Brodeck by Philippe Claudel Read Free Book Online Page A

When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they’re mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.

VII
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    have to tell the story of the Anderer’s arrival among us, but I’m afraid: afraid of waking ghosts, and afraid of the others. The men of the village, I mean, who are no longer with me the way they used to be. Yesterday, for example, Fritz Aschenbach, whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, failed to return my greeting when we met on the slope of the Jornetz. He was coming down from cutting firewood; I was going up to see whether I might still be able to find some chanterelles. For a moment, his silence dumbfounded me. I stopped, turned around, and said to his back, “What’s this, Fritz, you don’t tell me hello?” But he didn’t even slow down or turn his head. He contented himself with spitting copiously to one side; that was his sole reaction. Maybe he was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see or hear me—but thoughts of what? Thoughts about what?
    I’m not crazy. I’m not going crazy. Nevertheless, there’s Diodemus’s death to consider, too. (Another death! And a strange death indeed, as I shall soon describe.) Since my time in the camp, I know the wolves outnumber the lambs.
    De Anderer arrived late in the afternoon of May 13, which will be a year ago next spring. A gentle, blond-tinged year. Evening came on tiptoe, as if unwilling to bother anyone. In the fields surrounding the village, and in the high pastures, as far as the eye could see, was a vast ocean of white and yellow. The green grass practically disappeared under a dandelion carpet. The wind swayed the flowers or brushed them or bent them, according to its whim, while above them bands of clouds hastened westward and vanished into the Prätze gap. A few patches of snow on the stubble fields still held out against the early-spring warmth, which was slowly lapping them up, reducing them from one day to the next, and would soon change them into clear, cold pools.
    It was around five o’clock, perhaps five-thirty when Gunther Beckenfür, who was busy mending the roof of his shepherd’s hut, looked up and saw, heading his way on the road that comes from the border—a road on which nothing has been seen since the end of the war, on which no one travels anymore, and on which it would have occurred to no one to travel—a strange crew.
    “Coming on like a real slow train, they were.” That’s Beckenfür talking, answering my question. I write down every word he says in a notebook, literally every word. We’re at his house. He has served me a glass of beer. I’m writing. He’s chewing on the cigarette he has just rolled for himself, half tobacco and half lichen, which fills the room with a stench of burned horn. His old father’s sitting in a corner; his mother’s been dead for a good while. The old man talks to himself. The words rumble and gurgle in his mouth, where no more than two or three teeth remain, and he shakes his fragile starling’s head continuously, like one of the moving cherubs in a church. Snow has started falling outside—the first snow, the one that delights children, the one whose whiteness blinds. We can see the flakes drifting close to the window, like thousands of curious eyes turned on us, and then, as though frightened, rushing away in great clouds toward the street.
    “They were barely moving, like the fellow was hauling a load of granite boundary stones all by himself. I stopped working and took a long look, just to see if I was dreaming. But no, I wasn’t dreaming, I definitely saw something, even though I wasn’t sure yet what it was. At first I thought it might be stray animals, and then I thought it was people who’d lost their way or vendors of some kind, because