The first event took place two weeks after the Anderer’s arrival in our village. I think it was the mayor’s idea, even though I couldn’t swear it. I’ve never asked him because that’s not important. What is important is what happened that evening, the evening of June 10.
By then everyone in the village knew that the Anderer was only a transient presence within our walls, but it also seemed clear that he was preparing for an extended sojourn. During the day on June 10, news spread that the village, led by the mayor, was going to welcome the new visitor in a fitting manner. There would be a speech, some music, and even a Schoppessenwass, which is the dialect word for a kind of large table, laden with glasses, bottles, and food, which is traditionally set up on certain popular occasions.
Zungfrost got busy near dawn, building a small platform (which looked rather more like a scaffold, to tell the truth) near the covered market. His hammer blows and his screeching saw could be heard even before the sun started to gnaw away at the blackness of the night; the sound pulled many an onlooker from his bed. By eight o’clock, everyone had heard about the reception. By ten, there were more people in the streets than on a market day. In the afternoon, Zungfrost began painting some large, shaky letters on a wide paper banner hung above the platform. They turned out to be an expression of welcome, WI SUND VROH WEN NEU KAMME, an odd formulation which had issued from Diodemus’s brain. While Zungfrost finished his job, two peddlers, alerted to the opportunity in some unfathomable way, arrived and began offering the villagers gathered around the market blessed medals, rat poison, knives, thread, almanacs, seeds, pictures, and felt hats. I knew the peddlers, having often encountered them on mountain roads or forest paths. Dirty as earthworms, with hair black as ink, the two were father and son. People called them De Runhgäre, “the Runners,” because they were capable of covering considerable distances in very few hours. The father greeted me. I asked him, “Who told you there was a celebration today?”
“The wind.”
“The wind?”
“The wind says a lot, if you know how to listen.”
He looked at me mischievously as he rolled himself a cigarette. “Have you been back to S.?”
“I don’t have authorization. The road’s still closed.”
“So what do you live on? The wind?”
“No, not the wind. The night. When you know it well, the night’s a fairy cape. All you have to do is put it on, and you can go wherever you want!”
He burst out laughing, and his laughter exposed his four remaining teeth, planted in his jawbone like the memories of trees on a desolate hill. Not far from us, Diodemus was absorbed in watching Zungfrost, who was putting the finishing touches on his letters. Diodemus gave me a little wave, but only later, when we were side by side and the ceremony was about to begin, did I ask him the question that was troubling me somewhat: “Was that your idea?”
“What idea?”
“The sentence on the banner.”
“Orschwir told me to.”
“Told you to what?”
“To come up with something, some words …”
“Your sentence is pretty odd. Why didn’t you write it in Deeperschaft?”
“Orschwir didn’t want me to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Right there and then I didn’t know, either, but later I had a chance to reflect. The Anderer was a mystery. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew where he came from or why he was here. And nobody knew whether he understood when people spoke in dialect. The sentence painted on the banner was perhaps a means of discovering the answer to that last question. A most naïve means, to be sure, and in any case it failed in its purpose, for that evening, when the Anderer passed the platform and saw the inscription, he paused briefly, ran his eyes over the words, and then continued on his way. Did he understand what he read? No one knows; he said nothing about it.
Although it’s possible that Diodemus hadn’t intended to be ambiguous, the banner slogan he came up with sounded funny. It means — or rather it can mean — different things, because our dialect is like a springy fabric: it can be stretched in every direction.
“Wi sund vroh wen neu kamme” can mean “We’re happy when a new person arrives.” But it can also mean “We’re happy when something new comes along,” which isn’t at all the same thing. Strangest of all, the word vroh has two meanings, depending on the context: it’s equivalent to “glad” or “happy,” but it also has a connotation of “wary” or “watchful,” and if you favor this second area of meaning, then you find yourself contemplating a bizarre, disquieting statement which nobody perceived at the time but which hasn’t stopped resounding in my head ever since, a kind of warning freighted with a small load of threats, a greeting like a knife brandished in a fist, the blade shaken a little and glinting in the sun.
XXIII
—
n the afternoon of that same day, I brought Amelia and Poupchette along with me on an excursion. We climbed all the way to Lutz’s cabin. It was formerly a shepherd’s refuge, but it hasn’t been used for two decades. Rushes and meadow buttercups have slowly overgrown the surrounding pastures. The grass has retreated before the advancing moss. Some ponds have appeared; at first, they were merely puddles, but eventually they transformed the place into a kind of ghost, the ghost of a meadow not yet completely metamorphosed into a marsh. In an effort to understand and explain this transformation, I’d already written three reports on it, and each year around the same time I returned to the spot to measure the extent and nature of the changes. The cabin is west of the village, about a two-hour walk away. The path leading to it is no longer as clearly marked as it once was, when the tread of hundreds of pairs of clogs gave it renewed depth and form every year. Paths are like men; they die, too. Little by little, they get cluttered and then overwhelmed; they break apart, they’re eaten by grass, and in the end they disappear. After only a few years have passed, all that remains is a dim outline, and most people eventually forget that the path ever existed.
Poupchette, riding on my shoulders, chattered to the clouds. She spoke to them as if they could understand her. She told them to get a move on, to suck in their big bellies, and to leave the sun alone in the wide sky. The air coming down off the mountains gave fresh pinkness to her cheeks.
I was holding Amelia’s hand. She was beside me, walking along at a good pace. Sometimes her eyes rested on the ground and sometimes they stared off toward the far horizon, which was serrated by the jagged peaks of the Prinzhornï. But in either case, I could tell that her gaze never really came to rest on her surroundings, whether near or far. Her eyes seemed like butterflies, marvelously flitting about for no apparent reason, as though shifted by the wind, by the transparent air, but with no thought to what they were doing or what they saw. She marched on in silence. No doubt, the quickened rhythm of her breathing prevented her from humming her eternal song. Her lips were slightly parted. I clutched her hand and felt her warmth, but she noticed nothing. Perhaps she no longer knew how much the person at her side loved her.
Once we reached the cabin, I had Amelia sit on the stone bench by the door, and then I set Poupchette down next to her. I told Poupchette to be good while I made my rounds and recorded my data. I assured her I wouldn’t be long. I promised that after I finished we’d sit there and eat up the Pressfrütekof and the apple-walnut cake that old Fedorine had wrapped in a big white cloth for us.