He pronounced them in Deeperschaft , not in dialect, and my ear wasn’t used to hearing that.”

Menigue Wirfrau told me that Schloss hesitated for a few moments, looking at the Anderer and scratching his head, before he replied. As for the Anderer , it seems he stood motionless, smiling as if all this were perfectly normal and time — which was falling drop by drop into a narrow pipe — was of no importance. Doris Klattermeier remembered that his donkey and his horse didn’t move, either. She shivered a little when she told me that, and then she made the sign of the cross, twice. For most of the people in our village, God is a distant being composed of books and incense; the Devil, on the other hand, is a neighbor whom many of them believe they’ve seen once or twice.

At last, Schloss uttered a few words. “He asked the stranger how many nights he planned to stay,” according to Wirfrau. Wirfrau was kneading when I went to see him, naked from the waist up, his chest and the rims of his eyes covered with flour. He seized the big wad of dough with both hands, lifted it, turned it, flung it into the kneading trough, and repeated the process. He spoke without looking at me. I’d found a place to sit between two sacks and the woodpile. The oven had been humming for a good while, and the little room was hot with the smell of burning wood. Wirfrau went on: “For a while, the fellow seemed to be thinking the question over, smiling the whole time. He looked at the ass and the horse, and it was like he was asking them their opinion. Then he answered in his funny voice, ‘I should think that our sojourn will be rather extended.’ I’m sure Schloss didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t want to look like a dope, either. So he shook his head several times, and then he invited the stranger to step inside.”

Two hours later, the Anderer was lodged in the room, which Schloss had dusted in haste. The Anderer ’s bags and trunks had been brought upstairs and his horse and donkey given beds of fresh straw in the stable just across from the inn, the property of one Solzner, an old man about as lovable as a whack from a club. At the stranger’s request, a basin of fresh, pure water and a bucket of oats were placed close to the animals. He went over to make sure they were well accommodated, taking the opportunity to brush their flanks with a handful of hay and whisper in their ears some words no one heard. Then he handed old Solzner three gold pieces, the equivalent of several months’ food and shelter for the beasts, bade them farewell, wished them a good night, and left the stable.