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

valley periwinkle in our mountains; I have, however, seen it in a book, a precious book. It’s a low-growing flower, with deep-blue petals that appear to be fused shut, never really willing to open. But maybe it no longer grows anywhere. Maybe Nature decided to withdraw it permanently from the big catalogue and deprive humans of its beauty because they didn’t deserve it anymore.
    At the end of the road and the end of my run was the entrance to the camp: a large gate of handsomely worked wrought iron, like the entrance to a leisure park or a pleasure garden. There were two sentry boxes, one on either side, painted pink and bright green; the guards inside them stood stiff and straight, and above the gate was a large, gleaming hook, like a butcher’s hook for suspending entire carcasses of beef. A man was hanging from the hook—his hands tied behind his back, a rope around his neck, his eyes wide open and bulging from their sockets, his tongue thick, swollen, protruding between his lips—a poor fellow who resembled us like a brother. His skinny chest bore a placard, on which someone had written in their language, the language of the Fratergekeime (which in the old days was the double of our dialect, its twin sister), ICH BIN NICHTS, “I am nothing.” The wind made his body sway a little. Not far away, three crows watched and waited, craving his eyes like sweetmeats.
    Every day a man was hanged like that at the entrance to the camp. When we got up in the morning, each of us thought that perhaps today it would be his turn. The guards rousted us out of the huts where we slept in heaps on the bare ground and lined us up outside. We stood and waited like that for a long time, whatever the weather; we waited for them to choose one of us as that day’s victim. Sometimes the choice was made in three seconds. On other occasions they rolled dice or played cards, with us as the stakes. And we had to stand there, close to them, and wait, un-moving, in perfect ranks. Their games went on and on, and in the end, the winner had the privilege of making his choice. He walked though our ranks. We held our breath. Everyone tried to make himself as insignificant as possible. The guard took his time. Eventually, he stopped in front of a prisoner, touched him with the end of his stick, and simply said, “Du.” The rest of us, all the rest of us, felt a mad joy welling up in the depths of our hearts, an ugly happiness that would endure only until the following day, until the new ceremony, but which allowed us to hold on, to keep holding on.
    The “Du” walked off with the guards, who escorted him to the gate. They made him climb a stepladder to the hook. They made him detach the previous day’s hanged man, carry him down on his back, dig a grave for him, and bury him in it. Then the guards made the new victim put on the placard with the words ICH BIN NICHTS, looped the rope around his neck, made him climb to the top of the ladder, and waited for the arrival of the Zeilenesseniss .
    Die Zeilenesseniss was the camp commandant’s wife. She was young and moreover inhumanly beautiful, with a beauty composed of excessive blondness and excessive whiteness. She often went walking inside the camp, and we were ordered under pain of death never to meet her eyes.
    The Zeilenesseniss never missed the morning hanging. She approached the gate slowly, fresh-faced, her cheeks still ruddy from pure water, soap, and cream. Sometimes the wind carried her scent to us, a scent of wisteria, and ever since then, I can’t smell the fragrance of wisteria without retching and weeping. She wore clean clothes. She was impeccably dressed and coiffed, and as for us, standing a few meters away from her—eaten by the vermin in the rags we wore, which no longer had either shape or color, our bodies filthy and stinking, our skulls shaved and scabby, our bones threatening to poke through every square inch of our skin—we belonged to a different world from hers.
    She