Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

I never saw Ulli Rätte again.

Why did I just write that sentence, which isn’t the whole truth? I did see Ulli Rätte — or rather, I’m pretty certain I saw him — once again. In the camp. On the other side. I mean, he was on the side of those who guarded us, not on our side, the side of suffering and submission.

It was a frosty morning. I was Brodeck the Dog. Scheidegger, my master, was walking me. I was wearing the collar, and attached to the collar was the leash. I had to walk on all fours. I had to snort like a dog, eat like a dog, piss like a dog. Scheidegger strutted beside me, looking like a prim office worker. That day, we went all the way to the camp infirmary. Before going in, Scheidegger tied the leash to an iron ring embedded in the wall. I curled up in the dust, lay my head on my hands, and tried to forget the bitter cold.

That was the moment when I thought I saw Ulli Rätte. When I saw Ulli Rätte. When I heard his laugh, his very peculiar laugh, which sounded like a combination of high-pitched sleigh bells and gaily rasping wooden rattles. He was standing with two other guards a few meters away, and his back was turned to me. All three were trying to keep warm by pounding their hands together, and Ulli, or his phantom double, was speaking: “Yes, I’m telling you, it’s a little slice of heaven, but right here on earth, not two miles from this shitty place. They’ve got a lovely stove that purrs and whistles all the time, and they serve their beer cold, with a thick head of white foam. The waitress is round as a ham, and not at all shy! You can sit there and smoke your pipe for hours, lost in a dream, and forget all about this grubby vermin here, ruining our lives!”

He finished his speech with a loud laugh, which was taken up by the others. Then he started to turn around, and I buried my face in my hands. It wasn’t that I was afraid he’d recognize me. No, it wasn’t that. It was me. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to meet his eye. What I wanted was to preserve, deep inside my mind, the illusion that this tall, stout man, so happy in his role as torturer, this man who was standing so close to me but who actually lived in a different world from mine, the world of the living, could be someone other than Ulli Rätte, my Ulli, with whom I had spent so much time in former days, with whom I’d shared crusts of bread, dishes of potatoes, happy hours, dreams, and countless arm-in-arm promenades. I preferred doubt to the truth, even the thinnest, most fragile doubt. Yes, that’s what I preferred, because I thought the truth might kill me.

Life’s funny. I mean the currents of life, the ones that bear us along more than we follow them and then, after a strange journey, deposit us on the right bank or the left bank. I don’t know how the student Ulli Rätte became a camp guard, that is, one of the perfectly oiled and obedient cogs in the great death machine we were being fed to. I don’t know what trials he’d had to endure or what changes he’d had to go through in order to wind up where he was. The Ulli I’d known wouldn’t have hurt a fly. How could he have become the servant of a system that crushed people, that reduced them to the lowest form of existence?

The camp’s only advantage was its vast size. I never saw the guard who could have been Ulli Rätte or heard his laugh again. Was the frozen morning scene nothing but one of the many nightmares that visited me and not a memory at all? Perhaps so, but that particular nightmare seemed exceedingly real. So much so that on the day when the camp was liberated, I wandered all over it, going from one mound of corpses to another. There were many such piles. The dead were mostly prisoners, but there were a few guards as well. I turned their bodies over one by one, thinking maybe I’d come upon Ulli, but he wasn’t among them. I found only the remains of the Zeilenesseniss . I contemplated them for a long time, the way one contemplates an abyss or the memory of unspeakable suffering.

On the morning following what later came to be called Pürische Nacht , after I slipped my letter into the unconscious Ulli’s pocket, I hurried to Amelia’s. She was sitting calmly near the window of her room, absorbed in her embroidery. Her comrade Gudrun Osterick was similarly occupied. They looked at me surprised, both of them. They’d stayed inside for the past two days, just as I’d requested, working steadily in order to finish an important commission on time, a large tablecloth destined for a bridal trousseau. Across the white linen background, Amelia and her friend had scattered hundreds of tiny lilies mingled with large stars, and when I saw those stars, I felt my body go numb. Gudrun and Amelia had clearly heard the sounds of the crowd, the shrieking and howling, but their neighborhood was some distance from the Kolesh quarter, the scene of most of the murders and devastation. The two women knew nothing about the violence that had taken place.

I took Amelia in my arms and held her tight. I told her that I was going away, I was going away and never coming back. Above all, I told her that I had come for her, that I wanted to take her with me to my home, to my village in the mountains. It was another world there, I said, we’d be protected from everything; that land of crests and pastures and forests would be for us the safest of bulwarks. And I told her I wanted her to be my wife.

I felt her shivering against me, and it was as though I held a trembling bird in my arms. Her tremors seemed to reach into the deepest part of my body and make it more vibrant and alive. She turned her beautiful face to me, smiled, and gave me a long kiss.

An hour later, we left the city. We walked quickly, hand in hand. We weren’t alone. Men, women, children, old people, entire families were fleeing, too, bringing with them a great deal of baggage. Some carried suitcases crammed to overflowing and impossible to close, so that the linen and crockery they contained were visible. Others pushed carts loaded with trunks and badly tied bundles. Everyone looked serious, fearful, uncertain. Nobody spoke. We all marched along in great haste, as if compelled to put as much distance as possible between us and what we were leaving behind.

But what was actually driving us away? Other men, or the course of events? I’m still a young man, still in my prime, and yet, when I think about my life, it’s like a bottle too small to hold everything that’s been poured into it. Is this the case with every human life, or was I born into a time that has abolished all limits, that shuffles human lives like cards in a great game of chance?

I didn’t ask for very much. I would have liked to remain in the village and never leave. The mountains, the forests, our rivers — all that would have been enough for me. I would have liked to stay far from the noise of the world, but people in these parts have killed one another in large numbers throughout History. Many nations have died and are now only names in books. Some countries have devoured others, eviscerated them, violated them, defiled them. And justice hasn’t always triumphed over nastiness.

Why did I, like thousands of others, have to carry a cross I hadn’t chosen, a cross which was not made for my shoulders and which didn’t concern me? Who decided to come rummaging around in my obscure existence, invade my gray anonymity, my meager tranquillity, and bowl me like a little ball in a great game of skittles? God? Well, in that case, if He exists, if He really exists, let Him hide His face. Let Him put His two hands on His head, and let Him bow down. It may be, as Peiper used to teach us, that many men are unworthy of Him, but now I know that He, too, is unworthy of most of us, and that if the creature is capable of producing horror, it’s solely because his Creator has slipped him the recipe for it.