Brodeck (23 page)

“I went into the barn, Brodeck. I went inside. It was very silent and very dark. I saw some shapes on the floor, little shapes lying in a heap, not moving. I knelt beside them. I know death too well not to recognize it. There were the young girls, so young—none of them was twenty—and all three had their eyes wide open. I closed their eyelids. And there was Amelia. She was the only one still breathing, but weakly. She’d been left for dead, but she didn’t want to die, Brodeck, she didn’t want to die, because she knew you’d come back one day, she knew it, Brodeck … After I went over to her, while I was kneeling with her face pressed against my belly, she started to hum that song she hasn’t stopped humming since … I rocked her in my arms, I rocked her and rocked her for a long, long time …”

There was no more water in the samovar. Gingerly, I put the
Liber florae
down beside me. It was almost dark outside. The
Anderer
opened a window, and a scent of hot resin and humus permeated the room. I’d talked for a long time, no doubt for hours, but he hadn’t interrupted me. I was on the point of apologizing for having opened my heart to him like that, without shame and without permission, when chimes sounded directly behind me. I spun around brusquely, as if someone had fired a shot. It was an odd sort of old-fashioned clock, the size of a large watch, made in days gone by to be hung inside carriages. I hadn’t noticed it before. Its delicate golden hands indicated eight o’clock. The watch-case was made of ebony and gold, and the numbers of the hours were of blue enamel on an ivory background. Under the axis of the hands, the watchmaker, Benedik Fürstenfelder, whose name was engraved on the bottom of the frame, had inscribed a motto in fine, slanted, intertwining letters: ALLE VERWUNDEN, EINE TÖDTET—“They all wound; one kills.”

*    *    *

s I stood up, I read the motto aloud. The
Anderer
likewise got to his feet. I’d talked a lot. Too much, perhaps. It was time for me to go home. Somewhat confused, I told him he mustn’t think that… He interrupted me by swiftly raising his small, chubby hand, like the hand of a slightly overweight woman. “Don’t apologize,” he said, his voice nearly as imperceptible as a breath. “I know that talking is the best medicine.”

XXXIII

————

don’t know whether the
Anderer
was right.

I don’t know if it’s possible to be cured of certain things. Maybe talking’s not such good medicine, after all. Maybe talking has the opposite effect. Maybe it only serves to keep wounds open, the way we keep the embers of a fire alive so that when we want it to, when we’re ready for it, it can blaze up again.

I burned Diodemus’s letter. Of course I burned it. Writing hadn’t cured him of a thing, not him. And it wouldn’t have done me any good to turn over the last page and read the names of the
Dörfermesch
he’d written there. No good at all. I don’t have the spirit of revenge. Some part of me will always remain Brodeck the Dog, a creature that prefers prostration in the dust to biting, and maybe it’s better that way.

That evening, I didn’t go directly home. I made a long detour. The night was soft. The stars were like silver nails hammered into the growing blackness of the vanishing sky. There are hours on the earth when everything is unbearably beautiful, with a beauty whose scope and sweetness seem uniquely meant to emphasize the ugliness of our condition. I walked to the bank of the Staubi and then upstream from the Baptisterbrücke until I came to a grove of white willows which Baerensbourg tortures every January by cutting off all their branches. That’s where the three young girls are buried. I know, because Diodemus told me so. He showed me the exact spot. There’s no grave marker, no cross, nothing at all. But I know the three girls are there, under the grass: Marisa, Therne, and Judith. Names are important, and those are their names. The names I’ve given them. Because in addition to having killed them, the
Dörfermesch
made all trace of them disappear so thoroughly that no one knows what their names were, or where they came from, or who they really were.

That stretch of the Staubi is so beautiful. Its clear waters roll over a bed of gray pebbles. It murmurs and babbles, almost like a human voice. To those willing to lend an ear and sit for a moment on the grass, the Staubi offers a subtle music.

The
Anderer
often sat on that grassy bank, taking notes in his little notebook and drawing. I think some of the people who saw him there persuaded themselves that he wasn’t dallying in that place merely by chance, not precisely there, so close to the young girls’ mute graves. And it was no doubt over the course of his stops by the willow grove that the
Anderer
’s doom, unbeknownst to him, began to be sealed, and that the
Dörfermesch
gradually determined on his death. One must never, not even inadvertently, not even against his will, resurrect horror, for then it revives and spreads. It bores into brains; it grows; and it gives birth to itself again.

Diodemus also found his death not far from there.
Found his death—
a strange expression, when you think about it, but I think it suits Diodemus’s case: in order to find something, you must seek it, and I really believe that Diodemus sought his end.

I know he left his room. I know he left the village. I know he walked along the banks of the Staubi, and I know that as he headed upstream, in the opposite direction of the river current, his thoughts flowed backward, against the current of his life. He thought about our long walks, about all the things we’d said to each other, about our friendship. He’d just finished writing his letter, and as he walked along the riverbank, his mind was on what he’d written. He passed by the white willows, he thought about the young girls, he walked on, he kept walking, he tried to drive the ghosts away, he tried to talk to me one last time, I’m sure of it, yes, I’m certain he spoke my name; he climbed up to the top of the Tizenthal rocks, and that very short ascent did him good because the higher he climbed, the lighter he felt. When he reached the summit, he looked at the roofs of the village, he looked at the moon’s reflection on the margins of the river, he looked one last time at his life, he felt the night breeze caressing his beard and his hair. He closed his eyes; he let himself drop. His fall lasted for a while. Maybe, wherever he is now, he still hasn’t stopped falling.

On the night of the
Ereigniës
, Diodemus wasn’t in Schloss’s inn. Along with Alfred Wurtzwiller, our harelipped postmaster, Diodemus had gone to S., where Orschwir had sent him with some important papers. I think the mayor gave Diodemus that mission on purpose, to get him out of the way. When he came back to the village three days later, I tried to tell him what had happened, but he quickly cut me off: “I don’t want to hear it, Brodeck. You can keep all that to yourself. Besides, you don’t know anything for sure. Maybe he left without saying anything to anyone. Maybe he tipped his hat and made a bow and went off the way he came. You didn’t see anything, you said so yourself! Did he even exist, this
Anderer
of yours?”

His words took my breath away. I said, “But Diodemus, you can’t possibly—”

“Shut up, Brodeck. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. Leave me alone! There’s enough trouble in this village!”

Then he rushed away, leaving me at the corner of Silke Lane. I think it was that very evening when Diodemus started writing his letter to me. The
Anderer’s
death had stirred up too many things, more things than he could bear.

I repaired the desk and the broken drawer. I did a good job, I think. Then I rubbed the desk with beeswax, which makes it smell good and gleam in the candlelight. And here I am, sitting at the desk and writing again. It’s cold in the shed, but the pages hold the heat from Amelia’s belly for a long time. I hide all these words I’ve written against Amelia’s belly. Every morning, I wash and dress Amelia, and every evening, I undress her. Every morning, after writing almost all night long, I slip the pages into a finely woven linen pouch and tie it around her stomach, under her shirt. Every night, when I put her to bed, I remove the pouch, which is warm and impregnated with her scent.

I tell myself that Poupchette grew in Amelia’s belly, and that in a way, the story I’m writing comes out of it, too. I like this encouraging analogy.

I’ve almost finished the Report that Orschwir and the others are waiting for. I have just a few more things to say, and then it’s done. But I don’t want to give it to them before I finish my own story. I still have certain paths to go down. I still have several pieces to put together. I still have a few doors to open. So they won’t be getting their Report yet, not right away. First I have to continue describing the days that led up to the
Ereigniës
. Imagine a bowstring being pulled tauter and tauter, every hour a little more. Such an image gives a good idea of the weeks that preceded the
Ereigniës
because the whole village was drawn like a bow; but no one knew what arrow it would let fly, nor what its true target would be.

The summer heat was baking us like an oven. Old folks declared that they couldn’t remember such sweltering temperatures. Even in the heart of the forest, among the rocks where in mid-August the cool breath of buried glaciers usually rises up from the depths, the only breezes were searing hot. Insects whirled around madly above the dry mosses, rubbing their elytra together with an unnerving sound like an orchestra of out-of-tune violins and filling woodcutters’ brains with steadily mounting irritation. Springs dried up. The wells were at their lowest level. The Staubi turned into a narrow, feeble stream in which brown trout, brook trout, and char died by the score. Cows panted for air, and their withered teats yielded a small amount of clear, bitter milk. The animals were brought back to their stables and only let out again at nightfall. They lay on their sides, lowering their big eyelids over their shiny eyes and lolling their tongues, which were as white as plaster. Anyone in search of a cool spot had to climb up to the high stubble fields, and the happiest creatures of all were undoubtedly the flocks of sheep and goats, the shepherds, and the goatherds on the heights, heartily drinking the fresh wind. Down below, in the village streets and in the houses, all conversations revolved around the blazing sun, which we watched in despair as it rose every morning and quickly climbed to its zenith in a blue and absolutely empty sky that stayed that way the whole day long. We moved very little. We ruminated. The smallest glasses of wine went to men’s heads, and their owners needed no pretext to fly off the handle. No one’s to blame for a drought. No one can be condemned for it. And so anger builds and must be taken out on something, or someone.

Let the reader make no mistake. I’m not saying that the
Ereigniës
occurred because we had scorching weather in the weeks preceding it and heads were on the boil like potatoes in a pot. I think it would have taken place even at the end of a rainy summer. In that case, of course, it would have required more time. There would not have been the haste, the tensed bow I mentioned earlier. The thing would have happened differently, but it would have happened.

People are afraid of someone who keeps quiet. Someone who says nothing. Someone who looks and says nothing. If he stays mute, how can we know what he’s thinking? No one was pleased about the
Anderer’s
scant, two-word reply to the mayor’s speech. The next day, once the joy of the celebration—the free wine, the dancing—was past, people talked about the stranger’s attitude, about his smile, his outfits, and the pink cream on his cheeks, about his donkey and his horse, about the various nicknames he’d been given, about why he’d come to our village and why he was still here.

And it can’t be said that the
Anderer
made up any lost ground over the course of the following days. I have no doubt that I’m the person he talked to most—apart from Father Peiper, but in that regard I’ve never been able to find out which of them talked more than the other, and about what—and one may judge the
Anderer
’s verbosity from the fact that I’ve already recorded in these pages every word he ever said to me. A total of about ten lines, hardly more. It’s not that he ignored people. When he passed someone, he raised his hat, inclined his large head (upon which the remaining hair was sparse, but very long and frizzy), and smiled, but he never opened his lips.

And then, of course, there was his black notebook and all the notes people saw him taking, all the sketches and drawings he made. That conversation I overheard, when Dorcha, Pfimling, Vogel, and Hausorn were talking at the end of a market day—I didn’t make that up! And those four weren’t the only ones aggravated by that notebook! Why was he doing all that scribbling and scratching? What was the purpose of all that? What was it going to lead to?

We would eventually learn the answers to those questions. On August 24.

And that day, for him, was really the beginning of the end.