Read Online Brodeck by Philippe Claudel - Free Book Online Page A

apprentice actress. This girl, a roundish brunette, was playing a minor role in a pointless farce. I had nearly dozed off when a young woman took a seat two places away from me. Her unseasonably light clothing showed that her chief reason for coming to the theater was the same as mine. She shivered a little. She resembled a small bird—a fragile, lively willow tit. Her pale pink lips were slightly parted in a smile. She breathed on her small hands, turned in my direction, and gazed at me. An old mountain song says that when love knocks at the door, everything else disappears and the door is all that remains. And so our eyes spoke for more than an hour, and we left the theater like a pair of robots; it took the cold outside to wrench us out of our dream. A bit of snow fell on our shoulders. I dared to ask her to tell me her name. She gave it to me, and it was the most precious of gifts. In the course of the night, I kept murmuring that name, saying it over and over again, as if repeating it endlessly were going to make its owner appear before me, the angel with the hazel eyes: “Amelia, Amelia, Amelia …”
    Kelmar and I got out of the freight car at the same time. Like the others, we began to run, protecting our heads with our hands. The guards yelled. Some of them even managed to laugh as they yelled. You might have thought it was just a big comedy, but people were groaning and there was an odor of blood. Kelmar and I grew breathless. We were very hungry and very thirsty. Our legs were unsteady, our joints full of rust. We ran as best we could. The road went on and on. The morning began to drop its pale light on the fields around us, even though the sun had yet to appear in the sky. We passed a big, twisted oak, part of whose foliage had been scorched by lightning. It was shortly after that when Kelmar stopped running. All of a sudden.
    “I won’t go any farther, Brodeck,” he said.
    I told him he was crazy. The guards were going to catch up with us, I said, and then they would fall on him and kill him.
    “I won’t go any farther,” he repeated. “I can’t go on living with that… with what we did.”
    I tried to grab him by the sleeve and pull him along willy-nilly. He didn’t budge. I pulled harder. A piece of his shirt remained in my hand. The guards, far off, had by now noticed something. They stopped talking and looked in our direction.
    “Come on, come on, quick!” I begged him.
    Kelmar calmly sat down in the middle of the dusty road. He said again, “I won’t go any farther,” very softly, very calmly, like someone speaking aloud a serious decision which he has pondered for a long time in the silence of his thoughts.
    The guards started walking toward us, faster and faster, and then they began to shout.
    “Kelmar,” I murmured. “Kelmar, come on, get up, I beg you!”
    He looked at me and smiled. “You’ll think of me when you get back to your country, Brodeck. When you see the valley periwinkle, you’ll think about the student Moshe Kelmar. And then you’ll tell our story. All of it. You’ll tell about the freight car, and about this morning. You’ll tell the story for me, and you’ll tell it for everyone else …”
    The small of my back was suddenly aflame. A second truncheon blow cut my shoulder. Two guards were upon us, shouting and striking. Kelmar closed his eyes. A guard shoved me, bellowing at me to get moving. Another blow from his club split my lips. Blood ran into my mouth. I started to run again, weeping as I ran, not because of the pain but because I was thinking of Kelmar, who had made his choice. The shouting receded into the distance behind me. I turned around. The two guards were savaging him as he lay on the ground. His body rocked from right to left, like a poor puppet attacked by wicked boys intent on the fun of breaking its every joint. And some hideous shortcut in my mind brought me to the evening of Pürische Nacht , the Night of Purification.
    I have never found the