Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Orschwir pushed his ledger aside, took the pitcher and the two glasses that the No-Eyed Girl handed him, poured two glasses of beer, and shoved one over to me. It was plain that my request annoyed him. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he said, “If you think it’ll be good for us, then do it.”

He took a little piece of paper, slowly wrote a few words on it, and held it out to me: “Go to the village hall and show that to Hausorn. He’ll find the speech and give it to you.”

“Did you write it?”

Orschwir put his beer glass down and gave me a look that managed to be both irritated and sympathetic. Then he spoke to Die Keinauge in a gentle voice I’d never heard him use before: “Leave us, Lise, will you?”

The little blind girl inclined her head in a slight bow and withdrew. Orschwir waited to answer me until after she’d closed the door behind her. “You see that child, Brodeck? Her eyes, as you know, are dead. She was born with dead eyes. Of all the things you can contemplate around you — that sideboard, that clock, this table my great-grandfather made, that corner of the Tannäringen forest you can glimpse through the window — of all that she can see nothing. Of course, she knows it all exists because she feels it, she inhales it, she touches it, but she can’t see it. And even if she should ask to see it, she wouldn’t be able to see it. So she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t waste time making such a request because she knows no one can fulfill it.”

He stopped and took a long pull on his beer.

“You ought to make an effort to be a little like her, Brodeck. You ought to content yourself with asking for what you can have and for what can serve your purpose. The rest is useless. All it can do is distract you and put I don’t know what kinds of ideas in your head and set them boiling in your brain, and all for nothing! I’m going to tell you something. That night when you agreed to write the Report, you said you would say ‘I,’ but ‘I’ would mean all of us. You remember saying that, right? Well, tell yourself that all of us wrote that speech. Maybe I read it, but we all thought it up together. Be content with that, Brodeck. Another glass?”

At the village hall, Caspar Hausorn made a face when I handed him the mayor’s note. He was about to say something, but he restrained himself at the last instant. He turned his back to me and opened two large drawers. After shifting several registers, he took out a dark-brown cardboard box, which contained dozens of sheets of paper in various sizes. He glanced at them quickly, one by one, until he came to the pages with the speech, which he handed to me without a word. I took them and was about to stick them in my pocket, but he stopped me abruptly. “The mayor’s message says you have the right to read the pages and copy them, but not to remove them.”

With a movement of his head, Hausorn indicated a chair and a small table. Then he adjusted the eyeglasses on his nose and returned to his desk and whatever he’d been writing. I sat down and started copying the speech, taking great care to record every word. From time to time, Hausorn raised his head and gazed at me. The lenses of his glasses were so thick that if you looked through them they made his eyes seem disproportionately large, the size of pigeons’ eggs, and although he was a man whose fine, well-modeled features women had always appreciated, when I saw him like that I thought about an enormous insect, a kind of giant, furious fly attached to the neck of a decapitated human body.

“My dear friends, both those from our village and those visiting from elsewhere in the vicinity, and you, my dear sir, Mister … It is with great pleasure that we welcome you within our walls.”

Before going on to reproduce the rest of what Orschwir said on this occasion, standing on the platform and speaking in the twilight of a mild day so far removed from the cold and the feeling of terror on the night of the Ereigniës , I must allude to the mayor’s moment of confusion and embarrassment when, early in his speech, he said “my dear sir, Mister …,” paused, looked at the Anderer , and waited for him to supply his name, the name that nobody knew. But the Anderer remained mute, smiling without parting his lips, so that the mayor, after repeating “Mister … Mister …?” several times in a gently questioning tone, was obliged to continue his speech without having obtained any satisfaction.

“You are the first, and for the time being the only, person to visit our village since the long, grievous months when the war held this part of the world in its atrocious grip. In former days, and for centuries, our region was traversed by travelers who came up from the great plains of the south and took the mountain route on their way to the distant northern coasts and the port cities. Such travelers always found this village a pleasant, auspicious stopping place, and the old chronicles refer to it by the ancient name Wohlwollend Trast , ‘Kindly Halt.’ We don’t know whether such a halt is the purpose of your stay here. But however that may be, you honor us by your sojourn in the bosom of our modest community. You are as it were the first sign of a springtime of humanity, returning to us after too long a winter, and we hope that after you others will come to visit us and that we will thus gradually reestablish our connection with the community of mankind. Please, my dear Mister …”—and here, once again, Orschwir stopped and looked at the Anderer , giving him the opportunity to say his name, but that name was not spoken, and Orschwir, after clearing his throat one more time, returned to his text—“my dear sir, please don’t judge us too severely or too quickly. We have gone through much adversity, and our isolation has no doubt reduced us to living on the margins of civilization. Nevertheless, to those who really know us, we’re better than we might appear to be. We have known suffering and death, and we must learn again how to live. We must also learn not to forget the past but to overcome it, by banishing it far from us and making sure that it no longer overflows into our present and even less into our future. In the name of every man, woman, and child, and in the name of our beautiful village, which I have the honor to administer, I therefore bid you welcome, my dear”—and this time, the mayor did not pause—“sir, and now I shall yield the floor to you.”

Orschwir looked at the crowd, refolded his pages, and shook the Anderer’s hand, while the applause mounted up to the pink-and-blue sky, where some apparently drunken swallows were challenging one another to speed trials along incoherent courses. The applause gradually died down and silence fell again, heavily. The Anderer smiled, but no one could say at whom or what. At the countryfolk crowded into the first row, who hadn’t understood much of the speech and couldn’t wait to drink the wine and beer? At Orschwir, whose mounting anxiety grew more and more palpable as the silence persisted? At the sky? Maybe at the swallows. He had yet to pronounce a single word when there came a sudden, violent gust of wind, of very balmy, even hot wind, the kind that makes animals nervous in their stalls and sometimes irritates them so much that they begin kicking wildly at walls and doors. The wind assailed the welcome banner, tore it in half, and wrapped itself in the two parts, twisting and ripping off large sections, which swiftly flew away toward the birds, the clouds, the setting sun. The wind departed as it had come, like a thief. What was left of the banner sagged down. Only two words remained: “Wi sund”— “We are.” The rest of the sentence had disappeared into thin air, vaporized, forgotten, destroyed. Once again I noticed a chicken smell, very close to me. Göbbler was at my side, and he spoke into my ear. “We are! What are we, Brodeck? I wonder what we are …”