Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

The Anderer obviously perceived my confusion, which I made no effort to conceal. “Please,” he said. “Feel free to examine it. Go on, go on …”

Then, like a child who’s just had a marvelous toy placed in front of him, I took hold of the book, opened it, and started turning the pages.

It was like plunging into a treasure trove. Brother Abigaël had taken his inventory with extreme precision, and the extensive notes on each flower, each plant, not only recapitulated all the known lore but also added many details I’d never read anywhere else.

But the most extraordinary part of the work, the primary reason for its reputation, was to be found in its illustrations, in the beauty and delicacy of the plates that accompanied the commentaries. Mother Pitz’s herbaria were a precious resource that had often helped me to revise or complete my reports and sometimes even to focus and direct them. All the same, what I found there had lost all life, all color, all grace. Imagination and memory were required to envision that entombed, dry world as it once had been, full of sap and suppleness and colors. Here, on the other hand, in the Liber florae , it seemed as though an intelligence combined with a diabolical talent had succeeded in capturing the very truth of flowers. The disturbing precision of lines and hues made each subject appear to have been picked and placed on the page just a few seconds before. Summer snowflake, lady’s slipper orchid, snow gentian, healing wolfsbane, coltsfoot, amber lily, iridescent bellflower, shepherd’s spurge, genepy, lady’s mantle, fritillary potentilla, mountain aven, stonecrop, black hellebore, androsace, silver snowbell — they danced before me in an endless round and made my head spin.

I’d forgotten the Anderer . I’d forgotten where I was. But suddenly, the spinning stopped short. I turned a page, and there before my eyes, as fragile as gossamer, so minuscule that it seemed almost unreal, its blue, pink-edged petals surrounding and protecting a crown of golden stamens, was the valley periwinkle.

I’m certain I cried out. There in front of me, in the ancient, sumptuous volume lying across my knees, was a painting of that flower, a testament to its reality, and there was also, peering over my shoulder, the face of the student Kelmar, who had spoken so much of the valley periwinkle and made me promise to find it.

“Interesting, isn’t it?”

The Anderer’s voice drew me out of my reverie. “I’ve been looking for this flower for so long …” I heard myself saying, in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

The Anderer looked at me with his delicate smile, the otherworldly smile that was always on his face. He finished his cup of tea, set it down, and then said, in an almost lighthearted tone, “Things in books don’t always exist. Books lie sometimes, don’t you think?”

“I hardly ever read them anymore.”

A silence fell that neither of us sought to break. I closed the book and clasped it to me. I thought about Kelmar. I saw us getting down from the railway car. I heard the uproar again, the cries of our companions in misery, the bawling guards, the barking dogs. And then Amelia’s face appeared before me, her beautiful, wordless face, her lips humming their never-ending refrain. I felt the Anderer ’s kindly eyes on me. And then it all came out of its own accord. I started talking to him about Amelia. Why did I speak of her to him? Why did I tell him, whom I knew not at all, things I’d never confessed to anyone? No doubt I needed to talk more than I was willing to admit, even to myself; I needed to relieve the burden that was weighing down my heart. Had Father Peiper remained the same, had he not turned into a wine-soaked specter since the end of the war, would I perhaps have confided in him? I’m not so sure.

I’ve suggested that the Anderer’s smile didn’t seem to belong to our world. But that was simply because he himself didn’t seem to belong to our world. He wasn’t part of our history. He wasn’t part of History. He came out of nowhere, and today, when there’s no more trace of him, it’s as if he never existed. So what better person for me to tell my story to? He wasn’t on any side.

I told him about my departure, about being led away by the two soldiers, while Amelia lay on the ground behind me, weeping and screaming. I also told him about Frippman’s good humor, his heedless assessment of what was happening to us and of what would be our inevitable fate.

We left the village that same evening, bound by the hands to the same tether, walking under the watchful eyes of the two soldiers on horseback. The journey took four days, during which the guards gave us nothing but water and the remains of their meals. Frippman was far from despair. He kept talking about the same things as we trudged along, doling out advice concerning sowing, the phases of the moon, and cats, which, he declared, often chased him through the streets. He told me all this in his gobbledygook, a mélange of dialect and the old language. It was only over the course of those few days I spent with him that I realized he was simpleminded; before, I’d just considered him a bit whimsical. Everything filled him with wonder: the motions of our guards’ horses, the sheen of our guards’ polished boots, the glint of their uniform buttons in the sunlight, the landscape, the bird-song. The two soldiers didn’t mistreat us. They hauled us along like parcels. They never addressed a word to us, but they didn’t beat us, either.

When we reached S., it was in chaos. Half the city had been destroyed; its streets were filled with rubble and charred ruins. For a week, we were penned up in the train station with many other people of all sorts — men, women, children, entire families — some of them poor, some still wearing the symbols of their past riches and looking down on the others. There were hundreds of us. We were all Fremdër— in fact, that name had become our name. The soldiers never called us anything but that, indiscriminately. Little by little, we were already losing our individual existences. We all had the same name, and we had to obey whenever that name — which wasn’t a name — was spoken. We didn’t know what was awaiting us. Frippman stayed close to me, never leaving my side, sometimes holding my arm for many long minutes at a stretch, squeezing it between his hands like a frightened child. I let him do whatever he wanted. Facing the unknown is always better when you do it with someone else. One morning, the camp authorities carried out a selection process. Frippman was put in the column on the left, and they assigned me to the one on the right.

“Schussa Brodeck! Au baldiegeï en Dörfe!”— “Good-bye, Bro-deck! See you soon in the village!”—Frippman called out, his face beaming, as his column was marched away. I couldn’t respond to him. I simply waved; I gave him a little wave of my hand so he’d suspect nothing, and especially not the great nothing I had a premonition of. I was sure we were both heading there, him first and me later, to the accompaniment of cudgel blows. He turned and walked away at a good pace, whistling.

I never saw Frippman again. He didn’t come back to the village. Baerensbourg, the road mender, inscribed his name on the monument. Unlike mine, there was no need to erase it.

Amelia and Fedorine remained alone in the house. The rest of the village avoided them, as if they’d suddenly caught some kind of plague. Diodemus was the only person who concerned himself with them, out of friendship and out of shame, as I’ve said. In any case, he tried to take care of them.

Amelia practically stopped receiving commissions for her embroidery, but even though she no longer spent much time working on trousseaus and tablecloths and curtains and handkerchiefs, she hardly remained idle. She and Fedorine had to have food and warmth. I’d shown Amelia all the useful things the woods and stubble fields contained: branches, roots, berries, mushrooms, herbs, wild salads. Fedorine taught her how to trap birds with birdlime and string, how to snare rabbits, how to station herself under a tall fir tree, lure down a squirrel, and stun it with a thrown rock. The two of them didn’t go hungry.