Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

—

spent the rest of that strange day inside the walls of the University. I felt protected there. I didn’t want to leave. I heard horrible sounds coming from outside, followed by great silences which dragged on and on, giving rise to uneasiness as intense as what was caused by the noise. I stayed in the library the whole afternoon. I knew Amelia was safe at her place, the furnished room she shared with another embroiderer named Gudrun Osterick, a ruddy-faced young woman with hair like sheep’s wool. The previous evening, I’d promised them I wouldn’t venture out.

I don’t remember much about the book I was trying to read during those bizarre hours in the library. It was the work of a physician, Doctor Klaus Reinhold Maria Messner, on the propagation of the plague across the centuries. The book contained tables, charts, and figures, as well as striking illustrations that contrasted with the scientific detachment of the inquiry, for they illuminated it with a sort of macabre and precious romanticism. One of the illustrations that I found particularly unsettling showed a narrow, poor city street. Uneven paving stones constituted the roadway, and the doors of all the houses were wide open. Dozens of big, black, hirsute rats ran grimacing from the houses while three men dressed in long, dark robes, their heads hidden by peaked hoods, piled stiff corpses onto the bed of a handcart. In the distance, plumes of smoke streaked the horizon, while in the foreground, as if he wished to escape from the picture, a child in rags sat on the ground with his face in his hands. Curiously, none of the three men paid any attention to him, already considering him as good as dead. The only creature contemplating him was a rat. Standing on its rear legs, it seemed to be addressing a malicious, ironic question to the child’s hidden face. I stared at the picture for a long time, wondering what its engraver’s real purpose had been and why Doctor Messner had wanted it reproduced in his book.

Around four o’clock, the daylight suddenly grew dim. Snow clouds had filled the sky, and they began dumping their load on the city. I opened one of the library’s windows. Big flakes immediately struck my cheeks and melted. I saw silhouettes coming and going in the streets, walking at a normal pace; the city seemed to have regained its ordinary appearance. I collected my jacket and left the University. At that moment, I didn’t know that I would never set foot in it again.

To return to my room, I had to cross Salzwach Square, go down Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue, traverse the Kolesh quarter — the oldest part of the city, a maze of narrow streets lined by innumerable storefronts — skirt Wilhem Park, and walk past the lugubrious buildings that housed the thermal baths. I stepped ahead briskly, not raising my head too much. I passed many shadows that were doing the same thing and then a group of men who seemed rather drunk, talking very loud and laughing a lot.

In Salzwach Square and on Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue the snow was already sticking to the ground, and the pedestrians left black tracks as they moved along, scurrying like insects. Looking at those places, one could have believed that nothing had happened, that the city had experienced an ordinary Monday, and that the untimely emptiness of the streets was due to nothing more than the cold, the bad weather, and the night itself, which had fallen a little too early.

But to realize that none of that was true, one had only to enter the labyrinth of the Kolesh quarter. What I noticed first was a sound. The sound of glass, of the broken glass I was treading on. I was on a narrow street littered with broken glass, and glinting shards, here and there half buried by snow, covered the ground as far as my eyes could see. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining that someone had scattered precious stones by the handful all over the Kolesh quarter. The thought gave the little street a new dimension, sparkling, marvelous, magical, like the setting of a fairy tale; my task was to find the plot and the princess. But that first vision vanished at once when my eyes focused on the shop windows gaping like the jaws of dead animals, the looted interiors of the stores, the smashed barrels spilling out marinated herrings, dried meats, gherkins, and wine, the befouled stalls, the strewn merchandise. The sounds of groans and weeping mingled with the crunch of footsteps on the glass carpet. I couldn’t tell where the human sounds were coming from, as there wasn’t a living creature in sight. By contrast, three corpses, their heads grotesquely swollen and bruised from the blows they’d been struck, were stretched out in front of a tailor’s shop. Stuck on the door, which was hanging from the frame by its single remaining hinge, was a piece of paper with the words SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, “dirty foreigner” (but the word Fremdër is ambiguous, as it can also mean “traitor,” or in a more colloquial usage, “scumbag,” “filth”), crudely lettered in red paint. The paint had run on many of the letters, which looked as though they were dripping blood. Rolls of cloth had been piled up anyhow and an attempt made to set them on fire. Some shards of glass were still attached to the window jambs, forming a star with incredibly slender, fragile rays.

That inscription, SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, was visible in many places, usually accompanied by another, RACHE FÜR RUPPACH, “Revenge for Ruppach.” My mind’s eye kept returning to the three corpses. Dizziness overcame me, and the vision of those dead bodies made confused images return to my memory, images of other corpses sprawled out like puppets, with no trace of humanity left in their features. I became again the little boy who wandered amid the ruins, abandoned among the debris and the rubble, surrounded by small fires, and not knowing whether he was the plaything of an unending nightmare or a victim of the times, which had decided to toy with him like a cat with a mouse. At the same time as those fragments of my past life arose before me, I could also see every detail of the engraving in Doctor Messner’s volume — the plumes of smoke, the countless rats, the child, the robed men, the heap of corpses — and it was as though I were staring at the awful spectacle in the narrow street, the memories of my childhood, and the details of the illustration in Doctor Messner’s book, all superimposed on one another and triply horrible. I staggered and almost fell, but I heard someone calling me; I heard a voice calling me, a weak, broken voice, a voice like the thousands of glass shards on the ground.

The caller was an old man, crouched in a doorway a little farther on. He was painfully thin, and his long white beard tugged his face downward, making it look still thinner. He trembled as he stretched out an arm toward me. I hurried to his side, and while he kept repeating the same words—“Madmen. Madmen. They’ve gone mad. Madmen”—in the old language that was Fedorine’s native tongue, I tried to set him on his feet.

“Where do you live?” I asked him. “Do you live on this street?”

His eyes connected with mine for a few seconds, but he didn’t seem to understand my questions and took up his litany again. His clothes were ripped in many places; his right hand was covered with blood and appeared useless. I put my arms around his waist to lift him, but I’d barely managed to prop him against the door when voices erupted behind us.

“They’re still moving! They’re taunting us! They’re on their feet, and our Ruppach’s dead!”

Three men were coming toward us. They carried long billy clubs, and I could make out two intertwined letters, W R , on the black armbands they wore on their left sleeves. They were talking loud and guffawing. Insofar as I could see them — the visors of their caps cast a shadow over their features — one face looked familiar to me, but fear gripped me and my thoughts became confused. At first glance, I thought they might be drunk — and yet they didn’t smell of alcohol. Anger and hatred suffice to scramble human brains more thoroughly than brandy can. Alas, I was able to verify this observation on several later occasions, in the camp.