All the pieces of paper bore two names: Simon Frippman’s and mine. Diodemus swears he didn’t put down my name, but I don’t believe him. And even if that were true, the others couldn’t have had much difficulty persuading him to include my name in the end.
Frippman and I had many things in common: we hadn’t been born in the village, we didn’t look like the people around here (hair too black, skin too swarthy), and we came from far away, from an obscure past and a painful, wandering, age-old history. I’ve related my arrival in the village, riding in Fedorine’s cart after having made my way amid ruins and corpses, orphaned of my parents and orphaned of my memory. As for Frippman, he’d arrived ten years ago, babbling a few words of the local dialect mixed with the old language Fedorine had taught me. Since many found him impossible to understand, I was asked to serve as interpreter. It seemed likely that Frippman had suffered a severe blow to the head. He kept repeating his last name followed by his first name, but apart from that, he didn’t know a lot about himself. As he appeared to be a gentle sort, people didn’t drive him away. A bed was found for him in a barn attached to Vurtenhau’s farm. Frippman was full of heart. He did day labor for this or that employer — haymaking, plowing, milking, woodcutting — without ever seeming to grow tired and received his wages in food. He didn’t complain. He whistled tunes unknown to us. The village adopted him; he let himself be tamed without difficulty.
Simon Frippman and I were thus Fremdër—“scumbags” and “foreigners”—the butterflies that are tolerated for a while when everything’s going well and offered as expiatory victims when everything’s going badly. What was odd was that the men who decided to turn us over to Buller — that is, to send us to our deaths, as they must certainly have known! — agreed to spare Fedorine and Amelia, even though they were alien butterflies, too. I don’t know that one should speak of courage when referring to this omission, to this desire to spare the two women. I think rather that the gesture was like an attempt at expiation. Those who denounced us needed to keep a region of their conscience pure and intact, a portion that would be free from the taint of evil and would therefore allow them to forget what they’d done or at least give them the ability to live with it, in spite of everything.
The soldiers kicked in the door of our house shortly before midnight. Not long before that, the men who’d participated in the meeting of the brotherhood had gone to see Captain Buller and given him the two names. Diodemus was there. In his letter, he says that he was crying. He was crying, but he was there.
Before I had time to realize what was happening, the soldiers were already in our bedroom. They grabbed me by the arms and dragged me outside while Amelia screamed, clung to me, tried to beat them with her weak fists. They didn’t even pay attention to her. Tears were running down Fedorine’s old cheeks. I felt as though I’d become the little lost boy again, and I knew that Fedorine was thinking the same thing. We were already in the street. I saw Simon Frippman, his hands tied behind his back, waiting between two soldiers. He smiled at me, wished me a good evening as if nothing were wrong, and remarked that it wasn’t too warm. Amelia tried to embrace me, but someone pushed her away and she fell on the ground.
“You’ll come back, Brodeck! You’ll come back!” she screamed, and her words made the soldiers burst out laughing.
XXXII
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don’t feel any hatred toward Diodemus. I bear him no grudge. As I read his letter, I imagined his suffering more vividly than I remembered my own. And I understood, too. I understood why he’d been so assiduous in taking care of Fedorine and Amelia, visiting them every day, constantly doing things for them, and helping them all the more after Amelia entered into her great silence. And I also understood why, once he got over his initial astonishment, he greeted my return from the camp with such an explosion of joy, hugging me, making me dance, spinning around with me in his arms, laughing all the while and wheeling me faster and faster, until in the end I passed out. I had returned from the dead, but he was the one who could finally live again.
Brodeck, all my life I’ve tried to be a man, but I haven’t always succeeded. It’s not God’s forgiveness I want; it’s yours. You’ll find this letter. I know if something happens to me, you’ll keep my desk, and that’s why I’m going to hide the letter in it. I know you’ll keep the desk because you talk about it so much — it must be lovely to write at that desk, you say, and I write all the time. So sooner or later, you’ll find this. And you’ll read it, all of it. All of it. About Amelia, too, Brodeck. I’ve uncovered everything; I owed you that much. And now I know who did it. It wasn’t only soldiers—Dörfermesch, men from the village, were in on it, too. Their names are on the back of this sheet. There’s no possibility of a mistake. Do what you want with this information, Brodeck. And forgive me, Brodeck, forgive me, I beg you …
I read the end of the letter several times, bumping up against those last words, unable to comply with Diodemus; I couldn’t turn the page over and look at the names. The names of men whom I necessarily knew, because our village is very small. Amelia and Poupchette were sleeping only a few dozen meters from where I was. My Amelia, and my adorable Poupchette.
I remember telling the Anderer the story. It was two weeks after I’d come upon him sitting on the Lingen rock, contemplating the landscape and making sketches. I was returning home from a long hike I’d taken to check the state of the paths connecting the pastures in the high stubble. I’d left at dawn and walked a lot, and now I was hungry and thirsty and glad to be back in the village. I encountered him just as he was leaving Solzner’s stable, where he’d gone to visit his donkey and his horse. We greeted each other. I went on my way, but after a few steps I heard him speak: “Would this be an appropriate time for you to accept my recent invitation?”
I was on the point of telling him I was exhausted and eager to get home to my wife and daughter, but all I had to do was look at him as he stood there expectantly, a broad smile on his round face, and I found myself saying exactly the opposite. My response seemed to make him happy, and he asked me to follow him.
When we entered the inn, Schloss was washing down the floor, using a great deal of water. There were no customers. The innkeeper started to ask me what I was having, but he changed his mind when he realized I was following the Anderer up the stairs to his lodging. Schloss leaned on his broom and gave me a funny look, and then, seizing the handle of his bucket as if in anger, he violently flung the remaining water onto the wooden floor.