by Roy Jacobsen
When Léon also showed up at the building site, of course people thought it strange that a criminal would come back so brazenly, but that is what criminals do, they want to admire their handiwork, they want to study its effects, it is a mixture of curiosity, conscience, vanity, Schadenfreude and presumably also further vices that drive the criminal back to the scene of the crime. But no-one said anything, and Léon was not even told that a crime had been committed, you don’t say to a murderer: “Hey, have you heard? A child was killed here yesterday?” So Léon went about his business in blissful ignorance of both the murder and the suspicions; in other words, there was nothing conspicuous about his behaviour, he was as he always was, reserved and extremely private, people noted with disbelief and disgust.
The gendarmerie arrived in force and carried out its investigations, and even though people in border regions know how to keep a secret there were enough Germans who didn’t like a Luxembourger getting away with killing a German child, so it wasn’t long before Léon’s name was mentioned, it was a relief to have it out in the open, now it was done.
Léon was arrested at work and at first didn’t realise what this was all about, then he put up a furious resistance. He had to be clapped in irons, and three officers carried him down to the provisional jail that had been established in the Dasburg bar. Late that afternoon the news travelled over the river to Rodershausen, where it reached Father Rampart’s ears.
“Léon has been through enough,” Father Rampart thought, and then added on his own behalf: “I have, too.” Before he crossed himself and left, over the Frankmühle bridge, to break his oath of silence to God, for borders are not only there to separate friends from enemies, one language from another, me from you and neighbours from those who are not necessarily good neighbours, or to prevent someone moving from one narrative to another without warning, they are also there to be crossed at the appropriate time.
“You’ve arrested an innocent man,” he said to the inspector in charge, who was vainly trying to bribe Léon with some friendly chat and a cup of cold coffee – Léon was sitting dejectedly, half out of his mind, on a spindleback chair, refusing to say a word.
“Oh no,” mumbled the inspector, seeing the clergyman. “That was all we needed. Having this case further complicated by a priest from Luxembourg.”
“I’m German, young man,” said Father Rampart. “Come with me and I’ll show you who the perpetrator is. He has confessed to me.”
All the inspector could do was go with him along the bank to the bridge, where Father Rampart poked his forefinger in the chest of the culprit and said:
“Him. He did it.”
But then he, too, mounted a furious defence, he hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing at all, so they had to clap him in irons as well and carry him on their shoulders, down to the provisional jail, and seat him in a chair next to Léon.
On the way, Father Rampart was struck by a terrible disquiet, partly caused by the miscreant’s genuine surprise and violent resistance, partly by his own clear breach with the Lord, which had set his stomach in ferment, he hadn’t even hesitated, but his agitation was mostly caused by the words the inspector had come out with …further complicated, he had said, and what was that supposed to mean, didn’t he think he had the right man when he had Léon?
Father Rampart asked him point-blank: “What did you mean by ‘further complicated’, Herr Kommissar?”
“What seems odd to me,” the inspector said slowly, “is that now a day and a half has passed since the child was found murdered, yet – as far as I can judge – none of the people we’ve interviewed considers it as strange as I do that no mother has come forward. And we have two suspects, a youth from Germany and a war cripple from Luxembourg – as far as I can judge – who both stubbornly deny the charges. In addition, we have no forensic evidence and no witnesses either, except for you, whom I doubt any court on earth would trust, if I may be allowed to say so, Father, for a priest who breaks his vow of silence has no credibility, neither in this world nor the next, he does not speak the truth, he does not tell a lie, what he says is quite simply of no value.
Then Father Rampart woke up from his bad dream and stared down at his large body, dumbfounded, and felt his insides churning, as though he had received all the sacraments at once, a short life, life is so short, and what do we do with it, we throw it away, no matter how sacred it is, he thought, before getting up and going to the window, where he gazed down at the morning-grey garden and behind it the peaceful Our, which meandered through the dewy meadows with such heavenly calm, if only life on earth were like that. Borders are scars, they say in the Ardennes, don’t allow them to develop into sores, allow them to heal, build bridges and share the expenses like brothers, don’t divide them up according to who has most use of them, or who gains most from misusing them, for “use” and “misuse” are like lies and truth, they have many interpretations, which in the end has ramifications for other rivers, with or without a contentious bridge project.
He went down to the kitchen, where the housekeeper, Madame Gören, reigned supreme, but now she was asleep, so Father Rampart took a bottle of cognac and sat at the sitting-room table by the large window overlooking the garden and gazed down on the peaceful Our as he had a glass or two while concluding that the reason why people from time immemorial had been allowed – on both sides – to wade over but not necessarily cross on a bridge was that God created the river whereas man created the bridge, and man has to be on one side or the other, you can’t be on both, and man does not necessarily like the person on the other side, and as there are two there is a conflict, and now this new bridge is going far too fast, it is happening too soon, for there is a time for everything. As he was thinking this, day broke.
9
It was a special day.
The River Our rose. It broke its banks and roared like a dragon with all the rainwater it had collected on its winding journey through Belgium and Germany. Then the rain arrived here, cloudburst upon cloudburst, the river swept along with it twigs and branches and grass and soil and sand, and the Frankmühle bridge and the shuttering around the bridge pillars at Dasburg disappeared in a turbid maelstrom, foaming as yellow as the froth around the devil’s mouth, one look was enough to tell you that there would soon be no bridge. Work has to be suspended and the workers are told to go home, they stay in their rudimentary lodgings smoking and playing cards and drinking beer and writing letters in three languages, because it won’t be better tomorrow, it will be worse, the whole week through, until it begins to affect their spirits, what about pay, now they have to go on the dole, and you have to do that in your home district because Dasburg hasn’t got the means to bear these expenses as well as those of a bridge that will never materialise, so the workers go back to their respective homes, the river has reached a level it will retain all winter, the winter when they removed the Bailey bridge and when for once, after all these years, the Frankmühle bridge was no longer there, as far as we know. In Rodershausen only half the congregation attends church and between the empty pews Father Rampart’s voice rings hollow. But he is not beaten.
10
Not until late spring do thoughts of the other bank re-emerge. The sound of muffled hammering is heard from the bank, not at Dasburg but at Frankmühle on the Luxembourg side, the mayor of Rodershausen has got an eighteen-year-old to sink some oak posts in the river bed where the old ones were, Holper the miller’s posts are no longer there, the mayor is only doing a site survey, to see whether the place is stable enough to bear anything anymore.
But for the eighteen-year-old it means a great deal more. He returns a day later with two friends and a horse which he rides through the water, with a rope between his teeth, because now he is sick of living beside a river he can’t cross, he lives in a free country and can move at will, westward as far as he likes, mile after mile in a Europe without let or hindrance, Bastogne, Dinant, Namur, yes, even Antwerp, Manteuffel’s distant goal, is at his feet, but he cho
oses the obstacle, like Manteuffel, he chooses to settle here, not that it is very far, he carries posts over to the German side, as well as tools, and drives the posts in there, and his friends secure logs to the top, they start from opposite ends with hammers and nails and attach boards to the logs and meet in the middle, so it was done, that was all he had wanted, to make sure he could get home dry-shod with the horse wading in the river alongside him. But this is what is needed, the time is ripe, the Our has been tamed, and work at Dasburg can be resumed, it is March 1953.
11
The universe is mild and warm. When the sun is in the south it shines as brightly on both sides of the river, on the workers who flock to the site again, from hither and from thither. But it doesn’t shine on Léon. Léon is lying in his attic at home in Dorscheid, in pensive mood. He has just been musing about something that happened to him in the P.O.W. camp near Edinburgh. A fellow inmate came up to him to pass on a greeting from a blind man Léon had met in Enscherange when he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment by a German war tribunal, there was no message, it was just a greeting, a token that someone outside his family remembered him. And yesterday he had seen this blind man again when he dropped into Clervaux for a new camera lens, he was sitting next to Leni’s old Latin teacher in a patisserie, eating cake. Léon had also taken this as a sign, because he knew there were no coincidences in this world, every life is planned and predestined according to an inexorable pattern, like the circles buzzards describe in the sky, and we have only to make sure that we don’t go off course, that is all we can do, that is why Léon is at home today, for safety’s sake, and now in a couple of days it will be the weekend, so he might as well stay at home until then. He walks round in the forests, which have begun to attract birds again, they swirl around him making an infernal racket, but then who should come along the path but Father Rampart, as broad as a barn door and clearly irate. “Get back to work, Léon,” he says. “You made a contract. You have to keep your word. We’re building a bridge and you know as well as I do that, beside the alphabet and weapons and borders, bridges are mankind’s greatest invention, whereas if you stay all alone in your wilderness you will go to the dogs, non est bonum esse hominem solum!”
Léon defers to this childhood wisdom, and on Monday morning, shame-faced, he returns to his work by the Our, produces some plausible explanation for his absence and is let off with a sullen grunt and three days docked off his pay.
12
Léon works. And now he no longer goes to Father Rampart every evening, but sits with colleagues and plays cards and drinks beer in the Dasburg bar. And in the few months it takes to construct a decent bridge he notices something strange, he notices that more and more of his countrymen have begun to talk Letzebuergesch, and not only to each other, no, they also insist on being understood by the foreman from Frankfurt an der Oder, and perhaps it has been like that for some time, perhaps it is not a figment of Léon’s imagination, perhaps it was the war that had given the impetus to this new code in the Ardennes, or revived an old code so that these forests could be separated from the neighbouring ones in more ways than by a narrow river, across which there will soon be wide-open bridges. And all this means that life is about to return to Léon. He has noticed that he is not so different from others.
Buried Alive
1
Sometimes God holds me between His forefinger and thumb and lifts me into the sky so that I can see the earth as birds see it, or bomber aircraft, and then I spot Léon down there, who finally has a plan of action for “the reconquest of Agnes”, as he calls it, because he has possessed her before, in his mind.
And I can see Robert, too, he has left Clervaux and is in the Belgian university town of Leuven – imagine having the luck to study in Leuven, his mother has always said, and Father Rampart has also nodded in approval at the mention of this prestigious institution. Robert studies history, then psychology, then he goes back to history, half-heartedly, for none of what he spends his time on is worth dying for, it is knowledge, in his view, not a skill.
But he is part of the new movement sweeping Europe, a wave of academic criticism of existing practices and values which has barely risen from the dust, and that half-heartedly too, so he joins a small group of anarchists, where the need for rigour and objective thinking is not a top priority. And now his finals are approaching, his dissertation on Charles XII’s diplomatic hocus-pocus to bring Poland to its knees in the light of Voltaire’s famous historical analysis. Then his mother rings and orders him home, it is urgent, she says in a way only a mother can, but don’t panic, she says again in the way only a mother can, it is not life and death.
It is mid-January. Robert gets a lift with a friend to Bastogne and catches a bus with ambitions of crossing the border to Clervaux. But half a metre of snow has fallen in the Ardennes and the flimsy vehicle can only make it up with difficulty and down through the narrow valleys and backwaters to collect small fleeting shadows that scuttle from their pink and pale orange brick houses carrying brown paper packages under their arms and shabby suitcases, short, thickset Ardennes peasants with ruddy faces and rough hands who know how to keep their moods and their bitterness to themselves – they have their own invisible paths here, Robert thinks excitedly every time he returns home and hears this language which is so distinct from all the languages it resembles; where his neighbours have yielded to the universal “Soldat”, for instance, Luxembourgers say “Zaldot”, and people who change “Soldat” to “Zaldot” to retain their distinctiveness, that is Robert’s people, a sturdy rock of yeomen, diplomats, interpreters and customs officials and the caricatures of modesty portrayed by their neighbours, because “Zaldoten” is in fact what they were, both Markus and Léon, and not “Soldaten”, yes, Father Rampart was probably a “Zaldot”, too, despite his German origins.
But at that moment a shudder went through the bus, and also Robert’s body, a quivering suspicion that his mother had finally found the time right to shed light on the mysterious circumstances of his birth, to break her wondrous silence and tell him over a glass of red wine or schnapps that his father, the Pianist, did not head towards Vianden when he left her on that unhappy day at the end of January, but directly east, over the Schwarzenhügel hill and down into the Our valley and across the border at Dasburg or at Frankmühle, probably the latter, because the Dasburg bridge had been blown up, just like all the other serviceable bridges, and there he read, with an ambivalent smile on his lips, the sign which Colonel Mitchelson’s Armored Engineer Combat Battalion had just nailed to the shaky bridge pillars: “You are now entering Germany! No fraternization with the Germans!”
A dazed, wounded American might well have chosen this route, a confused jazz pianist, but equally a German soldier might well have done so too, such as a paratrooper who, in his attempt to sabotage Allied communications in the first days of the Ardennes Offensive, had strayed from his company and was wandering around in the snow and the forests, with frostbite, starving and on the verge of a breakdown, until at the will of the Lord he met a Belgian beauty, who due to the shifting military fronts at the time picked him up and took him in for a while, out of pure compassion, and then fell in love with him, for she discovered that he, too, hated the war, he was from Saarland and used to travel to Luxembourg as a child, to the River Sauer in the summer to do some fly fishing with his father in idyllic surroundings, a father who incidentally fell at Kursk eighteen months earlier. She also became pregnant by this German straggler – it is not even certain it was love, loneliness is enough, or fear – before the fronts blurred once again and for the soldier it was time to go back home, double quick, across the only bridge still standing in those days, Miller Holper’s chicken ramp.
Robert, for obvious reasons, had never aired these absurd and not least hurtful reflections to his mother, who’d had such a struggle to provide him with a decent identity, it has never been an easy decision, he hasn’t taken it yet, he sits over there in Leuven specul
ating about it every day, for who can honestly claim his own identity is irrelevant? No-one, to be sure. What otherwise is the purpose of birth certificates and confession boxes and nationalities and forgiveness, or all this new science about blood groups and D.N.A. tests, not to mention the morbid tendency people of any “significance” have always had to make geneological tables and family trees, their “significance” lies in their origins, in their passports and language and blood. Unfortunately this goes for the vagabond and charcoal-burner too, for perhaps they are actually the son of a prince or a general and not of that pitiful, destitute bungler who drinks and lies and is as brutal to his wife as he is mortified in front of his children, and it is not only the possible heritage which is in their minds, although that would be very welcome, but there is also some innate self-confidence, a realistic hope that one day they can wash off this charcoal-burner’s grime and employ a servant and be respected by those who scorn them now, sit on a board of trustees and teach their children Latin and to play the flute, it all comes from your origins, the worldly and the spiritual, from behind and beneath, the way the top leaf on an oak tree has its origins in the branch beneath, not the roots.
And, Robert continues to ruminate in the jolting bus, what about the even murkier heritages that are handed down from generation to generation, “from father to son”, which is what those who have a son say, all the tales which are told by those who can talk and have lived to those who still haven’t begun to do either, the magic and the folklore and all the authentic accounts of our forefathers’ wars and sufferings, their fleeting love stories and valiant crusades and blunders for nation and empire? It is in the light of this that Robert looks upon Markus, his spiritual font, the voice he listens to and the man he imitates, while the American and his despairing jazz in the castle ballroom only become apparent through his mother’s evasive reminiscences, her determined fight to put the past in a coherent, rosy light, because what people say, that one story is as good as another, is not true.