Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

“Come on,” I said, putting my hand over her eyes.

Later, when we were already in bed, someone knocked at our door. I felt Amelia flinch. I knew she wasn’t asleep. I kissed her on the nape of her neck and went downstairs. Fedorine had already admitted the visitor; it was Diodemus. She was extremely fond of him. She called him the Klübeigge , which means “scholar” in her old language. He and I sat at the table. Fedorine brought us two cups and poured us some herbal tea that she’d just prepared with wild thyme, mint, lemon balm, and fir-tree buds.

“What do you intend to do?” Diodemus asked me.

“What do you mean, what do I intend to do?”

“I don’t know, look, you were there, you saw what they did to Cathor!”

“I saw it.”

“And you heard what the officer said.”

“That it’s forbidden to touch the body? It reminds me of a Greek story Nösel used to tell back in the University, about a princess who—”

“Forget the Greek princesses! That’s not what I want to talk about,” Diodemus blurted out, interrupting me. He hadn’t stopped wringing his hands since he sat down. “When he said we have to ‘cleanse the village,’ what do you think he meant?”

“Those people are madmen. I watched them at work when I was in the Capital. Why do you think I came back to the village?”

“They may be mad, but they are nevertheless the masters, ever since they deposed their Emperor and crossed our borders.”

“They’ll leave, Diodemus. In the end, they’ll leave. Why would they want to stay with us? There’s nothing here. It’s the ends of the earth. They wanted to show us that they have the power now. They’ve shown us. They wanted to terrorize us. They’ve done it. They’re going to stay a few days, and then they’ll go somewhere else, somewhere farther along.”

“But the captain threatened us. He said we’re supposed to ‘cleanse the village.’”

“So? What do you propose to do? Get a bucket of water and a broom and tidy up the streets?”

“Don’t joke, Brodeck! You think they’re joking? There wasn’t anything innocent about what he said. He wasn’t speaking at random! He chose every word carefully. Like the word Fremdër he used to refer to poor Cathor.”

“That’s the word they use to talk about anybody they don’t like. They’re all Fremdër , all ‘scumbags.’ I saw that word painted on many a door during Pürische Nacht.”

“As you well know, it means ‘foreigner,’ too!”

“Cathor wasn’t a foreigner! His family’s as old as the village!”

Diodemus loosened his shirt collar, which seemed to be strangling him. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, gave me a fearful look, turned his eyes to his cup, took a quick sip, looked at me furtively once more, cast his eyes down again, and then said, almost in a murmur, “But you, Brodeck? You?”

—

know how fear can transform a man.

I didn’t always know that, but I learned it. In the camp. I saw men scream, beat their heads against stone walls, hurl themselves on wire with barbs as sharp as razors. I saw them vomit, soil their pants, empty their bowels entirely, expel all the liquids, all the humors, all the gases their bodies contained. I saw some pray while others renounced the name of God and covered it with obscene insults. I even saw a man die of it — of fear, I mean. One morning, our guards played their little game and picked him as the next to be hanged, but when one of them stopped in front of him, laughed, and said “Du!” the prisoner didn’t move. His face betrayed no emotion, no distress, no thought. And as the guard started to lose his smile and lift his club, the man fell down dead, all at once, before the other even touched him.

The camp taught me this paradox: man is great, but he can never measure up to his full greatness. It’s an impossibility inherent in our nature. When I made my vertiginous journey, when I descended one by one the rungs of the sordid ladder that carried me ever deeper into the Kazerskwir , I was not only moving toward the negation of my own person but also, at the same time, proceeding toward full awareness of my tormentors’ motivations and full awareness of the motivations of those who had delivered me into their hands. And thus, somehow, toward a rough outline of forgiveness.

It was the fear others felt, much more than hatred or some other emotion, that had made a victim of me. It was because fear had seized some of them by the throat that I was handed over to torturers and executioners, and it was also fear that had turned those same torturers, formerly men like me, into monsters; fear that had caused the seeds of evil, which we all carry, to germinate inside them.

There’s no doubt that I badly misjudged the consequences of Aloïs Cathor’s execution. I’d grasped its horror, its odious cruelty, but I hadn’t envisioned the inroads it was going to make in people’s minds, nor had I understood how much Captain Buller’s words, examined and sifted through dozens and dozens of brains, would distress them; I hadn’t considered that those words could induce the others to make a decision whose victim would be me. And there was also, of course, Cathor’s remains, his head lying on the ground a couple of meters from his body, with the sun shining down and all the ephemeral insects which in those days of early fall were born in the morning, died at night, and spent the hours of their brief existence zooming around the corpse, reveling in the banquet, whirling, zigzagging, buzzing, driven wild by the great mass of flesh putrefying in the heat.

The nauseating smell permeated the whole village. The wind seemed to be on Buller’s side. It went to the church square, loaded itself with the miasmal exhalations of carrion, and then rushed gusting and swirling down every street, dancing a jig, slipping under doors, penetrating incompletely closed windows and disjointed tiles, and bringing all of us the fetid spoor of Cathor’s death.

Throughout this time, the soldiers behaved with the most perfect propriety, as if everything were normal. There was no thieving, no plundering, no violence, no demands. They paid for whatever they took from the shops. Whenever they encountered women, young or old, they raised their caps. They chopped wood for elderly widows. They joked with the children, who got scared and ran off. They saluted the mayor, the priest, and Diodemus.

Captain Buller, always displaying his tic and flanked by his two lieutenants, took a walk through the village streets every morning and every night, striding along on his short, thin legs. He walked fast, as if someone were waiting for him somewhere, and paid no attention to those he met on his way. Sometimes, wielding his riding crop, he flailed the air or drove off bees.

The inhabitants of the village were all dazed. There was very little in the way of conversation. Communication was kept to a minimum. Heads were bowed. We weltered in our astonishment.

After Diodemus left my house on the night of the execution, I never saw him again. I’ve learned everything I’m about to write from the long letter he left me.

One evening, the third evening of the Fratergekeime’s presence in the village, Buller summoned Orschwir and Diodemus. Orschwir was sent for, obviously, because he was the mayor, but Diodemus was a surprising choice. Anticipating a question Diodemus would never have dared to ask, Buller observed that the village teacher must necessarily be less stupid than the other villagers and could even be capable of understanding him.

Buller received the two men in his tent. It contained a camp bed, a desk, a chair, a sort of traveling chest, and a canvas wardrobe like a slipcover under which were hanging what looked like a few articles of clothing. On the desk, there was some paper printed with the regimental letterhead, along with ink, pens, blotting paper, and a framed photograph showing a thickset woman surrounded by six children ranging in age from about two to about fifteen.