Brodeck (25 page)

Sometimes I look at myself in the little mirror that hangs above the stone sink in our house. I observe my nose, the shape and color of my eyes, the color of my hair, the outline of my lips, the formation of my ears, the shade of my skin. And aided by all that, I attempt to compose a portrait of my absent mother, of the woman who one day saw the little body emerge from between her thighs, who cradled it to her breast, who caressed it, who gave it her warmth and her milk, who talked to it, who gave it a name, and who no doubt smiled a smile of happiness. I know what I’m doing is futile. I’ll never be able to compose her features or draw them out of the night she entered so long ago.

Everything had been turned upside down inside Schloss’s inn. The place was unrecognizable. It was as if it had put on a new skin. We went in on tiptoe, almost not daring to enter at all. Even those ordinarily incapable of keeping their mouths shut remained speechless. Many turned toward Orschwir, apparently under the impression that the mayor was different from them and would show them what was to be done, how they should behave, what to say and not to say. But Orschwir was like everybody else. Not any cleverer, not any wiser.

The tables had been pushed against one wall, covered with clean cloths, and laden with dozens of bottles and glasses, lined up like soldiers before a battle. There were also big platters piled with sliced sausages, pieces of cheese, strips of lean bacon, slices of ham, loaves of bread, and brioches, enough sustenance to nourish a regiment. At first, all eyes were attracted by that array of food and drink, which was lavish to a degree that is rarely seen among us, except at certain weddings where well-to-do peasants unite their progeny and seek to impress their guests. And so it was only later that we noticed the cloths hanging on the walls, covering what appeared to be about twenty picture frames. Members of the company pointed out these objects to one another with quick chin movements, but there was no time to say or do anything else, because the staircase steps began to creak and the
Anderer
appeared.

He didn’t have on any of the bizarre clothing that people had willy-nilly grown accustomed to—no frilly shirt, no jabot, no frock coat, no stovepipe trousers. He was simply wearing a sort of large, ample robe, which covered his entire body and fell to his feet, baring his big neck in a way that made it look disembodied, as though an executioner had neatly lopped off his head.

The
Anderer
walked down a few steps. He made an odd impression, for his robe was so long that even his feet were hidden; he seemed to glide along a few inches above the floor, like a ghost. No one who saw him said a word, and he precluded any reaction by beginning to speak himself, in his discreet, slightly reedy voice: “I have long searched for a way to thank you all for your welcome and your hospitality. The conclusion I reached was that I should do what I know how to do: look, listen, and capture the souls of people and things. I have done much traveling, all over the world. Perhaps that is the reason why my eyes see more and my ears hear better. I believe, without presumption, that I have comprehended you yourselves to a great degree, and likewise this landscape which you inhabit. Accept my little works as homages. See nothing more in them. Mr. Schloss, if you please!”

The innkeeper had been standing at attention, awaiting only this signal before going into action. On the double, he sped around the perimeter of his inn’s main room, whipping off the cloths covering the pictures. As if the scene were not yet sufficiently strange, this was the moment when the first thunderclap sounded, loud and sharp, like a whip cracking on an old nag’s rump.

The perfumed card had told the truth: there were
portraits
, and there were
landscapes
. They weren’t, properly speaking, paintings, but rather ink drawings, sometimes composed in broad brushstrokes, sometimes in extremely delicate lines jostling, covering, and crossing one another. To see the pictures up close, we passed before them in procession, as though making a strange Way of the Cross. Some in attendance, such as Göbbler and Lawyer Knopf, who were both blind as bats, practically pressed their noses against the pictures; others did the opposite, backing away to take the full measure of a drawing and falling behind the rest of the company. The first cries of surprise and the first nervous laughs came when some of the men recognized themselves or others in the portraits. The
Anderer
had made his selection. How was not clear, but the portrait subjects he had chosen were Orschwir, Hausorn, Father Peiper, Göbbler, Dorcha, Vurtenhau, Röppel, Ulrich Yackob (the verger), Schloss, and me. The “landscapes” included the church square and the low houses around its perimeter, the
Lingen
, Orschwir’s farm, the Tizenthal rocks, the Baptisterbrücke with the grove of white willows in the background, Lichmal clearing, and the main room in Schloss’s inn.

What was really curious was that although we recognized faces and places, no one could say that the drawings were perfect likenesses. It was almost as though they elicited familiar echoes, impressions, resonances that came to mind to complete the portraits which were merely suggested in the pictures before us.

Once everyone had completed his little round, things began to get serious. The company turned its back to the drawings as though they had never existed. There was a general movement toward the laden tables. You would have thought that most of the men in the inn had neither eaten nor drunk for days, so savage was their assault on the refreshments. In no time at all, everything that had been put out disappeared, but Schloss must have had orders to provide a steady supply of full bottles and platters because the buffet never seemed to be depleted. Cheeks grew flushed, foreheads began to sweat, words became louder, and the first oaths reverberated off the walls. Many in the group had doubtless already forgotten why they had come, and no one was looking at the pictures anymore. The only thing that counted was what they could get down their throats. As for the
Anderer
, he had disappeared. It was Diodemus who pointed this out to me: “Right after his little speech, he went back up to his room. What do you think about that?”

“About what?”

“About this whole affair …” Diodemus waved a hand at the exposition on the walls. I believe I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s funny,” he said. “Your portrait, I mean. It doesn’t look very much like you, and yet, it’s completely you. I don’t know how to describe it. Come have a look.”

Not wanting to be disagreeable to Diodemus, I followed him. We slipped past the bodies in our way, with their emanations, their smells, their sweat, their beery or vinous breath. Voices were growing heated and so were heads; many of the company were talking very loud. Orschwir had removed his velour hat. Lawyer Knopf was whistling.
Zungfrost
, who ordinarily drank only water, had downed three glasses under compulsion and was starting to dance. Three laughing men held back Lulla Carpak, a vagrant with yellow hair and the complexion of a radish, who as soon as he got drunk always felt an absolute need to break someone’s face.

“Take a good look,” Diodemus said. We were standing before my portrait. I did what he suggested. At length. Initially, I didn’t fix my attention too closely on the lines the
Anderer
had traced there, but then, little by little, and without understanding why or how, I went deeper and deeper into the drawing.

The first time I’d seen it—a few minutes earlier—I hadn’t noticed anything. My name was written under it, and maybe I felt a bit embarrassed about being portrayed, because I’d quickly turned my head away and hurried on to the next picture. But when I saw it again, when I stood in front of it and considered it, it was as if it sucked me in, as if it came alive, and what I saw were no longer lines and curves and points and little blots, but entire pieces of my life. The portrait the
Anderer
had composed was, so to speak, alive. It was my life. It confronted me with myself, with my sorrows, my follies, my fears, my desires. I saw my extinguished childhood, my long months in the camp. I saw my homecoming. I saw my mute Amelia. I saw everything. The drawing was an opaque mirror that threw back into my face all that I’d been and all that I was. Diodemus, once again, brought me back to reality.

“Well?”

“It’s peculiar,” I said.

“If you look, if you really look, it’s like that for everyone: not really faithful, but very true.”

Maybe it was Diodemus’s passion for novels that made him always peer into the deepest folds of words and caused his imagination to run ten times faster than he did. But on that particular occasion, what he said to me wasn’t stupid. I made one more tour around the room, studying the drawings the
Anderer
had put up on the walls of the inn. The landscapes, which had at first struck me as run-of-the-mill, came to life, and the faces in the portraits told of secrets, of torments, of heinousness, of mistakes, of confusion, of baseness. I’d touched neither wine nor beer, and yet I tottered and my head spun. In Göbbler’s portrait, for example, there was a mischievousness of execution which caused the viewer, if he looked at the image from the left, to see the face of a smiling man with faraway eyes and serene features, whereas if he looked at it from the right side, the same lines fixed the expressions of the mouth, eyes, and forehead in a venomous scowl, a sort of horrible grimace, haughty and cruel. Orschwir’s portrait spoke of cowardice, of dishonorable conduct, of spinelessness and moral stain. Dorcha’s evoked violence, bloody actions, unpardonable deeds. Vurtenhau’s displayed meanness, stupidity, envy, rage. Peiper’s suggested renunciation, shame, weakness. It was the same for all the faces; the
Anderer
’s portraits acted like magic revelators that brought their subjects’ hidden truths to light. His show was a gallery of the flayed.

And then there were the landscapes! That doesn’t seem like much, a landscape. It has nothing to say. At best, it sends us back to ourselves, nothing more. But there, as sketched by the
Anderer
, landscapes could talk. They recounted their history. They carried traces of what they had known. They bore witness to events that had unfolded there. In the church square, on the ground, an ink stain, located in the very spot where the execution of Aloïs Cathor had taken place, evoked all the blood that had flowed out of his beheaded body, and in the same drawing, if you looked at the houses bordering the square, all their doors were closed. The picture displayed only one open door, the one to Otto Mischenbaum’s barn. I’m not making anything up, I swear it! For example, if you tilted your head a little while looking at the drawing of the Baptisterbrücke, you could see that the roots of the white willows figured the shapes of three faces, the faces of three young girls. In the same way, if you squinted slightly when you looked at the picture of the Lichmal clearing, you could make out the shapes of the girls’ faces in the oak branches. And if I was unable at the moment to discover what was to be seen in some of the other drawings, that was simply because the events they alluded to hadn’t yet taken place. At the time, for example, the Tizenthal rocks were just that, dumb rocks, neither pretty nor ugly, figuring in neither history nor legend, but it was before the
Anderer’s
drawing of those very rocks that I found Diodemus. He was planted in front of it like a milestone in a field. Transfixed. I had to say his name three times before he turned a bit and looked at me.

“What do you see in this one?” I asked.

“Several things,” he said dreamily. “Several things …”

He added nothing more. Later, when he was dead, I had (needless to say) time to reflect. I thought about the
Anderer’s
drawing again.

I suppose it could be said that I’ve got a hot head and a broken brain. That the entire rigmarole with the drawings was pure nonsense. That an unsound mind and deranged senses would be required for someone to see in those simple doodles everything that I saw. And that it’s surely easy to bring all this up for consideration now, when there’s no proof of anything, when the drawings no longer exist, when they’ve all been destroyed. Yes, exactly right, they were all destroyed! That very evening, no less! If that’s not proof, then what is it? The drawings were ripped into a thousand pieces, scattered to the four winds, or reduced to ashes, because they said, in their fashion, things that should never have been said, and they revealed truths that had been carefully smothered.

As for me, I’d had more than enough.

I left the inn when drinking was proceeding at a steadily increasing pace and men were bellowing like beasts, but they were still happy beasts, merrily carousing. Diodemus, for his part, stayed until the end, and I got my account of what happened from him. Schloss continued to bring out pitchers and bottles for about an hour after I left, and then, the ammunition having run out, an armistice was abruptly declared; evidently, the sum agreed between him and the
Anderer
had been reached. From this point on, everything went sour. At first, there were words, followed by a few deeds, but nothing really nasty as yet—general grumbling, a bit of breakage, nothing more serious than that. But then the nature of the grumbling changed, as when a calf is separated from its mother’s teats; at first it whimpers, but then it resigns itself and looks around for some other amusement, some small raison d’être. The change came when everyone recalled the reason why they were all there in the first place. They turned back to the drawings and considered them again. Or differently. Or with the scales fallen from their eyes, if you will. In any case, they took another look at the pictures and saw themselves. Exposed. They saw what they were and what they had done. They saw in the
Anderer’s
drawings everything that Diodemus and I had seen. And, of course, they couldn’t bear it. Who could have borne it?

“A real mess! I never quite understood who started it, and in any case that’s not important, because everyone joined in, and nobody tried to restrain anyone else at all. The priest had long since passed out. He was sleeping under a table with a bit of his cassock in his mouth, like a child sucking his thumb. The older fellows had gone home shortly after you did. As for Orschwir, he didn’t take part in the spectacle, he just watched, but he had a satisfied smile on his face, and when young Kipoft threw his portrait into the fire, Orschwir looked downright happy, believe me! And the whole thing happened so fast, you know. Before I had time to blink, everything on the walls was gone. The only person who looked a bit peeved was Schloss.”