Fedorine was there, I clasped her to me, and I could talk to her. I inhaled her smell; I felt her beating heart. It was as if mine were beating in her. Again I remembered the camp. The only thought that occupied our minds there was the thought of death. We lived in perpetual consciousness of our death, and this was, no doubt, the reason why some of us went mad. Even though man knows he’ll die one day, he can’t live for long in a world that offers him nothing but the consciousness of his own death, a world pervaded by death and conceived solely for that purpose.
ICH BIN NICHTS read the placard the hanged man wore. We were quite aware that we were nothing. We knew it all too well. Each of us was a nothing. A nothing handed over to death. Its slave. Its toy. Waiting and resigned. Oddly enough, although I was a creature of nothingness, inhabiting nothingness and by it inhabited, the fact never managed to frighten me. I didn’t fear my own death, or if I feared it, it was with a sort of fleeting, animal reflex. By contrast, the thought of death became unbearable when I associated it with Amelia and Fedorine. It’s the death of others, of loved ones, not our own, which eats away at us and can destroy us. And that’s what I’ve been bound to struggle against, brandishing faces and features at its black light.
XXII
—
n the beginning, our village welcomed the Anderer as some kind of monarch. Indeed, there was something like magic in the whole affair. People in these parts aren’t open by nature. That can no doubt be explained, at least to some extent, by our landscape of valleys and mountains, of dense forests and hemmed-in vales, and our climate of rains and mists, of frosts and snowstorms and unbearable hot spells. And then, of course, there was the war, which failed to improve things. Doors and hearts were closed even more completely and padlocks were carefully affixed, concealing what was inside from the light of day.
But at first, once the incredible surprise of his coming among us had passed, the Anderer was able, however involuntarily, to emanate a charm with the power to cajole even the most hostile, for everyone wanted to see him — children, women, and oldsters included — and he happily entered into the spirit of the game, smiling at one and all, lifting his hat to the ladies and inclining his head to the men. However, he never spoke the smallest word, and if there hadn’t been people who’d heard him speak the day he arrived, we might have considered him a mute.
He couldn’t walk in the streets without being followed by a little band of laughing, idle kids, to whom he gave small gifts that seemed to them treasures: ribbons, glass marbles, lengths of gilded string, sheets of colored paper. He pulled all that out of his pockets, as if they were constantly full of such things; one would have thought there was nothing else in his baggage.
When he went into old man Solzner’s stable to visit his two mounts, children came and watched him from the door, not daring to enter, nor did he invite them to do so. He greeted his horse and his donkey by name, always addressing them formally, stroking their coats, and slipping lumps of yellow sugar (which he extracted from a little garnet-colored velvet bag) between their gray lips. The children watched the spectacle with open mouths and staring eyes, wondering what was the language he used when he murmured into the animals’ ears.
To tell the truth, he spoke more to his horse and his ass than he did to us. Schloss had received instructions to knock on his guest’s door at six o’clock every morning, but not to enter the room, and to place the tray on the floor in front of the threshold. The same items were always arranged on the tray: a round brioche — for which the Anderer paid Wirfrau in advance — a raw egg, a pot of hot water, and a large bowl.
“He can’t be drinking hot water with nothing in it!” The man who uttered this cry of disbelief one evening was Rudolf Scheuling, whose gullet had admitted no liquid but schnick since he was twelve years old. In fact, what the Anderer drank was tea, strong tea that left large brown stains on the rims of cups. I tasted that tea once, when he invited me to his room to chat a bit and to show me some books. It left a taste of leather and smoke in the mouth, along with a hint of salt meat. I’d never drunk anything like it.
For dinner, he went down to the big room. There were always a few curiosity seekers who came just to look at him, and especially to observe his manners, his delicate table manners: his distinguished way of holding his fork and knife, of sliding his blade into the breast of a chicken or the flesh of a potato.
In the very beginning, Schloss made a real effort to search his memory for recipes worthy of the visitor, but he quickly gave up, at the request of the Anderer himself. Despite his round body and his red cheeks, he ate almost nothing. At the end of a meal, his plate was never empty; half the food was untouched. By contrast, he drank one large glass of water after another, as if always afflicted by a raging thirst. This conduct moved Marcus Graz, a beanpole as lean as a stray dog, to remark that it was a blessing that the Anderer didn’t piss in the Staubi, which he would have surely caused to overflow its banks.
In the evening, he’d take only a bowl of soup, and even then it was light fare, more a broth than a soup, and after that he’d bow to whoever was in the inn and go upstairs to his room. The light in his window shone late. Some even said they had seen it all night long. In any case, people wondered what he could be doing up there.
Early in his sojourn among us, he spent a good part of each afternoon walking every street in the village, methodically, as if he were making a grid or a survey. No one really noticed, because to see what he was doing you would have had to follow him all the time, and only the children did that.
Dressed like something out of an old, dusty fable full of obsolete words, he trudged along, slightly slew-footed, his left hand on a handsome cane with an ivory pommel and his right clutching the little black notebook which came and went under his fingers like some odd sort of tamed animal.
Sometimes he took one of his beasts out for a bit of air. He chose either the horse or the donkey, never both at the same time, and he led the animal by its bridle, patting its sides as they walked, down to the banks of the Staubi, a little upriver from the Baptisterbrücke, where the grass was fresh and thick and the grazing good. He himself placed his large buttocks on the riverbank and remained unmoving, watching the current and the bright eddies, as if he expected a miracle to rise up out of them. The children stopped some distance behind him, a little higher up on the slope. They all respected his silence, and not one of them threw a stone into the water.