Enard The Deserters

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80427-164-3
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Fleeing a nameless war, a soldier emerges from the Mediterranean scrubland, filthy, exhausted and seeking refuge. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a scientific conference pays tribute to the late Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist whose commitment to his side of the Wall was unshaken by its collapse. The oblique pull between these two narratives - a cipher in itself - brings to light everything that is at stake in times of conflict: truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell and told in Mathias Enard's typically mesmerizing, inventive prose, The Deserters lays bare the ravages of war on the most intimate aspects of life - and asks what remains of our selves in its wreckage.

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize for Compass.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Enard, Mathias

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mandell, Charlotte

Leseproben

Overcome by remembering, arse on a rock – one of those stones veering to blue-grey, which warm up quickly in the sun and smell of metal and gun-flint, smooth as they are hard: was there an initial shudder, a harsh wind, premise of the logic of brutality, a bellow preceding the sovereign rutting of war, he thinks not,

it’s the surprise that sat you down there,

soon the black snakes will emerge from their holes and the males will set out in search of females, 

he unlaces his boots, undoes the knots and takes them off. The leather is gnawed away by wear, water and cold. The smell of shit hasn’t left him. His hands are rough; his white palm is starred with darker callouses, stiff from squeezing wooden handles for too long. His tobacco-stained fingers end in yellowing nails streaked with black filth, you can see the outline of veins, in his thumb and along his wrist; his cheeks are coarse with a patchy beard, his hair is greasy, in clumps, stuck together in darker strands with dried blood,

you’ll reach the house before nightfall,

the house, the cabin, the shack – it rests deep in his memories and hopes. Childhood country cairn. At the edge of the enemy lines. High enough in the mountain that no one will venture there. Concealed enough from the mountain people so that he can seclude himself there. For a while. The roof might be partly collapsed, the cypress pillars, round, still gleaming, will stand alone, without tiles, between the uneven stones. The very low door. The front porch, its wooden struts reminiscent of the arms of the Father, its two stone posts, unevenly squared, the columns of the temple of a brutal God. The façade of unplastered quarried stone. The roof made of old yellow clay tiles,

you can sculpt faces with the knife in the pillars like you used to,

you’re so hungry it’s frightening,

you’re hungry down to the roots of your hair,

imagining the little grill in the cabin’s porch and a fowl crackling on the embers makes him writhe in raging pain,

you are thirsty,

he drains his metal flask. The lovely March sun is tinted orange. A wind is blowing from the sea,

you walk forward,

you must move forward even if you stumble a little, clumsy with dizziness. He lets thoughts fly away as soon as they’re born. He chases them away with his feet, makes them flee by walking. He transmits his thoughts to his boots, scattering them in the pebbles. Then silence inside, until the return of the great fixed star of hunger.

The treachery of illusion, the perfume of spring returning.

The sea, its violet plains fringed with white.

So high up in the mountain the sea is nothing but a threatening line, a horizon of pain.

His feverishness distorts him: the more he walks, the further away the house recedes.

You’re making too much noise,

you shouldn’t trust the scree looming over the cabin,

lie down in the sunset and observe strange movements – abandoned dogs made feral by war, deserters, villagers, distant cousins, all of them, far from their relics, on the path to the hermitage, to escape suffering, to be done with the long Lent of blood,

Spring suddenly takes his breath away. A spring of the beating of wings, of flowers on rocks, of thorn bushes, of white and blue rosemary, of the buzzing of the beetles’ elytra – the track he was following sloped down a few dozen metres to the sea; he takes off his clothes stiff with filth, stained with grease and dried blood, finds himself bare-chested licked by the seabreeze and blinded by the power of the sun whose burning heat he feels on his shoulders, on the long scar streaking across his back, before the bag’s cloth covers it. Tired of the too-short gun strap, he takes his weapon in his arms like a hunter, his left hand on the stock, his right on the grip the way you grasp a fowl’s neck, firmly, casually; the breech is open, he sees the brass of a cartridge case in the cartridge, once again he wants to get rid of the object of misfortune,

it’s heavier than a child in your arms,

you should abandon it, hide it there in a bush, a few hours’ walk from the cabin,

he plays with the well-oiled breech, impossible to get rid of it,

Fate in front of you and all these things, the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future,

you’ll be what the Lord wants,

force or forgiveness, nothing, like this yellow spider under your boot, crushed despite its power for death, crushed despite its sting, all that we don’t know about ourselves, we bend beneath the world of yesterday, we bend beneath our sins, we bend beneath the prospect of the next day, our Father give us this day our daily oblivion, in the too-numerous steps that wear down our soul, metre after metre, path after path, track after track, this sudden emotion comes from nearby – one day walking – from the village below, halfway up the slope, where the orange trees are little by little invading the plains, where the olive trees make themselves scarce on the terraces with their stone walls, where a few towers appear among the houses with gentle arches, with their broken domes between the green medlar trees, lit up with orange fruit in June, among the noble fig trees bent with age whose figs hum with insects in autumn, just as the trellis shaded the terrace in front of the father’s house, a wine was pressed there that quickly stung the tongue, purple, troubling and intoxicating – the green demijohns, woven round with straw, piled up in the darkest, coolest recesses, until they were cleaned in September to receive the new vintage, and the red and black clouds of tannin clinging there inside their glass shoulders were scrubbed away with a metal bottle brush,

you’ll have to hide, they must be looking for you,

you mustn’t come across anyone, conceal yourself from men and beasts, from shepherds and dogs, swallow your own name,

the closer your footsteps bring you to the cabin, to the mountain house, the greater the danger grows, in the village everyone knows, no doubt, rumours swell like the war itself, everyone knows, or thinks they know,

the afternoon swells like thirst and reddens like hunger.

He pauses in the shade of a holm oak. He sits down on a root. The sun drenches the valley in front of him. He dreams of rain. He shakes his flask over his tongue one more time. He unties his shoes, hesitates to take them off, he’s so tired he won’t put them back on if he removes them. The smell seems to have disappeared for an instant but returns, even stronger, unexpectedly, 

you stink of blood and shit,

you stink of sleep and hunger,

a child could kill you with one punch,

he counts the days since he left the city. Since his flight from the barracks. Four days since he launched the vehicle into the ravine,

you’ve travelled almost a hundred kilometres on foot in the mountain,

the holm oak’s root is hard under your buttocks,

your bent knees hurt,

he leans against the black trunk, stretches out his legs, gazes into the valley (almond trees, hazelnut trees, prickly pear trees) he knows so well. He worked these terraces, weeded around the trees, removed countless stones. The sun that he knows. The fringe of sea beyond the hills that he knows. The fear that he carries with him. That black smoke on the horizon marks the beginning of enemy territory. There, only just. The remains of enemy territory as it’s reduced from shell to shell.

At the next turn in the path, when he passes the old retention basin for the stream, dried up now, he’ll be two hours’ walk from the house. He’ll reach it almost an hour before sunset,

you know where you’ll take cover, 

behind the big rock and make sure without being seen that no one’s hanging around the cabin. Behind the rock and observe. Observe the last insects in the twilight. Listen to the birds and stones in the twilight.

He takes out the knife. The blade is as grey as it is blue. He dreams of a hare, leaping out of a hollow, suddenly within reach of the dagger. He draws a cross on the tree root. A short thin cross. A sign. He would have been capable of drinking the warm blood of that hare if it had appeared, he’s so thirsty,

you’re feverish like those areas in your memory,

for hours he’s been searching for an orange tree or even a lemon tree on whose branches there might still be a few forgotten fruits. Opposite the cabin is an immense lemon tree planted by his grandfather that bears (or rather bore, it’s been a long time since he saw it last) dozens of juicy yellow fruits, with thick skins, which leave on your hands a scent of linen and flowers, a perfume of purity, purity pleases the Lord,

there’s also an orange tree, they used to weave crowns from its flowers for weddings,

you’re the least pure of creatures,

he finds the strength to start off again, with his painful knees, his thighs hard as...