Buller had a delicate, almost feminine voice, and the curious thing was that the uncontrolled chin movement that made him look like a robot gone haywire disappeared while he spoke. He’d hardly finished his speech when, with flawless protocol, as if everything had been rehearsed numerous times, Aloïs Cathor was brought into the square, escorted by the two soldiers who had him in their charge, and led before the captain. Another soldier walked close behind them, carrying something heavy that we couldn’t make out very well. When he placed it on the ground, we could see that it was a timber log, a section about a meter high cut from the trunk of a fir tree. Then everything went very fast. The soldiers grabbed Cathor, forced him to his knees, laid his head on the log, stepped back. They were quickly replaced by a fourth soldier, whom no one had yet seen. A big apron of dark leather was strapped to his chest and legs. In his hands he held a large ax. He moved very close to Cathor, raised the ax, and — before anyone even had time to catch his breath — brought the blade down forcefully on the pottery mender’s neck. The cleanly severed head hit the ground near the block and rolled a little. A great stream of blood gushed out of Cathor’s body, which jerked about spasmodically for several seconds like a decapitated goose before all movement ceased and the corpse lay inert. From the ground, Cathor’s head looked at us. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he’d just asked us a question and none of us had answered it.
It had happened so quickly; the awful scene had transfixed us all. Stunned as we were, the sound of the captain’s voice cleared our heads, only to plunge us into even greater astonishment: “This is the fate of those who wish to play games with us. Think about it, villagers! Ladies and gentlemen, think about it! And in order to assist your reflections, the head and the body of this Fremdër will remain here! Burial is forbidden under pain of suffering a similar punishment! And one further word of advice: Cleanse your village! Do not wait for us to do it ourselves. Cleanse it while there’s still time! And now disperse, go back to your houses! I wish you a good evening!”
His chin gave a little jerk to the left, as if to shoo a fly. He smacked his riding crop against the seam of his trousers, did an about-face, and departed, followed by his lieutenants. Amelia was trembling against me and sobbing. I held her to my chest as best I could. In a very soft voice, she kept repeating, “It’s a bad dream, Brodeck, isn’t it? Isn’t it just a bad dream?” She kept staring at Cathor’s headless body, slumped against the block.
“Come on,” I said, putting my hand over her eyes.
Later, when we were already in bed, someone knocked at our door. I felt Amelia flinch. I knew she wasn’t asleep. I kissed her on the nape of her neck and went downstairs. Fedorine had already admitted the visitor; it was Diodemus. She was extremely fond of him. She called him the Klübeigge, which means “scholar” in her old language. He and I sat at the table. Fedorine brought us two cups and poured us some herbal tea that she’d just prepared with wild thyme, mint, lemon balm, and fir-tree buds.
“What do you intend to do?” Diodemus asked me.
“What do you mean, what do I intend to do?”
“I don’t know, look, you were there, you saw what they did to Cathor!”
“I saw it.”
“And you heard what the officer said.”
“That it’s forbidden to touch the body? It reminds me of a Greek story Nösel used to tell back in the University, about a princess who—”
“Forget the Greek princesses! That’s not what I want to talk about,” Diodemus blurted out, interrupting me. He hadn’t stopped wringing his hands since he sat down. “When he said we have to ‘cleanse the village,’ what do you think he meant?”
“Those people are madmen. I watched them at work when I was in the Capital. Why do you think I came back to the village?”
“They may be mad, but they are nevertheless the masters, ever since they deposed their Emperor and crossed our borders.”
“They’ll leave, Diodemus. In the end, they’ll leave. Why would they want to stay with us? There’s nothing here. It’s the ends of the earth. They wanted to show us that they have the power now. They’ve shown us. They wanted to terrorize us. They’ve done it. They’re going to stay a few days, and then they’ll go somewhere else, somewhere farther along.”
“But the captain threatened us. He said we’re supposed to ‘cleanse the village.’”
“So? What do you propose to do? Get a bucket of water and a broom and tidy up the streets?”
“Don’t joke, Brodeck! You think they’re joking? There wasn’t anything innocent about what he said. He wasn’t speaking at random! He chose every word carefully. Like the word Fremdër he used to refer to poor Cathor.”
“That’s the word they use to talk about anybody they don’t like. They’re all Fremdër, all ‘scumbags.’ I saw that word painted on many a door during Pürische Nacht.”
“As you well know, it means ‘foreigner,’ too!”
“Cathor wasn’t a foreigner! His family’s as old as the village!”
Diodemus loosened his shirt collar, which seemed to be strangling him. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, gave me a fearful look, turned his eyes to his cup, took a quick sip, looked at me furtively once more, cast his eyes down again, and then said, almost in a murmur, “But you, Brodeck? You?”
XXXI
—
know how fear can transform a man.
I didn’t always know that, but I learned it. In the camp. I saw men scream, beat their heads against stone walls, hurl themselves on wire with barbs as sharp as razors. I saw them vomit, soil their pants, empty their bowels entirely, expel all the liquids, all the humors, all the gases their bodies contained. I saw some pray while others renounced the name of God and covered it with obscene insults. I even saw a man die of it — of fear, I mean. One morning, our guards played their little game and picked him as the next to be hanged, but when one of them stopped in front of him, laughed, and said “Du!” the prisoner didn’t move. His face betrayed no emotion, no distress, no thought. And as the guard started to lose his smile and lift his club, the man fell down dead, all at once, before the other even touched him.
The camp taught me this paradox: man is great, but he can never measure up to his full greatness. It’s an impossibility inherent in our nature. When I made my vertiginous journey, when I descended one by one the rungs of the sordid ladder that carried me ever deeper into the Kazerskwir, I was not only moving toward the negation of my own person but also, at the same time, proceeding toward full awareness of my tormentors’ motivations and full awareness of the motivations of those who had delivered me into their hands. And thus, somehow, toward a rough outline of forgiveness.
It was the fear others felt, much more than hatred or some other emotion, that had made a victim of me. It was because fear had seized some of them by the throat that I was handed over to torturers and executioners, and it was also fear that had turned those same torturers, formerly men like me, into monsters; fear that had caused the seeds of evil, which we all carry, to germinate inside them.
There’s no doubt that I badly misjudged the consequences of Aloïs Cathor’s execution. I’d grasped its horror, its odious cruelty, but I hadn’t envisioned the inroads it was going to make in people’s minds, nor had I understood how much Captain Buller’s words, examined and sifted through dozens and dozens of brains, would distress them; I hadn’t considered that those words could induce the others to make a decision whose victim would be me. And there was also, of course, Cathor’s remains, his head lying on the ground a couple of meters from his body, with the sun shining down and all the ephemeral insects which in those days of early fall were born in the morning, died at night, and spent the hours of their brief existence zooming around the corpse, reveling in the banquet, whirling, zigzagging, buzzing, driven wild by the great mass of flesh putrefying in the heat.