Read Online Brodeck by Philippe Claudel - Free Book Online

wall there much like this one.
    When we arrived at the camp, the first stop for all of us was the Büxte— the “box.” That’s what the guards called the place, which was a little stone room, about a meter and a half by a meter and a half. Once inside it, you could neither stand up nor lie down.
    They drove us out of the railway cars with clubs and a great deal of yelling. Then we had to run to the camp. Three kilometers of bad road, amid shouts and barking dogs, which sometimes bit as well. Those prisoners who fell were finished off at once, bludgeoned by the guards. We were weak; for six days, we had eaten nothing and drunk very little. Our bodies were stiff and numb. Our legs could hardly carry us.
    The person toiling along at my side was a student, Moshe Kelmar. We’d traveled to the camp in the same suffocating, crowded boxcar, talking for six days while the big metal vise we were in advanced at a snail’s pace through countryside we couldn’t even see, while our throats became as dry as straw at the end of August, and while the great mass of humanity around us moaned and wept. There was no air and no room. There were people of all ages in the car—old folks, little girls, young men and women. Very close to us, there was a young mother and her child of a few months. A very young mother and her tiny child. I shall remember them all my life.
    Kelmar spoke Fedorine’s language, the ancient tongue she had deposited in me, and it came back to my lips quite suddenly and without effort. He knew a great number of books, as well as the names of many flowers; although he’d always lived in the Capital, far from our village and far from the mountains, he even knew the valley periwinkle, which is a sort of legendary flower in our region. He’d never set foot in mountain country, a fact that troubled him exceedingly. He had a young woman’s fingers, fine blond hair, and a delicate face. He was wearing a shirt that had been white, a shirt made of fine linen with an embroidered front, the kind you’d wear to a dance or a romantic rendezvous.
    I asked him for news of the Capital, which I knew from my younger days, when I was a student. Back then, people from our province had to cross the border to go to the University. Even though it was located in the Fratergekeime’s capital city, our region had been connected to their country for so many years under the empire that we still felt at home there. Kelmar talked to me about the cafés where students went to drink hot wine and eat cinnamon cakes sprinkled with sesame seeds; about the Elsi Promenade, a walk around a pretty lake where in the summer you could invite girls to go boating and in the winter you could skate; about the main library on Glockenspiel Street, with its thousands of books in gilt bindings; and about the Stüpe canteen, where a fat woman named Fra Gelicke assumed the role of our mother, filling our plates with heaping servings of ragout and our bowls with sausage soup. But when I asked him about some of my very favorite places, Kelmar usually replied that he hadn’t seen them for at least three years, ever since the day when he and all those designated as Fremdër were confined to the old part of the Capital, which had been transformed into a ghetto.
    Inside the ghetto, however, there was a place he frequented and about which he talked at length, a place so dear to me that the simple fact of evoking it again today makes my heart beat faster and brings a smile to my soul: the minuscule Stüpispiel Theater, with its tiny stage and its mere four rows of seats. The shows put on there were doubtless the worst in the city, but tickets cost almost nothing, and on cold days in November and December, the little room was as warm and pleasant as a hayrick.
    One evening, I went there with a comrade of mine named Ulli Rätte, a fellow student and a lover of the good life, whose constant laughter sounded like a cascade of copper pieces and who was crazy about an