Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Every evening, Amelia jotted down in a little notebook — which I’ve since found — some words meant for me. Her sentences were always simple and sweet, and she wrote about me, about us, as if I were going to return in the next instant. She recounted her day and began every entry the same way: “My little Brodeck…” There was never any bitterness in what she wrote. She didn’t mention the Fratergekeime . I’m sure she omitted them on purpose. It was an excellent method of denying their existence. Of course, I still have her notebook. I often reread passages from it. It’s a long, touching account, in which days of absence unspool, one after another. It’s our story, Amelia’s and mine. Her words are like lights, counterpoints to all my vast darkness. I want to keep them for myself, for myself alone, the last traces of Amelia’s voice before she stepped into the night.

Orschwir didn’t shift himself to visit them. One morning, he had half a pig delivered to them, and they found it outside the door. Peiper came to visit them two or three times, but Fedorine found him hard to bear. He would sit for hours next to the stove, emptying the bottle of plum brandy she brought out for him, while his speech became steadily more confused. One evening she went so far as to chase him out of the house with a broom.

Adolf Buller and his troops continued to occupy the village. A week after Frippman and I were arrested, Buller finally gave the authorization to bury Cathor. The deceased had no family apart from Beckenfür, who had married his sister, and so Beckenfür took charge of the burial. “A filthy job, Brodeck, let me tell you … Not pretty, really not pretty… His head was twice its former size, like some strange balloon, with the skin all black and splitting, and then the rest, my God, the rest — let’s not talk about it anymore …”

Aside from Cathor’s execution and our arrest, the Fratergekeime behaved most civilly toward the locals, so much so that the two events were quickly forgotten, or rather, people did all they could to forget them. It was during this time that Göbbler returned to the village with his fat wife. He moved back into his house, which he’d left fifteen years before, and was received with open arms by the whole village, and in particular by Orschwir; the two of them had been conscripts together.

I’m prepared to swear that it was Göbbler’s counsels which gradually sent the village over the edge. He pointed out to everyone how advantageous it was to be occupied by foreign troops, how there was nothing hostile about the occupation, no, quite the opposite; it guaranteed peace and security, and it made the village and the surrounding region a massacre-free zone. Admittedly, it wasn’t hard for him to convince people that it was in everyone’s interest for Buller and his men to stay in the village as long as possible. Clearly, a hundred men eating and drinking and smoking and having their clothes washed and mended bring a community a considerable infusion of money.

With the consent of the whole village and Orschwir’s blessing, Göbbler became a sort of deputy mayor. He was often seen in Buller’s tent. In the beginning, the captain had viewed him with suspicion, but then, seeing the benefits to be derived from the feckless fellow and the rapprochement he championed, Buller began treating him almost like a comrade. As for Boulla, she opened her thighs wide to the whole troop and distributed her favors to officers as well as to the rank and file.

“Well, what can I say? We got used to it.” Schloss told me that the day he came over to my table and sat across from me and got all teary-eyed while he talked to me. “It became natural for them to be here. After all, they were men like us, cut from the same block. We spoke about the same things in the same language, or close to it. Eventually, we knew almost all of them by their first names. A lot of them did favors for the old folks, and others played with the kids. Every morning, ten of them cleaned the streets. Others took care of the roads and the paths, cut wood, cleared away the piles of dung. The village has never been so clean, not before or since! What can I tell you? When they came in here, I filled their glasses — I sure wasn’t going to spit in their faces! How many of us do you think wanted to wind up like Cathor or vanish like you and Frippman?”

The Fratergekeime stayed in the village for nearly ten months. There were no notable incidents, but the atmosphere worsened during the final weeks. Later, the reason why became clear. The war was changing both its location and its mind. Like a fire in spring, when the acrid smoke, agitated by the wind, panics and abruptly shifts direction, military victories abandoned one side and went over to the other. No news came to the village — not to the villagers, that is. If they were kept ignorant, they couldn’t become dangerous. But Buller, of course, knew everything. I like to imagine his face, ravaged by his tic more and more frequently in proportion as the messages arrive with their tidings of defeat, of disaster, of the collapse of the Greater Territory, which was meant to extend its sway over the whole world and last for thousands of years.

Like dogs, the occupying troops sensed their leader’s confusion and became increasingly nervous. The masks fell again. The old reflexes returned. Brochiert, the butcher, was beaten before Diodemus’s eyes for teasing a corporal about his fondness for tripe. Limmat, having neglected to salute two soldiers on the street, was shoved around, and only the intervention of Göbbler, who happened to be passing at that moment, saved him from a severe clubbing. A dozen incidents of this type made everyone realize that the monsters had never left them, that they had simply fallen asleep for a while, and that now their slumbers were over. Then the fear came back, and with it the desire to keep it at bay.

One afternoon — in fact, it must have been the day before the troops’ departure — some Dörfermesch , some “men from the village,” who had gone off with a sledge to the Borensfall forest to transport some timber, made a discovery near Lichmal clearing: under a jumble of fir branches, arranged to form a sort of shelter, three panic-stricken young girls, adolescents who clung to one another when they saw the men coming. They wore clothes that weren’t the same as those peasant women wore. Nor did their shoes bear any resemblance to clogs or boots. The girls had a little suitcase. They’d come from far, very far. They’d obviously been on the run for weeks, and then — God knows how — they’d reached that forest in the midst of a strange universe in which they were completely lost.

The Dörfermesch gave them food and drink. They flung themselves on the food as though they hadn’t swallowed a bite for days. Then they followed the men trustingly to the village. Diodemus thought that the men didn’t yet know, as they made their way back to the village, what they were going to do with those girls. I’d like to believe him. In any case, however, they realized that the girls were Fremdër , and they knew that each step, each meter along the path that led to the village brought them closer to their fate. As I’ve said, Göbbler had become an important man, the only person in the village whom Captain Buller had really accepted, and so the men brought the three girls to Göbbler’s house. He was the one who convinced the Dörfermesch that they should hand the three over to the Fratergekeime as a means of gaining their favor, calming them down, taming them. While Göbbler dispensed this advice, the three young girls waited outside, in front of his house. They were still waiting when rain suddenly began to come down in torrents.

The heavens sport with us. I’ve often thought that if the rain hadn’t started beating down on the roof tiles so hard, maybe Amelia would never have looked out the window. And in that case, she wouldn’t have seen the three drenched, trembling, thin, exhausted young girls. She wouldn’t have gone outside and invited them to come in and sit by the fire. She wouldn’t have been out there with them when the two soldiers, alerted by one of the men from the village , appeared and took hold of the girls. Therefore, she wouldn’t have protested. She wouldn’t have screamed at Göbbler, as I’m sure she did, that what he was doing was inhuman, and she wouldn’t have slapped his face. The soldiers wouldn’t have seized her. They wouldn’t have taken her away with the three girls. And so she wouldn’t have taken that first step toward the abyss.