Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

When I returned from the camp, I put all my books of poetry in the stove and burned them. I watched the flames as they consumed everything, first words, then sentences, then whole pages. The smoke that rose from the burning poems was neither better nor nobler nor more charming than any other smoke. There was nothing special about it. I later learned that Nösel had been arrested during the first raids, like a number of professors and others whose occupation it was to study the world and explain it. He died shortly afterward in a camp similar to mine, a camp little different from hundreds of other camps which had sprung up all over the place on the other side of the border like poisonous flowers. Poetry had been of no use to him in the matter of his survival. Perhaps it had even hastened his demise. The thousands of verses, in Latin, Greek, and other languages, which he kept locked in his memory like the greatest of treasures, had availed him nothing. I felt certain that he, unlike me, had refused to act the dog. Yes, that was it. Poetry knows nothing of dogs. It ignores them.

Orschwir mopped his plate with a piece of bread. “Brodeck, Brodeck, I can see you haven’t had much sleep,” he began, speaking softly, in a tone of muffled reproach. “I, on the other hand — well, it’s been a long time since I’ve slept so well, quite some time indeed. Before, I couldn’t so much as close my eyes, but last night I felt like I was six or seven years old again. I laid my head on the pillow, and three seconds later I was asleep …”

By this time, the sun had fully risen, and its white light entered the kitchen in oblique rays, which struck the scarlet flagstones of the floor. Farm sounds could be heard: animals, servants, creaking axles, unidentifiable thwacks, and snatches of conversation.

“I want to see the body.” I spoke the words without realizing what I was doing. They came almost of their own accord, and I let them pass. Orschwir looked surprised and upset. His face changed in an instant. He froze, like a shellfish when you douse it with a few drops of vinegar, and quite suddenly, his features regained all their ugliness. He lifted his cap, scratched the crown of his head, stood up, turned his back to me, walked over to one of the windows, and planted himself in front of it.

“What good would that do, Brodeck? Didn’t you see your fill of corpses during the war? And what does one dead man look like, if not another dead man? You must tell the story, in sequence, one event after another. You mustn’t forget anything, but you mustn’t add useless details, either. They’ll make you veer off your course, and you’ll run the risk of confusing or even irritating your readers. Because you will be read, Brodeck, don’t forget that; you will be read by people who occupy important positions in S. Yes indeed, you will be read, even though I have a feeling you don’t believe it…”

Orschwir turned around and looked me up and down. “I respect you, Brodeck, but it’s my duty to put you on your guard. It’s my duty as mayor, and as … Please don’t leave the path, I beg you, and don’t go looking for what has never existed — or what doesn’t exist anymore.”

He drew up his great carcass to its full height, yawned, and stretched his huge arms toward the ceiling. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He was a good head taller than I was. We left the kitchen and entered a long corridor which wound its way through the entire house. I had the feeling we’d never get out of that corridor; it made my head spin and filled me with dread. I knew Orschwir’s house was big, but I would never have imagined it to be so labyrinthine.

It was an ancient structure, frequently remodeled, and it bore witness to a time unconcerned with alignment or logic. Diodemus told me that the oldest walls of the house dated back more than four centuries. According to an act he’d found in the archives, the Emperor stopped there in the fall of 1567, on his way to the marches of Carinthia and an encounter with the Grand Turk. I walked behind Orschwir, who stepped out smartly, displacing a quantity of air. I felt as though I were being pulled along in his wake, drawn by his scent, a combination of leather, night, fried bacon, beard, and unwashed skin. We met no one. Sometimes we went up a few steps or down two or three others. I would be hard put to say how long we walked — a few minutes, a few hours — because that corridor erased all the reference points of space and time. Finally Orschwir stopped in front of a large door covered with weathered green copper and square nails. He opened the door, and the milky light behind it dazzled me. I had to stand still for a moment with my eyes closed before I could open them to the light again. And see.

We were about to step out into the area behind the house. I had never gotten a look at this part of Orschwir’s property except from very far away, while hiking up in the mountains. I knew that the sheds and outhouses back here sheltered the mayor’s entire fortune, and before him his father’s fortune, and that of his father’s father. A pink, noisy fortune, which spent its time wallowing in mud. A squealing fortune, which produced a diabolical racket all day long.

Orschwir’s gold was swine. For several generations, his family had lived on and grown rich from hog fat. They had the largest pig farm for fifty kilometers around. Every morning, vehicles left the property — carrying either freshly killed corpses or panic-stricken, squealing animals bound for slaughter — and drove to the villages, the markets, and the butcher shops in the surrounding region. These daily rounds constituted a well-ordered ballet which not even the war had managed to disrupt. People eat in wartime, too. At least some of them.

For three months after the war began, there was a long moment of stupefied calm when everyone gazed eastward and cocked an ear for the sound of marching boots, a specialty of the still-invisible Fratergekeime . (That’s the word in our dialect for those who came here to spread death and ashes, for the men who made me become an animal, men very much like us. Having gone to university in their Capital, I happened to know them well. We associated with some of them, since they often visited our village, brought here by business and trade fairs, and spoke a language which is the twin sister of ours and which we understand with little difficulty.) When the calm ended and our border posts were suddenly swept aside like paper flowers scattered by a child’s breath, Orschwir was not even slightly worried: He kept on raising, selling, and eating his pigs. His door remained immaculate; no obscenities were painted on it. Although the conquerors marching in triumph through our streets bore at least a little responsibility for the idiotic deaths of his two sons, he had no qualms about selling them the fattest of his hogs in exchange for the pieces of silver they pulled out of their pockets in handfuls, having no doubt stolen them somewhere along the way.

In the first pen that Orschwir showed me, dozens of piglets a few weeks old were playing on fresh straw. They chased one another, collided with one another, and poked one another with their snouts, all the while emitting little cries of joy. Orschwir tossed them three shovelfuls of grain, which they rushed to devour.

In the next pen, eight-month-old hogs were walking around, jostling and challenging one another. You could feel their strange, gratuitous violence and aggressiveness, which nothing in evidence justified or explained. They were already large, thick beasts, with drooping ears and brutish faces. An acrid stench assailed my nostrils. The straw the animals sprawled on was filthy with their excrement. Their grunts caromed off the wooden walls and struck my temples. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.