Schloss is convinced that the Anderer said, “Greetings, Mr. Schloss,” but young Doris and Wirfrau both swear that this was not the case. Schloss was probably so stunned by the strange apparition and its request that he lost his bearings for a few moments. He said, “I didn’t know how to answer him at first. It had been so many years since we’d had any visitors, except for the ones you know about! And besides, the words he used… He pronounced them in Deeperschaft, not in dialect, and my ear wasn’t used to hearing that.”
Menigue Wirfrau told me that Schloss hesitated for a few moments, looking at the Anderer and scratching his head, before he replied. As for the Anderer, it seems he stood motionless, smiling as if all this were perfectly normal and time — which was falling drop by drop into a narrow pipe — was of no importance. Doris Klattermeier remembered that his donkey and his horse didn’t move, either. She shivered a little when she told me that, and then she made the sign of the cross, twice. For most of the people in our village, God is a distant being composed of books and incense; the Devil, on the other hand, is a neighbor whom many of them believe they’ve seen once or twice.
At last, Schloss uttered a few words. “He asked the stranger how many nights he planned to stay,” according to Wirfrau. Wirfrau was kneading when I went to see him, naked from the waist up, his chest and the rims of his eyes covered with flour. He seized the big wad of dough with both hands, lifted it, turned it, flung it into the kneading trough, and repeated the process. He spoke without looking at me. I’d found a place to sit between two sacks and the woodpile. The oven had been humming for a good while, and the little room was hot with the smell of burning wood. Wirfrau went on: “For a while, the fellow seemed to be thinking the question over, smiling the whole time. He looked at the ass and the horse, and it was like he was asking them their opinion. Then he answered in his funny voice, ‘I should think that our sojourn will be rather extended.’ I’m sure Schloss didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t want to look like a dope, either. So he shook his head several times, and then he invited the stranger to step inside.”
Two hours later, the Anderer was lodged in the room, which Schloss had dusted in haste. The Anderer’s bags and trunks had been brought upstairs and his horse and donkey given beds of fresh straw in the stable just across from the inn, the property of one Solzner, an old man about as lovable as a whack from a club. At the stranger’s request, a basin of fresh, pure water and a bucket of oats were placed close to the animals. He went over to make sure they were well accommodated, taking the opportunity to brush their flanks with a handful of hay and whisper in their ears some words no one heard. Then he handed old Solzner three gold pieces, the equivalent of several months’ food and shelter for the beasts, bade them farewell, wished them a good night, and left the stable.
In the meanwhile, the inn had filled with people, many of whom had come to gaze upon the prodigy with their own eyes. Although not curious by nature, I must confess that I myself was one of them. The news had flashed along the streets and into the houses at lightning speed, and there were a good thirty or more of us in the inn by the time the lukewarm night settled on the roofs of the village. For all that, our curiosity remained unsatisfied, because the Anderer went up to his room and stayed there. Downstairs the discussion was vigorous, as was the consumption of beverages. Schloss didn’t have enough hands to keep up with all the drinkers. He must surely have told himself that the arrival of a traveler was, when all was said and done, a good thing. He did as much business on that day as he did when there were fairs or funerals. Menigue Wirfrau couldn’t stop describing the arrival of the Anderer, his outfit, his horse and his donkey, and little by little, since everyone stood him a drink to loosen his tongue, he began embellishing his account and stumbling on every word at the same time.
But every now and then we could hear footsteps upstairs, and the room would fall silent while everyone held his breath. Our eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling, as if in an effort to pass through it. We imagined the visitor. We gave him form and flesh. We were trying to enter into the labyrinth of his brain when we hadn’t even set eyes on him yet.
At one point, Schloss went upstairs to ask him if everything was all right. We tried to overhear their conversation, but in vain; even those who leaned their big ears into the stairwell caught nothing. When Schloss came back down, he was immediately surrounded.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he wanted a ‘collation.’”
“A ‘collation’? What’s that?”
“A light meal, he said.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What he asked me to do!”
Everyone was curious to see what a collation looked like. Most of the crowd followed Schloss into his kitchen and watched him prepare a large tray, on which he put three thick slices of bacon, a sausage, some marinated gherkins, a pot of custard, a loaf of brown bread, some sweet-and-sour cabbage, and a large piece of goat cheese, together with a jug of wine and a mug of beer. When he passed through the crowd of his customers, he carried the tray devoutly, and everyone made way for him in silence, as though for the passage of a holy relic. Then Wirfrau’s voice broke the spelclass="underline" he was still describing the Anderer’s arrival at the inn. No one was listening to him anymore, but because of the state he was in, that fact escaped his notice. Similarly, a little later, he failed to observe that he had confused his kneading-trough with his bed; after preparing his dough in the latter, he went to sleep in the former. The following day brought him a raging hangover, while we got a day without bread.
When I returned home, Fedorine was waiting for me: “What’s going on, Brodeck?”
I told her what I’d learned. She listened to me attentively, shaking her head. “That’s not good. None of it. Not good.”
They were just a few simple words, but they irritated me, and I asked her curtly why she’d said them.
“When the flock has finally settled down, it must not be given any reason to start moving again,” she replied.
I shrugged my shoulders. I was in a lighthearted mood. I was — I haven’t realized this until today — I was probably the only person in the village pleased by the arrival of a stranger. I considered it a sign of rebirth, a return to life. For me, it was as though an iron door that for years had sealed the entrance to a cave had opened wide, and the air of that cave had suddenly received the wind and the beams of a bright sun. But I couldn’t imagine that sometimes the sun grows bothersome, and its beams, which light up the world, inadvertently illuminate what people are trying to bury.
Old Fedorine knew me like a pocket she’d put her hand into several thousand times. She planted herself in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and stroked my cheek with one trembling hand. “I’m very old, my little Brodeck, so very old,” she said. “Soon I won’t be around anymore. You must be careful. You’ve already come back once from a place people don’t come back from. There’s never a second chance. Never. And don’t forget: you have other souls in your charge. Think about them, both of them …”
I’m not very big, but only at that moment did I grasp how little Fedorine was. She looked like a child, a child with an old man’s face; a bent, wizened, thin, fragile creature with crumpled, wrinkled skin, a creature a small puff of air could have swept away like a collection of dust. Her eyes shone, despite the milky cloud obscuring them, and her lips moved. I took her in my arms and pressed her against me at length, and I thought of birds, little lost birds, the weak, sick, or disconsolate sparrows that can’t keep up with their fellows in the great migrations; toward the end of fall, you can see them, with their feathers drooping and panic in their hearts, perching on roofs or in the lower branches of trees, waiting resignedly for the cold that will kill them. I gave Fedorine several kisses, first on her hair, then on her forehead and cheeks, as I did when I was a child, and I recognized her smell, a smell of wax, of stoves, of clean cloth, the smell that has sufficed, almost since my life began, to bring a peaceful smile to my lips, even in my sleep. I held her against me like that for a long time, while scenes from the past flashed through my mind at lightning speed. My memory juxtaposed disparate instants, creating a bizarre mosaic whose only effect was to make me more aware of times that had fled away forever, moments that would never return.