Brodeck (16 page)

XXV

————

hat conflict between knowledge and ignorance, between solitude and numbers—that’s what made me leave the city before I completed my studies. The great, sprawling urban organism was suddenly shaken by gossip, by rumors that had sprung from nothing: two or three conversations, an unsigned article a few lines long in a daily newspaper, the patter of a tumbler in the marketplace, a song of unknown origin whose ferocious refrain was taken up in the twinkling of an eye by all the singers in the streets.

More and more public gatherings took place until they seemed to be everywhere. A few men would stop near a streetlight and speak among themselves; soon they were joined by others and by others after that. Thus, in a few minutes, the group had swelled to forty—forty bodies pressed together, their shoulders a bit hunched, all moving slightly from time to time or assenting concisely to a point made by one of the speakers, though exactly which one was never clear. Then, as if blown away by a gust of wind, those silhouettes suddenly dispersed in every direction, and the empty sidewalk recommenced its monotonous waiting.

Remarkable and contradictory news reached the Capital from the eastern frontier. On the other side of the border, it was said, entire garrisons were on the march by night, as surreptitiously as possible, and witnesses reported troop movements of a scope hitherto unknown. It was also said that people on this side could hear machines at work over there, digging ditches, galleries, trenches, secret tunnels. And finally, it was said that recently perfected weapons of diabolical power and range were being prepared for deployment, and that the Capital was full of spies, ready to set it ablaze when the time came. Meanwhile, widespread hunger was tormenting citizens’ bellies and governing their minds. The oven-like heat of the two preceding summers had grilled the vast majority of the crops standing in the fields surrounding the city. Every day, bands of farmers and their families, impoverished and emaciated, flocked to the Capital; their lost eyes settled on everything they saw, as if they were going to steal it. Children—drab little creatures with yellowish complexions—clung to their mother’s skirts. Often, barely able to remain upright, youngsters would fall asleep on their feet, leaning against a wall, and many a mother who could go on no longer sat on the ground with a sleeping child lying across her lap.

At the same moment, Professor Nösel would be talking to us about our great poets, who—in days gone by, centuries and centuries ago, when the Capital was still nothing more than a big market town, when our forests were full of bears and wolf packs, aurochs and bison, when hordes of tribesmen from the distant steppes were spreading fire and terror—fashioned the countless verses of our fundamental epic poems. Nösel could decipher Ancient Greek, Latin, Cimbrian, Arabic, Aramaic, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian, but he was incapable of looking out his window, or of lifting his nose from his reading as he walked home to his apartment in Jeckenweiss Street. A man most learned in books, he was blind to the world.

One day, the first demonstration took place. After waiting in vain for someone to hire them, about a hundred men, most of them ruined farmers and unemployed workers, left the Albergeplatz market, where those looking for a day’s work ordinarily gathered. Walking fast and shouting, they headed for Parliament. Outside the building, they came up against the soldiers on duty, who managed to disperse them without violence. The demonstrators passed Ulli and me on our way to the University. They formed a somewhat noisy procession, nothing more, like students parading to celebrate their diplomas, except that in this case, the taut, ashen faces and the eyes glittering with muffled resentment clearly didn’t belong to students.

“They’ll get over it soon!” Rätte declared mockingly. He grabbed me by the arm to haul me to a new café, which he had discovered the previous evening and which he wanted to show me. We set out, but from time to time as we walked, I turned around to catch a glimpse of those men disappearing down the street like the tail of a giant serpent, whose invisible head was even bigger in my imagination.

The phenomenon repeated itself the following day and the six days after that; the only difference was that each time the marchers were more numerous and their grumbling louder. Women, perhaps their wives, joined the ranks of the farmers and workers, along with some protesters who came out of nowhere and had never been seen before. They looked like herdsmen or shepherds, except that they wielded neither sticks nor staffs for driving animals but shouts and words. Soon there was a bit of daily bloodshed, caused when the soldiers stationed in front of the Parliament building struck a few skulls with the flats of their swords. Newspaper headlines about the growing numbers of demonstrators began to appear, but the government remained strangely mute. On a Friday evening eight days after the demonstrations began, a soldier was seriously injured when someone threw a paving stone. A few hours later, the entire city was placarded with an announcement declaring that all gatherings were forbidden until further notice and that any demonstrations would be repressed with the greatest firmness.

This volatile mixture was ignited at dawn the following day, when the swollen body of Wighert Ruppach was found near the church of the Ysertinguës. An unemployed typographer known for his revolutionary opinions, he was said to have had a hand in instigating the first demonstrations, and it was true that many people had spotted his bearded, half-moon face at the head of the mob and heard his baritone voice shouting for bread and work. The police very quickly established that he’d been clubbed to death and that he’d been last seen in the slaughterhouse district, half drunk and stumbling as he exited one of the numerous dives that served black wine and contraband liquor. Robbed of his papers, his watch, and every cent in his pocket, Ruppach had doubtless been the victim of one of his drinking companions or of some criminal whose path he’d crossed—or so went the explanation given by the police. But the city, which was starting to show signs of fever, responded to the official story with growls and threats. Within a few hours, Ruppach achieved the status of martyr, the victim of a senile governing power which couldn’t feed its children or protect them from the foreign menace swelling with impunity along its borders. In the death of Ruppach, people thought they recognized a foreigner’s hand, or the hand of a traitor. By that point, the truth mattered little. Few citizens were disposed to hear it. Over the course of the previous week, the majority had stuffed their heads with plenty of powder, they had plaited a lovely fuse, and now they had their spark.

Everything exploded on Monday, after a Sunday which most citizens had dedicated to fleeing the city. It seemed deserted, abandoned, emptied by a strange and sudden epidemic. Amelia and I had gone for a walk Sunday evening, pretending not to notice that everything around us pointed to an imminent event of an unprecedented kind.

We’d known each other for five weeks. I was entering another world. I’d suddenly discovered that both the earth and my life could move to rhythms different from those I’d previously known, and that the soft, regular sound of the beloved’s breathing is the sweetest one can ever hear. We always walked the same streets and passed the same places. Somehow, without meaning to, we’d outlined a pilgrimage that traced the first days of our love. Our way led past the Stüpispiel Theater, then down Under-de-Bogel Avenue to the Elsi Promenade, the music pavilion, the skating rink. Amelia asked me to tell her about my studies, about the books I was reading, about the country I came from. “I’d love to get to know it,” she said.

She’d been in the Capital for a year, having arrived with no treasure but her two hands, which knew how to do delicate embroidery, sew complicated stitches, and make lace as fragile as a thread of frost. One evening, when I inquired about her family and the place she’d come from, she told me, “Everything behind me is darkness. Nothing but darkness,” and what she said brought me back to my own past, my distant childhood, which featured death, destroyed houses, broken walls, smoking wounds—some of it I remember a little, and some things Fedorine has related to me. After Amelia spoke those words, I began to love her also as a sister, a fellow creature risen from the same depths as I, a fellow creature who, like me, had no other choice but to keep her eyes fixed straight ahead.

On Monday morning, I attended Nösel’s lecture in the Hall of Medals. I’ve never figured out the reason for that name. It was a low-ceilinged, completely undecorated room whose waxed walls reflected our blurred images. The topic of that day’s class was the rhythmic structure of the first part of
Kant’z Theus
, the great national poem that’s been passed down from generation to generation for nearly a thousand years. Nösel was speaking without looking at us. I believe he spoke mostly to himself when he lectured, carrying on an odd conversation for solo voice without much concern for our presence and even less for our opinions. As he expounded passionately upon pentasyllables and hexameters, he applied cream to his hair and mustache, filled his pipe, methodically scratched at the various food particles on his jacket lapels, and cleaned his fingernails with a pocketknife. Barely ten of us were paying attention to him; most of the others were dozing or examining the cracks in the ceiling. Nösel stood up, went to the blackboard, and wrote two verses that are still in my memory because the old language of the poem resembles our dialect in so many ways:

Stu pekart in dei mümerie gesachetet
Komm de Nebe un de Osterne vohin

They shall arrive in a murmur
And shall disappear into fog and earth

At that moment, the door of the lecture room opened violently and slammed against the wall, making an enormous, reverberating noise. We all snapped our heads around and saw bug-eyed faces, gesticulating arms, and mouths screaming at us: “Everybody outside! Everybody outside! Vengeance for Ruppach! The traitors will pay!” There weren’t more than four or five individuals in the doorway, no doubt students—their features seemed vaguely familiar—but we heard behind them the murmur of a considerable crowd, pushing and supporting those in the front line. Then they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving the door open like the hole in a stone sink, and almost all the students in the room, who a few seconds earlier had been sitting around me, were sucked out through that hole as though by some imperious physical force. There was a great racket of overturned chairs and benches, shouts, insults, cries, and then, suddenly, nothing. The wave had rolled on and was now getting farther and farther away, carrying off brutality to spread it throughout the city.

There were only five of us left in the Hall of Medals: Fritz Schoeffel, an obese fellow with very short arms, who couldn’t climb three steps without gasping for air; Julius Kakenegg, who never spoke to anyone at all and always breathed through a perfumed handkerchief; Barthéleo Mietza, who was deaf as a post; me; and, of course, Nösel himself, who’d observed the entire scene with one hand raised, still holding the chalk. He shrugged his shoulders and went on with the class as if nothing had happened.

XXVI

————

spent the rest of that strange day inside the walls of the University. I felt protected there. I didn’t want to leave. I heard horrible sounds coming from outside, followed by great silences which dragged on and on, giving rise to uneasiness as intense as what was caused by the noise. I stayed in the library the whole afternoon. I knew Amelia was safe at her place, the furnished room she shared with another embroiderer named Gudrun Osterick, a ruddy-faced young woman with hair like sheep’s wool. The previous evening, I’d promised them I wouldn’t venture out.

I don’t remember much about the book I was trying to read during those bizarre hours in the library. It was the work of a physician, Doctor Klaus Reinhold Maria Messner, on the propagation of the plague across the centuries. The book contained tables, charts, and figures, as well as striking illustrations that contrasted with the scientific detachment of the inquiry, for they illuminated it with a sort of macabre and precious romanticism. One of the illustrations that I found particularly unsettling showed a narrow, poor city street. Uneven paving stones constituted the roadway, and the doors of all the houses were wide open. Dozens of big, black, hirsute rats ran grimacing from the houses while three men dressed in long, dark robes, their heads hidden by peaked hoods, piled stiff corpses onto the bed of a handcart. In the distance, plumes of smoke streaked the horizon, while in the foreground, as if he wished to escape from the picture, a child in rags sat on the ground with his face in his hands. Curiously, none of the three men paid any attention to him, already considering him as good as dead. The only creature contemplating him was a rat. Standing on its rear legs, it seemed to be addressing a malicious, ironic question to the child’s hidden face. I stared at the picture for a long time, wondering what its engraver’s real purpose had been and why Doctor Messner had wanted it reproduced in his book.

Around four o’clock, the daylight suddenly grew dim. Snow clouds had filled the sky, and they began dumping their load on the city. I opened one of the library’s windows. Big flakes immediately struck my cheeks and melted. I saw silhouettes coming and going in the streets, walking at a normal pace; the city seemed to have regained its ordinary appearance. I collected my jacket and left the University. At that moment, I didn’t know that I would never set foot in it again.

To return to my room, I had to cross Salzwach Square, go down Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue, traverse the Kolesh quarter—the oldest part of the city, a maze of narrow streets lined by innumerable storefronts—skirt Wilhem Park, and walk past the lugubrious buildings that housed the thermal baths. I stepped ahead briskly, not raising my head too much. I passed many shadows that were doing the same thing and then a group of men who seemed rather drunk, talking very loud and laughing a lot.

In Salzwach Square and on Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue the snow was already sticking to the ground, and the pedestrians left black tracks as they moved along, scurrying like insects. Looking at those places, one could have believed that nothing had happened, that the city had experienced an ordinary Monday, and that the untimely emptiness of the streets was due to nothing more than the cold, the bad weather, and the night itself, which had fallen a little too early.

But to realize that none of that was true, one had only to enter the labyrinth of the Kolesh quarter. What I noticed first was a sound. The sound of glass, of the broken glass I was treading on. I was on a narrow street littered with broken glass, and glinting shards, here and there half buried by snow, covered the ground as far as my eyes could see. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining that someone had scattered precious stones by the handful all over the Kolesh quarter. The thought gave the little street a new dimension, sparkling, marvelous, magical, like the setting of a fairy tale; my task was to find the plot and the princess. But that first vision vanished at once when my eyes focused on the shop windows gaping like the jaws of dead animals, the looted interiors of the stores, the smashed barrels spilling out marinated herrings, dried meats, gherkins, and wine, the befouled stalls, the strewn merchandise. The sounds of groans and weeping mingled with the crunch of footsteps on the glass carpet. I couldn’t tell where the human sounds were coming from, as there wasn’t a living creature in sight. By contrast, three corpses, their heads grotesquely swollen and bruised from the blows they’d been struck, were stretched out in front of a tailor’s shop. Stuck on the door, which was hanging from the frame by its single remaining hinge, was a piece of paper with the words SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, “dirty foreigner” (but the word
Fremdër
is ambiguous, as it can also mean “traitor,” or in a more colloquial usage, “scumbag,” “filth”), crudely lettered in red paint. The paint had run on many of the letters, which looked as though they were dripping blood. Rolls of cloth had been piled up anyhow and an attempt made to set them on fire. Some shards of glass were still attached to the window jambs, forming a star with incredibly slender, fragile rays.

That inscription, SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, was visible in many places, usually accompanied by another, RACHE FÜR RUPPACH, “Revenge for Ruppach.” My mind’s eye kept returning to the three corpses. Dizziness overcame me, and the vision of those dead bodies made confused images return to my memory, images of other corpses sprawled out like puppets, with no trace of humanity left in their features. I became again the little boy who wandered amid the ruins, abandoned among the debris and the rubble, surrounded by small fires, and not knowing whether he was the plaything of an unending nightmare or a victim of the times, which had decided to toy with him like a cat with a mouse. At the same time as those fragments of my past life arose before me, I could also see every detail of the engraving in Doctor Messner’s volume—the plumes of smoke, the countless rats, the child, the robed men, the heap of corpses—and it was as though I were staring at the awful spectacle in the narrow street, the memories of my childhood, and the details of the illustration in Doctor Messner’s book, all superimposed on one another and triply horrible. I staggered and almost fell, but I heard someone calling me; I heard a voice calling me, a weak, broken voice, a voice like the thousands of glass shards on the ground.

The caller was an old man, crouched in a doorway a little farther on. He was painfully thin, and his long white beard tugged his face downward, making it look still thinner. He trembled as he stretched out an arm toward me. I hurried to his side, and while he kept repeating the same words—“Madmen. Madmen. They’ve gone mad. Madmen”—in the old language that was Fedorine’s native tongue, I tried to set him on his feet.

“Where do you live?” I asked him. “Do you live on this street?”

His eyes connected with mine for a few seconds, but he didn’t seem to understand my questions and took up his litany again. His clothes were ripped in many places; his right hand was covered with blood and appeared useless. I put my arms around his waist to lift him, but I’d barely managed to prop him against the door when voices erupted behind us.

“They’re still moving! They’re taunting us! They’re on their feet, and our Ruppach’s dead!”

Three men were coming toward us. They carried long billy clubs, and I could make out two intertwined letters,
W R
, on the black armbands they wore on their left sleeves. They were talking loud and guffawing. Insofar as I could see them—the visors of their caps cast a shadow over their features—one face looked familiar to me, but fear gripped me and my thoughts became confused. At first glance, I thought they might be drunk—and yet they didn’t smell of alcohol. Anger and hatred suffice to scramble human brains more thoroughly than brandy can. Alas, I was able to verify this observation on several later occasions, in the camp.

The old man kept up his droning. In fact, I think he hadn’t even noticed the presence of the other three. One of them placed the end of his stick against the old fellow’s chest and said, “You will repeat after me: ‘I’m a
Fremdër
, a worthless piece of shit!’ Now! Say it!”

But the old man neither heard nor saw him. I said, “I don’t think he understands you. He’s hurt—”

The words had sprung unbidden to my lips, and I already regretted them. The stick moved to my chest.

“Did you say something? Did you dare to say something? Who are you, with that nasty mug? You stink like a
Fremdër
, too!” And he struck me a blow on the side that knocked the wind out of me. At that moment, one of his comrades, the one who reminded me of someone, intervened and said, “No, I know him. His name’s Brodeck.”

He brought his face quite close to mine, and suddenly I recognized him. He was a third-year student who, like me, frequented the library. I didn’t know his name, but I remembered that he often consulted volumes of astronomy and spent a lot of time contemplating star charts.

“Brodeck, Brodeck,” the one who seemed to be the leader repeated. “A real
Fremdër
name! And look at this faggot’s nose! The nose is what gives them away! And their big eyes, popping out of their heads, so they can see everything, so they can take everything!” He kept shoving his stick into my ribs, the way you do to a balky animal.

“Felix, leave him alone! The old guy’s the one we want. He’s one of them, for sure, the old bastard, and that’s his shop over there, I know it! He’s a real crook! He gets rich off giving credit!”

The third member of the group, who hadn’t spoken yet, made himself heard: “He’s mine! It’s my turn! You’ve already bashed two apiece!”

He’d stayed in the shadows so far, but now he came rushing up and I could see him. I could see that he was a boy, a child, in fact, maybe thirteen years old, hardly more. He had fresh, delicate skin, his teeth gleamed in the night, and he was smiling like a lunatic.

“Well, look here, tiny Ulrich wants to join the party! But you’re too tender, little brother. The milk’s still running out of your ears!”

The old man seemed to have fallen asleep. His eyes were closed. He’d stopped talking. The boy gave his older brother a furious push, prodded me to one side with the end of his club, and stationed himself in front of the feeble mass crouched on the ground. A great silence fell. The night had become as thick as mud. A gust of wind swept through the narrow street, kicking up a bit of snow. Nobody moved. I must be dreaming, I thought, or maybe I’m on the stage at the little Stüpispiel Theater, which put on a great many grotesque and sometimes atrocious spectacles that made no sense whatsoever and always ended in farce—but suddenly the boy went into action. He raised his club above his head and brought it down on the old man with a scream. The victim didn’t cry out, but he opened his eyes wide and began trembling as if he’d been flung into an icy river. The child dealt him a second blow, on the forehead, then a third, on a shoulder, then a fourth and a fifth … He didn’t stop, and he laughed as he swung his club. His comrades encouraged him, clapping their hands and chanting
“Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy!”
to give him the rhythm. The old man’s skull split open with a sharp sound like a hazelnut cracked between two stones. The child kept on striking, harder and harder, still laughing like a madman, but gradually, even though his blows didn’t cease raining down and he continued to laugh as he looked upon what was left of his victim and his comrades were still clapping time, his blood-spattered face changed. The horror of what he’d just done seemed to penetrate his veins, spread out to his limbs, his muscles, his nerves, invade his brain, and wash away all its foulness. His blows slowed and then stopped. Horrified, he contemplated his club, which was covered with blood and fragments of bone, and his hands, as if they didn’t belong to him. Then his eyes returned to the old man, whose face was now unrecognizable, the closed eyelids appallingly swollen, each as big as an apple.

The child dropped his club abruptly, as if it were burning his palm. He was seized by a sudden spasm and vomited a quantity of yellow liquid in two heaves; then he ran away, and the night absorbed him into its belly while his two comrades laughed uproariously. The leader, his brother, shouted after him: “Good work, little Ulrich! The old guy got what he deserved! Now you’re a man!”

He prodded the old man’s corpse with one foot, turned around, and casually walked away, arm in arm with his comrade, whistling a little love song that was quite popular at the time.

I hadn’t moved. It was the first time I’d witnessed a murder. I felt empty. Empty of all thought. And my mouth was full of the bitterest bile. I couldn’t take my eyes off the old man’s body. His blood mingled with the snow. As soon as the big flakes touched the ground, they were tinged with red, like notched petals of an unknown flower. Once again, the sound of footsteps made me jump. Someone was approaching. I thought they’d decided to come back and kill me, too.

“Get the hell out, Brodeck!”

It was the voice of the student, the one who spent hours gazing at constellations and galaxies reproduced in large books with giant pages. I raised my eyes to him. He was looking at me without hatred but with a kind of contempt. He spoke calmly. “Get the hell out! I won’t always be there to save you.”