The room was completely empty. There was no more furniture, no more art objects, no more clothes, no trunks; all that remained was a big wardrobe, which was bolted to the wall. I opened the double doors, but the wardrobe, too, was empty. There was nothing in the room anymore. It was as if the Anderer had never occupied it. As if he’d never existed.
“What happened to all his baggage?”
“What are you talking about, Brodeck?”
“Don’t insult me, Schloss.”
The room smelled like damp wood and soap. The floor had been copiously wetted down and scrubbed. In the place where the bed used to stand, I could make out a big stain, which was darker than the rest of the bare larch-wood planks.
“Was it you who washed the floor?”
“Somebody had to do it…”
“And what’s that stain?”
“What do you think it is, Brodeck?”
I turned to Schloss.
“What do you think?” he repeated wearily.
XX
—
got up very late this morning, with a hammer at work inside my head. I believe I really drank too much last night. The brandy bottle’s almost completely empty. My mouths as dry as tinder, and I have no idea how I found the way to my bed. I wrote late into the night, and I remember being unable to feel my fingers toward the end because the cold had numbed them. I also remember that the keys on the typewriter were sticking more and more. The windowpane was covered with frost shaped like fern fronds, and I was so drunk I thought the forest was on the march, preparing to surround and smother the shed, and me with it.
When I finally got out of bed, Fedorine asked no questions. She brewed an infusion for me, a concoction in which I recognized the aromas of wild thyme, pennyroyal, and houseleek. She simply said, “Drink this. It’s good for what you’ve got.” I did what she said, as I used to do when I was little. Then she placed before me a basket Alfred Wurtzwiller had brought a little earlier in the day. It contained potato soup, a loaf of rye bread, half a ham, apples, and leeks — but no money. This wasn’t my usual delivery. When the administration in S. deigned to show that it hadn’t completely forgotten me, I’d receive a money order, along with three or four stamped, restamped, signed, and countersigned official documents, attesting to the payment made thereby. But in this basket, there was only food. I couldn’t help drawing a connection between the food basket and the previous evening’s audition in front of the mayor and the others. They were paying me like this. They were paying me a little. For the Report. For what I’d already written, and — especially — for what I hadn’t written.
Next, Fedorine bathed Poupchette in the tub. My darling clapped her hands and slapped the hot water, laughing and shouting, “Li’l fish! Li’l fish!” I took her in my arms, pressing her against me, as wet as she was, and kissed her soft, warm, naked skin, which made her laugh all the more. Behind us, at the window, her eyes raised to the distance and the white immensity of the valley, Amelia hummed her song. Poupchette started struggling, and I put her down. She scooped up a handful of suds, ran to her mother, and threw them at her. Amelia turned and looked at the child but kept right on humming. Her dead eyes settled for a few moments on Poupchette’s pretty smile, and then she stared out at the whiteness again.
I feel weak and useless. I’m trying to write things down, but who’s going to read them? Who? I’d do better to take Amelia and Poupchette in my arms, sling old Fedorine across my back, along with a bundle of provisions, clothes, and a few nice keepsakes, and go far away from here. Start over. Start all over again. In the old days, Nösel said this was mankind’s distinguishing feature: “Man is an animal that always starts over.” Nösel spoke in slow, cadenced, spellbinding sentences, his two hands flat on his wide desk, and after each pronouncement he left a great silence, which each of us could fill as he chose.
“Man is an animal that always starts over.” But what is it he’s always starting over? His mistakes, or the fragile scaffolding whose construction sometimes allows him to climb close to heaven? Nösel never said, maybe because he knew that life itself, the life we hadn’t completely entered yet, would eventually make us understand. Or maybe because he simply had no idea, or because he was untroubled by doubts, or because he’d fed on books for so long he’d forgotten the real world and those who dwelled in it.
Last night, Schloss brought me my hot wine and then sat down uninvited at my table. I knew he wanted to say something to me, but I had nothing to say to him. I was too absorbed in what Father Peiper had told me. Moreover, I wanted to drink my glass of hot wine and feel the fire reviving my body, and that was all. I wasn’t looking for anything else. My skull was teeming with unanswered questions and hundreds of little pieces of a big mechanism I had to invent so that I could put it together.
“I know you don’t like me too much, Brodeck,” Schloss suddenly murmured. I’d forgotten he was there. “But I’m not the worst, you know.”
The innkeeper seemed even bigger and sweatier than usual. He was twisting his fingers and gnawing his plump, cracked lips. “I did what I was told, that’s all. I don’t want any trouble, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking … Look, I’m only a simple man. I’m not as intelligent as you are, but whatever you might think, I’m not vicious, either. I’m not the worst. It’s true that I served drinks to the Fratergekeime while they occupied the village. But what did you want me to do? Serving drinks is my business. I wasn’t about to get myself killed for refusing to serve a glass of beer. I’ve always regretted what happened to you, Brodeck, I swear, and I had nothing to do with it, you can believe me … and as for what they did to your wife … My God …”
I nearly spat in Schloss’s face when he referred to Amelia, but what he said after that stopped me.
“I loved my wife, too, you know. Maybe that seems strange to you, because as you may remember she wasn’t very beautiful, but now she’s not here I feel like I’m living only half a life. Nothing’s important anymore. If Gerthe had been here during the war, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have served the Fratergekeime. I felt strong in her presence … Maybe I would’ve spat in their faces. Maybe I would’ve grabbed the big knife I cut onions with and stuck it in their bellies. And then, if she’d been here, maybe … maybe the Murmelnër would still be alive, maybe I would’ve got myself killed before I let anything happen to him under my roof…”
I felt my stomach churning. A touch of nausea. The hot wine didn’t agree with me. It wasn’t warming my insides, it was nibbling at them, like a little animal in my stomach, suddenly trying to get a bite of everything within reach. I looked at Schloss as though I’d never seen him before. It was as if a bank of fog had dissolved, bit by bit, and behind it an unsuspected, oddly harmonious landscape was visible. At the same time, I wondered whether Schloss might be trying to fool me. It’s always easy to regret what happened after it happens. Regret costs nothing. It allows you to wash your hands and your memory, to cleanse them thoroughly and make them pure and white. But all the same, what Peiper told me about confession and the sewer — that was really something! All the men of the village must have passed through his confessional eventually, and Schloss probably wasn’t the last of them. And then I remembered too clearly his attitude and his face on the night of the Ereigniës—he hadn’t exactly hung back. He didn’t seem then to disapprove of the crime committed within his walls, whatever he might say to me now. He hadn’t looked like a man seized by the terror and horror of what had just taken place.