Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

She knows everything. Or almost everything.

She knows about the black void that returns to my dreams again and again. About my unmoving promenades around the rim of the Kazerskwir . I often tell myself that she must make similar excursions on her own, that she too must have some great absences which haunt her and pursue her. We all do.

I don’t know if Fedorine was ever young. I’ve always seen her twisted and bent, covered with brown spots like a medlar long forgotten in the pantry. Even when I was a small child and she took me in, she already looked like a battered old witch. Her milkless breasts hung down under her gray smock. She came from afar, far back in time and far away in the geography of the world. She had escaped from the rotten belly of Europe.

This was a long time ago, at the beginning of another war: I stood in front of a ruined house from which a little smoke was rising. Was it perhaps my father’s house, my mother’s? I must have had a family. I was a full four years old, and I was alone. I was playing with a hoop half consumed by the fire. Fedorine passed by, pulling her cart. She saw me and stopped. She dug in her bag, brought out a beautiful, gleaming red apple, and handed it to me. I devoured the fruit like a starveling. Fedorine spoke to me, using words I didn’t understand, asked me questions I couldn’t answer, and touched my forehead and my hair.

I followed the old woman with the apples as if she were a piper. She lifted me into the cart and wedged me among some sacks, three saucepans, and a bundle of hay. There was also a rabbit with pretty brown eyes and tawny fur; its stomach was soft and very warm. I remember that it let me stroke it. I also remember that Fedorine stopped on a bend in the road (broom was growing along its borders) and, in my language, asked me my name. She told me hers—“Fedorine”—and pointed down below us at what remained of my village. “Take a good look, little Brodeck. That’s where you come from, but you’ll never go back there because soon there will be nothing left of it. Open your eyes wide!”

So I looked as hard as I could. I saw the dead animals with their swollen bellies, the barns open to the four winds, the crumbled walls. There were also a great many puppets lying in the streets, some with their arms crossed, others rolled up into balls. Although they were big puppets, at that distance they seemed tiny. And then I stared at the sun, and it poured burning gold into my eyes and made the tableau of my village disappear.

I tossed and turned in the bed. I was certain that Amelia wasn’t sleeping any more than I was. When I closed my eyes, I saw the Anderer’s face, his pond-colored irises, his full amaranth-tinged cheeks, his sparse frizzy hair. I smelled his violet scent.

Amelia moved. I felt her warm breath against my cheek and lips. I opened my eyes. Her lids were closed. She seemed utterly tranquil. She’s so beautiful that I often wonder what it was I did to make her take an interest in me one day. It was because of her that I didn’t founder back then. When I was in the prison camp, it was her I thought about every minute.

The men who guarded us and beat us were always telling us that we were nothing but droppings, lower than rat shit. We didn’t have the right to look them in the face. We had to keep our heads bowed and take the blows without a word. Every evening, they poured soup into the tin bowls used by their guard dogs, mastiffs with coats the color of honey and curled-up lips and eyes that drooled reddish tears. We had to go down on all fours, like the dogs, and eat our food without using anything but our mouths, like the dogs.

Most of my fellow prisoners refused to do it. They’re dead. As for me, I ate like the dogs, on all fours and using only my mouth. And I’m alive.

Sometimes, when the guards were drunk or had nothing to do, they amused themselves by putting a collar and a leash on me. I had to crawl around like that, on all fours, wearing a collar attached to a leash. I had to strut and turn round in circles and bark and dangle my tongue and lick their boots. The guards stopped calling me “Brodeck” and started calling me “Brodeck the Dog” and then laughing their heads off. Most of those who were imprisoned with me refused to act the dog, and they died, either of starvation or from the repeated blows the guards dealt them.

Some of the other prisoners never spoke to me except to say, “You’re worse than the guards, Brodeck! You’re an animal, you’re shit!” Like the guards, they kept telling me I was no longer a man. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Me, I’m alive. Maybe they had no reason to survive. Maybe they had no love lodged deep in their hearts or back home in their village. Yes, maybe they had no reason to go on living.

Eventually the guards took to tying me to a post near the mastiffs’ kennels at night. I slept on the ground, lying in the dust amid the smells of fur and dogs’ breath and urine. Above me was the sky. Not far away were the watchtowers and the sentinels, and beyond them was the country; the fields we could see by day, the wheat rippling with fantastic insolence in the wind, the clumped stands of birch, and the sound of the great river and its silvery water were all quite near.

But in fact I was very far from that place. I wasn’t leashed to a post. I wasn’t wearing a leather collar. I wasn’t lying half naked near sleeping dogs. I was in our house, in our bed, pressed against Amelia’s warm body and no longer couched in the dust. I was warm, and I could feel her heart beating against mine. I heard her voice, speaking to me the words of love she was so good at finding in the darkness of our room. For all that, I came back.

Brodeck the Dog came home alive and found his Amelia waiting for him.

—

he morning after the Ereigniës , I got up very early. I shaved, dressed, and left the house without a sound. Poupchette and Amelia were still sleeping, while Fedorine was in her chair, dozing and talking a little. She spoke words without coherence or logic in a strange babble drawn from several languages.

Daylight was just beginning to bleach the sky, and the whole village was still bound up in sleep. Very softly, I closed the door behind me. The grass in front of the house was drenched with whitish, almost milky dew, which quivered and dripped on the edges of the clover leaves. It was cold. The peaks of the Prinzhornï looked higher and sharper than usual. I knew that this was a portent of bad weather, and I told myself that before long snow would begin to fall on the village, enveloping it and isolating it even more.

“Zehr mogenhilch , Brodeck!”

I jumped as though caught in some shameful act. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I had nothing to feel guilty about, but I nevertheless leapt like a kid called to order by the goatherd’s switch. I hadn’t recognized the voice, even though it belonged to Göbbler, our neighbor.

He was sitting on the stone bench built against the wall of his house, leaning forward and steadying himself on the stick he held with both hands. I’d never seen him sit on that bench before, except perhaps once or twice on one of the rare summer nights when the air is stifling and oppressive and there are no cool breezes to refresh the village.

Göbbler’s a man past sixty, with a rough-hewn face; he never smiles and seldom speaks. A milky veil is slowly covering his eyes, and he can’t see farther than five meters. The war brought him back to the village, although people say he occupied a position in some administration in S. for years before his return; but no one knows exactly which administration that was, and I don’t think anyone has ever asked him. Now he lives on his pension and his henhouse. Moreover, he’s come to resemble his roosters a little. His eyes move in the same way, and the skin hanging down below his neck has ruddy patches like wattles. His wife, who’s much younger than he, is called Boulla. She’s fat and fond of talking; she smells of grain and onion. They say that a great heat burns between her legs, and that it would take many buckets of water to extinguish it. She seeks men as others look for reasons to exist.