A Whole Life (7 page)

In spring their route took him back to the valley, where he stayed for a while to clear brush and debris from Blue Liesl’s forest aisle and fix small cracks in the girder foundations. He found lodgings at the Golden Goat again, in the room where he had spent so many days with his broken legs. Every evening he came back from the mountain dead tired, ate the remains of his daily ration sitting on the edge of his bed, and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Once he awoke in the middle of the night with a peculiar sensation, and looking up at the small, dusty window under the ceiling he saw that it was clouded by hundreds of moths. The creatures’ wings seemed to glow in the moonlight, and they beat against the pane with a barely discernible papery sound. For a moment Egger thought their appearance must be a sign, but he didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, so he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. They’re only moths, he thought, a few silly little moths; and when he awoke early the next morning they had vanished.

He stayed several weeks in the village, which as far as he could tell had largely recovered from the impact of the avalanche, and then moved on. He avoided going to look at his plot of land or visiting the cemetery, and he didn’t sit on the little birchwood bench. He moved on, hung in the air between mountains, and watched the seasons change beneath him like colourful paintings that meant nothing to him and had nothing to do with him. Later on he recalled the years after the avalanche as an empty, silent time that only slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to fill with life again.

One clear autumn day, when a roll of sandpaper slipped out of his hand and sprang down the slope like an impetuous young goat before eventually sailing out over a spur of rock and vanishing in the depths, Egger paused for the first time in years and contemplated his surroundings. The sun was low, and even the distant mountaintops stood out so clearly that it was as if someone had just finished painting them onto the sky. Right beside him a lone sycamore burned yellow; a little further off some cows were grazing, casting long, slim shadows that kept pace with them step for step across the meadow. A group of hikers was sitting beneath the canopy of a small calving shed. Egger could hear them talking and laughing amongst themselves, and their voices seemed to him both strange and agreeable. He thought of Marie’s voice and how much he had liked to listen to it. He tried to recall its melody and sound, but they eluded him. ‘If only I still had her voice, at least,’ he said aloud to himself. Then he rolled slowly over to the next steel girder, climbed down and went in search of the sandpaper.

Three evenings later, after a cold, wet day spent scrubbing rust off the base rivets on a top station, Egger jumped down off the back of the truck and entered the little boarding house where he and the other men were staying. The way to his quarters took him past the landlady’s living room with its smell of pickled gherkins. The old woman was sitting alone at the table. She had propped up her elbows and buried her face in her hands. In front of her was the big wireless set, which at this hour was usually blasting out brass-band music or Adolf Hitler’s furious tirades. This time the radio was silent, and Egger could hear the old woman breathing quietly and heavily into her hands. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.

The landlady raised her head and looked at him. Her face retained the imprints of her fingers, pale stripes to which the blood only slowly returned. ‘We’re at war,’ she said.

‘Who says so?’ asked Egger.

‘The radio,’ said the old woman, throwing a hostile look at the wireless. Egger watched as she reached behind her head and in two swift movements loosened her bun. The woman’s hair fell onto her neck, long and yellowish, like flax fibres. For a moment her shoulders shook as if she was about to start sobbing; then she stood up, walked past him down the corridor and out into the open, where she was greeted by a grubby cat that wound itself about her feet for a while before the two of them disappeared around the corner.

The next morning Egger set off home to register for military service. His decision wasn’t prompted by any particular considerations: it was simply there, all of a sudden, like a call from very far away, and Egger knew he had to follow it. He had been called up once before, when he was seventeen, for the army medical examination, but back then Kranzstocker had successfully lodged an objection, arguing that if they were to tear his beloved foster-son (who was also, incidentally, the most capable worker in the family) from his arms to use him as cannon-fodder against the wops or (worse still) the baguette-scoffers, they might as well in God’s name just burn his whole farm down right under his arse. Back then, Egger was secretly grateful to the farmer: he’d had nothing in his life to lose, but at least he’d still had something to gain. That was different now.

As the weather was reasonably calm, he set off on foot. He walked all day, spent the night in an old hay barn and was up again before dawn. He listened to the steady hum of the telephone wires, recently strung along the roads between narrow poles, and he saw the mountains grow out of the night with the first rays of the sun, and although it was a spectacle he had watched thousands of times before, this time he found himself strangely moved by it. He couldn’t remember ever in his life seeing something at once so beautiful and so terrifying.

Egger’s stay in the village was brief. ‘You’re too old. And you limp,’ said the officer who, along with the mayor and an elderly female typist, formed the examination committee. He was sitting in the Golden Goat, at one of the guesthouse tables, which was covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with little swastika flags.

‘I want to go to war,’ said Egger.

‘Do you think the Wehrmacht can use someone like you?’ asked the officer. ‘Who do you think we are?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Andreas, go back to your work,’ said the mayor. And that was the end of the matter. The typist stamped the single sheet of paper that constituted his file, and Egger returned to the cable cars.

Just over three years later, in November 1942, Egger stood before the same committee, not as a volunteer this time but as a conscript. He had no idea why the Wehrmacht suddenly could use someone like him after all: at any rate, it seemed that times had changed.

‘What can you do?’ the officer asked.

‘I know about mountains,’ answered Egger. ‘I can sand steel cables and make holes in rock.’

‘That’s good,’ the officer remarked. ‘Have you ever heard of the Caucasus?’

‘No,’ said Egger.

‘Never mind,’ said the officer. ‘Andreas Egger, I hereby declare you fit to go to war. You have been assigned the honourable task of liberating the East!’

Egger looked out of the window. It had started to rain: fat drops smacked against the window, darkening the restaurant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mayor slowly hunch over the table and stare down at its surface.

Egger spent a total of more than eight years in Russia. Less than two months of this were at the front; the rest was in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in the vast steppe north of the Black Sea. Although in the beginning his mission still seemed fairly clear (as well as liberating the East it was also about securing oil reserves and defending and maintaining planned production facilities), after just a few days he could no longer have said exactly why he was there, or for what or against whom he was actually fighting. It was as if in these pitch-dark Caucasian winter nights, when shell-fire blossomed like blazing flowers over the mountain crests on the horizon, casting its light on the soldiers’ fearful or despairing or blank faces, any thought about purpose or the lack of it was stifled before it could be formulated. Egger questioned nothing. He carried out orders, that was all. Besides, he was of the opinion that he could have had it an awful lot worse. Just a few weeks after his arrival in the mountains, two taciturn comrades who were clearly familiar with the area brought him by night to a narrow rocky plateau at an altitude of around four thousand metres. One of his superiors had explained to him that he was to stay there until he was recalled, firstly to set a series of blast holes, secondly to secure the forward position and, if necessary, to hold it. Egger had no idea what forward position they were referring to or even what such a position might be, but he wasn’t dissatisfied with his task. His two comrades left him there alone, with tools, a tent, a crate of provisions and the promise to return once a week with fresh supplies, and Egger made himself at home as best he could. During the day he bored dozens of holes in the rock, for which he often had first to hack away a thick layer of ice, and at night he lay in his tent and tried to sleep despite the biting cold. His equipment included a sleeping bag, two blankets, his fur-lined winter boots, and the thick, quilted jacket worn by mountain troops. He had also pitched the tent half inside a frozen snowdrift, and this provided him with at least a little shelter from the wind, which often howled so loudly that it drowned out the roaring of the bombers and the muffled explosions of the anti-aircraft guns. Yet all this was not enough to keep out the cold. The frost seemed to creep in through every seam, under clothing and under the skin, digging its claws into every fibre of his body. Making a fire was forbidden and punishable by death, but even had it been permitted, the plateau lay far above the tree line and for miles around there wasn’t so much as a twig that Egger could have burned. Sometimes he would light the little petrol stove he used to heat the tinned food, but the tiny flames just seemed to mock him. They burned his fingertips and left the rest of his body to freeze all the more. Egger feared the nights. He lay huddled in his sleeping bag and the cold brought tears to his eyes. Sometimes he dreamed: confused dreams, filled with pain and hideous faces that materialized in the blizzard of his mind and hunted him down. Once he awoke from just such a dream because he thought that something soft and mobile had crept into the tent and was staring at him. ‘Jesus!’ he gasped softly. He waited until his heart had calmed again, then slipped from his sleeping bag and crawled out of the tent. The sky was starless and profoundly black. Everything around him was wrapped in darkness and altogether silent. Egger sat on a stone and stared out into the night. Again he heard his heart pounding, and at that moment he knew he was not alone. He couldn’t say where this feeling came from; he saw only the blackness of the night and heard his heartbeat, but somewhere out there he sensed the presence of another living creature. He had no idea how long he sat like that in front of his tent, listening out into the darkness, but before the first pale strip of light appeared over the mountains he knew where this other creature was located. About thirty metres away, on the other side of the ravine that marked the western edge of the plateau, there was a spur that jutted out of the face of the rock, scarcely wide enough for a goat to gain a foothold. On the ledge stood a Russian soldier, his shape rapidly becoming clearer in the growing light of dawn. He was just standing there, inexplicably motionless, looking across at Egger, who for his part remained sitting on his stone, not daring to move. The soldier was young and had the milky face of a city boy. His forehead was smooth and snowy white, his eyes oddly slanting. He carried his weapon, a Cossack rifle without a bayonet, on a strap over his shoulder; his right hand lay calmly on the stock. The Russian looked at Egger and Egger looked at the Russian and around them was nothing but the silence of a Caucasian winter morning. Later, Egger could not have said which of them was first to move: a spasm passed through the soldier’s body and, at the same time, Egger stood. The Russian removed his hand from the rifle stock and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Then he turned and quickly, nimbly, without looking back, climbed up a few metres and disappeared between the rocks.

Egger stayed where he was for a moment, thinking. He realized that he had been standing face to face with his mortal enemy, yet now that the soldier had disappeared he felt his loneliness more profoundly than ever before.

At first his two comrades came every few days, as agreed, to stock up his food supplies and, when necessary, to bring a pair of woollen socks or a new rock drill, as well as news from the front (things were seesawing back and forth, there had been losses but also some gains, all in all no one really knew what was going on). But after a few weeks the visits stopped, and towards the end of December – Egger was scoring the days onto a sheet of ice with the drill, and by his count it must have been the day after Christmas – he started to suspect that they wouldn’t be coming again. On the first of January 1943, after another week had gone by and still no one had turned up, he set off in thick, driving snow to walk back down to the camp. He followed the path they had come up almost two months earlier and was relieved when he soon saw the familiar red of the swastikas glimmering towards him. Within seconds, though, it abruptly dawned on him that the flags driven into the ground ahead to mark the camp perimeter were not swastikas at all, but the banners of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. In that moment Egger owed his life entirely to the presence of mind with which he immediately tore his rifle off his back and flung it as far away from him as he could. He saw the gun disappear into the snow with a muffled thud, and a split second later he heard the shouts of the guards running towards him. He raised his hands, fell to his knees and bowed his head. He felt a blow to the back of his neck, toppled forwards, and heard deep Russian voices speaking over him like incomprehensible sounds from another world.

For two days Egger crouched alongside two other prisoners in a wooden crate carelessly nailed together and sealed with felt. It had a length and breadth of about one and a half metres and was less than a metre high. He spent most of the time peering out through a slit, trying to glean from the movements around them some hint as to the Russians’ plans, and his own future. When at last, on the third day, the nails were ripped from the wood with a screech and one of the slatted walls fell outwards, the winter light pierced his eyes so brightly that he feared he would never be able to open them again. He could, after a while; but this sensation of piercing brightness, which seemed to fill even his nights with blinding light, stayed with him until long after the end of his wartime captivity, and only disappeared for good many years after his return home.