The Fratergekeime stayed in the village for nearly ten months. There were no notable incidents, but the atmosphere worsened during the final weeks. Later, the reason why became clear. The war was changing both its location and its mind. Like a fire in spring, when the acrid smoke, agitated by the wind, panics and abruptly shifts direction, military victories abandoned one side and went over to the other. No news came to the village — not to the villagers, that is. If they were kept ignorant, they couldn’t become dangerous. But Buller, of course, knew everything. I like to imagine his face, ravaged by his tic more and more frequently in proportion as the messages arrive with their tidings of defeat, of disaster, of the collapse of the Greater Territory, which was meant to extend its sway over the whole world and last for thousands of years.
Like dogs, the occupying troops sensed their leader’s confusion and became increasingly nervous. The masks fell again. The old reflexes returned. Brochiert, the butcher, was beaten before Diodemus’s eyes for teasing a corporal about his fondness for tripe. Limmat, having neglected to salute two soldiers on the street, was shoved around, and only the intervention of Göbbler, who happened to be passing at that moment, saved him from a severe clubbing. A dozen incidents of this type made everyone realize that the monsters had never left them, that they had simply fallen asleep for a while, and that now their slumbers were over. Then the fear came back, and with it the desire to keep it at bay.
One afternoon — in fact, it must have been the day before the troops’ departure — some Dörfermesch, some “men from the village,” who had gone off with a sledge to the Borensfall forest to transport some timber, made a discovery near Lichmal clearing: under a jumble of fir branches, arranged to form a sort of shelter, three panic-stricken young girls, adolescents who clung to one another when they saw the men coming. They wore clothes that weren’t the same as those peasant women wore. Nor did their shoes bear any resemblance to clogs or boots. The girls had a little suitcase. They’d come from far, very far. They’d obviously been on the run for weeks, and then — God knows how — they’d reached that forest in the midst of a strange universe in which they were completely lost.
The Dörfermesch gave them food and drink. They flung themselves on the food as though they hadn’t swallowed a bite for days. Then they followed the men trustingly to the village. Diodemus thought that the men didn’t yet know, as they made their way back to the village, what they were going to do with those girls. I’d like to believe him. In any case, however, they realized that the girls were Fremdër, and they knew that each step, each meter along the path that led to the village brought them closer to their fate. As I’ve said, Göbbler had become an important man, the only person in the village whom Captain Buller had really accepted, and so the men brought the three girls to Göbbler’s house. He was the one who convinced the Dörfermesch that they should hand the three over to the Fratergekeime as a means of gaining their favor, calming them down, taming them. While Göbbler dispensed this advice, the three young girls waited outside, in front of his house. They were still waiting when rain suddenly began to come down in torrents.
The heavens sport with us. I’ve often thought that if the rain hadn’t started beating down on the roof tiles so hard, maybe Amelia would never have looked out the window. And in that case, she wouldn’t have seen the three drenched, trembling, thin, exhausted young girls. She wouldn’t have gone outside and invited them to come in and sit by the fire. She wouldn’t have been out there with them when the two soldiers, alerted by one of the men from the village, appeared and took hold of the girls. Therefore, she wouldn’t have protested. She wouldn’t have screamed at Göbbler, as I’m sure she did, that what he was doing was inhuman, and she wouldn’t have slapped his face. The soldiers wouldn’t have seized her. They wouldn’t have taken her away with the three girls. And so she wouldn’t have taken that first step toward the abyss.
Rain. Just rain, pelting the roof tiles and the windowpanes.
The Anderer listened to me. From time to time, he poured some hot water into his glass and added a few tea leaves. All the while I talked, I clutched the old Liber florae montanarum in my arms as if it were a person. The Anderer’s benevolent silence and his smile encouraged me to continue. It soothed me to talk about all that for the first time, to speak of it to that stranger, with his queer looks and his queer clothes, and in that place, which so little resembled a room.
I told him the rest in a few words. There wasn’t much left to say. Buller and his men were breaking camp, and despite the driving rain, there was much feverish activity in the market square. The air was filled with orders, shouts, and the sound of shattering glass as dozens of drunken men, laughing, stumbling, and exchanging insults, drank their bottles dry and dashed them to the ground. Buller, his head jolted by his tic with ever-increasing frequency, was observing the whole tumult, standing rigid like a picket just inside the flap of his tent. At that paradoxical moment, the Fratergekeime were still the masters, even though it was already clear to them that they had lost. They were fallen gods, mighty warriors with a premonition that soon they’d be stripped of their weapons and their armor. With their feet still in their dream, they knew they were hanging upside down.
Such was the scene when the little procession arrived: the three girls and Amelia, escorted by the Dörfermesch and the two soldiers. Very quickly, Amelia and the girls became prey; all four were surrounded, shoved, touched, groped. Accompanied by great outbursts of laughter, they disappeared into the center of a circle that closed behind them, a circle of inebriated, violent men, who drove them toward Otto Mischenbaum’s barn amid shouted obscenities and crass jokes. Mischenbaum, a farmer nearly a hundred years old, had never engendered any progeny—“Hab nie Zei gehab, nieman Zei gehab!” (“Never had the time, never ever had the time!”) — and spent most of his days shut up in his kitchen.
Amelia and the girls vanished into the barn.
They were swallowed up in there.
And then, nothing more.
The next day, the square was deserted but littered with innumerable shards of glass. The Fratergekeime had left. All that remained of them was a sour odor of wine, vomited brandy, and thick beer, which lay in puddles all over the square. After that sickening night, during which some soldiers and a few men from the village, with Buller’s mute blessing, had done great harm to bodies and souls, the doors of all the houses were shut. Nobody yet dared to go outside. And old Fedorine went knocking, knocking, knocking at all those doors. Until she came to the barn.
“I went inside, Brodeck.” That’s Fedorine, telling me the whole story while she feeds me with a spoon. My hands are covered with wounds. My lips hurt so badly. My broken teeth hurt so badly, as if their fragments were still cutting into my gums. I’ve just come back after two years out of the world. I left the camp, I walked along highways and byways, and now I’m home again, but I’m still half dead. And so weak. A few days ago, when I finally stepped into my house, I found Fedorine there, and the sight of me made her drop the big earthenware dish she was wiping. Its pattern of red flowers was dispersed to the four corners of the room. I found Amelia, too, more beautiful than ever, yes, even more beautiful than she was in all my memories, and those aren’t empty words. She was sitting by the stove, and despite the noise of the breaking dish, despite the sound of my voice calling her name, despite my hand on her shoulder, she didn’t raise her eyes to me but kept humming a song that pained my heart, “Schöner Prinz so lieb / Zu weit fortgegangen,” the song of our first kiss. And as I said her name, as I said it once more with the great joy I felt at seeing her again, as my hand patted her shoulder and stroked her cheek and her hair, I saw that her eyes didn’t see me, I understood that she didn’t hear me, I understood that Amelia’s body and Amelia’s wonderful face were there before my eyes, but that her soul was wandering somewhere else, I didn’t know where, but in some unknown place, and I swore to myself that I’d go to that place and bring her back, and it was at that precise moment, at the moment when I made that vow, that I heard for the first time a little voice I’d never heard before and didn’t know, a child’s little voice, coming from our bedroom and rubbing the syllables against one another, the way you rub flint to make sparks fly, and producing a joyous, free, disorderly cascade of melody, a playful babbling that I now know must be the closest thing to the language of the angels.