Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

One man alone couldn’t do away with two beasts like that. Nor could two men manage it. Such a job would require several men. And, besides, what an expedition! To enter the stable — at night, no doubt — wasn’t much of a trick. Nor was getting the animals out, because they were docile, good-natured, anything but wild. But then, by the riverside (because it can have happened nowhere else), to make the two beasts lie on their sides, maybe by pushing them over, to seize their legs, put them together, and bind them solidly, and then to carry or drag the animals to the water and throw them in — that was quite a feat. After careful consideration, I believe there couldn’t have been fewer than five or six of them, five or six beefy fellows who, on top of everything else, had to be unafraid of getting kicked or bitten.

The cruelty of the animals’ death didn’t seem to strike anyone. Some villagers declared that such beasts could be nothing less than demonic creatures. Some even murmured that they had heard the beasts talking. But most people said that what had happened was maybe the only way to get rid of the Anderer , the only way to compel him to get the hell out of our village and go back to where he came from, that is, to a far-off place nobody even wanted to think about. This imbecile savagery was, among other things, rather a paradox, since killing the Anderer ’s mounts in order to make him understand that he must go away deprived him of the only quick means of leaving the village. But murderers, whether of animals or of men, rarely reflect on the deed they do.

—

’ve never killed any donkeys or horses.

I’ve done much worse.

Yes, much worse.

At night, I walk along the rim of the Kazerskwir .

I see the railway car again.

I see the six days I spent in the railway car.

I see the six nights again, too, and especially, like a never-fading nightmare, the fifth of those nights.

As I’ve already said, we were held for a week at the train station in S., and then we were separated into two columns and put on trains. We were all Fremdër . Some rich, some poor. Some from the city, others from the country. Such distinctions were quickly blurred. We were shoved into big, windowless freight cars. There was a bit of straw, already soiled, on the wooden floor. Under normal conditions, each car had room for about thirty persons to sit very close together. The guards pushed more than double that number into our car. There were cries, moans, protests, tears. An old man fell down. Some people near him tried to raise him up, but the guards thrust in still more prisoners, causing unpredictable, abrupt movements among those already there. The old man was trampled by the very people who had tried to save him.

He was the first to die in our car.

A few minutes later, having loaded the freight onto the cars, the guards slid the big iron doors shut and bolted them, plunging us into darkness. The only daylight that entered the car came through a few small cracks. The train started moving with a great lurch, which served to press us even more tightly together. The journey began.

It was in these circumstances that I made the acquaintance of the student Kelmar. Chance had placed us side by side. Kelmar was on my right, while on my left was a young woman with a child in her arms, a baby a few months old. She held the child close the whole time. We felt our companions’ heat and smelled the odors of their skin, their hair, their perspiration, their clothes. You couldn’t move without making your neighbor move. You couldn’t get up or shift position. The occasional jolts of the train further compressed us. People spoke in low voices at first; later, they didn’t speak at all. There was some weeping, but very little. Sometimes a child hummed a tune, but most of the time there was silence, nothing but silence, and the sound of the axles and the iron wheels pounding the rails. Sometimes the train rolled along for hours without stopping; sometimes it remained at a standstill, but we never knew where or why. Over the course of six days, the big door was opened only once, and that wasn’t until the fifth day, nor was it done with any intention of letting us out; hands with no faces behind them doused us with several buckets of tepid water.

Unlike some of our more provident companions, neither Kelmar nor I had brought anything to eat or drink. But strangely enough — at least for the first few days — we didn’t suffer much from hunger and thirst. We talked softly to each other. We evoked memories of the Capital. We discussed the books we’d read, the comrades we’d had at the University, and the cafés I used to pass with Ulli Rätte, the same cafés in which Kelmar, who came from a well-to-do family, used to meet his friends to drink burned brandy and beer and large cups of creamy chocolate. Kelmar told me about his family: about his father, who was a fur merchant; about his mother, who spent her days playing piano in their great house on the banks of the river; and about his six sisters, who ranged in age from ten to eighteen. He told me their names, but I can’t remember them. I talked to him about Amelia and Fedorine, about our village and its surroundings, its landscapes, its springs, its forests, its flowers, and its animals.

Thus, for three days, our food and drink were words, and we nourished each other with them in the stinking heat of the railway car. Sometimes at night we managed to sleep a little, but when we couldn’t, we continued our conversations. The child in the young woman’s arms made no sound. He took her breast when she gave it to him, but he never demanded it. I watched him with the nipple in his little mouth, creasing his cheeks in his effort to draw out some milk, but his mother’s breasts looked flaccid and empty, and the baby soon grew tired of sucking in vain. Then his mother produced a glass demijohn enclosed in wicker-work and poured a little water into his mouth. Others in the car had similar treasures — a bit of bread, a chunk of cheese, some cookies or sausage or water, which they guarded jealously and kept under their clothes, next to their skin.

In the beginning, I was very thirsty. My mouth burned. I felt as though my tongue was becoming enormous and dry, like an old stump, filling my mouth to the point of bursting. I had no more saliva. My teeth were like red-hot daggers, thrusting their little points into my gums. I believed they were bleeding, but then I passed my fingers over them and saw that it was only an illusion. Gradually, bizarrely my thirst disappeared. I was feeling weaker and weaker, but I wasn’t thirsty anymore. And barely hungry. The two of us, Kelmar and I, kept on talking.

The young woman paid no attention to us. She surely must have heard us, however, and I know she could feel me as I felt her, her hip against mine, her shoulder, sometimes even her head, striking my head or leaning on me in sleep. She never said a word to us. She held her baby close, and likewise her equally precious demijohn, rationing the water methodically and sparing only a little at a time for herself and her child.

We had lost all sense of time and place. I don’t mean the immediate place we were in, bounded by the dimensions of the freight car, but the geography our train was slowly lumbering through. What direction were we traveling in? What was our destination? What regions, what countries were we crossing? Did they exist on any maps?

Today I know that they existed on no map and came into being as our train rolled over them. Our freight car and all the other cars like ours — carriages in which, as in ours, dozens of women, children, and men, gasping for air, consumed by thirst, fever, and hunger, were pressed against one another, sometimes the dead against the living — our car and the other cars were inventing, from one minute to the next, a country, the land of inhumanity, of the negation of all humanity, and the camp was going to be that country’s heart. That was the journey we were making, the likes of which nobody had ever made before us — I mean not so methodical, so thorough, so efficient a journey as ours, which left no leeway for the unforeseen.