Brodeck by Philippe Claudel Page A

some of them still looking a bit astonished, others with their eyes well closed, as if they’d been put to sleep by surprise and tucked into lovely liquid sheets.
    From my conversations with him, I’m certain that the Anderer took the time to observe our river. Staubi—it’s a funny name. It means nothing, not even in our dialect. No one knows where it came from. Diodemus himself, in all the pages that he read and rummaged through, failed to find its origin or its meaning. They’re strange, names are. Sometimes you know nothing about them, and yet you’re always saying them. Basically, they’re like people: I mean like the ones whose paths you cross for years but never know, until one day, before your eyes, they reveal themselves to be what you would never have imagined them capable of being.
    I don’t know what the Anderer must have thought when he saw our roofs and our chimneys for the first time. He had arrived. His journey was over. He had reached his goal, which was our village and nowhere else. Beckenfür was the first to realize that, and later we all felt as he did. There was no mistake. Without any doubt, the Anderer came here of his own free will and deliberate choice, having prepared his adventure and brought along everything he would need. His coming was the result of no sudden impulse or passing fancy.
    His calculations must have included even the hour of his arrival. An oblique hour, during which the light exalts things—the mountains that watch over our narrow valley, the forests, the pastures, the walls and gables, the hedgerows, the voices—and makes them more beautiful and more majestic. Not an hour of full daylight, yet sufficiently bright to give every event a unique sheen and the arrival of a stranger a distinct impact, in a village of four hundred souls already quite busy imagining things, even in ordinary times. And conversely, an hour which by the mere fact of its ongoing attachment to the dying day arouses curiosity, but not yet fear. Fear comes later, when the windows are down and the shutters closed, when the last log has slipped beneath the ashes, and when silence extends its realm over the inmost depths of every house.
    I’m cold. My fingertips are like stones, hard and smooth. I’m in the shed behind my house, surrounded by abandoned planks, pots, seeds, balls of string, chairs in need of reseating—a great clutter of more or less decrepit things. This is where life’s dross is piled up. And I’m here, too. I’ve come here of my own accord. I need to isolate myself so that I can try to put this terrible story into some semblance of order.
    We’ve been in this house for nearly ten years. We left our cabin to come here after I’d managed to buy the place with the money saved from my salary and from the sale of Amelia’s embroidery. When I signed my name to the act of sale, Lawyer Knopf vigorously shook both my hands. “Now you’ve really got a home of your own, Brodeck. Never forget: a house is like a country.” Then he brought out some glasses and we drank a toast, he and I, because the seller refused the drink the notary held out to him. Rudolf Sachs was his name; he wore a monocle and white gloves and had made a special trip from S. He looked down on us from a great height, as if he lived on a white cloud and we wallowed in liquid manure. The house had belonged to one of his great-uncles, whom, as it happened, Sachs had never known.
    The cabin had been given to us when we—Fedorine, her cart, and I—first arrived in the village, more than thirty years ago. We came from the ends of the earth. Our journey had lasted for weeks, like an interminable dream. We’d traversed frontiers, rivers, open country, mountain passes, towns, bridges, languages, peoples, forests, and fields. I sat in the cart like a little sovereign, leaning against the bundles and stroking the belly of the rabbit, which never took its velvet eyes off me. Every day, Fedorine fed me with bread, apples, and