Brodeck by Philippe Claudel Read Free Book Online Page B

now I could see that there was something a little human about whatever it was. I remember shivering, a real shiver, and not from cold, but from remembering the war, the war and the road it came on, that shitty goddamned road that brought the people here nothing but bad luck and trouble, and there he was, a creature in the shape of a man, with his two beasts which I couldn’t tell what they were, there he was, coming toward the village on that very same road. He could only have come from over there, from the Fratergekeime , those shit-assed sons of infected old whores … Do you remember what they did to Cathor, those sick bastards?”
    I nodded. Cathor was the pottery mender. He was also Beckenfür’s brother-in-law. After the Fratergekeime arrived in the village, he tried to play games with them, and he lost. Perhaps I’ll tell about him later.
    “I was so fascinated I put down my roofing stones and my tools. I rubbed my eyes and squinted, trying to see as far as I could. It was a vision out of the past. I was flabbergasted. He looked like a fairground entertainer, with his fancy old-style clothes and a pair of circus animals for mounts. Like something from a variety show or a puppet theater.”
    Where we live, the horses were slaughtered and eaten a long time ago. And after the war, no one ever gave serious thought to getting new ones. The people of the village didn’t want horses anymore. We preferred donkeys and mules. Real, beastly beasts, with nothing human about them and nothing to remind us of the past. And if someone was arriving on horseback, that necessarily meant that he had come from very far away and that he knew nothing about our region, or about what had happened here, or about our misfortunes.
    It wasn’t so much that riding a horse looked old-fashioned; after the war, we all seemed to go back in time. All the misery that the war had sown sprouted up like seeds in an auspicious spring. Farm implements from days gone by—including rickety buggies and patched-up carts—were brought out of barns and mended one way or another with whatever had not been destroyed or stolen. People still work their fields with plowshares forged more than a century ago. Haymaking is manual labor. Everyone’s taken a few steps backward, as if human history has given man a violent kick in the ass and now we have to start over again almost from scratch.
    The apparition was moving at a slow trot, looking (according to Beckenfür) left and right, stroking his mount’s neck, and often speaking to the beast (Beckenfür could see his lips moving). The second animal, tied to the horse, was an old but still robust donkey with upright pasterns. It stepped surely, showing no sign of weakness and never swerving, even though it had three large and extremely heavy-looking trunks lashed to its back, as well as various sacks dangling down on either side, like strings of onions hung up in a kitchen.
    “Finally, though it took a while, he got close to where I was standing. I thought he looked like some sort of genie, or maybe the Teufeleuzeit my father used to tell me about when I was a little boy and he wanted to scare the crap out of me. It lived in burrows all over the valley, among the foxes and the moles, and fed on lost children and fledglings. Anyway, the new arrival was wearing a strange, melon-shaped hat that looked as though it had been planed. He took it off and greeted me with great ceremony. Then he started dismounting from his horse, a pretty mare with a clean, shiny coat. An elegant, graceful animal, she was. He let himself slide down the side of her belly, very slowly, breathing hard and rubbing his own paunch, which was big and round. When he got his feet on the ground, he dusted off his operetta outfit, namely a kind of frock coat made of cloth and velvet, covered with crimson braids and other froufrous. He had a balloon for a face, with tight skin and red, red cheeks. The donkey groaned a little. The horse answered and