Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Schloss put everyone out, including the mayor, and the whole jolly crew waded home through the storm, occasionally illuminated by lightning. Some of them lay down at full length in puddles and pretended to swim, shouting like unsupervised schoolboys, throwing handfuls of mud like snowballs at their companions’ faces.

I like to think that the Anderer stood at his upstairs window and contemplated the spectacle. I imagine his little smile. The heavens were vindicating him, and everything that he saw below him — creatures soaked to the skin, vomiting and shouting insults at one another, heartily mingling their laughs, their slurred words, and their streams of piss — could but make his destroyed portraits seem even truer to life. It was, in a way, something of a triumph for him. The coronation of the master of the game.

But down here, it’s best never to be right. That’s one thing you always end up paying a very high price for.

—

he next day was hangover day, when the skull pounds away like a drum, all on its own, and one isn’t sure whether what he remembers was dreamed or lived. I believe the majority of those who’d gone wild the previous night must have felt like great fools once they returned to the sober state; perhaps they’d obtained some relief, but they also knew they’d been damned stupid. Not that they were ashamed of their treatment of the Anderer , not at all; in that regard, their minds were set and nothing could change them; but when they thought about it, their furious attack on some scraps of paper could not have seemed the stuff of manly heroism.

The rain suited them fine. They didn’t have to leave their houses or encounter one another or converse or see in others’ eyes what they themselves had done. Only the mayor braved the storms that came sweeping over the village in rapid succession, as if it were April and not August. That evening, he left his house and went directly to the inn. When he arrived, he was soaked to the skin. Schloss was quite surprised to see his door open, since it had remained insistently shut all day long. Moreover, he hadn’t exactly spent the day wishing for customers. It had taken him hours to clean up after the revelers and wash everything, including the floor, all the while maintaining a roaring blaze in the hearth to dry the tiles and consume the rancid air. He’d just finished the long job. Everything — the room, the tables, the walls — had at last regained its customary appearance, as if nothing had happened the previous evening. And at this point, Orschwir made his entrance. Schloss looked at him as if he were a monster, a monster that had taken on a great deal of water, but a monster all the same. The mayor removed the big shepherd’s cloak he’d rigged himself out in and hung it on a nail near the fireplace. He took out a crumpled and rather dirty handkerchief, wiped his face with it, blew his nose in it, folded it up again, stuffed it in his pocket, and finally turned to Schloss, who was leaning on his broom, waiting.

“I have to talk to him. Go get him.”

It was, obviously, an order. No need for Schloss to ask Orschwir to specify who “him” was; there were only two people in the inn, Schloss and the Anderer . As he did each morning, Schloss had placed a breakfast tray — round brioche, raw egg, pot of hot water — in front of his guest’s door. A little later he’d heard, as he did each morning, footsteps on the stairs, followed by the sound of the little rear door opening and closing. That was the door his guest used when he went to visit his donkey and his horse in old Solzner’s stable, which shared a wall with the inn. Shortly thereafter, Schloss had heard the little door open again and the stairs creak again, and then that was all.

In a village like ours, the mayor is somebody. No innkeeper is going to argue with him about what he’s being told to do. So Schloss went upstairs and knocked on the door of his guest’s room. Almost at once, he found himself face-to-face with the Anderer’s smile and presented Orschwir’s request. The Anderer smiled a little more, made no reply, and closed the door. Schloss went back down and said, “I think he’s coming.”

Orschwir replied, “Very good, Schloss. Now, I suppose you have enough work to keep you busy in the kitchen, right?”

The innkeeper, no idiot, mumbled a yes. The mayor drew a complex, finely worked silver key from his pocket and opened the door to the smaller of the two public rooms in the inn, the one reserved for the Erweckens’Bruderschaf .

When Schloss told me all this, I asked him, “You don’t have a key to that door?”

“Of course I don’t! I’ve never even gone into that room! I have no fucking idea what it looks like. I don’t know how many keys there are or who has them, apart from the mayor, and Knopf, and most probably Göbbler, but I’m not even sure about him.”

Schloss came to our house not long ago. He waited until the night was black as pitch and scratched at the door like an animal. I suppose he’d crept along the walls of houses, careful to make no noise and especially trying to avoid being seen. It was the first time he’d ever stepped over our threshold; I wondered what in the world he could want. Fedorine looked at him as if he were rat droppings. She doesn’t like him; as far as she’s concerned, he’s a thief who buys a few commodities cheap and then sells them at very high prices. She calls him Schlocheikei , which in her ancient language is an untranslatable pun combining the innkeeper’s name with a word that means “profiteer.” Soon after he arrived, she made an excuse about having to put Poupchette to bed and left us alone. When she said Poupchette’s name, I saw a sad light glimmer in the innkeeper’s eyes, and I thought about his dead infant son; then, very quickly, the light went out.

“I wanted to talk to you, Brodeck. I have to talk to you. I have to try again to make you see I’m not your enemy, I’m not a bad man. I know you didn’t really believe me that other time. I’m going to tell you what I know. You can do what you want with it, but I warn you, don’t say you got it from me, because if you do, I’ll deny everything. I’ll say you’re lying. I’ll say I never told you that. I’ll even say I never entered your house. Understand?”

I didn’t reply to Schloss. I hadn’t asked him for anything. He’d come on his own. It was up to him to say his piece, without trying to obtain anything at all from me.

Eventually, he told me, the Anderer came downstairs, and the mayor showed him into the little room used by the brotherhood. Then he closed the door behind them.

“Me, I stayed in my kitchen the way Orschwir suggested. But here’s the thing: the closet where I keep the brooms and buckets is built into the wall, and the back of the closet is nothing but planks of wood. I don’t think they were nailed up straight in the first place, and over the years they’ve developed openings as big as eyes. Now, the back of the closet faces their little room. Gerthe knew it. I’m sure she listened to what was said and done in there on certain evenings, even if she never would admit it to me. She knew very well I’d be furious.”

So on the evening in question, Schloss did what he had never before allowed himself to do. Why? Men’s actions are very bizarre; you can cudgel your brains endlessly about human behavior without ever getting to the bottom of it. Did Schloss consider eavesdropping the way for him to become a man, to defy a prohibition and pass a test, to change camps definitively, to do what he thought was just, or to satisfy a curiosity too long suppressed? Whatever his motive, he wedged his big body in among brooms, shovels, buckets, and old dusting rags and glued his ear to the planks.