I gave him a little greeting and continued on my way.
I entered Orschwir’s farm. I passed his farmhands and I passed his pigs. Nobody paid any attention to me. Neither the men nor the animals looked at me.
I found Orschwir seated at his big table, where he’d been sitting when I came to see him the morning after the Ereigniës. But yesterday morning, he wasn’t busy with his breakfast. He was simply sitting there. His hands were joined on the table in front of him, and he seemed to be lost in thought. When he heard me, he raised his head, looked at me, and smiled a little. “Well, here you are, Brodeck,” he said. “How are you doing? You may not believe it, but I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come this morning.”
On another occasion, maybe I would have asked him how he could possibly have known such a thing, but oddly enough, I found that I was indifferent to or, rather, detached from a great many questions and their answers. Orschwir and the others had played with me enough. The mouse had learned to pay no more attention to the cats, so to speak, and if they needed entertainment, they had only to scratch one another with their sharp claws. They could stop counting on me to amuse them. They’d given me a mission, and I had accomplished it. I’d told the story.
I placed before the mayor all the pages containing my presentation of the events in question. “Here’s the Report you and the others asked for.”
Orschwir picked up the sheets absentmindedly I’d never seen him so distant, so thoughtful. Even his face was missing the brutal features it ordinarily presented to the world. A kind of sadness had erased a little of his ugliness.
“The Report…,” he said, scattering the pages.
“I want you to read it right away, right here in front of me, and tell me what you think. I’ve got time. I’ll wait.”
Orschwir smiled at me and said simply, “If you wish, Bro-deck, if you wish … I’ve got time, too …”
Then the mayor started reading from the beginning, from the first word. My chair was comfortable, and I settled myself in it, prepared to wait a long time. I tried to tell what Orschwir might be feeling by scrutinizing his facial expressions, but he read without betraying the smallest reaction. Nevertheless, from time to time he passed one big hand over his forehead, rubbed his eyes, or pinched his lips, harder than he seemed to realize.
From outside came the sounds of the big farm waking up. Footsteps, cries, squeals, bucketfuls of water striking the ground, voices, the shriek of axles — all the noises of a way of life resuming its course, beginning a day which would be, all in all, like the other days, during which some people would be born and others would die, everywhere in the world, in a kind of perpetual motion.
The reading took a few hours — I couldn’t say exactly how many. My mind seemed to be at rest. I let it roam as after a great effort, free to relax a little, to loaf, to go where it would.
The clock struck. Orschwir had finished his reading. He cleared his throat — three times — gathered up the pages, jogged them into an orderly stack, and brought his big, heavy eyes to bear on me.
“Well?” I asked.
He waited awhile before answering me. He rose to his feet without a word and started walking slowly around the big table, rolling up the papers until they formed a kind of little scepter. Then he spoke: “Brodeck, I’m the mayor, as you know. But I don’t think you know what that fact means to me. You write well, Brodeck — we were right to choose you — and you love images, maybe a little too much, but still… I’m going to talk to you in images. You know our shepherds well — you’ve often observed them in the stubble fields and the meadows. Whether or not they love the animals entrusted to them, I have no idea. Besides, how they feel about them is none of my business, and I don’t think it’s any of theirs, either. The animals are placed in the shepherd’s care. He must find them grass in abundance, pure water, and sheep-folds sheltered from the wind. He must protect his flock from all danger and keep it away from excessively steep slopes, from rocks where the animals could slip and break their backs, from certain plants which would cause them to swell up and die, from various pests and predators which might attack the weakest of them, and of course from the wolves that come prowling near the flock. A good shepherd knows and does all that, whether he loves his animals or not. And what about the animals, you may ask. Do they love their shepherd? I put the question to you.”
As a matter of fact, Orschwir wasn’t putting any question to me. He continued walking around the big table, keeping his head down, tapping his left hand with the rolled-up Report, which he held in his right, and talking all the while. “Furthermore, do the animals know they have a shepherd who does all that for them? Do they know? I don’t believe so. I believe they’re interested only in what they can see at their feet and right in front of their eyes: grass, water, straw to sleep on. That’s all. A village is a small thing, and a fragile one, too. You know that. You know it well. Ours nearly didn’t survive. The war rolled over it like an enormous millstone, not to extract flour from it but to smother and flatten it. All the same, we managed to deflect the stone a little. It didn’t crush everything. Not everything. The village had to take what was left and use it to recover.”
Orschwir came to a stop near the big blue-and-green tiled stove that occupied a whole corner of the room. A small, carefully laid stack of firewood stood against the wall. Orschwir stooped, picked up a log, opened the door to the firebox, and thrust in the log. Lovely flames, short and agile, danced around it. The mayor didn’t close the door right away. He gazed at the flames for a long time. They made a joyful music, like the sounds a hot wind sometimes draws from the branches of certain oaks covered with dry leaves in the middle of autumn.
“The shepherd always has to think about tomorrow. Everything that belongs to yesterday belongs to death, and the important thing is to live. You’re well aware of that, Brodeck — you came back from a place people don’t come back from. My job is to act so that the others can live, so that they can see tomorrow and the day after that…”
That was the moment when I understood. “You can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not, Brodeck? I’m the shepherd. The flock counts on me to protect it from every danger, and of all dangers, memory’s one of the most terrible. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, am I? You who remembers everything, who remembers too much?”
Orschwir gave me two little taps on the chest with the Report, either to keep me at a distance or to drive an idea into me, like a nail into a board. “It’s time to forget, Brodeck. People need to forget.”
After those last words, Orschwir very gently slipped the Report into the stove. In a second, the pages, which had been tightly wrapped around one another, opened up like the petals of a strange, enormous, tormented flower, writhed, became incandescent, then black, then gray, and collapsed upon themselves, mingling their fragments in a red-hot dust that was quickly sucked into the flames. “Look,” Orschwir whispered in my ear. “There’s nothing left, nothing at all. Are you any unhappier?”
“You burned a stack of paper. You didn’t burn what’s in my head!”
“You’re right, it was only paper, but that paper contained everything the village wants to forget — and will forget. Everyone’s not like you, Brodeck.”
When I got back home, I told Fedorine the whole thing. She was holding Poupchette, who was taking a nap on her lap. The child’s cheeks were as soft as peach-flower petals. Our peach orchards are blossoming now, the first to gladden our early spring with their very pale pink bloom. People here call them Blumparadz, “flowers of Paradise.” It’s a funny name when you think about it; as if Paradise could exist on this land, as if it could exist anywhere at all. Amelia was sitting by the window.