The oddest thing about Limmat was that he never ate what he killed; he distributed his game among the neediest of the village. When I was little, it was thanks to him that Fedorine and I had meat to eat now and then. As for Limmat himself, he ate nothing but vegetables, clear broths, eggs, trout, and mushrooms; among these last, his decided preference was for the ones called “trumpets of death.” One day he told me that this type was the monarch of mushrooms, and that its sinister look served merely to repel fools and discourage the ignorant. Trumpets of death always adorned the inside of his house, hanging down everywhere in long garlands, and as they dried they filled the place with a smell of licorice and manure. He’d never married. A servant named Mergrite lived with him, a woman very nearly his own age; in the old days, wicked tongues used to say she surely did more than wash his clothes and polish his furniture.
I told him about the fox mystery, about the discoveries of the numerous carcasses, about their peaceful appearance. He searched his memory in vain, unable to recall any precedents, but he promised to consult his books assiduously and report back to me should he discover any references to similar cases in regions other than ours or in other times. Then our conversation turned to the winter, which was approaching with rapid strides, and to the snow, which was encroaching on the village from higher ground, slowly but surely descending the slopes of the mountains and the sides of the valley, and would soon be arriving outside our doors.
Like all the other old men, Limmat had been absent from Schloss’s inn on the night of the Ereigniës, and I wondered if he’d been informed of what had happened. I wasn’t even sure whether he’d known or been told about the Anderer’s presence in our village. I would certainly have liked to talk to him about the affair and get it off my chest.
“I’m delighted to see you haven’t forgotten your old teacher, Brodeck,” he said. “Indeed, I’m touched. Do you remember when you first came to school? I remember your arrival very well. You looked like a skinny dog, with eyes too big for the rest of you. And you spoke a gibberish only you and Fedorine understood. But you learned fast, Brodeck, very fast. Not just our language; the rest, too.”
Mergrite came in, bringing two glasses of hot wine. It smelled of pepper, orange, cloves, and anise. She added two logs to the fire, sending showers of bright sparks into the darkness, and then disappeared.
“You weren’t like the others, Brodeck,” my old schoolteacher went on. “And I don’t say that because you weren’t from here, because you came from far away. You weren’t like the others because you always looked beyond things … You always wanted to see what didn’t exist.”
He fell silent, cracked open a chestnut, slowly ate it, drank a mouthful of wine, and threw the pieces of nutshell into the fire. “I’m thinking about your foxes again. The fox is an odd animal, you know. We say foxes are sly, but in fact, they’re a lot more than that. Man has always hated foxes, doubtless because they’re a little too much like him. Foxes hunt for food, but they’re also capable of killing just for the fun of it.”
Limmat paused for a while and then began to speak again, in a pensive voice: “So many people have died these last years, in the war, as you know better than anyone in the village, alas. Maybe the foxes are only imitating us, who knows?”
I didn’t dare tell my old teacher that I couldn’t put that sort of thing in my account. The officials in the administration who read what I write — if what I write is read at all anymore — would understand nothing, and perhaps they’d think I’d gone mad and decide to do without my services altogether, in which case the paltry sums I receive so irregularly, the money my family lives on, would stop coming to me at all.
I stayed a little longer in his company. We spoke no more about foxes but about a beech tree which some woodcutters had recently felled — because it was sick — on the far side of the Bösenthal. According to them, the tree had to be more than four centuries old. Limmat reminded me that in other climates, on distant continents, there were trees that could live two thousand years. He’d already taught me that when I was a child, and at the time, I thought that God, if he existed, must be quite a strange character, who chooses to allow trees to live peacefully for centuries but makes man’s life so brief and so hard.
After presenting me with two garlands of trumpets of death and walking me to his threshold, Ernst-Peter Limmat asked me for news of Fedorine, and then, more gently, more gravely, he inquired about Amelia and Poupchette.
The rain hadn’t stopped, but now some heavy flakes of wet snow were mingled with it. A little stream flowed down the middle of the street, making the sandstone cobbles gleam. The cold air smelled good, a combination of smoke and moss and undergrowth. I thrust the dried mushrooms into my jacket and went back home.
I asked Mother Pitz the same question about the foxes. Her memory isn’t as good as the old teacher’s, and she’s surely not the expert he is on the subject of game animals and pests, but back in the days when she used to drive her beasts to and from the mountain pastures, she covered all the local roads, side paths, and stubble fields so thoroughly that I hoped she might be able to provide some sort of explanation. By tallying all the figures reported by my various sources, I’d arrived at a total of eighty foxes found dead — a considerable figure, if you think about it. Unfortunately, the old woman had no memory of ever having heard of such a phenomenon, and in the end I realized that she couldn’t possibly care less about it. “I’ll be glad if they all croak!” she declared. “Last year, they carried off my three hens and all their chicks. And then, they didn’t even eat them! They just ripped them to shreds and disappeared. Your foxes are Scheizznegetz’zohns, ‘sons of the damned.’ They’re not even worth the blade of the knife that slits their throats.”
In order to speak to me, she’d interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange and rearrange the deck into pairs, conjuring up wedding celebrations and mended destinies, all the while drinking little glasses of mulberry liqueur. I could see that I was disturbing their concentration.
In the end, I concluded that the only person who could possibly shed light on the matter was Marcus Stern, who lives alone in the middle of the forest, an hour’s walk from the village. He was the person I was off to see on the morning when I ran into Orschwir.
XIII
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he path that leads to Stern’s cabin begins its steep climb almost as soon as you exit the village. You enter the woods, go around a few hairpin curves, and in no time at all you’re looking down at the roofs. At the halfway point on the path, a rock shaped like a table invites the hiker to take a break. The rock is called the