Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Most of the students came from middle-class families. They had pink cheeks, slender hands, and clean fingernails. All their lives, they’d eaten their fill and worn good clothes. There were only a few of us who were virtually penniless. We could be spotted right away, identified by the scoured look the mountain air had given our cheeks, by our clothes, by our gauche manners, by our obvious and enduring fear of being in the wrong place. We’d come from far away. We weren’t from the city or even from the countryside around it. We slept in badly heated attic rooms. We never, or very rarely, went home. Those who had families and money paid us little attention. But for all that, I don’t believe they had contempt for us. They simply couldn’t imagine who we were, or where we came from, or the desolate, sublime landscapes we’d grown up in, or our daily existence in the big city. They often walked past us without even seeing us.

After several weeks, I stopped being frightened of the city. I was unaware of its monstrous, hostile aspect; I noticed only its ugliness. And that was easy for me to forget for hours on end because I loved plunging myself into my studies, into books. To tell the truth, I hardly ever left the library, except to go to the lecture halls where the professors gave their courses. I found a companion in the person of Ulli Rätte, who was the same age I was and had likewise been more or less dispatched to the University by his village, in the hope of his returning with an education that would contribute to the greater good. Rätte came from a far corner of the country, the border region around the Galinek hills, and he spoke a rasping language full of expressions I didn’t know. In the eyes of many of our fellow students, Rätte’s strange tongue proved him either an oddball or a savage. When we weren’t in the University library, in class, or in our rooms, we’d walk together along the streets, talking about our dreams and our future lives.

Ulli had a passion for cafés but not enough money to frequent them. He often dragged me along to contemplate them, and the mere sight of those places — where blue gas and wax candles burned, where women’s laughter rose to the ceiling amid clouds of cigar and pipe smoke, where the men wore elegant suits, fur coats during the winter months and silk scarves when the weather was fine, where waiters impeccably cinched into white aprons seemed like soldiers of an inoffensive army — sufficed to fill him with a childlike joy. “We’re wasting our time on books, Brodeck,” he’d say. “This is where real life is!”

Unlike me, Ulli took to the city like a fish to water. He knew all the streets and all the tricks. He loved the dust of the city, its noise, its soot, its violence, its hugeness. He liked everything about it.

“I don’t think I’ll go back to my village,” he often told me. It was no use my pointing out that his village was the reason why he was there or reminding him that it was counting on him; he dismissed such talk with a word or a backhanded wave. “A bunch of brutes and drunkards — that’s all there is where I come from. You think they sent me here out of charity? They’re motivated by self-interest and nothing else! They want me to return home stuffed with knowledge, like a force-fed animal, and then they’ll make me pay for it for the rest of my life. Don’t forget, Brodeck: it’s ignorance that always triumphs, not knowledge.”

Although cafés occupied his thoughts more than University classrooms, Ulli Rätte was far from stupid. Some of the things he said deserved to be printed in books, but he tossed them off as though they were of no importance, as though he were making fun of them and himself as soon as he said them; and then he’d burst out laughing. His laugh was equal parts bellow and vocalise, and passersby never failed to turn their heads when they heard it.

—

hat conflict between knowledge and ignorance, between solitude and numbers — that’s what made me leave the city before I completed my studies. The great, sprawling urban organism was suddenly shaken by gossip, by rumors that had sprung from nothing: two or three conversations, an unsigned article a few lines long in a daily newspaper, the patter of a tumbler in the marketplace, a song of unknown origin whose ferocious refrain was taken up in the twinkling of an eye by all the singers in the streets.

More and more public gatherings took place until they seemed to be everywhere. A few men would stop near a streetlight and speak among themselves; soon they were joined by others and by others after that. Thus, in a few minutes, the group had swelled to forty — forty bodies pressed together, their shoulders a bit hunched, all moving slightly from time to time or assenting concisely to a point made by one of the speakers, though exactly which one was never clear. Then, as if blown away by a gust of wind, those silhouettes suddenly dispersed in every direction, and the empty sidewalk recommenced its monotonous waiting.

Remarkable and contradictory news reached the Capital from the eastern frontier. On the other side of the border, it was said, entire garrisons were on the march by night, as surreptitiously as possible, and witnesses reported troop movements of a scope hitherto unknown. It was also said that people on this side could hear machines at work over there, digging ditches, galleries, trenches, secret tunnels. And finally, it was said that recently perfected weapons of diabolical power and range were being prepared for deployment, and that the Capital was full of spies, ready to set it ablaze when the time came. Meanwhile, widespread hunger was tormenting citizens’ bellies and governing their minds. The oven-like heat of the two preceding summers had grilled the vast majority of the crops standing in the fields surrounding the city. Every day, bands of farmers and their families, impoverished and emaciated, flocked to the Capital; their lost eyes settled on everything they saw, as if they were going to steal it. Children — drab little creatures with yellowish complexions — clung to their mother’s skirts. Often, barely able to remain upright, youngsters would fall asleep on their feet, leaning against a wall, and many a mother who could go on no longer sat on the ground with a sleeping child lying across her lap.

At the same moment, Professor Nösel would be talking to us about our great poets, who — in days gone by, centuries and centuries ago, when the Capital was still nothing more than a big market town, when our forests were full of bears and wolf packs, aurochs and bison, when hordes of tribesmen from the distant steppes were spreading fire and terror — fashioned the countless verses of our fundamental epic poems. Nösel could decipher Ancient Greek, Latin, Cimbrian, Arabic, Aramaic, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian, but he was incapable of looking out his window, or of lifting his nose from his reading as he walked home to his apartment in Jeckenweiss Street. A man most learned in books, he was blind to the world.

One day, the first demonstration took place. After waiting in vain for someone to hire them, about a hundred men, most of them ruined farmers and unemployed workers, left the Albergeplatz market, where those looking for a day’s work ordinarily gathered. Walking fast and shouting, they headed for Parliament. Outside the building, they came up against the soldiers on duty, who managed to disperse them without violence. The demonstrators passed Ulli and me on our way to the University. They formed a somewhat noisy procession, nothing more, like students parading to celebrate their diplomas, except that in this case, the taut, ashen faces and the eyes glittering with muffled resentment clearly didn’t belong to students.