“What do you see in this one?” I asked.
“Several things,” he said dreamily. “Several things …”
He added nothing more. Later, when he was dead, I had (needless to say) time to reflect. I thought about the Anderer’s drawing again.
I suppose it could be said that I’ve got a hot head and a broken brain. That the entire rigmarole with the drawings was pure nonsense. That an unsound mind and deranged senses would be required for someone to see in those simple doodles everything that I saw. And that it’s surely easy to bring all this up for consideration now, when there’s no proof of anything, when the drawings no longer exist, when they’ve all been destroyed. Yes, exactly right, they were all destroyed! That very evening, no less! If that’s not proof, then what is it? The drawings were ripped into a thousand pieces, scattered to the four winds, or reduced to ashes, because they said, in their fashion, things that should never have been said, and they revealed truths that had been carefully smothered.
As for me, I’d had more than enough.
I left the inn when drinking was proceeding at a steadily increasing pace and men were bellowing like beasts, but they were still happy beasts, merrily carousing. Diodemus, for his part, stayed until the end, and I got my account of what happened from him. Schloss continued to bring out pitchers and bottles for about an hour after I left, and then, the ammunition having run out, an armistice was abruptly declared; evidently, the sum agreed between him and the Anderer had been reached. From this point on, everything went sour. At first, there were words, followed by a few deeds, but nothing really nasty as yet — general grumbling, a bit of breakage, nothing more serious than that. But then the nature of the grumbling changed, as when a calf is separated from its mother’s teats; at first it whimpers, but then it resigns itself and looks around for some other amusement, some small raison d’être. The change came when everyone recalled the reason why they were all there in the first place. They turned back to the drawings and considered them again. Or differently. Or with the scales fallen from their eyes, if you will. In any case, they took another look at the pictures and saw themselves. Exposed. They saw what they were and what they had done. They saw in the Anderer’s drawings everything that Diodemus and I had seen. And, of course, they couldn’t bear it. Who could have borne it?
“A real mess! I never quite understood who started it, and in any case that’s not important, because everyone joined in, and nobody tried to restrain anyone else at all. The priest had long since passed out. He was sleeping under a table with a bit of his cassock in his mouth, like a child sucking his thumb. The older fellows had gone home shortly after you did. As for Orschwir, he didn’t take part in the spectacle, he just watched, but he had a satisfied smile on his face, and when young Kipoft threw his portrait into the fire, Orschwir looked downright happy, believe me! And the whole thing happened so fast, you know. Before I had time to blink, everything on the walls was gone. The only person who looked a bit peeved was Schloss.”
When Diodemus gave me this account, it was two days later and the rain hadn’t stopped falling since that festive evening at Schloss’s inn. It was as if the heavens needed to do a big wash, to launder men’s dirty linen, since they weren’t up to doing it themselves. The walls of our houses seemed to be weeping, and in the streets, rivulets of water turned brown by earth and stable dung streamed among the paving stones, ferrying along small pebbles, straw bits, sundry peelings, flecks of grime. What’s more, it was an odd rain, a continuous deluge coming down from a sky we couldn’t even see, so thick, dirty, and waterlogged was the blanket of clouds that kept it constantly hidden. We’d waited for that rain for weeks. For weeks, the village had baked in the heat, and with the village the bodies of the villagers, their nerves, their muscles, their desires, their hearts; and then the storm came, the great splashing havoc of the storm, which corresponded on a gigantic scale to the human havoc, the contained fury inside Schloss’s inn, for precisely at the moment when that sort of minor rehearsal for the Ereigniës was going on, when effigies were being burned as a preliminary to killing the man, the overloaded sky split in half along its entire width, from east to west, and torrents of gray rain spilled out of it like guts, an immense downpour of water as greasy and heavy as dishwater.
Schloss put everyone out, including the mayor, and the whole jolly crew waded home through the storm, occasionally illuminated by lightning. Some of them lay down at full length in puddles and pretended to swim, shouting like unsupervised schoolboys, throwing handfuls of mud like snowballs at their companions’ faces.
I like to think that the Anderer stood at his upstairs window and contemplated the spectacle. I imagine his little smile. The heavens were vindicating him, and everything that he saw below him — creatures soaked to the skin, vomiting and shouting insults at one another, heartily mingling their laughs, their slurred words, and their streams of piss — could but make his destroyed portraits seem even truer to life. It was, in a way, something of a triumph for him. The coronation of the master of the game.
But down here, it’s best never to be right. That’s one thing you always end up paying a very high price for.
XXXV
—
he next day was hangover day, when the skull pounds away like a drum, all on its own, and one isn’t sure whether what he remembers was dreamed or lived. I believe the majority of those who’d gone wild the previous night must have felt like great fools once they returned to the sober state; perhaps they’d obtained some relief, but they also knew they’d been damned stupid. Not that they were ashamed of their treatment of the Anderer, not at all; in that regard, their minds were set and nothing could change them; but when they thought about it, their furious attack on some scraps of paper could not have seemed the stuff of manly heroism.
The rain suited them fine. They didn’t have to leave their houses or encounter one another or converse or see in others’ eyes what they themselves had done. Only the mayor braved the storms that came sweeping over the village in rapid succession, as if it were April and not August. That evening, he left his house and went directly to the inn. When he arrived, he was soaked to the skin. Schloss was quite surprised to see his door open, since it had remained insistently shut all day long. Moreover, he hadn’t exactly spent the day wishing for customers. It had taken him hours to clean up after the revelers and wash everything, including the floor, all the while maintaining a roaring blaze in the hearth to dry the tiles and consume the rancid air. He’d just finished the long job. Everything — the room, the tables, the walls — had at last regained its customary appearance, as if nothing had happened the previous evening. And at this point, Orschwir made his entrance. Schloss looked at him as if he were a monster, a monster that had taken on a great deal of water, but a monster all the same. The mayor removed the big shepherd’s cloak he’d rigged himself out in and hung it on a nail near the fireplace. He took out a crumpled and rather dirty handkerchief, wiped his face with it, blew his nose in it, folded it up again, stuffed it in his pocket, and finally turned to Schloss, who was leaning on his broom, waiting.