More and more public gatherings took place until they seemed to be everywhere. A few men would stop near a streetlight and speak among themselves; soon they were joined by others and by others after that. Thus, in a few minutes, the group had swelled to forty — forty bodies pressed together, their shoulders a bit hunched, all moving slightly from time to time or assenting concisely to a point made by one of the speakers, though exactly which one was never clear. Then, as if blown away by a gust of wind, those silhouettes suddenly dispersed in every direction, and the empty sidewalk recommenced its monotonous waiting.
Remarkable and contradictory news reached the Capital from the eastern frontier. On the other side of the border, it was said, entire garrisons were on the march by night, as surreptitiously as possible, and witnesses reported troop movements of a scope hitherto unknown. It was also said that people on this side could hear machines at work over there, digging ditches, galleries, trenches, secret tunnels. And finally, it was said that recently perfected weapons of diabolical power and range were being prepared for deployment, and that the Capital was full of spies, ready to set it ablaze when the time came. Meanwhile, widespread hunger was tormenting citizens’ bellies and governing their minds. The oven-like heat of the two preceding summers had grilled the vast majority of the crops standing in the fields surrounding the city. Every day, bands of farmers and their families, impoverished and emaciated, flocked to the Capital; their lost eyes settled on everything they saw, as if they were going to steal it. Children — drab little creatures with yellowish complexions — clung to their mother’s skirts. Often, barely able to remain upright, youngsters would fall asleep on their feet, leaning against a wall, and many a mother who could go on no longer sat on the ground with a sleeping child lying across her lap.
At the same moment, Professor Nösel would be talking to us about our great poets, who — in days gone by, centuries and centuries ago, when the Capital was still nothing more than a big market town, when our forests were full of bears and wolf packs, aurochs and bison, when hordes of tribesmen from the distant steppes were spreading fire and terror — fashioned the countless verses of our fundamental epic poems. Nösel could decipher Ancient Greek, Latin, Cimbrian, Arabic, Aramaic, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian, but he was incapable of looking out his window, or of lifting his nose from his reading as he walked home to his apartment in Jeckenweiss Street. A man most learned in books, he was blind to the world.
One day, the first demonstration took place. After waiting in vain for someone to hire them, about a hundred men, most of them ruined farmers and unemployed workers, left the Albergeplatz market, where those looking for a day’s work ordinarily gathered. Walking fast and shouting, they headed for Parliament. Outside the building, they came up against the soldiers on duty, who managed to disperse them without violence. The demonstrators passed Ulli and me on our way to the University. They formed a somewhat noisy procession, nothing more, like students parading to celebrate their diplomas, except that in this case, the taut, ashen faces and the eyes glittering with muffled resentment clearly didn’t belong to students.
“They’ll get over it soon!” Rätte declared mockingly. He grabbed me by the arm to haul me to a new café, which he had discovered the previous evening and which he wanted to show me. We set out, but from time to time as we walked, I turned around to catch a glimpse of those men disappearing down the street like the tail of a giant serpent, whose invisible head was even bigger in my imagination.
The phenomenon repeated itself the following day and the six days after that; the only difference was that each time the marchers were more numerous and their grumbling louder. Women, perhaps their wives, joined the ranks of the farmers and workers, along with some protesters who came out of nowhere and had never been seen before. They looked like herdsmen or shepherds, except that they wielded neither sticks nor staffs for driving animals but shouts and words. Soon there was a bit of daily bloodshed, caused when the soldiers stationed in front of the Parliament building struck a few skulls with the flats of their swords. Newspaper headlines about the growing numbers of demonstrators began to appear, but the government remained strangely mute. On a Friday evening eight days after the demonstrations began, a soldier was seriously injured when someone threw a paving stone. A few hours later, the entire city was placarded with an announcement declaring that all gatherings were forbidden until further notice and that any demonstrations would be repressed with the greatest firmness.
This volatile mixture was ignited at dawn the following day, when the swollen body of Wighert Ruppach was found near the church of the Ysertinguës. An unemployed typographer known for his revolutionary opinions, he was said to have had a hand in instigating the first demonstrations, and it was true that many people had spotted his bearded, half-moon face at the head of the mob and heard his baritone voice shouting for bread and work. The police very quickly established that he’d been clubbed to death and that he’d been last seen in the slaughterhouse district, half drunk and stumbling as he exited one of the numerous dives that served black wine and contraband liquor. Robbed of his papers, his watch, and every cent in his pocket, Ruppach had doubtless been the victim of one of his drinking companions or of some criminal whose path he’d crossed — or so went the explanation given by the police. But the city, which was starting to show signs of fever, responded to the official story with growls and threats. Within a few hours, Ruppach achieved the status of martyr, the victim of a senile governing power which couldn’t feed its children or protect them from the foreign menace swelling with impunity along its borders. In the death of Ruppach, people thought they recognized a foreigner’s hand, or the hand of a traitor. By that point, the truth mattered little. Few citizens were disposed to hear it. Over the course of the previous week, the majority had stuffed their heads with plenty of powder, they had plaited a lovely fuse, and now they had their spark.
Everything exploded on Monday, after a Sunday which most citizens had dedicated to fleeing the city. It seemed deserted, abandoned, emptied by a strange and sudden epidemic. Amelia and I had gone for a walk Sunday evening, pretending not to notice that everything around us pointed to an imminent event of an unprecedented kind.
We’d known each other for five weeks. I was entering another world. I’d suddenly discovered that both the earth and my life could move to rhythms different from those I’d previously known, and that the soft, regular sound of the beloved’s breathing is the sweetest one can ever hear. We always walked the same streets and passed the same places. Somehow, without meaning to, we’d outlined a pilgrimage that traced the first days of our love. Our way led past the Stüpispiel Theater, then down Under-de-Bogel Avenue to the Elsi Promenade, the music pavilion, the skating rink. Amelia asked me to tell her about my studies, about the books I was reading, about the country I came from. “I’d love to get to know it,” she said.
She’d been in the Capital for a year, having arrived with no treasure but her two hands, which knew how to do delicate embroidery, sew complicated stitches, and make lace as fragile as a thread of frost. One evening, when I inquired about her family and the place she’d come from, she told me, “Everything behind me is darkness. Nothing but darkness,” and what she said brought me back to my own past, my distant childhood, which featured death, destroyed houses, broken walls, smoking wounds — some of it I remember a little, and some things Fedorine has related to me. After Amelia spoke those words, I began to love her also as a sister, a fellow creature risen from the same depths as I, a fellow creature who, like me, had no other choice but to keep her eyes fixed straight ahead.