“I went into the barn, Brodeck. I went inside. It was very silent and very dark. I saw some shapes on the floor, little shapes lying in a heap, not moving. I knelt beside them. I know death too well not to recognize it. There were the young girls, so young — none of them was twenty — and all three had their eyes wide open. I closed their eyelids. And there was Amelia. She was the only one still breathing, but weakly. She’d been left for dead, but she didn’t want to die, Brodeck, she didn’t want to die, because she knew you’d come back one day, she knew it, Brodeck … After I went over to her, while I was kneeling with her face pressed against my belly, she started to hum that song she hasn’t stopped humming since … I rocked her in my arms, I rocked her and rocked her for a long, long time …”
There was no more water in the samovar. Gingerly, I put the Liber florae down beside me. It was almost dark outside. The Anderer opened a window, and a scent of hot resin and humus permeated the room. I’d talked for a long time, no doubt for hours, but he hadn’t interrupted me. I was on the point of apologizing for having opened my heart to him like that, without shame and without permission, when chimes sounded directly behind me. I spun around brusquely, as if someone had fired a shot. It was an odd sort of old-fashioned clock, the size of a large watch, made in days gone by to be hung inside carriages. I hadn’t noticed it before. Its delicate golden hands indicated eight o’clock. The watch-case was made of ebony and gold, and the numbers of the hours were of blue enamel on an ivory background. Under the axis of the hands, the watchmaker, Benedik Fürstenfelder, whose name was engraved on the bottom of the frame, had inscribed a motto in fine, slanted, intertwining letters: ALLE VERWUNDEN, EINE TÖDTET—“They all wound; one kills.”
* * *
s I stood up, I read the motto aloud. The Anderer likewise got to his feet. I’d talked a lot. Too much, perhaps. It was time for me to go home. Somewhat confused, I told him he mustn’t think that… He interrupted me by swiftly raising his small, chubby hand, like the hand of a slightly overweight woman. “Don’t apologize,” he said, his voice nearly as imperceptible as a breath. “I know that talking is the best medicine.”
XXXIII
—
don’t know whether the Anderer was right.
I don’t know if it’s possible to be cured of certain things. Maybe talking’s not such good medicine, after all. Maybe talking has the opposite effect. Maybe it only serves to keep wounds open, the way we keep the embers of a fire alive so that when we want it to, when we’re ready for it, it can blaze up again.
I burned Diodemus’s letter. Of course I burned it. Writing hadn’t cured him of a thing, not him. And it wouldn’t have done me any good to turn over the last page and read the names of the Dörfermesch he’d written there. No good at all. I don’t have the spirit of revenge. Some part of me will always remain Brodeck the Dog, a creature that prefers prostration in the dust to biting, and maybe it’s better that way.
That evening, I didn’t go directly home. I made a long detour. The night was soft. The stars were like silver nails hammered into the growing blackness of the vanishing sky. There are hours on the earth when everything is unbearably beautiful, with a beauty whose scope and sweetness seem uniquely meant to emphasize the ugliness of our condition. I walked to the bank of the Staubi and then upstream from the Baptisterbrücke until I came to a grove of white willows which Baerensbourg tortures every January by cutting off all their branches. That’s where the three young girls are buried. I know, because Diodemus told me so. He showed me the exact spot. There’s no grave marker, no cross, nothing at all. But I know the three girls are there, under the grass: Marisa, Therne, and Judith. Names are important, and those are their names. The names I’ve given them. Because in addition to having killed them, the Dörfermesch made all trace of them disappear so thoroughly that no one knows what their names were, or where they came from, or who they really were.
That stretch of the Staubi is so beautiful. Its clear waters roll over a bed of gray pebbles. It murmurs and babbles, almost like a human voice. To those willing to lend an ear and sit for a moment on the grass, the Staubi offers a subtle music.
The Anderer often sat on that grassy bank, taking notes in his little notebook and drawing. I think some of the people who saw him there persuaded themselves that he wasn’t dallying in that place merely by chance, not precisely there, so close to the young girls’ mute graves. And it was no doubt over the course of his stops by the willow grove that the Anderer’s doom, unbeknownst to him, began to be sealed, and that the Dörfermesch gradually determined on his death. One must never, not even inadvertently, not even against his will, resurrect horror, for then it revives and spreads. It bores into brains; it grows; and it gives birth to itself again.
Diodemus also found his death not far from there. Found his death—a strange expression, when you think about it, but I think it suits Diodemus’s case: in order to find something, you must seek it, and I really believe that Diodemus sought his end.
I know he left his room. I know he left the village. I know he walked along the banks of the Staubi, and I know that as he headed upstream, in the opposite direction of the river current, his thoughts flowed backward, against the current of his life. He thought about our long walks, about all the things we’d said to each other, about our friendship. He’d just finished writing his letter, and as he walked along the riverbank, his mind was on what he’d written. He passed by the white willows, he thought about the young girls, he walked on, he kept walking, he tried to drive the ghosts away, he tried to talk to me one last time, I’m sure of it, yes, I’m certain he spoke my name; he climbed up to the top of the Tizenthal rocks, and that very short ascent did him good because the higher he climbed, the lighter he felt. When he reached the summit, he looked at the roofs of the village, he looked at the moon’s reflection on the margins of the river, he looked one last time at his life, he felt the night breeze caressing his beard and his hair. He closed his eyes; he let himself drop. His fall lasted for a while. Maybe, wherever he is now, he still hasn’t stopped falling.