Brodeck (11 page)

Today, I imagine her eyes. I imagine the eyes of the
Zeilenesseniss
when she began to realize that she was the last of them, that she was alone, and that perhaps—yes, perhaps—she would never leave the camp, that for her, too, it was going to be transformed into a grave.

I was told that she began to strike the men at the head of the crowd with her fists. No one replied in kind; they simply made way for her. And so she gradually moved deeper into the great river of walking dead, unaware that she would never emerge from it, for the waves closed in again behind her. There was no outcry, no complaint. Her words disappeared with her. She was swallowed up, and she met an end in which there was no hatred, an end that was almost mechanical—a fitting end, in short, an end in her own image. I truly believe, even though I couldn’t swear it, that no one laid a hand on her. She died without suffering a blow, without a word addressed to her, without even so much as a glance cast upon her, who had felt such contempt for our glances. I imagine her stumbling at some point and falling to the ground. I imagine her stretching out her hands, trying to catch hold of the shadows moving past her, over her, on her body, on her legs, on her delicate white arms, on her stomach and her powdered face; shadows that paid her no attention, that didn’t look at her, that brought her no help but didn’t attack her, either; moving shadows that simply passed, passed, passed, treading her underfoot the way one treads dust or earth or ashes.

The next day, I found what remained of her body. It was a poor thing, swollen and blue. All her beauty had vanished. She looked like a
Strohespuppe
, a “straw fairy,” one of the big dolls children make by stuffing old dresses with hay;
Strohespuppen
are paraded through the village on the feast of St. John and then, as night falls, tossed into a great fire, while everyone sings and dances to the glory of summer. Her face wasn’t there anymore. She no longer had eyes or a mouth or a nose. In their place I saw a single wound, enormous and round, inflated like a balloon, and attached to it was a long mane of blond hair mingled with clumps of mud. It was by her hair that I recognized her. In former days, while I crept along the ground, acting the dog, her hair had appeared to me like filaments of sunlight, blinding and obscene.

Even in death, she kept her fists so tightly clenched that they resembled stones. Part of a prettily worked golden chain dangled from one hand. At the end of that chain, no doubt, there was a medal, one of those delicately engraved medals that represent a male or female saint and are placed around infants’ necks when they’re baptized. Perhaps that very medal was the reason why she returned; perhaps she’d noticed it was missing from her child’s small, soft chest. She’d reentered the camp, counting on leaving it again very quickly. She must not have known that once you abandon Hell, you must never go back there. But in the end, there’s no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there’s nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it’s served.

XVII

————

eer leaves no stain, nor does eau-de-vie, but wine!”

Father Peiper was launched on a litany of complaints. He stood at his stone sink, dressed in his shirt and underpants, scrubbing his white chasuble with a large brush and a bar of soap. “And right on the cross, to boot! If I can’t get this out, idiots and zealots will see it as a symbol! We’re already weighed down with symbols! We traffic in symbols! It’s no use adding to them!”

I watched him work and said not a word. I was in a corner of his kitchen, sitting on a rickety chair with a frowsy straw bottom. The air in the room was hot and heavy and reeked of dirty dishes, hardened cooking fat, and cheap wine. Hundreds of empty bottles stood here and there, dozens of them holding burning candles, their fragile flames stretching toward the ceiling.

Peiper stopped scrubbing his vestment, tossed it with a gesture of vexation into the stone sink, and turned around. He looked at me and started, as if he had forgotten my presence. “Brodeck, Brodeck,” he said. “Have a drink?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t need it yet. Lucky you …”

In his quest for a bottle that still had some wine in it, he shifted a great many empties, producing a crystalline, incoherent music before finding the one he sought. He grabbed it by the neck as though his life depended on it and poured himself a glass. Picking it up with both hands, he raised it to eye level, smiled, and said in a solemn voice heavy with irony, “This is my blood. Take and drink ye all of it.” Then he downed the contents in one gulp, slammed the glass on the table, and burst into loud laughter.

I had just come from the village hall, where—in compliance with Orschwir’s command—I’d gone to discuss the progress of my Report.

Night had fallen suddenly on the village that evening, like an ax striking a chopping block. Over the course of the day, big clouds had moved in from the west and stalled over our valley. Blocked by the mountains as though caught in a trap, the clouds had begun to gyrate madly, and then, around three o’clock in the afternoon, a glacial north wind had arrived and split them wide open. Their gaping bellies released a great deal of dense snow, a deluge of stubborn, numberless flakes, serried like the resolute soldiers of an infinite army and clinging to everything they touched: roofs, walls, paving stones, trees. It was the third of December. All the snowfalls of the previous weeks had been mere tokens, and we knew it; the snow that came down that day, however, was no laughing matter. It was the first of the big snows, to be followed by others, whose company we would have to endure until spring.

In front of the village hall,
Zungfrost—
“Frozen Tongue”—had lit two lanterns and placed them on either side of the door. With the aid of a large shovel, he was piling the snow into two mounds, leaving a path like a trench between them. His clothes were covered with snowflakes, which clustered and clung to him in a way reminiscent of feathers, so that he looked like a large fowl.

“Hello,
Zungfrost!”

“Hel… hel… hello, Bro … Brodeck! It’s real… real… real… really com … com … coming down!”

“I’m here to see the mayor.”

“I … I know. He … he … he’s waiting for you upstairs.”

Zungfrost
is my junior by a few years. He always smiles, but he’s not simpleminded. In fact, if you look closely at his smile, it could just as easily be a grimace. His face froze one day long ago; his face, his smile, and his tongue all froze. At the time, he was a kid of seven or eight, and we were in the depths of another frigid winter. All the village children, both young and not so young, had gone to a bend in the Staubi where the surface of the river was completely frozen. We slid around on the ice. We shoved one another. And then someone—it was never clear who—threw
Zungfrost’s
afternoon snack, a slice of bacon stuffed into a chunk of bread, far out onto the ice. The kid watched his sandwich skidding across the surface, getting farther and farther away, until it stopped about a meter or two from the other bank of the river. Then he began to cry, shedding big, silent tears as round as mistletoe berries. The rest of us laughed, and then someone yelled, “Stop crying! Just go get it!” There was a silence. We all knew that the ice must be thin where the sandwich had come to rest, but no one said anything. We waited. The kid hesitated; then, maybe out of defiance, to show that he wasn’t afraid, or maybe simply because he was very hungry, he started moving out across the ice, crawling slowly on all fours. Everyone held his breath. We sat down on the riverbank, pressing against one another, and watched the kid as he advanced like a cautious little animal. We could tell he was trying to make himself as light as possible, even though he wasn’t very heavy to begin with. The closer he got to his sandwich, the more our little group of spectators managed to recover from our original amazement, and we began to cheer him on, beating out a cadence whose rhythm grew faster and faster. At the moment when he stretched out his hand toward the bread and bacon, everything went awry. The ice beneath him suddenly withdrew, like a tablecloth snapped off a table, and he disappeared without a cry into the waters of the river.

A forester named Hobel happened to be passing not far away, and it was he, alerted by our cries, who pulled the boy out of the river some minutes later with the help of a long pole. The kid’s face was as white as cream. Even his lips had turned white. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling. Some of us thought he was dead for sure. Nevertheless, he was put under blankets and his skin rubbed with alcohol, and several hours later he came to. Life returned to his veins and blood ran into his cheeks. The first thing he asked for was his afternoon snack, but in the asking, he stumbled over every word, as if the cold, flowing river had frozen his mouth and his tongue had remained enclosed and half dead under a caparison of ice. He received his nickname that day, and thereafter no one ever called him anything other than
Zungfrost
.

When I reached the landing, I could hear voices coming from the council room. My heart started beating a bit faster. I took a deep breath, uncovered my head, and knocked at the door before entering.

The council room is huge. I’d even say it’s too big for the little that goes on in it. It’s something out of another era, from a time when a community’s riches were measured in proportion to its public buildings. The ceiling’s improbably high. The walls, which have been simply whitewashed, are covered with ancient maps, framed parchments whereon texts written in sloping, complex scripts record laws, leases, and duties dating back to the time when the village was dependent upon the lords of Molensheim, before the Emperor, by a charter of 1756, accorded it its freedom and declared it released from all servitude. On all these documents, wax seals hang from shriveled ribbons.

Ordinarily the members of the village council sit on either side of the mayor at a large table, facing several rows of benches set out to accommodate the citizens who come to hear the council’s deliberations. That evening the table was there, but the benches had been shoved into a corner of the room and piled atop one another in monumental disorder. The only objects in front of the big table were a single chair and a tiny desk.

“Come on in, Brodeck, we’re not going to eat you …” That was Orschwir, addressing me from his central place at the table. His words elicited from the others a bit of muffled laughter, apparently an expression of their self-assurance and complicity. There were two of them. On the mayor’s left, Lawyer Knopf stuffed tobacco into his pipe while looking at me over the smudged lenses of his spectacles. The chair on Orschwir’s right was empty, but Göbbler occupied the next seat over. He leaned toward me and turned his head; because his eyes betrayed him more and more with each passing day, he’d apparently decided to try to see people and things with his ears instead. My blood ran cold at the sight of him.

“Are you going to sit down or not?” Orschwir said. The warmth in his voice sounded forced. “You’re among friends, Bro-deck. Make yourself at home. You have nothing to fear.”

I was on the point of asking the mayor the reason for my neighbor’s presence, and for Lawyer Knopf’s as well; Knopf may have been one of the village notables, but he wasn’t even a member of the council. Why were he and Göbbler there and nobody else? Why precisely those two? What offices did they hold? What were their functions? What qualified them to sit behind the big table?

My brain was boiling with all these questions when I heard the door open behind me. A broad smile lit up Orschwir’s face. “Come in, please,” he said respectfully, addressing the newcomer, whom I couldn’t yet see. “You haven’t missed anything. We were just about to get started.”

Halting steps, punctuated by the taps of a cane, resounded in the room. The new arrival was approaching, but I still couldn’t see him. The sounds at my back came closer. I didn’t want to turn around. He paused a few paces from me, and then I heard him say, “Hello, Brodeck.” I’d heard that voice tell me hello hundreds and hundreds of times. My heart stopped beating; I closed my eyes; my hands felt damp. A bitter taste flooded my mouth. The steps behind me began again, elegantly slow. Then there was the sound of a chair scraping the floor, followed by silence. I opened my eyes again. Ernst-Peter Limmat, my old schoolmaster, was sitting in the chair on Orschwir’s right, looking at me.

“Have you lost your tongue, Brodeck? Come on! We’re all here! Read us what you’ve written so far.”

As he spoke these words, Orschwir rubbed his hands together, the way he rubbed them after concluding a shrewd business deal. It wasn’t my tongue that had gone missing. That wasn’t what I’d lost all of a sudden. It was something else: another portion, perhaps, of faith and hope.

My dear old teacher Limmat, what were you doing there, sitting behind that table like a judge in a tribunal? So you knew, too, didn’t you?