Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

On another sheet of paper, he’d drawn up a sort of genealogical tree for his own family. There were the names of his parents, his grandparents, and his great-grandparents, along with their dates and their places of birth. There were also uncles, aunts, cousins, and distant ancestors. But there were likewise some great voids, some holes, some lines that stopped suddenly at a blank space or a question mark. Thus the tree contained both full, abundant branches, almost cracking under their load of names, and naked limbs, reduced to a simple line that died out unadorned. I thought about the strange forests of symbols and dead lives that our trees would compose if they were all lined up together side by side. My tree would disappear under the suffocating branches of the many families that for centuries have safeguarded their memory as their most precious inheritance. In fact, mine wouldn’t be a tree at all, just a puny trunk. Above my name, there would simply be two stems, cut very short, bare, leafless, and resolutely mute. But could I possibly, all the same, find a place for Fedorine, the way one can sometimes graft a sturdier plant onto a sickly one in order to give it some of the other’s strength and sap?

The envelope also contained two letters. They had been read and reread so often that the paper they were written on was reduced to a thin film about to fall apart at the creases. They were signed “Magdalena” and had been sent to Diodemus a long time ago, well before he came to settle in the village. Both were love letters, but the second spoke of the end of love. It spoke of it in simple terms, without grand phrases, without mawkish expressions or effects. It spoke of the end of love as a truth of existence, an event which cannot be striven against and which forces man to bow his neck and accept his fate.

I don’t wish to transcribe here all or even part of those two letters. They don’t belong to me. They aren’t part of my story. As I read them, I thought that perhaps they had been the cause of Diodemus’s arrival among us, the reason why he put so much distance between his former existence and the daily life he’d built for himself, little by little, in the village. I don’t know if he succeeded in healing his wound, nor do I know if he really wanted to. Sometimes you love your own scars.

I was holding in my hands fragments of Diodemus’s life, small but essential pieces which, if put together, offered insights into his departed spirit. And as I thought about his life, about mine and Amelia’s and Fedorine’s, and also about the Anderer’s —concerning which, to tell the truth, I knew almost nothing, and which I only imagined — the village appeared before me in a new light. I suddenly saw it as the final place, reached by those who leave the night and the void behind them; not the place for new beginnings but simply the place where everything may end, where everything must end.

But there was still something else in the big brown envelope.

There was another letter, a letter addressed to me. I seized it with great curiosity, for it’s not often you can hear a dead man speak to you. Diodemus’s letter began with these words: “Forgive me, Brodeck, please forgive me …” and ended with them as well.

’ve just finished reading that long letter.

Yes, I’ve just read it.

don’t know if I’ll be able to give an idea of what I felt as I read the letter. Besides, I’m not certain I felt anything. In any case, however, I can swear that there was no suffering. I didn’t suffer as I read Diodemus’s letter, which is in fact a long confession, because I’m missing the essential organs for experiencing suffering. I don’t possess them anymore. They were removed from me, one by one, in the camp. And — alas — they’ve never grown back since.

—

’m sure Diodemus assumed I’d wind up thoroughly detesting him after reading the letter he wrote me. Diodemus believed that I was still a participant in the human order, but he was mistaken.

Yesterday evening, after straightening up the shed and accidentally finding Diodemus’s hiding place and going through the contents of the brown envelope, I joined Amelia in our bed. It was late. I nestled myself against her. I embraced her warmth and the shape of her body and fell asleep very quickly. I didn’t even think about what I’d just read. My heart felt curiously light, while my body was heavy with weariness and disentangled knots. I dropped happily into sleep, as one does every night of his childhood. And I had dreams, not the dreams that ordinarily torment me, the black crater of the Kazerskwir and me circling around it, circling and circling — no; my dreams were peaceful.

I found the student Kelmar again. He was very much alive and wearing his beautiful white linen shirt with the embroidered front. The immaculate shirt set off his suntanned skin and his elegant neck. We weren’t on the road to the camp. Nor were we in the railway car where we spent so many days and nights, crammed in with the others. We were in a place that recalled to me nothing that I knew; I couldn’t even say if it was inside a house or outdoors. I’d never known Kelmar this way. He bore no trace of any blow. His cheeks were fresh and clean-shaven. His clothes smelled good. He smiled. He talked to me. He talked to me at length, and I listened without interrupting him. After some time, he stood up, and I understood, without his having to tell me, that he had to go. He looked at me and smiled, and I have a clear memory of the last words we exchanged.

“After what they did to us in the railway car, Kelmar, I should have stopped like you. I should have quit running and sat on the road.”

“You did what you thought you should do, Brodeck.” “No, you were right. It’s what we deserved. I was a coward.” “I’m not sure I was right. The death of one man never makes amends for the sacrifice of another, Brodeck. That would be too simple. And then, it’s not up to you to judge yourself. Nor to me, either. It’s not up to men to judge one another. They’re not made for that.”

“Kelmar, do you think it’s time for me to join you now?” “Stay on the other side, Brodeck. Your place is still over there.”

Those are the last words I remember him speaking. Then I tried to get close to him, I wanted to take him in my arms and hold him tight, but I embraced only the wind.

Contrary to what some claim, I don’t think dreams foreshadow anything at all. I just think they come at the right moment, and they tell us, in the hollow of the night, what we perhaps dare not admit to ourselves in the light of day.

I’m not going to reproduce Diodemus’s entire letter. For one thing, I don’t have it anymore. I’m aware of what it must have cost him to write it.

I didn’t leave for the camp of my own accord. I was arrested and transported there. The Fratergekeime had entered our village barely a week previously. The war had begun three months before that. We were cut off from the world, and we didn’t know very much about what was happening. The mountains often protect us from commotion and turmoil, but at the same time they isolate us from a part of life.

One morning we saw them coming, a lengthy, dusty column marching up the border road. Nobody tried to slow their progress, and in any case such an effort would have been futile; furthermore, I think the deaths of Orschwir’s two sons were on everyone’s mind, and if there was one thing everyone wanted to avoid, it was any more death.