We left the village that same evening, bound by the hands to the same tether, walking under the watchful eyes of the two soldiers on horseback. The journey took four days, during which the guards gave us nothing but water and the remains of their meals. Frippman was far from despair. He kept talking about the same things as we trudged along, doling out advice concerning sowing, the phases of the moon, and cats, which, he declared, often chased him through the streets. He told me all this in his gobbledygook, a mélange of dialect and the old language. It was only over the course of those few days I spent with him that I realized he was simpleminded; before, I’d just considered him a bit whimsical. Everything filled him with wonder: the motions of our guards’ horses, the sheen of our guards’ polished boots, the glint of their uniform buttons in the sunlight, the landscape, the bird-song. The two soldiers didn’t mistreat us. They hauled us along like parcels. They never addressed a word to us, but they didn’t beat us, either.
When we reached S., it was in chaos. Half the city had been destroyed; its streets were filled with rubble and charred ruins. For a week, we were penned up in the train station with many other people of all sorts — men, women, children, entire families — some of them poor, some still wearing the symbols of their past riches and looking down on the others. There were hundreds of us. We were all Fremdër—in fact, that name had become our name. The soldiers never called us anything but that, indiscriminately. Little by little, we were already losing our individual existences. We all had the same name, and we had to obey whenever that name — which wasn’t a name — was spoken. We didn’t know what was awaiting us. Frippman stayed close to me, never leaving my side, sometimes holding my arm for many long minutes at a stretch, squeezing it between his hands like a frightened child. I let him do whatever he wanted. Facing the unknown is always better when you do it with someone else. One morning, the camp authorities carried out a selection process. Frippman was put in the column on the left, and they assigned me to the one on the right.
“Schussa Brodeck! Au baldiegeï en Dörfe!”—“Good-bye, Bro-deck! See you soon in the village!”—Frippman called out, his face beaming, as his column was marched away. I couldn’t respond to him. I simply waved; I gave him a little wave of my hand so he’d suspect nothing, and especially not the great nothing I had a premonition of. I was sure we were both heading there, him first and me later, to the accompaniment of cudgel blows. He turned and walked away at a good pace, whistling.
I never saw Frippman again. He didn’t come back to the village. Baerensbourg, the road mender, inscribed his name on the monument. Unlike mine, there was no need to erase it.
Amelia and Fedorine remained alone in the house. The rest of the village avoided them, as if they’d suddenly caught some kind of plague. Diodemus was the only person who concerned himself with them, out of friendship and out of shame, as I’ve said. In any case, he tried to take care of them.
Amelia practically stopped receiving commissions for her embroidery, but even though she no longer spent much time working on trousseaus and tablecloths and curtains and handkerchiefs, she hardly remained idle. She and Fedorine had to have food and warmth. I’d shown Amelia all the useful things the woods and stubble fields contained: branches, roots, berries, mushrooms, herbs, wild salads. Fedorine taught her how to trap birds with birdlime and string, how to snare rabbits, how to station herself under a tall fir tree, lure down a squirrel, and stun it with a thrown rock. The two of them didn’t go hungry.
Every evening, Amelia jotted down in a little notebook — which I’ve since found — some words meant for me. Her sentences were always simple and sweet, and she wrote about me, about us, as if I were going to return in the next instant. She recounted her day and began every entry the same way: “My little Brodeck…” There was never any bitterness in what she wrote. She didn’t mention the Fratergekeime. I’m sure she omitted them on purpose. It was an excellent method of denying their existence. Of course, I still have her notebook. I often reread passages from it. It’s a long, touching account, in which days of absence unspool, one after another. It’s our story, Amelia’s and mine. Her words are like lights, counterpoints to all my vast darkness. I want to keep them for myself, for myself alone, the last traces of Amelia’s voice before she stepped into the night.
Orschwir didn’t shift himself to visit them. One morning, he had half a pig delivered to them, and they found it outside the door. Peiper came to visit them two or three times, but Fedorine found him hard to bear. He would sit for hours next to the stove, emptying the bottle of plum brandy she brought out for him, while his speech became steadily more confused. One evening she went so far as to chase him out of the house with a broom.
Adolf Buller and his troops continued to occupy the village. A week after Frippman and I were arrested, Buller finally gave the authorization to bury Cathor. The deceased had no family apart from Beckenfür, who had married his sister, and so Beckenfür took charge of the burial. “A filthy job, Brodeck, let me tell you … Not pretty, really not pretty… His head was twice its former size, like some strange balloon, with the skin all black and splitting, and then the rest, my God, the rest — let’s not talk about it anymore …”
Aside from Cathor’s execution and our arrest, the Fratergekeime behaved most civilly toward the locals, so much so that the two events were quickly forgotten, or rather, people did all they could to forget them. It was during this time that Göbbler returned to the village with his fat wife. He moved back into his house, which he’d left fifteen years before, and was received with open arms by the whole village, and in particular by Orschwir; the two of them had been conscripts together.
I’m prepared to swear that it was Göbbler’s counsels which gradually sent the village over the edge. He pointed out to everyone how advantageous it was to be occupied by foreign troops, how there was nothing hostile about the occupation, no, quite the opposite; it guaranteed peace and security, and it made the village and the surrounding region a massacre-free zone. Admittedly, it wasn’t hard for him to convince people that it was in everyone’s interest for Buller and his men to stay in the village as long as possible. Clearly, a hundred men eating and drinking and smoking and having their clothes washed and mended bring a community a considerable infusion of money.
With the consent of the whole village and Orschwir’s blessing, Göbbler became a sort of deputy mayor. He was often seen in Buller’s tent. In the beginning, the captain had viewed him with suspicion, but then, seeing the benefits to be derived from the feckless fellow and the rapprochement he championed, Buller began treating him almost like a comrade. As for Boulla, she opened her thighs wide to the whole troop and distributed her favors to officers as well as to the rank and file.
“Well, what can I say? We got used to it.” Schloss told me that the day he came over to my table and sat across from me and got all teary-eyed while he talked to me. “It became natural for them to be here. After all, they were men like us, cut from the same block. We spoke about the same things in the same language, or close to it. Eventually, we knew almost all of them by their first names. A lot of them did favors for the old folks, and others played with the kids. Every morning, ten of them cleaned the streets. Others took care of the roads and the paths, cut wood, cleared away the piles of dung. The village has never been so clean, not before or since! What can I tell you? When they came in here, I filled their glasses — I sure wasn’t going to spit in their faces! How many of us do you think wanted to wind up like Cathor or vanish like you and Frippman?”