A Whole Life (12 page)

Or he’d say: ‘This weather makes you miserable. Nothing but fog. Your gaze slips because it doesn’t know what to hang on to. If it carries on like this the fog’ll soon come creeping into my room, and it’ll start to drizzle ever so lightly over the table.’

And he’d say: ‘Spring’ll be here soon. The birds have seen it already. Something’s stirring in the bones, and the bulbs are already splitting deep down beneath the snow.’

Sometimes Egger had to laugh at himself and his own thoughts. He would sit there alone at his table, look out of the window at the mountains with the shadows of clouds passing silently across them, and laugh until his eyes filled with tears.

Once a week he went down to the village to get matches and paint, or bread, onions and butter. He had realized long ago that people there speculated about him. When he set off for home with his purchases on his homemade sledge, which he upgraded with little rubber wheels in spring, he would see them out of the corner of his eye, putting their heads together and starting to whisper behind his back. Then he would turn around and give them the blackest look of which he was capable. Yet in truth he didn’t much care about the villagers’ opinions or their outrage. To them he was just an old man who lived in a dugout, talked to himself, and crouched in a freezing cold mountain stream to wash every morning. As far as he was concerned, though, he had done all right, and thus had every reason to be content. He would be able to live well for quite some time on the money from his tour-guiding days; he had a roof over his head, slept in his own bed, and when he sat on his little stool outside the front door he could let his gaze wander until his eyes closed and his chin sank onto his chest. In his life he too, like all people, had harboured ideas and dreams. Some he had fulfilled for himself; some had been granted to him. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands again. But he was still here. And in the mornings after the first snowmelt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks scattered there, the cool stone at his back and the first warm rays of sun on his face, he felt that many things had not gone so badly after all.

It was at this time, the time after the snowmelt, when in the early hours of the morning the earth steamed and the animals crept forth from their holes and caves, that Andreas Egger met the Cold Lady. He had tossed and turned on his mattress for hours, unable to sleep. Later he lay there quietly, arms folded over his chest, and listened to the sounds of the night: to the restless wind, prowling about the hut and knocking on the window with muffled thumps. Suddenly there was silence. Egger lit a candle and stared at the flickering shadows on the ceiling. He extinguished the candle again. For a while he lay there without moving. Finally he got up and went outside. The world was submerged in impenetrable fog. It was still night, but somewhere behind this soft silence day was dawning and the air shimmered like milk in the darkness. Egger took a few steps up the slope. He could hardly see the contours of his hand before his eyes, and when he stretched it out in front of him it looked as if he were plunging it into a deep, fathomless body of water. He walked on, carefully, step by step, a few hundred metres up the mountain. Far away he heard a note, like the long-drawn-out whistle of a marmot. He stopped and looked up. The moon hung in a gap in the fog, white and naked. Suddenly he felt a breath of air on his face, and the next moment the wind was back again. It came in solitary gusts, picking the fog to pieces, shredding it and chasing it apart. Egger heard the wind howling as it swept around the rocks higher up the mountain, and whispering in the grass at his feet. He walked on through streaks of fog that scattered before him like living creatures. He saw the sky open up. He saw flat rocks with remnants of snow on them, as if someone had covered them with white tablecloths. And then he saw the Cold Lady, crossing the slope about thirty metres above him. Her form was completely white, and at first he mistook her for a wisp of fog, but a moment later he clearly recognized her pale arms, the threadbare shawl that hung around her shoulders, and her shadow-like hair above the whiteness of her body. A shiver ran down his spine. Suddenly now he felt the cold. But it wasn’t the air that was cold: the cold came from inside. It sat deep in his heart, and it was horror. The figure was heading for a narrow rock formation, and although it was moving swiftly Egger couldn’t see it taking any steps. It was as if some hidden mechanism in the rock were drawing it on. He didn’t dare move. The horror sat in his heart, yet at the same time he was strangely afraid that he might chase the figure away with a noise or a hasty movement. He saw the wind catch her hair, exposing, for a brief moment, the nape of her neck. And then he knew. ‘Turn around,’ he said. ‘Please, turn around and look at me!’ But the figure kept on receding, and Egger saw only the nape of her neck and the reddish sickle of her scar shimmering upon it. ‘Where have you been so long?’ he cried. ‘There’s so much to tell you. You wouldn’t believe it, Marie! This whole, long life!’ She didn’t turn around. She didn’t answer. All he heard was the noise of the wind, the howling and sighing as it swept across the ground, taking with it the last snow of the year.

Egger stood alone on the mountain. He stood there for a long time without moving, as the shadows of the night slowly retreated around him. When he finally stirred, the sun was flashing from behind the distant mountain ranges and pouring its light over the mountaintops, so soft and beautiful that had he not been so tired and confused he could have laughed for sheer happiness.

Over the following weeks Egger roamed again and again across the rocky slopes above his hut, but the Cold Lady, or Marie, or whoever the apparition may have been, never showed herself to him again. Gradually her image faded until at last it dissolved entirely. Egger was in any case growing forgetful. Sometimes he would get up in the morning and spend over an hour looking for the shoes that he had hung on the stovepipe to dry the night before. Or, thinking about what he had wanted to cook for dinner, he would fall into a kind of brooding reverie so exhausting that he would often fall asleep sitting at the table, head propped on both hands, without having eaten a bite. Sometimes, before going to bed, he would place his stool next to the window, gaze out, and hope that against the backdrop of the night specific memories would surface that might bring at least a little order to his confused mind. More and more often, though, the sequence of events would slip away from him, things would tumble over one another, and as soon as an image seemed to come together in his mind’s eye it would drift away again or evaporate like lubricating oil on hot iron.

Some people in the village thought old Egger was completely mad, certainly since a couple of skiers had seen him walk out of his hut stark naked one frosty winter morning and stamp about barefoot in the snow, trying to find a beer bottle he had left outside to cool the previous night. It didn’t bother him. He was aware of his increasing confusion, but he wasn’t mad. Besides, he barely cared what people thought any more, and as the bottle did in fact reappear after a brief search (right next to the gutter – it had burst overnight in the frost and he was able to suck the beer like a lolly on a stick), he considered with quiet satisfaction that, on this particular day at least, his reasoning and conduct had been justified.

According to his birth certificate, which in his opinion wasn’t even worth the ink on the stamp, Egger lived to be seventy-nine years old. He had held out longer than he himself had ever thought possible, and on the whole he could be content. He had survived his childhood, a war and an avalanche. He had never felt himself to be above doing any kind of work, had blasted an incalculable number of holes in rock, and had probably felled enough trees to heat the stoves of an entire town for a whole winter. Over and over again he had hung his life on a thread between heaven and earth, and in his latter years as a tour guide he had learned more about people than he was able fully to understand. As far as he knew, he had not burdened himself with any appreciable guilt, and he had never succumbed to the temptations of the world: to boozing, whoring and gluttony. He had built a house, had slept in countless beds, stables, on the backs of trucks, and even a couple of nights in a Russian wooden crate. He had loved. And he had had an intimation of where love could lead. He had seen a couple of men walk about on the Moon. He had never felt compelled to believe in God, and he wasn’t afraid of death. He couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.

Andreas Egger died one night in February. Not somewhere out in the open, as he had often imagined he would, with the sun on the back of his neck or the starry sky above his brow, but at home in his hut, at the table. The candles had gone out and he was sitting in the faint light of the moon, which hung in the small square of the window like a light bulb dimmed by dust and spider’s webs. He was thinking about the things he was planning to do over the next few days: buy a couple of candles, seal the draughty crack in the window frame, dig a ditch in front of the hut, knee-deep and at least thirty centimetres wide, to divert the meltwater. The weather would cooperate, he could say that with relative certainty. If his leg gave him some peace of an evening, the weather usually stayed calm the following day, too. He was overcome by a feeling of warmth at the thought of his leg, that piece of rotten wood that had carried him through the world for so long. At the same time he was no longer sure whether he was still thinking this, or was already dreaming. He heard a sound, very close to his ear: a gentle whisper, as if someone were speaking to a little child. ‘I suppose it is late,’ he heard himself say, and it was as if his own words hovered in the air in front of him for a few moments before bursting in the light of the little moon in the window. He felt a bright pain in his chest, and watched as his body sank slowly forwards and his head came to rest with his cheek on the tabletop. He heard his own heart. And he listened to the silence when it stopped beating. Patiently he waited for the next heartbeat. And when none came, he let go and died.

Three days later the postman found him when he knocked on the window to bring him the parish newsletter. Egger’s body had been well preserved by the wintry temperatures, and it looked as if he had fallen asleep over breakfast. The funeral took place the following day. The ceremony was short. The parish priest froze in the cold as the gravediggers let the coffin down into the hole they had scraped out of the frozen ground with a little excavator.

Andreas Egger lies next to his wife, Marie. His grave is marked by a rough-hewn limestone veined with cracks, and the pale purple toadflax grows on it in summer.

Not quite six months before his death, Egger had woken up one morning with an inner restlessness that drove him out of bed and out of doors the moment he opened his eyes. It was the beginning of September, and where the sun’s rays stabbed through the blanket of cloud he could see the gleam and flash of the commuters’ cars: people who for some reason couldn’t make a living in tourism and so threaded their way along the road every morning to arrive on time at their workplaces beyond the valley. Egger liked the look of this colourful string of cars snaking its way along the short stretch of road before its contours finally blurred and vanished in the misty light. At the same time, the sight of it made him sad. He thought of the fact that, apart from trips to the Bittermann & Sons cable cars and chair lifts in the surrounding area, he had only left the neighbourhood on one single occasion: to go to war. He thought about how once, along this very road, back then little more than a deeply rutted track across the fields, he had come to the valley for the first time on the box of a horse-drawn carriage. And at that moment he was overcome with a longing so searing and profound he thought his heart would melt. Without looking back he got up and ran. He limped, stumbled, raced down to the village as fast as he could, where the yellow number 5 bus – the so-called Seven Valley Line – was waiting at the stop outside the lofty Post Hotel with its engine running, ready to depart. ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, without looking up. Egger knew the man: he had worked for a few years fitting ski bindings in the repair shop run by the former blacksmith, until arthritis twisted his joints and he found work with the bus company. The steering wheel looked like a little toy tyre in his hands.

‘To the last stop!’ said Egger. ‘You can’t go further than that.’ He bought a ticket and sat in an empty seat at the back amid the tired villagers – some of whom he knew by sight – who either didn’t have the money for a car of their own, or were already too old to master its speed and technique. His heart beat like mad as the doors closed and the bus drove off. He sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. For a while he stayed like that, and when he sat up and opened his eyes again the village had vanished and he saw things passing by along the road. Little boarding houses that had sprung up out of nowhere in the fields. Service stations. Petrol signs. Advertising hoardings. A guesthouse with bedding hanging from every single one of its open windows. A woman standing at a fence with one hand on her hip, her face indistinct, blurred by cigarette smoke. Egger tried to think, but the torrent of images made him tired. Just before falling asleep he tried to recall the longing that had driven him from the valley, but there was nothing there. For a moment he thought he could still feel a slight burning round his heart, but he was imagining it, and when he woke again he could no longer remember what it was he wanted or why he was sitting on this bus at all.

At the last stop he got off. He took a few steps across an expanse of concrete overgrown with weeds, then stopped. He didn’t know which direction to go in. The square where he was standing, the benches, the low station building, the houses behind it all meant nothing to him. He took another faltering step, and stopped again. He was shivering. In his hasty departure he had forgotten to put on a jacket. He hadn’t thought to pick up a hat, and he hadn’t locked the hut. He had simply run off, and he regretted that now. Somewhere far off he could hear the babble of voices, a child being called, then the slamming of a car door, an engine growing louder and then rapidly fading away. Egger was now shivering so hard he would have liked to have something to hang on to. He stared at the ground, not daring to move. In his mind’s eye he saw himself standing there, an old man, useless and lost, in the middle of an empty square, and he was more ashamed than he had ever been in his life. Just then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and when he slowly turned around the bus driver was standing before him.