Brodeck (8 page)

XII

————

t’s been at least five days since I left off writing this account. And then, a short while ago, when I took out the packet of pages I keep in a corner of the shed, some of them already had a bit of dirt and a yellow dust like pollen on them. I’m going to have to find a gentler hiding place.

The others suspect nothing. They’re convinced that I’m busy putting together the Report they asked me to write; they think I’m entirely absorbed by my task. The fact that Göbbler found me in my shed very late the other evening has worked in my favor. When I met Orschwir, quite by chance, in the street the following morning, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It seems you’re working hard, Brodeck. Keep it up.” Then he went on his way. It was very early. And I paused to reflect: despite the early hour, Orschwir has already been informed that at midnight I was in my shed, tapping on the typewriter keys. My reflections were interrupted by his voice, which came to my ears again through the freezing dawn mist: “By the way, Brodeck, where are you going with that sack in this weather?” I stopped. Orschwir watched me steadily as he seized both sides of his fur cap and pulled it down a little lower on his head. When he pounded his hands together to warm himself, big streams of vapor surged out of his mouth and rose in the air.

“Am I obligated from now on to answer any question anybody asks me?”

Orschwir produced a small smile, but his smiles greatly resemble grimaces. Then he shook his head slowly, very slowly, as he had done when I went to see him on the day after the
Ereigniës
. “Brodeck, you wound me. It was a friendly question. Why do you feel you must be on your guard?”

My breath failed me, but I was able to shrug my shoulders, in a way I tried to make as natural as possible. Then I said, “I’m going to see what I can figure out about the foxes. I have to write up a small report on them, too.”

While Orschwir weighed what I had said, he cast several glances at my sack, as if attempting to see what was inside it.

“The foxes? Ah, right… the foxes. Well, have a good day, Brodeck. Better not go too far from the village, though. And … keep me informed,” he said. Then he turned his back to me and continued on his way.

Two weeks or so previously, several hunters and foresters had told me about the foxes. While beating the woods to flush game on one of the first hunts of the season or cutting wood in the forest or simply coming and going, many of them had found dead foxes: young and old, males and females. At first, each of those who came upon the fox carcasses thought they’d died of rabies, which appears regularly in our mountains, does a little killing, and disappears. But none of the dead animals that were found showed any of the characteristic signs of the disease: tongue covered with white froth, pronounced thinness, eyes rolled back, coat dull and matted. On the contrary, the dead foxes were superb specimens and seemed to have been well nourished and in full health. At my request, Brochiert, the butcher, opened up three of them. Their bellies were filled with berries, beechnuts, mice, birds, and green worms. The foxes’ unmarked, unwounded bodies gave no indication of a struggle, so it appeared that they had not died violent deaths. And all the men who found the dead animals had been surprised at their position: lying on their side or on their back, with their forepaws extended as if they were about to take hold of something. Their eyes were closed, and they seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

When I first heard about this, I paid a visit to Ernst-Peter Limmat, who was the principal of the village school for two generations of pupils, including me. He’s over eighty now and hardly ever leaves his house anymore, but time hasn’t been able to dent or damage his brain. He spends most of his time sitting in a high-backed chair in front of his hearth, where a fragrant fire redolent of fir and hornbeam is always burning. He watches the flames, rereads the books in his library, smokes tobacco, and roasts chestnuts, which he then peels with his long, elegant fingers. When I visited him, he gave me a big handful of chestnuts, and after blowing on them, we ate them in small pieces, savoring their hot, oily flesh, while my drenched jacket dried by the fire.

Besides having taught hundreds of children to read and write, Ernst-Peter Limmat was without a doubt the greatest hunter and woodsman in our region. With his eyes closed, he could draw an accurate and detailed map of every forest, every boulder, every mountain crest, and every stream for many kilometers around.

In former days, when class was over, he would take a hike, greatly preferring the company of the tall firs, the birds, and the springs to the company of men. If school happened to be closed during hunting season, he’d sometimes disappear for days on end. We’d see him coming back, his eyes gleaming with pleasure and his game bag filled with grouse, pheasant, and fieldfare; occasionally he had a chamois slung across his shoulders, a beast he’d tracked all the way to the sheer rocks of the Hörni, where in the past more than one hunter had broken his bones.

The oddest thing about Limmat was that he never ate what he killed; he distributed his game among the neediest of the village. When I was little, it was thanks to him that Fedorine and I had meat to eat now and then. As for Limmat himself, he ate nothing but vegetables, clear broths, eggs, trout, and mushrooms; among these last, his decided preference was for the ones called “trumpets of death.” One day he told me that this type was the monarch of mushrooms, and that its sinister look served merely to repel fools and discourage the ignorant. Trumpets of death always adorned the inside of his house, hanging down everywhere in long garlands, and as they dried they filled the place with a smell of licorice and manure. He’d never married. A servant named Mergrite lived with him, a woman very nearly his own age; in the old days, wicked tongues used to say she surely did more than wash his clothes and polish his furniture.

I told him about the fox mystery, about the discoveries of the numerous carcasses, about their peaceful appearance. He searched his memory in vain, unable to recall any precedents, but he promised to consult his books assiduously and report back to me should he discover any references to similar cases in regions other than ours or in other times. Then our conversation turned to the winter, which was approaching with rapid strides, and to the snow, which was encroaching on the village from higher ground, slowly but surely descending the slopes of the mountains and the sides of the valley, and would soon be arriving outside our doors.

Like all the other old men, Limmat had been absent from Schloss’s inn on the night of the
Ereigniës
, and I wondered if he’d been informed of what had happened. I wasn’t even sure whether he’d known or been told about the
Anderer’s
presence in our village. I would certainly have liked to talk to him about the affair and get it off my chest.

“I’m delighted to see you haven’t forgotten your old teacher, Brodeck,” he said. “Indeed, I’m touched. Do you remember when you first came to school? I remember your arrival very well. You looked like a skinny dog, with eyes too big for the rest of you. And you spoke a gibberish only you and Fedorine understood. But you learned fast, Brodeck, very fast. Not just our language; the rest, too.”

Mergrite came in, bringing two glasses of hot wine. It smelled of pepper, orange, cloves, and anise. She added two logs to the fire, sending showers of bright sparks into the darkness, and then disappeared.

“You weren’t like the others, Brodeck,” my old schoolteacher went on. “And I don’t say that because you weren’t from here, because you came from far away. You weren’t like the others because you always looked beyond things … You always wanted to see what didn’t exist.”

He fell silent, cracked open a chestnut, slowly ate it, drank a mouthful of wine, and threw the pieces of nutshell into the fire. “I’m thinking about your foxes again. The fox is an odd animal, you know. We say foxes are sly, but in fact, they’re a lot more than that. Man has always hated foxes, doubtless because they’re a little too much like him. Foxes hunt for food, but they’re also capable of killing just for the fun of it.”

Limmat paused for a while and then began to speak again, in a pensive voice: “So many people have died these last years, in the war, as you know better than anyone in the village, alas. Maybe the foxes are only imitating us, who knows?”

I didn’t dare tell my old teacher that I couldn’t put that sort of thing in my account. The officials in the administration who read what I write—if what I write is read at all anymore—would understand nothing, and perhaps they’d think I’d gone mad and decide to do without my services altogether, in which case the paltry sums I receive so irregularly, the money my family lives on, would stop coming to me at all.

I stayed a little longer in his company. We spoke no more about foxes but about a beech tree which some woodcutters had recently felled—because it was sick—on the far side of the Bösenthal. According to them, the tree had to be more than four centuries old. Limmat reminded me that in other climates, on distant continents, there were trees that could live two thousand years. He’d already taught me that when I was a child, and at the time, I thought that God, if he existed, must be quite a strange character, who chooses to allow trees to live peacefully for centuries but makes man’s life so brief and so hard.

After presenting me with two garlands of trumpets of death and walking me to his threshold, Ernst-Peter Limmat asked me for news of Fedorine, and then, more gently, more gravely, he inquired about Amelia and Poupchette.

The rain hadn’t stopped, but now some heavy flakes of wet snow were mingled with it. A little stream flowed down the middle of the street, making the sandstone cobbles gleam. The cold air smelled good, a combination of smoke and moss and undergrowth. I thrust the dried mushrooms into my jacket and went back home.

I asked Mother Pitz the same question about the foxes. Her memory isn’t as good as the old teacher’s, and she’s surely not the expert he is on the subject of game animals and pests, but back in the days when she used to drive her beasts to and from the mountain pastures, she covered all the local roads, side paths, and stubble fields so thoroughly that I hoped she might be able to provide some sort of explanation. By tallying all the figures reported by my various sources, I’d arrived at a total of eighty foxes found dead—a considerable figure, if you think about it. Unfortunately, the old woman had no memory of ever having heard of such a phenomenon, and in the end I realized that she couldn’t possibly care less about it. “I’ll be glad if they all croak!” she declared. “Last year, they carried off my three hens and all their chicks. And then, they didn’t even eat them! They just ripped them to shreds and disappeared. Your foxes are
Scheizznegetz’zohns
, ‘sons of the damned.’ They’re not even worth the blade of the knife that slits their throats.”

In order to speak to me, she’d interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange and rearrange the deck into pairs, conjuring up wedding celebrations and mended destinies, all the while drinking little glasses of mulberry liqueur. I could see that I was disturbing their concentration.

In the end, I concluded that the only person who could possibly shed light on the matter was Marcus Stern, who lives alone in the middle of the forest, an hour’s walk from the village. He was the person I was off to see on the morning when I ran into Orschwir.

XIII

————

he path that leads to Stern’s cabin begins its steep climb almost as soon as you exit the village. You enter the woods, go around a few hairpin curves, and in no time at all you’re looking down at the roofs. At the halfway point on the path, a rock shaped like a table invites the hiker to take a break. The rock is called the
Lingen
, from the dialect name of the little woodland sprites that are said to gather there and dance on it by moonlight, singing their songs, which sound like muffled laughter. Here and there on the broad rock, small cushions of milky green moss soften its hard surface, and heather provides bouquets of flowers. It’s a fine place for lovers and dreamers. I remember seeing the
Anderer
there one day in high summer—on July 8, in fact (I make a note of everything)—around three o’clock in the afternoon, that is, in the very hottest part of the day, when the sun seemed to have stopped its course across the sky and was pouring its heat like molten lead on the world. I had gone there to pick some raspberries for my little Poupchette, who’s crazy about them. I wanted to surprise her when she woke up from her afternoon nap.

The forest was alive and humming with busy bees and darting wasps, with frenzied flies and horseflies buzzing around in every direction, as if seized by a sudden madness. It was a great symphony, which seemed to arise out of the ground and emerge from the air. In the village, I hadn’t come across a living soul.

Although brief, the climb unsteadied my legs and winded me. My shirt was already soaked through, covered with dust, and sticking to my skin. I stopped on the path to catch my breath, and that was when I noticed him: a few meters away from where I stood, his back turned to me, there was the
Anderer
, contemplating the roofs of the village from a position on the rock. He was sitting on his strange, portable seat, which had been an object of fascination for everyone the first time we saw him deploy it. It was a folding stool, big and sturdy enough to support his ample buttocks, but when collapsed and stashed away, it looked like a simple cane.

In that landscape, all greenery and bright yellow, his dark clothing, his eternal, impeccably ironed black cloth frock coat, cast a shadow that looked out of place. Drawing a little closer to him, I noticed that he was also wearing his ruffled shirt, his woolen waistcoat, and gaiters on his heavy, highly polished shoes, which reflected light like the shards of a mirror.

Some twigs cracked under my feet, and he turned in my direction and saw me. I looked, I have no doubt, like a thief, but he didn’t seem startled. He smiled at me, raising his right hand and doffing an imaginary hat in a gesture of greeting. He had very pink cheeks, and the rest of his countenance—forehead, chin, nose—was covered with white lead. With the black curls on either side of his balding skull providing the final touch, he looked like an old actor. Great drops of perspiration ran down his face, which he mopped with a handkerchief whose embroidered monogram I couldn’t read.

“May I assume that you have also come here to take the measure of the world?” he asked me in his soft, mellifluous, mannered voice, gesturing at the countryside spread out before us. Then I noticed that an open notebook was lying across his perfectly round knees and that he was holding a graphite pencil in one hand. There were straight lines and curving lines and shadowed areas sketched on the notebook page. When he realized what I was looking at, he closed the book and put it in his pocket.

It was the first time I’d been alone with him since his arrival in the village, and also the first time he’d ever spoken to me. “Would you be so kind as to render me a service?” he asked, and since I made no reply and my face no doubt hardened a little, he went on, flashing the enigmatic smile that was never far from his lips. “Nothing to worry about. I simply hoped you might tell me the names of all these heights that enclose the valley. I fear that my maps may be inaccurate.”

And accompanying his words with a sweep of his hand, he indicated the mountains outlined in the distance, shimmering in the torpor of that summer day. Parts of them almost blended into the sky, which seemed intent on dissolving them. I stepped over to him, knelt down to be on his level, and starting from the east, I began to give the names: “This one, the one closest to us, is the Hunterpitz, so called because its profile looks like a dog’s head. Next you have the three Schnikelkopfs, then the Bronderpitz, and after that the ridge of the Hörni mountains, with its highest point, which is Hörni peak. Then there’s the Doura pass, the crest of the Florias, and finally, due west, the peak of the Mausein, which is shaped like a man bent over and carrying a load on his back.”

I stopped speaking. He finished writing the names in his notebook, which he had taken out of his pocket, but which he very quickly put away again. “I’m infinitely grateful to you,” he said, warmly shaking my hand. A gleam of satisfaction brightened his big green eyes, as if I’d just presented him with a treasure. As I was about to leave him, he added, “I understand that you are interested in flowers and herbs. We are alike, the two of us. I am fond of landscapes, forms, portraits. Quite an innocent vice, aside from its other charms. I have brought with me some rather rare books that I believe you would find interesting. I should be delighted to show them to you, if one day you would honor me with a visit.”

I nodded my head slightly but made no other response. I’d never heard him talk so much. I went away and left him on the rock.

“And you gave him all the names!?” Wilhem Vurtenhau raised his arms to heaven and glared at me. He’d just come into Gustav Röppel’s hardware store, at the moment when I was relating my encounter with the
Anderer
, some hours after it had taken place. Gustav was a comrade of mine. We were bench mates in school, sitting side by side, and when we were working out problems, I’d often let him see the solutions in my exercise book; in exchange for this service, he’d give me nails, screws, or a bit of twine, things he’d managed to nick from the store, which at the time was owned and operated by his father. I just wrote that Gustav
was
a comrade, because now I’m not sure that’s true anymore. He was with the others at the
Ereigniës
. He did what cannot be undone! And ever since, he hasn’t spoken a single word to me, even though we’ve met every Sunday after Mass in front of the church, where Father Peiper, red-faced and wobbly on his feet, accompanies his flock before bestowing upon them the incomplete gestures that constitute his last blessing. I don’t dare enter Gustav’s hardware store, either. I’m too afraid that there’s nothing left between us but a great void.

As I believe I’ve already mentioned, Vurtenhau is very rich and very stupid. He beat his fist on Röppel’s counter, causing a box of thumbtacks to tumble down from its shelf. “Do you realize what you did, Brodeck?” he asked. “You gave him the names of all our mountains, and you say he wrote them down!”

Vurtenhau was beside himself. All the blood in his body seemed to have been pumped into his huge ears. In vain, I pointed out that the names of mountains are no secret, that everybody knows them or can find them in maps or books; my observations failed to calm him down. “You’re not even considering what he might be up to, coming here out of the blue, nosing around everywhere the way he does, asking all his innocent questions, him with his fish face and his smooth manners!”

I tried to soothe Vurtenhau by repeating some of what the
Anderer
had said to me on the subject of forms and landscapes, but that only made him angrier. He stormed out of the hardware store, flinging over his shoulder one final remark which at the time seemed unimportant: “Don’t forget, Brodeck, if anything happens, it’ll be your fault!”

Only today do I realize the enormity of the menace his words contained. After he banged the door, Gustav and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders simultaneously, and burst into loud laughter, the way we used to do in the old days, in the time of our childhood.