Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

“Well?”

“It’s peculiar,” I said.

“If you look, if you really look, it’s like that for everyone: not really faithful, but very true.”

Maybe it was Diodemus’s passion for novels that made him always peer into the deepest folds of words and caused his imagination to run ten times faster than he did. But on that particular occasion, what he said to me wasn’t stupid. I made one more tour around the room, studying the drawings the Anderer had put up on the walls of the inn. The landscapes, which had at first struck me as run-of-the-mill, came to life, and the faces in the portraits told of secrets, of torments, of heinousness, of mistakes, of confusion, of baseness. I’d touched neither wine nor beer, and yet I tottered and my head spun. In Göbbler’s portrait, for example, there was a mischievousness of execution which caused the viewer, if he looked at the image from the left, to see the face of a smiling man with faraway eyes and serene features, whereas if he looked at it from the right side, the same lines fixed the expressions of the mouth, eyes, and forehead in a venomous scowl, a sort of horrible grimace, haughty and cruel. Orschwir’s portrait spoke of cowardice, of dishonorable conduct, of spinelessness and moral stain. Dorcha’s evoked violence, bloody actions, unpardonable deeds. Vurtenhau’s displayed meanness, stupidity, envy, rage. Peiper’s suggested renunciation, shame, weakness. It was the same for all the faces; the Anderer ’s portraits acted like magic revelators that brought their subjects’ hidden truths to light. His show was a gallery of the flayed.

And then there were the landscapes! That doesn’t seem like much, a landscape. It has nothing to say. At best, it sends us back to ourselves, nothing more. But there, as sketched by the Anderer , landscapes could talk. They recounted their history. They carried traces of what they had known. They bore witness to events that had unfolded there. In the church square, on the ground, an ink stain, located in the very spot where the execution of Aloïs Cathor had taken place, evoked all the blood that had flowed out of his beheaded body, and in the same drawing, if you looked at the houses bordering the square, all their doors were closed. The picture displayed only one open door, the one to Otto Mischenbaum’s barn. I’m not making anything up, I swear it! For example, if you tilted your head a little while looking at the drawing of the Baptisterbrücke, you could see that the roots of the white willows figured the shapes of three faces, the faces of three young girls. In the same way, if you squinted slightly when you looked at the picture of the Lichmal clearing, you could make out the shapes of the girls’ faces in the oak branches. And if I was unable at the moment to discover what was to be seen in some of the other drawings, that was simply because the events they alluded to hadn’t yet taken place. At the time, for example, the Tizenthal rocks were just that, dumb rocks, neither pretty nor ugly, figuring in neither history nor legend, but it was before the Anderer’s drawing of those very rocks that I found Diodemus. He was planted in front of it like a milestone in a field. Transfixed. I had to say his name three times before he turned a bit and looked at me.

“What do you see in this one?” I asked.

“Several things,” he said dreamily. “Several things …”

He added nothing more. Later, when he was dead, I had (needless to say) time to reflect. I thought about the Anderer’s drawing again.

I suppose it could be said that I’ve got a hot head and a broken brain. That the entire rigmarole with the drawings was pure nonsense. That an unsound mind and deranged senses would be required for someone to see in those simple doodles everything that I saw. And that it’s surely easy to bring all this up for consideration now, when there’s no proof of anything, when the drawings no longer exist, when they’ve all been destroyed. Yes, exactly right, they were all destroyed! That very evening, no less! If that’s not proof, then what is it? The drawings were ripped into a thousand pieces, scattered to the four winds, or reduced to ashes, because they said, in their fashion, things that should never have been said, and they revealed truths that had been carefully smothered.

As for me, I’d had more than enough.

I left the inn when drinking was proceeding at a steadily increasing pace and men were bellowing like beasts, but they were still happy beasts, merrily carousing. Diodemus, for his part, stayed until the end, and I got my account of what happened from him. Schloss continued to bring out pitchers and bottles for about an hour after I left, and then, the ammunition having run out, an armistice was abruptly declared; evidently, the sum agreed between him and the Anderer had been reached. From this point on, everything went sour. At first, there were words, followed by a few deeds, but nothing really nasty as yet — general grumbling, a bit of breakage, nothing more serious than that. But then the nature of the grumbling changed, as when a calf is separated from its mother’s teats; at first it whimpers, but then it resigns itself and looks around for some other amusement, some small raison d’être. The change came when everyone recalled the reason why they were all there in the first place. They turned back to the drawings and considered them again. Or differently. Or with the scales fallen from their eyes, if you will. In any case, they took another look at the pictures and saw themselves. Exposed. They saw what they were and what they had done. They saw in the Anderer’s drawings everything that Diodemus and I had seen. And, of course, they couldn’t bear it. Who could have borne it?

“A real mess! I never quite understood who started it, and in any case that’s not important, because everyone joined in, and nobody tried to restrain anyone else at all. The priest had long since passed out. He was sleeping under a table with a bit of his cassock in his mouth, like a child sucking his thumb. The older fellows had gone home shortly after you did. As for Orschwir, he didn’t take part in the spectacle, he just watched, but he had a satisfied smile on his face, and when young Kipoft threw his portrait into the fire, Orschwir looked downright happy, believe me! And the whole thing happened so fast, you know. Before I had time to blink, everything on the walls was gone. The only person who looked a bit peeved was Schloss.”

When Diodemus gave me this account, it was two days later and the rain hadn’t stopped falling since that festive evening at Schloss’s inn. It was as if the heavens needed to do a big wash, to launder men’s dirty linen, since they weren’t up to doing it themselves. The walls of our houses seemed to be weeping, and in the streets, rivulets of water turned brown by earth and stable dung streamed among the paving stones, ferrying along small pebbles, straw bits, sundry peelings, flecks of grime. What’s more, it was an odd rain, a continuous deluge coming down from a sky we couldn’t even see, so thick, dirty, and waterlogged was the blanket of clouds that kept it constantly hidden. We’d waited for that rain for weeks. For weeks, the village had baked in the heat, and with the village the bodies of the villagers, their nerves, their muscles, their desires, their hearts; and then the storm came, the great splashing havoc of the storm, which corresponded on a gigantic scale to the human havoc, the contained fury inside Schloss’s inn, for precisely at the moment when that sort of minor rehearsal for the Ereigniës was going on, when effigies were being burned as a preliminary to killing the man, the overloaded sky split in half along its entire width, from east to west, and torrents of gray rain spilled out of it like guts, an immense downpour of water as greasy and heavy as dishwater.