Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Amelia had strayed away from the cabin, walked to the edge of the pasture, and stopped on a sort of promontory, beyond which the slope splits and shatters into broken rocks. Her face was turned toward the vast landscape of plains spreading out beyond the border, an indistinct expanse that seemed to doze under scraps of fog. Amelia was holding her arms away from her body, a little as though she were preparing to take flight, and her slender silhouette stood out against the distant, pale, blue-tinted background with a grace that was almost inhuman. Poupchette ran to her mother and flung herself against her thighs, trying in vain to get her short arms around them.

Amelia hadn’t moved. The wind had undone her hair, which streamed in the wind like a cold brown flame. I approached her with slow steps. The wind carried her perfume to me, as well as snatches of her song, which she’d started humming again. Poupchette jumped up and managed to grab one of her arms. She pressed the flowers into her mother’s hand. Amelia made no effort to hold on to the bouquet; her fingers remained open, and one by one the flowers blew away. Poupchette dashed about right and left, trying to catch them, while I kept moving very slowly toward Amelia. Her body, outlined against the sky, seemed to be suspended in it.

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Zu weit fortgegangen

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Nacht um Nacht ohn Eure Lippen

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Tag um Tag ohn Euch zu erblicken

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Träumt Ihr was ich träume

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Ihr mit mir immerdar zusammen

Handsome Prince so dear

Gone too far away

Handsome Prince so dear

Night after night without your lips

Handsome Prince so dear

Day after day without seeing you

Handsome Prince so dear

Do you dream of what I dream of

Handsome Prince so dear

You and me, together forever

Amelia was dancing in my arms. We were with other couples under the bare trees of January, drunk on youth in the golden, misty light of the streetlamps in the park, gliding along to the music of the little orchestra playing under the pavilion. The musicians, bundled up in fur clothing, looked like strange animals. It was the instant before the first kiss, preceded and brought on by a few minutes of vertigo. It was in another time. It was before the chaos. That song was playing, the song of the first kiss, a song in the old language that had passed across the centuries as a traveler crosses frontiers. Called in dialect “Schon ofza prinzer, Gehtes so muchte lan,” it was a love song blended with bitter words, a song of legend, the song of an evening and a lifetime, and now it’s the dreadful refrain inside which Amelia has shut herself up as inside a prison, where she lives without really existing.

I held her tight against me. I kissed her hair, the nape of her neck. I told her in her ear that I loved her, that I would always love her, that I was there for her, close to her, all around her. I took her face in my hands, I turned it toward me, and then, while tears ran down her cheeks, I saw in her eyes something like the smile of a person far, far away.

—

s we made our way back home, we were caught up in the excitement of that particular day, the tenth of June. On the square, men and women were starting to form groups and press against one another, becoming a crowd.

For a long time now, I’ve fled crowds. I avoid them. I know that everything — or almost — has come from them. I mean the bad things, the war and all the Kazerskwirs it opened up in the brains of so many. I’ve seen how men act when they know they’re not alone, when they know they can melt into a crowd and be absorbed into a mass that encompasses and transcends them, a mass comprising thousands of faces fashioned like theirs. One can always tell himself that the fault lies with whoever trains them, exhorts them, makes them dance like a slowworm around a stick, and that crowds are unconscious of their acts, of their future, and of their course. This is all false. The truth is that the crowd itself is a monster. It begets itself, an enormous body composed of thousands of other conscious bodies. Furthermore, I know that there are no happy crowds. There are no peaceful crowds, either. Even when there’s laughter, smiles, music, choruses, behind all that there’s blood: vexed, overheated, inflamed blood, stirred and maddened in its own vortex.

Signs of what was to come were already visible a long time ago, when I was in the Capital, where I had been sent to complete my studies. My going there was Limmat’s idea. He spoke of it to the mayor at the time, Sibelius Craspach, as well as to Father Peiper. All three declared that the village needed at least one of its young people to advance his education beyond the rest, to go out and see a bit of the world before returning home to become a schoolmaster, a health practitioner, or perhaps the successor to Lawyer Knopf, whose powers were beginning to fail; his legal documents and his counsels had astounded more than one recent client. And so the three elders had chosen me.

In a way, you could say it was the village that sent me to the Capital. Limmat, Craspach, and Father Peiper may have had the idea, but just about everybody pitched in and supported me. At the end of every month, Zungfrost would take up a collection, going from door to door, ringing a little bell, and repeating the same words: “Fu Brodeck’s Erfosch! Fu Brodeck’s Erfosch!”— “For Brodeck’s studies! For Brodeck’s studies!” Everyone gave according to his means and inclination. The donation might be a few gold pieces, but it could also be a woolen overcoat, a cap, a handkerchief, a jar of preserves, a little bag of lentils, or some provisions for Fedorine, because as long as I was in the Capital, I couldn’t do any work to help her. So I’d receive little money orders along with some strange parcels, which my landlady, Fra Haiternitz, panting from having climbed the six flights of stairs to my room, would hand me with a suspicious air, all the while chewing a wad of black tobacco, which stained her lips and turned her breath into fumes from Hell.

In the beginning, the Capital gave me a headache. I’d never in my life heard so many noises. The streets seemed like furious mountain torrents, ferrying along an intermingled throng of people and vehicles amid a racket that made me dizzy and often drove me to flatten myself against a wall to avoid being swept away by the uninterrupted flood. I lived in a room whose rusty window wouldn’t open more than an inch. There was hardly space for anything except my straw mattress, which I folded up every morning. A board placed atop the folded mattress served as my desk. Apart from some luminous days in high summer or the dead of winter, the city was constantly imprisoned under a fog of coal smoke, which issued from the chimneys in lazy clouds that wrapped themselves around one another and then hung in the air for days and nights, deflecting the sun well beyond us. My first days of city life seemed unbearable. I never stopped thinking about our village, nestled in the valley’s conifer forest as in a lap. I even remember crying as I lay in bed.

The University was a large baroque building which, three centuries earlier, had been the palace of a Magyar prince. Looted and wrecked in the revolutionary period, it was then sold to a prosperous grain merchant, who converted it into a warehouse. In 1831, when the great cholera epidemic raged throughout the country like a dog tracking a debilitated prey the warehouse was requisitioned and served as a public hospital. Some people were treated there. Many died there. Much later, toward the end of the century, the Emperor decided to transform the hospital into a University. The common rooms were cleaned and furnished with benches and rostrums. The morgue became the library and the dissecting room a sort of lounge, where the professors and some students from influential families could sit in large armchairs of tawny leather, smoking their pipes, conversing, and reading newspapers.