Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Rain. Just rain, pelting the roof tiles and the windowpanes.

The Anderer listened to me. From time to time, he poured some hot water into his glass and added a few tea leaves. All the while I talked, I clutched the old Liber florae montanarum in my arms as if it were a person. The Anderer ’s benevolent silence and his smile encouraged me to continue. It soothed me to talk about all that for the first time, to speak of it to that stranger, with his queer looks and his queer clothes, and in that place, which so little resembled a room.

I told him the rest in a few words. There wasn’t much left to say. Buller and his men were breaking camp, and despite the driving rain, there was much feverish activity in the market square. The air was filled with orders, shouts, and the sound of shattering glass as dozens of drunken men, laughing, stumbling, and exchanging insults, drank their bottles dry and dashed them to the ground. Buller, his head jolted by his tic with ever-increasing frequency, was observing the whole tumult, standing rigid like a picket just inside the flap of his tent. At that paradoxical moment, the Fratergekeime were still the masters, even though it was already clear to them that they had lost. They were fallen gods, mighty warriors with a premonition that soon they’d be stripped of their weapons and their armor. With their feet still in their dream, they knew they were hanging upside down.

Such was the scene when the little procession arrived: the three girls and Amelia, escorted by the Dörfermesch and the two soldiers. Very quickly, Amelia and the girls became prey; all four were surrounded, shoved, touched, groped. Accompanied by great outbursts of laughter, they disappeared into the center of a circle that closed behind them, a circle of inebriated, violent men, who drove them toward Otto Mischenbaum’s barn amid shouted obscenities and crass jokes. Mischenbaum, a farmer nearly a hundred years old, had never engendered any progeny —“Hab nie Zei gehab, nieman Zei gehab!” (“Never had the time, never ever had the time!”) — and spent most of his days shut up in his kitchen.

Amelia and the girls vanished into the barn.

They were swallowed up in there.

And then, nothing more.

The next day, the square was deserted but littered with innumerable shards of glass. The Fratergekeime had left. All that remained of them was a sour odor of wine, vomited brandy, and thick beer, which lay in puddles all over the square. After that sickening night, during which some soldiers and a few men from the village , with Buller’s mute blessing, had done great harm to bodies and souls, the doors of all the houses were shut. Nobody yet dared to go outside. And old Fedorine went knocking, knocking, knocking at all those doors. Until she came to the barn.

“I went inside, Brodeck.” That’s Fedorine, telling me the whole story while she feeds me with a spoon. My hands are covered with wounds. My lips hurt so badly. My broken teeth hurt so badly, as if their fragments were still cutting into my gums. I’ve just come back after two years out of the world. I left the camp, I walked along highways and byways, and now I’m home again, but I’m still half dead. And so weak. A few days ago, when I finally stepped into my house, I found Fedorine there, and the sight of me made her drop the big earthenware dish she was wiping. Its pattern of red flowers was dispersed to the four corners of the room. I found Amelia, too, more beautiful than ever, yes, even more beautiful than she was in all my memories, and those aren’t empty words. She was sitting by the stove, and despite the noise of the breaking dish, despite the sound of my voice calling her name, despite my hand on her shoulder, she didn’t raise her eyes to me but kept humming a song that pained my heart, “Schöner Prinz so lieb / Zu weit fortgegangen,” the song of our first kiss. And as I said her name, as I said it once more with the great joy I felt at seeing her again, as my hand patted her shoulder and stroked her cheek and her hair, I saw that her eyes didn’t see me, I understood that she didn’t hear me, I understood that Amelia’s body and Amelia’s wonderful face were there before my eyes, but that her soul was wandering somewhere else, I didn’t know where, but in some unknown place, and I swore to myself that I’d go to that place and bring her back, and it was at that precise moment, at the moment when I made that vow, that I heard for the first time a little voice I’d never heard before and didn’t know, a child’s little voice, coming from our bedroom and rubbing the syllables against one another, the way you rub flint to make sparks fly, and producing a joyous, free, disorderly cascade of melody, a playful babbling that I now know must be the closest thing to the language of the angels.

“I went into the barn, Brodeck. I went inside. It was very silent and very dark. I saw some shapes on the floor, little shapes lying in a heap, not moving. I knelt beside them. I know death too well not to recognize it. There were the young girls, so young — none of them was twenty — and all three had their eyes wide open. I closed their eyelids. And there was Amelia. She was the only one still breathing, but weakly. She’d been left for dead, but she didn’t want to die, Brodeck, she didn’t want to die, because she knew you’d come back one day, she knew it, Brodeck … After I went over to her, while I was kneeling with her face pressed against my belly, she started to hum that song she hasn’t stopped humming since … I rocked her in my arms, I rocked her and rocked her for a long, long time …”

There was no more water in the samovar. Gingerly, I put the Liber florae down beside me. It was almost dark outside. The Anderer opened a window, and a scent of hot resin and humus permeated the room. I’d talked for a long time, no doubt for hours, but he hadn’t interrupted me. I was on the point of apologizing for having opened my heart to him like that, without shame and without permission, when chimes sounded directly behind me. I spun around brusquely, as if someone had fired a shot. It was an odd sort of old-fashioned clock, the size of a large watch, made in days gone by to be hung inside carriages. I hadn’t noticed it before. Its delicate golden hands indicated eight o’clock. The watch-case was made of ebony and gold, and the numbers of the hours were of blue enamel on an ivory background. Under the axis of the hands, the watchmaker, Benedik Fürstenfelder, whose name was engraved on the bottom of the frame, had inscribed a motto in fine, slanted, intertwining letters: ALLE VERWUNDEN, EINE TÖDTET—“They all wound; one kills.”

* * *

s I stood up, I read the motto aloud. The Anderer likewise got to his feet. I’d talked a lot. Too much, perhaps. It was time for me to go home. Somewhat confused, I told him he mustn’t think that… He interrupted me by swiftly raising his small, chubby hand, like the hand of a slightly overweight woman. “Don’t apologize,” he said, his voice nearly as imperceptible as a breath. “I know that talking is the best medicine.”

—

don’t know whether the Anderer was right.

I don’t know if it’s possible to be cured of certain things. Maybe talking’s not such good medicine, after all. Maybe talking has the opposite effect. Maybe it only serves to keep wounds open, the way we keep the embers of a fire alive so that when we want it to, when we’re ready for it, it can blaze up again.