Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

She was holding my two hands in her own, and her face was quite close to mine. She had big green eyes, very beautiful, with flecks of gold all round the edges of her irises. I remember thinking that eyes have no age, and that when you die, you still have the eyes you had as a child, eyes that opened upon the world one day and haven’t ever let it go.

She gave me a little shake and repeated her question.

What did she know, and what could I tell her? The previous night, only men had been present at Schloss’s inn, and it was with those men that I had come to an agreement. After I returned home, I had said nothing to my women, and in the early hours of the following morning, which was not yet over, I had left the house before they awakened. The others, all the others, hadn’t they done the same with their wives, their sisters, their mothers, their children?

She kept gently pressing my hands, as if she were trying to squeeze the truth out of them. I spoke the words in my mind: “Nothing’s wrong, nothing at all, Mother Pitz. Everything’s normal. Last night, the men of the village killed the Anderer . The killing took place at Schloss’s inn, very simply, like a game of cards or a verbal agreement. It had been building up for a long time. Me, I arrived right after it happened, I’d gone there to buy some butter, and I had nothing to do with the slaughter. I’ve simply been charged with writing the Report on it. I’m supposed to explain what went on from the time he arrived in the village and why they had no choice but to kill him. That’s all.”

Those words never passed my lips. They remained inside. I tried to let them out, but they didn’t want to leave. The old woman stood up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a small pink enamel saucepan. She poured the rest of the brew into my cup and motioned to me to drink it. I drank. The walls started swaying once more. I was very hot. Mother Pitz went away again. When she came back the next time, she was carrying one of the large books that contained her dried plant collection. The label on the cover read Blüte vo Maï un Heilkraüte vo June , which can be translated as “May Flowers and June Simples.” She placed the book on the table in front of me, sat down beside me, and opened the book. “Whatever you’ve got, Brodeck, have a look at my little Sullies and they’ll take your mind off of it.”

Then, as if he had been summoned by those words, I was aware of the Anderer standing behind me and adjusting the gold-rimmed eyeglasses, as I’d often seen him do, on his kind, round, overgrown child’s face; he smiled at me before bowing his big head, adorned with frizzy sideburns, to contemplate the desiccated leaves and lifeless petals in Mother Pitz’s book.

I’ve already noted that he spoke but little. Very little. Sometimes, when I looked at him, the figure of a saint crossed my mind. Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they’re mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.

—

have to tell the story of the Anderer’s arrival among us, but I’m afraid: afraid of waking ghosts, and afraid of the others. The men of the village, I mean, who are no longer with me the way they used to be. Yesterday, for example, Fritz Aschenbach, whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, failed to return my greeting when we met on the slope of the Jornetz. He was coming down from cutting firewood; I was going up to see whether I might still be able to find some chanterelles. For a moment, his silence dumbfounded me. I stopped, turned around, and said to his back, “What’s this, Fritz, you don’t tell me hello?” But he didn’t even slow down or turn his head. He contented himself with spitting copiously to one side; that was his sole reaction. Maybe he was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see or hear me — but thoughts of what? Thoughts about what?

I’m not crazy. I’m not going crazy. Nevertheless, there’s Diodemus’s death to consider, too. (Another death! And a strange death indeed, as I shall soon describe.) Since my time in the camp, I know the wolves outnumber the lambs.

De Anderer arrived late in the afternoon of May 13, which will be a year ago next spring. A gentle, blond-tinged year. Evening came on tiptoe, as if unwilling to bother anyone. In the fields surrounding the village, and in the high pastures, as far as the eye could see, was a vast ocean of white and yellow. The green grass practically disappeared under a dandelion carpet. The wind swayed the flowers or brushed them or bent them, according to its whim, while above them bands of clouds hastened westward and vanished into the Prätze gap. A few patches of snow on the stubble fields still held out against the early-spring warmth, which was slowly lapping them up, reducing them from one day to the next, and would soon change them into clear, cold pools.

It was around five o’clock, perhaps five-thirty when Gunther Beckenfür, who was busy mending the roof of his shepherd’s hut, looked up and saw, heading his way on the road that comes from the border — a road on which nothing has been seen since the end of the war, on which no one travels anymore, and on which it would have occurred to no one to travel — a strange crew.

“Coming on like a real slow train, they were.” That’s Beckenfür talking, answering my question. I write down every word he says in a notebook, literally every word. We’re at his house. He has served me a glass of beer. I’m writing. He’s chewing on the cigarette he has just rolled for himself, half tobacco and half lichen, which fills the room with a stench of burned horn. His old father’s sitting in a corner; his mother’s been dead for a good while. The old man talks to himself. The words rumble and gurgle in his mouth, where no more than two or three teeth remain, and he shakes his fragile starling’s head continuously, like one of the moving cherubs in a church. Snow has started falling outside — the first snow, the one that delights children, the one whose whiteness blinds. We can see the flakes drifting close to the window, like thousands of curious eyes turned on us, and then, as though frightened, rushing away in great clouds toward the street.

“They were barely moving, like the fellow was hauling a load of granite boundary stones all by himself. I stopped working and took a long look, just to see if I was dreaming. But no, I wasn’t dreaming, I definitely saw something, even though I wasn’t sure yet what it was. At first I thought it might be stray animals, and then I thought it was people who’d lost their way or vendors of some kind, because now I could see that there was something a little human about whatever it was. I remember shivering, a real shiver, and not from cold, but from remembering the war, the war and the road it came on, that shitty goddamned road that brought the people here nothing but bad luck and trouble, and there he was, a creature in the shape of a man, with his two beasts which I couldn’t tell what they were, there he was, coming toward the village on that very same road. He could only have come from over there, from the Fratergekeime , those shit-assed sons of infected old whores … Do you remember what they did to Cathor, those sick bastards?”

I nodded. Cathor was the pottery mender. He was also Beckenfür’s brother-in-law. After the Fratergekeime arrived in the village, he tried to play games with them, and he lost. Perhaps I’ll tell about him later.