Orschwir looked at the crowd, refolded his pages, and shook the Anderer’s hand, while the applause mounted up to the pink-and-blue sky, where some apparently drunken swallows were challenging one another to speed trials along incoherent courses. The applause gradually died down and silence fell again, heavily. The Anderer smiled, but no one could say at whom or what. At the countryfolk crowded into the first row, who hadn’t understood much of the speech and couldn’t wait to drink the wine and beer? At Orschwir, whose mounting anxiety grew more and more palpable as the silence persisted? At the sky? Maybe at the swallows. He had yet to pronounce a single word when there came a sudden, violent gust of wind, of very balmy, even hot wind, the kind that makes animals nervous in their stalls and sometimes irritates them so much that they begin kicking wildly at walls and doors. The wind assailed the welcome banner, tore it in half, and wrapped itself in the two parts, twisting and ripping off large sections, which swiftly flew away toward the birds, the clouds, the setting sun. The wind departed as it had come, like a thief. What was left of the banner sagged down. Only two words remained: “Wi sund”—“We are.” The rest of the sentence had disappeared into thin air, vaporized, forgotten, destroyed. Once again I noticed a chicken smell, very close to me. Göbbler was at my side, and he spoke into my ear. “We are! What are we, Brodeck? I wonder what we are …”
I made no reply. Poupchette hummed as she sat on my shoulders. She’d clapped very hard during every round of applause. The incident with the banner had distracted the crowd for a few seconds, but now it had calmed down again, and it was waiting. Orschwir was waiting, too, and if you knew him even slightly, you knew that he wouldn’t be able to wait much longer. Maybe the Anderer could sense that as well, for he moved a little, rubbing and stretching his cheeks with both hands; then he brought them down in front of him, joined them as if he were going to pray nodded his head to left and right, smiling all the while, and said, “Thank you.” That was it: “Thank you.” Then he bowed ceremoniously, three times, like an actor on the stage at the end of a play People looked at one another. Some of them opened their mouths so wide that a round loaf of bread could have slipped in without difficulty. Others elbowed their neighbors and exchanged questioning looks. Still others shrugged their shoulders or scratched their heads. Then someone started applauding. It was as good a way as any to ease the embarrassment. Others imitated him. Poupchette was happy again. “Fun, Daddy, fun!”
As for the Anderer, he replaced his hat on his head, climbed down the steps to the platform as slowly as he’d mounted them, and disappeared into the crowd before the eyes of the mayor, who stood there dumbfounded and unmoving, his arms hanging at his sides, while the surviving fragment of the banner teased the fur of his cap and the people at his feet abandoned him, moving briskly toward the trestle tables, the mugs, the glasses, the pitchers, the sausages, and the brioches.
XXIX
—
omeone’s been in the shed! Someone’s been in the shed! It was Göbbler, I know it was! I’d swear to it! It couldn’t be anybody but him! Besides, there are tracks, footsteps in the snow, big, muddy tracks going toward his house! He didn’t even hide them! They think they’re so powerful, they don’t even bother to hide the fact that they’re all spying on me, that they’ve got their eyes on me every moment.
It was enough for me to be away for barely an hour, off to buy three balls of wool for Fedorine in Frida Pertzer’s tiny shop, which offers a little of everything — gold braid, needles, thread, gossip, buttons, cloth by the meter — and that gave him enough time to enter the shed and rummage through everything! Everything’s upside down! Everything’s been overturned, opened, moved! He didn’t even try to put things back in order after he went through them! And he forced the desk drawer open, the one in Diodemus’s desk — he broke the drawer and left it on the floor! What was he looking for? He wanted what I’m writing, that’s certain. He hears the typewriter too much. He suspects I’m writing something other than the Report! But he didn’t find anything. He couldn’t find anything! My hiding place is too sure.
A short while ago, when I discovered what had happened, I was furious. I didn’t stop to think. I saw the tracks, I rushed over to Göbbler’s, and I banged on his door with the flat of my hand. The night was rather advanced, and the village was sleeping, but there was a light in Göbbler’s house, and I knew he wasn’t asleep. His wife answered the door. She was wearing a nightgown, and when she saw that it was me, she smiled. Against the light from inside, I could distinguish the outlines of her big hips and her immense breasts. She’d taken down her hair.
“Good evening, Brodeck,” she said, repeatedly passing her tongue over her lips.
“I want to see your husband!”
“Aren’t you feeling well? Are you sick?”
I shouted his name at the top of my voice. I kept shouting it. There was movement upstairs, and soon Göbbler made his appearance, with a candle in his hand and a nightcap on his head.
“Why, Brodeck, what’s going on?”
“You tell me! Why did you ransack my shed? Why did you break the desk drawer?”
“I assure you, I haven’t done any—”
“Don’t take me for an idiot! I know it was you! You’re always spying on me! Have the others put you up to it? The footprints lead to your house!”
“The footprints? What footprints? Brodeck… Do you want to come in and have some herb tea? I think you’re—”
“If you ever do it again, Göbbler, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
He stepped close to me. His face was a few inches from mine. He was trying to see me through the whitish veil that covers his eyes a little more every day. “Be reasonable,” he said. “It’s nighttime. Take my advice and go to bed. Take my advice.”
Suddenly Göbbler’s eyes frightened me. There was nothing human about them anymore. They looked like ice eyes, frozen eyes, like the eyes I saw once when I was eleven years old and a caravan of men from the village had gone to collect the bodies of two foresters from the hamlet of Froxkeim who had been carried off by a snowslide on the Schnikelkopf slopes. The villagers had brought down the remains in large sheets suspended from poles. I saw them pass not far from our cabin while I was out getting water from the stream. I noticed that the arm of one corpse was hanging out of the sheet and beating time on the ground, and I also saw the other man’s head through a tear in the cloth. His stare was fixed and white, with a flat, full whiteness, as if all the snow that killed him had poured itself into his eyes. I cried out, dropped the water jug, and went running back to the cabin to fling myself against Fedorine.