I particularly remember a conversation I overheard on August 3, a market day. It was coming to an end, and the ground was littered with spoiled vegetables, dirty straw, pieces of string, crate fragments, and other inert objects, which seemed to have been left in the market square by the receding waters of an invisible tide.
Poupchette loves the market, and so I take her there with me almost every week. The little animals in their pens — kids, bunnies, chicks, ducklings — make her clap her hands and laugh. And then there are the smells, of fritters and frying and hot wine and roasting chestnuts and grilled meat, and also the sounds, the voices of every pitch and timbre, mingling together as though in a giant basin: the cries, the calls, the chatter of the vendors hawking their wares, the prayers of those selling holy images, the feigned anger essential to proper bargaining. But what Poupchette looks forward to most of all is when Viktor Heidekirch arrives with his accordion and begins to play filling the air with notes that sound sometimes like laments and sometimes like cries of joy. People make way for him and form a circle around him, and suddenly the noise of the market seems to die out, as if everyone were listening to the music, as if it had become, for the moment, more important than everything else.
Viktor turns up at every party and every wedding. He’s the only person in the village who knows music, and also just about the only one in possession of a working musical instrument. I believe there’s a piano in the back room of Schloss’s inn, the one where the Erweckens’Bruderschaf meets, and there may be some brass instruments in there as well. Diodemus affirmed that there were, having seen them, he said, one day when the door wasn’t completely closed, and when I teased him about being so well informed, declaring that he must know the room very well and suggesting that maybe he was, in fact, a member of the brotherhood, his face darkened and he told me to shut up. Viktor’s accordion and his voice are also a part of our local memory. That day, he made the women weep and the men’s eyes turn red with his rendition of “Johanni’s Complaint,” a song about love and death whose origins are lost in the mists of time. It tells the story of a young girl who loves but isn’t loved in return, and who, faced with the prospect of seeing the ruler of her heart in another woman’s arms, prefers to step into the Staubi at twilight on a winter day and lie down forever in the cold, moving water.
When de abend gekomm Johanni schlafft en de wasser
Als besser sein en de todt dass alein immer verden
De hertz is a schotke freige who nieman geker
Und ubche madchen kann genug de kusse kaltenen
Sometimes Amelia comes with us. I take her arm. I lead her. She lets herself be guided, and her eyes gaze at things only she can see. On the day of the conversation I want to record, she was sitting on my left, humming her song and moving her head back and forth in a gentle rhythm. On my right, Poupchette was chewing a sausage I’d just bought for her. We leaned against the biggest of the columns supporting the entrance to the covered part of the market. In front of us, a few meters away, old Roswilda Klugenghal, who’s half madwoman and half vagrant, was digging around in some garbage, looking for vegetables and offal. She found a twisted carrot, held it up for inspection, and talked to it as if it were an old acquaintance. At that moment, the voices coming from the other side of the column became audible, voices that I recognized at once.
They belonged to four men: Emil Dorcha, a forester; Ludwig Pfimling, a stableboy; Bern Vogel, a tinsmith; and Caspar Hausorn, one of the mayor’s clerks. Four men already quite overheated, as they’d been drinking since dawn and the market’s festive atmosphere had done nothing to lower their temperatures. They spoke loudly, sometimes stumbling over words, but the tone of their conversation was very clear, and I quickly realized who its subject was.
“Did you see him? Like a weasel, he is, always sniffing around at everything,” Dorcha declared.
“That fellow’s nothing but rein schlecht, ‘pure bad,’” Vogel added. “Mark my words — bad and depraved.”
“He doesn’t hurt anybody,” Pfimling pointed out. “He takes walks, he looks around, he smiles all the time.”
“Outside smiles hide inside wiles — you forget the proverb. Besides, you’re so stupid and nearsighted, you wouldn’t see anything wrong with Lucifer himself!”
The speaker was Hausorn, and he’d spat out his words as though they were little pebbles. He went on in a milder tone: “He must have come here for some purpose. Some purpose that isn’t very clear and doesn’t bode well for us.”
“What do you think it is?” Vogel asked him.
“Don’t know yet. I’m racking my brains. I don’t know what it is, but a lad like him is bound to have something in mind.”
“He writes everything in his notebook,” Dorcha observed. “Didn’t you all see him a little while ago, sitting in front of Wuzten’s lambs?”
“Of course we saw him. He stayed there for minutes and minutes, writing stuff down and looking at the lambs the whole time.”
“He wasn’t writing,” Pfimling submitted. “He was drawing. I saw him, and I know you say I don’t see anything, but I saw him drawing. And he was so absorbed in what he was doing that you could’ve eaten off of the top of his head and he wouldn’t have felt anything. I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.”
“Drawing lambs?” Dorcha asked, apparently addressing Hausorn. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How should I know? You think I’ve got all the answers?”
The conversation came to a halt. I imagined it was over for good, not to be taken up again, but I was mistaken. After a while, a voice resumed speaking, but it had become very low and very serious, and I couldn’t identify it. “There aren’t many lambs around here, not among us, I mean … Maybe all that stuff he draws is a bunch of symbols, like in the church Bible, and it’s a way for him to say who’s who and who’s done what and how recently, so he can report it when he goes back where he came from …”
I felt the cold running over my back and rasping my spine. I didn’t like the voice or what it had said, even if the exact meaning of his words remained obscure.
“But then, if he’s using that notebook for what you’re talking about, it mustn’t ever leave the village!”
It was Dorcha who made that last remark; his was a voice I recognized.
“Maybe you’re right,” the other voice said. I still couldn’t make out whose it was. “Maybe that notebook should never go anywhere. Or maybe the person it belongs to is the one who can’t leave, not ever …”
After that, nothing. I waited. I didn’t dare move. Nevertheless, after a few moments, I leaned to one side and sneaked a look around the column. No one was there. The four had left without my hearing them. They’d disappeared into the air, like the veils of fog the southern breeze snatches off our mountain crests on April mornings. I even wondered whether I’d dreamed the things I’d heard. Poupchette pulled my sleeve. “Home, Daddy? Home?”
Her little lips were shiny with sausage grease, and her pretty eyes gleamed merrily. I gave her a big kiss on the forehead and put her on my shoulders. Her hands held on to my hair and her feet beat against my chest. “Giddyap, Daddy! Giddyap!” I took Amelia’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t resist. I hugged her against me, I caressed her beautiful face, I planted a kiss on her cheek, and the three of us returned home like that, while my head still resounded with the voices of the faceless men and the threats they had made, like seeds that asked nothing but time to grow.