Brodeck (15 page)

XXIII

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n the afternoon of that same day, I brought Amelia and Poupchette along with me on an excursion. We climbed all the way to Lutz’s cabin. It was formerly a shepherd’s refuge, but it hasn’t been used for two decades. Rushes and meadow buttercups have slowly overgrown the surrounding pastures. The grass has retreated before the advancing moss. Some ponds have appeared; at first, they were merely puddles, but eventually they transformed the place into a kind of ghost, the ghost of a meadow not yet completely metamorphosed into a marsh. In an effort to understand and explain this transformation, I’d already written three reports on it, and each year around the same time I returned to the spot to measure the extent and nature of the changes. The cabin is west of the village, about a two-hour walk away. The path leading to it is no longer as clearly marked as it once was, when the tread of hundreds of pairs of clogs gave it renewed depth and form every year. Paths are like men; they die, too. Little by little, they get cluttered and then overwhelmed; they break apart, they’re eaten by grass, and in the end they disappear. After only a few years have passed, all that remains is a dim outline, and most people eventually forget that the path ever existed.

Poupchette, riding on my shoulders, chattered to the clouds. She spoke to them as if they could understand her. She told them to get a move on, to suck in their big bellies, and to leave the sun alone in the wide sky. The air coming down off the mountains gave fresh pinkness to her cheeks.

I was holding Amelia’s hand. She was beside me, walking along at a good pace. Sometimes her eyes rested on the ground and sometimes they stared off toward the far horizon, which was serrated by the jagged peaks of the Prinzhornï. But in either case, I could tell that her gaze never really came to rest on her surroundings, whether near or far. Her eyes seemed like butterflies, marvelously flitting about for no apparent reason, as though shifted by the wind, by the transparent air, but with no thought to what they were doing or what they saw. She marched on in silence. No doubt, the quickened rhythm of her breathing prevented her from humming her eternal song. Her lips were slightly parted. I clutched her hand and felt her warmth, but she noticed nothing. Perhaps she no longer knew how much the person at her side loved her.

Once we reached the cabin, I had Amelia sit on the stone bench by the door, and then I set Poupchette down next to her. I told Poupchette to be good while I made my rounds and recorded my data. I assured her I wouldn’t be long. I promised that after I finished we’d sit there and eat up the
Pressfrütekof
and the apple-walnut cake that old Fedorine had wrapped in a big white cloth for us.

I began taking my measurements. I quickly found the landmarks on which I based my findings every year, namely various big stones that had once enclosed the sheepfold and marked property boundaries. By contrast, I had some trouble locating the sandstone trough that stood almost exactly in the center of the pasture. The trough was carved from a single block of stone; when I saw it for the first time as a child, it had seemed to me like some kind of vessel abandoned there on solid ground, a ship made by the gods and now an encumbrance to men, who were neither clever enough to make use of it nor strong enough to move it.

Eventually, I found the trough in the middle of a big pond whose surface area, curiously enough, had tripled over the course of a year. The mass of stone was completely submerged and nearly hidden from sight. Glimpsed through the transparent prism of the water, the trough no longer put me in mind of a vessel, but rather of a tomb. It looked like a primitive, heavy coffin, long since emptied of any occupant, or perhaps—and this thought gave me chills—awaiting the man or woman destined to lie in it forever.

I jerked my eyes away and looked for the silhouettes of Poupchette and Amelia in the distance, but all I could see were the crumbling cabin walls. My girls were on the other side, invisible, vanished. I abandoned my measuring instruments on the edge of the pond and ran like a madman back to the cabin, calling out their names, seized by a deep, violent, irrational fear. The cabin wasn’t very far away, but I felt as though I’d never reach it. My feet slipped on the slick earth. I sank into soggy holes and quagmires, and the soft wet ground, which made sounds like the groans of the dying, seemed determined to suck me in. When I finally got to the cabin, I was exhausted and out of breath. My hands, my pants, and my hobnailed boots were covered with black mud that stank of beechnuts and waterlogged grass. I couldn’t even shout out Amelia’s and Poupchette’s names anymore, even though I had run so hard to reach them. And then I saw a little hand reach around a corner of the wall, pick a buttercup, break off its stem, and move on to another flower. My fear disappeared as quickly as it had overcome me. Poupchette’s face came into sight. She looked at me. I could read her astonishment in her eyes. “Dirty Daddy! All dirty, Daddy!” She started laughing, and I laughed, too. I laughed very hard, very, very hard. I wanted everyone and everything to hear my laughter: all the people in the world who wished to reduce me to an ashy silence, and all the things in the world that conspired to swallow me up.

Poupchette was proudly holding the bouquet of buttercups, daisies, and forget-me-nots she’d gathered for her mother. The flowers were still quivering with life, as if they hadn’t noticed that they’d just passed the gates of death.

Amelia had strayed away from the cabin, walked to the edge of the pasture, and stopped on a sort of promontory, beyond which the slope splits and shatters into broken rocks. Her face was turned toward the vast landscape of plains spreading out beyond the border, an indistinct expanse that seemed to doze under scraps of fog. Amelia was holding her arms away from her body, a little as though she were preparing to take flight, and her slender silhouette stood out against the distant, pale, blue-tinted background with a grace that was almost inhuman. Poupchette ran to her mother and flung herself against her thighs, trying in vain to get her short arms around them.

Amelia hadn’t moved. The wind had undone her hair, which streamed in the wind like a cold brown flame. I approached her with slow steps. The wind carried her perfume to me, as well as snatches of her song, which she’d started humming again. Poupchette jumped up and managed to grab one of her arms. She pressed the flowers into her mother’s hand. Amelia made no effort to hold on to the bouquet; her fingers remained open, and one by one the flowers blew away. Poupchette dashed about right and left, trying to catch them, while I kept moving very slowly toward Amelia. Her body, outlined against the sky, seemed to be suspended in it.

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Zu weit fortgegangen

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Nacht um Nacht ohn Eure Lippen

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Tag um Tag ohn Euch zu erblicken

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Träumt Ihr was ich träume

Schöner Prinz so lieb

Ihr mit mir immerdar zusammen

Handsome Prince so dear

Gone too far away

Handsome Prince so dear

Night after night without your lips

Handsome Prince so dear

Day after day without seeing you

Handsome Prince so dear

Do you dream of what I dream of

Handsome Prince so dear

You and me, together forever

Amelia was dancing in my arms. We were with other couples under the bare trees of January, drunk on youth in the golden, misty light of the streetlamps in the park, gliding along to the music of the little orchestra playing under the pavilion. The musicians, bundled up in fur clothing, looked like strange animals. It was the instant before the first kiss, preceded and brought on by a few minutes of vertigo. It was in another time. It was before the chaos. That song was playing, the song of the first kiss, a song in the old language that had passed across the centuries as a traveler crosses frontiers. Called in dialect
“Schon ofza prinzer, Gehtes so muchte lan,”
it was a love song blended with bitter words, a song of legend, the song of an evening and a lifetime, and now it’s the dreadful refrain inside which Amelia has shut herself up as inside a prison, where she lives without really existing.

I held her tight against me. I kissed her hair, the nape of her neck. I told her in her ear that I loved her, that I would always love her, that I was there for her, close to her, all around her. I took her face in my hands, I turned it toward me, and then, while tears ran down her cheeks, I saw in her eyes something like the smile of a person far, far away.

XXIV

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s we made our way back home, we were caught up in the excitement of that particular day, the tenth of June. On the square, men and women were starting to form groups and press against one another, becoming a crowd.

For a long time now, I’ve fled crowds. I avoid them. I know that everything—or almost—has come from them. I mean the bad things, the war and all the
Kazerskwirs
it opened up in the brains of so many. I’ve seen how men act when they know they’re not alone, when they know they can melt into a crowd and be absorbed into a mass that encompasses and transcends them, a mass comprising thousands of faces fashioned like theirs. One can always tell himself that the fault lies with whoever trains them, exhorts them, makes them dance like a slowworm around a stick, and that crowds are unconscious of their acts, of their future, and of their course. This is all false. The truth is that the crowd itself is a monster. It begets itself, an enormous body composed of thousands of other conscious bodies. Furthermore, I know that there are no happy crowds. There are no peaceful crowds, either. Even when there’s laughter, smiles, music, choruses, behind all that there’s blood: vexed, overheated, inflamed blood, stirred and maddened in its own vortex.

Signs of what was to come were already visible a long time ago, when I was in the Capital, where I had been sent to complete my studies. My going there was Limmat’s idea. He spoke of it to the mayor at the time, Sibelius Craspach, as well as to Father Peiper. All three declared that the village needed at least one of its young people to advance his education beyond the rest, to go out and see a bit of the world before returning home to become a schoolmaster, a health practitioner, or perhaps the successor to Lawyer Knopf, whose powers were beginning to fail; his legal documents and his counsels had astounded more than one recent client. And so the three elders had chosen me.

In a way, you could say it was the village that sent me to the Capital. Limmat, Craspach, and Father Peiper may have had the idea, but just about everybody pitched in and supported me. At the end of every month,
Zungfrost
would take up a collection, going from door to door, ringing a little bell, and repeating the same words:
“Fu Brodeck’s Erfosch! Fu Brodeck’s Erfosch!”—
“For Brodeck’s studies! For Brodeck’s studies!” Everyone gave according to his means and inclination. The donation might be a few gold pieces, but it could also be a woolen overcoat, a cap, a handkerchief, a jar of preserves, a little bag of lentils, or some provisions for Fedorine, because as long as I was in the Capital, I couldn’t do any work to help her. So I’d receive little money orders along with some strange parcels, which my landlady, Fra Haiternitz, panting from having climbed the six flights of stairs to my room, would hand me with a suspicious air, all the while chewing a wad of black tobacco, which stained her lips and turned her breath into fumes from Hell.

In the beginning, the Capital gave me a headache. I’d never in my life heard so many noises. The streets seemed like furious mountain torrents, ferrying along an intermingled throng of people and vehicles amid a racket that made me dizzy and often drove me to flatten myself against a wall to avoid being swept away by the uninterrupted flood. I lived in a room whose rusty window wouldn’t open more than an inch. There was hardly space for anything except my straw mattress, which I folded up every morning. A board placed atop the folded mattress served as my desk. Apart from some luminous days in high summer or the dead of winter, the city was constantly imprisoned under a fog of coal smoke, which issued from the chimneys in lazy clouds that wrapped themselves around one another and then hung in the air for days and nights, deflecting the sun well beyond us. My first days of city life seemed unbearable. I never stopped thinking about our village, nestled in the valley’s conifer forest as in a lap. I even remember crying as I lay in bed.

The University was a large baroque building which, three centuries earlier, had been the palace of a Magyar prince. Looted and wrecked in the revolutionary period, it was then sold to a prosperous grain merchant, who converted it into a warehouse. In 1831, when the great cholera epidemic raged throughout the country like a dog tracking a debilitated prey the warehouse was requisitioned and served as a public hospital. Some people were treated there. Many died there. Much later, toward the end of the century, the Emperor decided to transform the hospital into a University. The common rooms were cleaned and furnished with benches and rostrums. The morgue became the library and the dissecting room a sort of lounge, where the professors and some students from influential families could sit in large armchairs of tawny leather, smoking their pipes, conversing, and reading newspapers.

Most of the students came from middle-class families. They had pink cheeks, slender hands, and clean fingernails. All their lives, they’d eaten their fill and worn good clothes. There were only a few of us who were virtually penniless. We could be spotted right away, identified by the scoured look the mountain air had given our cheeks, by our clothes, by our gauche manners, by our obvious and enduring fear of being in the wrong place. We’d come from far away. We weren’t from the city or even from the countryside around it. We slept in badly heated attic rooms. We never, or very rarely, went home. Those who had families and money paid us little attention. But for all that, I don’t believe they had contempt for us. They simply couldn’t imagine who we were, or where we came from, or the desolate, sublime landscapes we’d grown up in, or our daily existence in the big city. They often walked past us without even seeing us.

After several weeks, I stopped being frightened of the city. I was unaware of its monstrous, hostile aspect; I noticed only its ugliness. And that was easy for me to forget for hours on end because I loved plunging myself into my studies, into books. To tell the truth, I hardly ever left the library, except to go to the lecture halls where the professors gave their courses. I found a companion in the person of Ulli Rätte, who was the same age I was and had likewise been more or less dispatched to the University by his village, in the hope of his returning with an education that would contribute to the greater good. Rätte came from a far corner of the country, the border region around the Galinek hills, and he spoke a rasping language full of expressions I didn’t know. In the eyes of many of our fellow students, Rätte’s strange tongue proved him either an oddball or a savage. When we weren’t in the University library, in class, or in our rooms, we’d walk together along the streets, talking about our dreams and our future lives.

Ulli had a passion for cafés but not enough money to frequent them. He often dragged me along to contemplate them, and the mere sight of those places—where blue gas and wax candles burned, where women’s laughter rose to the ceiling amid clouds of cigar and pipe smoke, where the men wore elegant suits, fur coats during the winter months and silk scarves when the weather was fine, where waiters impeccably cinched into white aprons seemed like soldiers of an inoffensive army—sufficed to fill him with a childlike joy. “We’re wasting our time on books, Brodeck,” he’d say. “This is where real life is!”

Unlike me, Ulli took to the city like a fish to water. He knew all the streets and all the tricks. He loved the dust of the city, its noise, its soot, its violence, its hugeness. He liked everything about it.

“I don’t think I’ll go back to my village,” he often told me. It was no use my pointing out that his village was the reason why he was there or reminding him that it was counting on him; he dismissed such talk with a word or a backhanded wave. “A bunch of brutes and drunkards—that’s all there is where I come from. You think they sent me here out of charity? They’re motivated by self-interest and nothing else! They want me to return home stuffed with knowledge, like a force-fed animal, and then they’ll make me pay for it for the rest of my life. Don’t forget, Brodeck: it’s ignorance that always triumphs, not knowledge.”

Although cafés occupied his thoughts more than University classrooms, Ulli Rätte was far from stupid. Some of the things he said deserved to be printed in books, but he tossed them off as though they were of no importance, as though he were making fun of them and himself as soon as he said them; and then he’d burst out laughing. His laugh was equal parts bellow and vocalise, and passersby never failed to turn their heads when they heard it.