Brodeck (24 page)

XXXIV

————

n the morning of August 24, everyone found a little card under his door. The card was fragrant with the essence of roses, and written on it, very elegantly and in violet ink, were the following words:

This evening, at seven o’clock,
in Schloss’s Inn,
portraits and landscapes

More than one villager examined his card from every angle, turning it over and over, sniffing it, reading and rereading the brief text. By seven in the morning, the inn was already thick with people. With men. Only men, obviously, but some of them had been sent by their wives to see what they could find out. There were so many extended arms and empty glasses that Schloss had trouble keeping everyone served.

“So, Schloss, tell us what this foolishness is about!”

Elbow to elbow, they were all knocking back wine,
schorick
, or beer. Outside, the sun was already beating down hard. Schloss’s customers pressed against one another and pricked up their ears.

“Did your lodger fall and hit his head?”

“What’s he up to?”

“It’s
Scheitekliche
, right? Or what?”

“Come on, Schloss, say something! Tell us!”

“How long is this queer duck going to hang around here?”

“Where does he think he is, with his smelly little card?”

“Does he take us for neophytes?”

“What’s a neophyte?”

“How should I know? I didn’t say it!”

“Damn it, Schloss, answer! Tell us something!”

There was a steady barrage of questions, which Schloss received as if they were inoffensive pellets. His only perceptible response to the general curiosity was the malicious little smile on his thick face. He let the tension mount. It was good for his business, all of it. Talking about it made people thirsty.

“Come on, Schloss, out with it! Hell, you’re not going to keep quiet until this evening, are you?”

“Is he upstairs?”

“Can’t you move over a little?”

“Well, Schloss?”

“All right, all right, shut up! Schloss is going to speak!”

Everyone held his breath. The two or three who hadn’t noticed anything and were continuing their private conversation were quickly called to order. All eyes—some of them already a bit out of focus—converged on the innkeeper, who was enjoying his little show and taking his time. Finally, he said, “Since you insist, I’m going to tell you …”

A collective sound of happiness and relief greeted these first words.

“I’m going to tell you everything I know,” Schloss continued.

Necks were screwed around and stretched as far as possible in his direction. He slapped his towel on the bar, put both hands flat on top of the towel, and stared at the ceiling for a long time, amid absolute silence. Everyone imitated him, and had someone entered the inn at that moment, he would surely have wondered why approximately forty men were standing there mute, their heads tilted back and their eyes fixed on the ceiling, staring feverishly at the filthy, sooty, blackened beams as though asking them an important question.

“This is what I know,” Schloss went on in a confidential tone. His voice was very low, and everyone drank his words as if they were the finest eau-de-vie. “What I know is—well—it’s that I don’t know very much!”

A big sound rose from the gathering again, but this time it was full of disappointment and a touch of anger, accompanied by the crash of fists striking the bar, several choice insults, and so forth. Schloss raised his arms in an attempt to calm everyone down, but he had to shout in order to be heard: “He simply asked me for permission to have the whole room to himself, starting at six o’clock, so he can make his preparations.”

“Preparations for what?”

“I have no idea! One thing I can tell you is he’s going to pay for everyone’s drinks.”

The crowd recovered their good humor. The prospect of quenching their thirst at little or no expense sufficed to sweep away all their questions. Slowly but surely, the inn emptied out. I myself was on the point of leaving when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Schloss.

“Brodeck, you didn’t say anything.”

“I let the others talk—”

“But how about you? You have no questions to ask? If you don’t have any questions, maybe that’s because you have the answers. Maybe you’re in on the secret.”

“Why would I be?”

“I saw you go up to his room the other day and stay in there for hours. So, obviously, you must have found some things to talk about during all that time, right?”

Schloss’s face was very close to mine. It was already so hot that his skin was perspiring everywhere, like fat bacon in a hot skillet.

“Leave me alone, Schloss. I’ve got things to do.”

“You shouldn’t talk to me like that, Brodeck. You shouldn’t!”

At the time, I considered his words a threat. But after the other day, when he sat at my table and got weepy talking about his dead infant son, I don’t know anymore. Some men are so maladroit that you take them for the opposite of what they really are.

The only thing I’d learned at Schloss’s inn that morning was that the
Anderer’s
little perfumed cards had succeeded in focusing everyone’s attention on him even more closely. Now it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, and the last breath of air was already gone. The swallows in the sky looked exhausted and flew slowly. High aloft, one very small, nearly transparent cloud in the shape of a holly leaf drifted alone. Even the animals were quiet. The cocks hadn’t crowed. Silent and unmoving, trying to stay cool, hens languished in holes dug in the dusty earth of farmyards. Cats dozed in the shadows of carriage entrances, lying on their sides with their limbs outstretched and their pointy tongues lolling out of their half-open mouths.

When I passed Gott’s forge, I heard a great commotion inside. The diabolical racket was being made by Gott himself, who was tidying up the place a little. He noticed me, gave me a sign to stop, and walked over to me. His forge was at rest. No fire burned in it, and the blacksmith was freshly bathed, clean-shaven, and combed. He wasn’t wearing his eternal leather apron, nor were his shoulders bare; he had on a clean shirt, high-waisted pants, and a pair of suspenders.

“So what do you think about this, Brodeck?”

Not taking any chances, I shrugged my shoulders, as I really didn’t know what he was talking about: the heat, the
Anderer
, his little rosewater-scented card, or something else.

“I say it’s going to blow up, all at once, and it’s going to be violent, believe you me!”

As he spoke, Gott clenched his fists and his jaws. His cleft lip moved like a muscle, and his red beard made me think of a burning bush. He was three heads taller than I was and had to stoop to speak in my ear.

“This can’t last, and I’m not the only one who thinks so! You’re educated, you know more about such things than we do. How’s it going to end?”

“I don’t know, Gott. We just have to wait until this evening. Then we’ll see.”

“Why this evening?”

“You got a card like everyone else. We’re all invited at seven o’clock.”

Gott stepped back and scrutinized me as if I’d gone mad. “Why are you talking to me about a card? I mean this fucking sun! It’s been grilling our skulls for three weeks! I’m practically suffocating, I can’t even work anymore, and you want to talk to me about a card!”

A moan from the depths of the forge made us turn our heads. It was
Ohnmeist
, skinnier than a nail, stretching and yawning.

“He’s still the happiest,” I said to Gott.

“I don’t know if he’s the happiest, but in any case, he’s surely the idlest!”

And as if wishing to demonstrate that the blacksmith with whom he’d temporarily chosen to dwell had the correct view of the matter, the dog lay his head on his forepaws and calmly went back to sleep.

The day was another in an unbroken series of scorchers, yet it seemed peculiar, hollowed out inside, as if its center and its hours were unimportant and only the evening worth thinking about, waiting for, yearning toward. As I recall, after I returned from the inn that day, I didn’t leave the house again. I worked at putting the notes I’d taken for the past several months in order. My scribblings covered a variety of subjects: the exploitation of our forests; sections already cut and scheduled to be cut; assessments for all the parcels of land; replanting; sowing; timberland most in need of cleaning up next year; distribution of firewood-cutting privileges; reversals of debt. Hoping to find relief from the heat, I’d chosen the cellar for my workplace, but even there, where an icy perspiration usually dampens the walls, I found nothing but heavy, dusty air, barely cooler than in the other rooms in the house. From time to time, I heard the sound of Poupchette’s laughter above my head. Fedorine had placed her naked in a big wooden basin filled with fresh water. She could stay in there for hours, tirelessly playing the little fish while Amelia sat at the window near her, hands flat on her knees, staring out at nothing and intoning her melancholy refrain.

When I came up from the cellar, Poupchette, rubbed, dried, and entirely pink, was having a big bowl of clear soup, a broth of carrots and chervil. She called to me as I was preparing to go out: “Leave, Daddy? Leave?” She bounded off her chair and ran to throw herself in my arms.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “I’ll come and kiss you in bed. Be good!”

“Good! Good! Good!” she repeated, laughing and spinning around like someone dancing a waltz.

O little Poupchette, some will tell you you’re nobody’s child, a child of defilement, a child begotten in hatred and horror. Some will tell you you’re a child of abomination conceived in abomination, a tainted child, a child polluted long before you were born. Don’t pay attention to them, my little sweetheart, please don’t listen to them; listen to me. I say you’re my child and I love you. I say beauty and purity and grace are sometimes born out of horror. I say I’m your father forever. I say the loveliest roses can bloom in contaminated soil. I say you’re the dawn, the light of all my tomorrows, and the only thing that matters is the promise you contain. I say you’re my luck and my forgiveness. My darling Poupchette, I say you’re my whole life.

Göbbler and I closed our doors behind us at the same moment, and we were both so surprised that we simultaneously looked heavenward. Our houses, fashioned for winter, are naturally dark, and we often have to burn one or two candles, even on bright, sunny days, in order to see. When I stepped out of the dark interior, I expected to find, as soon as I crossed my threshold, the leonine sun that had roared down at us unremittingly for the past several weeks. But it was as if an immense, drab, grayish-beige blanket, streaked with black, had been cast over the whole sky. On the eastern horizon, the crests of the Hörni were disappearing into a thick, metallic magma, speckled with fleecy blotches, which gave the suffocating impression of gradually sinking, lower and lower, as if it would eventually crush the forests and stave in the roofs of houses. Fitful patches of brightness mottled the dense mass here and there with a false, yellowish light, like aborted, soundless flashes of lightning. The heat had grown sticky and seized our throats like criminals’ hands, slowly but surely strangling us.

After our first surprise had passed, Göbbler and I started walking: at the same time, in the same tempo, side by side, trudging like a pair of robots down the dusty road. Bathed in that strange illumination, it looked as though it were covered with birch ashes. The smell of chicken feathers and chicken droppings floated around me, a sickening, corrupt odor as of flower stems rotting in vases and neglected for days.

I had no desire to talk to Göbbler, and the silence didn’t bother me. I expected him to start a conversation at any moment, but he uttered no sound. We walked through the streets like that, mute, rather like two men on their way to a funeral who know that all words are useless in the face of death.

In proportion as we drew near the inn, more and more silhouettes joined us, gliding out of side streets and lanes, slipping out of alleyways and doorways, and walking beside us, as silent as we were. It may be that the general silence was due not to the prospect of discovering what we were going to be shown in the inn but to the sudden change in the weather, to the thick metallic cope which had brought the afternoon to a dark, winterish end and was still covering the sky.

There was no woman in that stream of men, which swelled with every step. We were all men, nothing but men, men among men. And yet, there are women in the village, as there are everywhere else, women of every sort, young, old, pretty, and very ugly women, all of whom know things, all of whom think. Women who have brought us into the world and who watch us destroy it, who give us life and often have occasion to regret it. I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought about at that moment, as I walked along without saying anything, in the midst of all those men who were walking along without saying anything, either, and I thought especially about my mother. About her who does not exist, whereas I exist. Who has no face, whereas I have one.