A Whole Life

by Seethaler, Robert

  Guided tours in all seasons (weather permitting)

  Guaranteed sunrise for early birds

  Guaranteed sunset (in the valley only,

  as too dangerous on the mountain)

  No danger to life and limb!

  (PRICE IS NEGOTIABLE,

  BUT NOT EXPENSIVE)

  The sign evidently made an impression because business was good from the start, such that Egger had no reason to go back to his old work as an odd-job man. As before, he often got up when it was still dark, but now instead of going out into the fields he went up into the mountains and watched the rising sun. In the reflection of its first rays the tourists’ faces looked as if they were glowing from the inside, and Egger saw that they were happy.

  In summer his tours often went well beyond the crests of the nearest mountains, while in winter he mostly confined himself to shorter walks, which in wide snowshoes were scarcely less exhausting. He always led the way, with an eye on potential dangers and the tourists panting at his back. He liked these people, even if some of them did try to explain the world to him or behaved idiotically in some other way. He knew that during a two-hour uphill climb, if not before, their arrogance would evaporate along with the sweat on their hot heads, until nothing remained but gratitude that they had made it and a tiredness deep in the bones.

  Sometimes he would pass his old plot of land. Over the years scree had accumulated on the spot where once his house had stood, forming a sort of embankment. In summer white poppies glowed between the lumps of stone, and in winter the children jumped over it on their skis. Egger would watch them whizzing down the slope, taking off with a whoop and sailing for a moment through the air before landing skilfully or tumbling through the snow like brightly coloured balls. He thought of the threshold where he and Marie had sat on so many evenings, and of the little wooden gate with the simple hook he had fashioned from a long steel nail. After the avalanche the gate had vanished, like so many other things that failed to reappear once the snow had melted. They were simply gone, as if they had never been. Egger felt the sadness well up in his heart. He thought that there would have been so much more for her to do with her life, probably far more than he could imagine.

  Egger didn’t usually speak on his walks. ‘When someone opens their mouth they close their ears,’ Thomas Mattl had always said, and Egger was of the same opinion. Instead of talking, he preferred to listen to these people, whose breathless chatter revealed to him the secrets of other fates and opinions. People were evidently looking for something in the mountains that they believed they had lost a long time ago. He never worked out what exactly this was, but over the years he became more and more certain that the tourists were stumbling not so much after him but after some obscure, insatiable longing.

  Once, during a short break at the top of the Zwanzigerkogel, a young man grabbed him by the shoulders, quivering with emotion, and screamed at him, ‘Can’t you see how beautiful all this is!’ Egger looked into the man’s face, contorted with bliss, and said, ‘Yes, but it’s going to rain soon, and when the earth starts to slide you can forget about all the beauty.’

  Only once in his career as a mountain guide did Egger almost lose a tourist. It was on a spring day sometime in the late Sixties; winter had returned again overnight, and Egger wanted to take a small group along the panoramic route above the new four-chair lift. As they were crossing the footbridge over the Häusler ravine, a fat lady slipped on the wet wood and lost her balance. Egger was walking right in front of her: out of the corner of his eye he saw her flailing her arms, and one of her legs rose up as if pulled into the air on an invisible string. Beneath the bridge was a twenty-metre drop. As he lunged towards her, his eyes were fixed on her face, tilting further and further back as if stricken with profound awe. He heard the wood groan as she crashed onto her back. At the very last moment, before she could slide over the edge and down into the abyss, he managed to seize one of her ankles with his hand, and even as he was marvelling at the unwontedly soft flesh beneath his fingers, his other hand grabbed her sleeve and he dragged her back onto the bridge, where she lay still, apparently contemplating the clouds with amazement.

  ‘That almost ended badly, didn’t it?’ she said. She took Egger’s hand, placed it on her cheek and smiled at him. Egger nodded, shocked. The skin of her cheek was damp. He sensed a barely perceptible quivering beneath his palm, and the contact seemed to him somehow improper. He was reminded of an experience from his childhood, when he was about eleven years old. The farmer had got him out of bed in the middle of the night: he had to help him deliver a calf. The cow had been labouring for hours, walking restlessly in circles and rubbing her muzzle on the wall until it bled. Finally she made a stifled noise and lay down on her side in the straw. In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp little Egger saw her roll her eyes and a glutinous slime flow from her cleft. When the calf’s front legs appeared, the farmer, who had been sitting on his stool throughout in silence, stood and rolled up his sleeves. But the calf didn’t move again, and the cow just lay there quietly. Suddenly she raised her head and began to bellow. It was a sound that filled Egger’s heart with cold horror. ‘It’s done for!’ said the farmer, and together they dragged the dead calf out of its mother’s body. Egger caught hold of the neck. The hide was soft and wet, and for a brief moment he thought he felt a pulse, a solitary throb beneath his fingers. He held his breath, but nothing followed, and the farmer carried the limp body out into the open. Outside day was already breaking. Little Egger stood in the stall, cleaned the floor, rubbed down the cow’s hide with straw and thought of the calf, whose life had lasted just a single heartbeat.

  The fat lady smiled. ‘I think everything’s still in one piece,’ she said. ‘My thigh hurts a bit, but that’s all. Now the two of us can limp down to the valley side by side.’

  ‘No,’ said Egger, and stood up. ‘Every one of us limps alone!’

  Since Marie’s death Egger had, from time to time, carried clumsy female tourists over a mountain stream or led them by the hand over a slippery ridge of rock, but apart from that he had never touched a woman more than fleetingly. It had been hard enough somehow to adapt to life again, and under no circumstances did he wish to forfeit the calm that had grown in him over the years. When it came down to it he had barely even understood Marie, and all other women were far more of a mystery to him. He didn’t know what they wanted or didn’t want, and much of what they said and did in his presence confused him, infuriated him, or provoked in him a kind of inner rigidity which he found very hard to shake off. On one occasion one of the seasonal workers thrust her heavy body with its kitchen smell up against him in the Golden Goat and whispered clammy words in his ear, which so flustered him that he rushed out of the inn without paying for his soup and spent half the night trudging over the frozen slopes to calm down.

  There were often moments like these that had the capacity to stir him, but they occurred less frequently with every passing year and eventually ceased altogether. He was not unhappy about this. He had had a love, and he had lost her. Nothing comparable would ever happen to him again: that, for Egger, was a given. The struggle with lust, which still surged up in him from time to time, was a struggle he intended to conduct with himself, on his own, until the end.

  In the early Seventies, however, Andreas Egger had another encounter which, for a few brief autumn days at least, conflicted with his desire to spend the rest of his life alone. Recently he had noticed that the atmosphere in the classroom behind his bedroom wall had changed. The children’s customary shouting had got louder, and when the break bell went, their outbursts and cheers of relief seemed to lack all inhibition. The reason for the pupils’ newly acquired, raucous self-confidence was clearly the retirement of the village schoolmaster, a man who had spent most of his life trying to implant at least the basic principles of reading and arithmetic in the lazy-minded heads of generations of farmers’ children, most of whom never thought beyond the here and now: if necessary, h
e would call on the assistance of a cudgel he had fashioned himself from an oxtail. After his final lesson the old teacher opened the window, tipped the box with the remaining pieces of chalk into the rose bed and turned his back on the village the very same day. This caused consternation among the local council members, particularly as they were unlikely to find a successor overnight who was keen to advance their career surrounded by herds of cows and skiers. A solution was found in the shape of Anna Holler, a teacher from the neighbouring valley who had retired many years ago, and who accepted the offer to fill in at the school with quiet gratitude. Anna Holler’s ideas about education differed from those of her predecessor. She trusted in the children’s innate powers of development, and she hung the old oxtail outside on the schoolhouse wall, where it weathered with the years and became a support for the wild ivy.

  Egger, however, took a dim view of the new pedagogy. One morning he got up and went next door.

  ‘Excuse me, but it’s too loud. A man needs his peace and quiet, after all.’

  ‘Who in heaven’s name are you?’

  ‘My name is Egger and I live next door. My bed must be about here, right behind the blackboard.’

  The teacher took a step towards him. She was at least a head and a half smaller, but with the children behind her, staring at Egger from their rows of seats, she appeared threatening and entirely unprepared to compromise. He would have liked to say more; instead, he just gazed mutely down at the linoleum. Suddenly he felt stupid standing there: an old man with ridiculous complaints, someone even little children could stare at in undisguised astonishment.

  ‘We can’t choose our neighbours,’ said the teacher, ‘but one thing’s for sure: you are an ill-mannered oaf! You burst into the middle of my lesson, uninvited, unshaven, hair uncombed, and to cap it all still in your underpants, or what’s that supposed to be you’ve got on?’

  ‘Leggings,’ murmured Egger, who was already bitterly regretting having come round. ‘They’ve been patched a few times.’

  Anna Holler sighed. ‘You will leave my classroom immediately,’ she said. ‘And when you have washed, shaved, and dressed properly you may come back again, if you wish!’

  Egger didn’t come back again. He would put up with the noise, or stuff moss in his ears if necessary: for him, the matter was settled. And that would probably have been the end of it, had there not been three loud knocks on his door the following Sunday. Anna Holler was standing outside with a cake in her hands.

  ‘I thought I’d bring you something to eat,’ she said. ‘Where’s the table?’

  Egger offered her his only seat, a milking stool he had made himself, and placed the cake on his old storage chest in which, out of a secret fear of hard times, he kept a few cans of tinned food – ‘Haggemeyer’s Finest Beef with Onions’ – and a pair of warm shoes. ‘Cakes like this are often very dry,’ he said, and as he set off with his earthenware jug to the fountain in the village square, he thought about this woman who was right now sitting in his room, waiting to cut the cake. He thought she might be about his age, but the many years of teaching had visibly taken their toll. Her face was wreathed in tiny wrinkles and under her dark hair, which she wore tied back in a tight bun, the snow-white roots shimmered through. For a moment a peculiar image thrust itself upon him: he saw her not simply sitting waiting on his stool, but had the impression that her mere presence had altered the room he had inhabited alone for so many years, had expanded it, had in some unpleasant way opened it up on all sides.

  ‘So this is where you live,’ said the teacher, when he returned with the jug full of water.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘One can be happy anywhere, really,’ she said. She had dark brown eyes that were warm and friendly, yet Egger found it uncomfortable to be looked at by her. He glanced down at his piece of cake, pressed out a raisin with his forefinger and let it fall discreetly to the floor. Then they ate, and he had to admit that the cake was good. Actually, he thought, the cake was probably better than anything he had eaten in recent years; but this he kept to himself.

  Later Egger could not have said how the whole affair came to pass. Just as Anna Holler had quite naturally appeared outside his door with the cake in her hands, she quite naturally walked into his life, where within a very short time she was claiming the space that she clearly assumed was hers. Egger didn’t really know what was happening; besides which he didn’t want to be rude, so he went for walks with her or sat beside her in the sun and drank the coffee she always brought along in a thermos, which she declared was blacker than the soul of Satan. Anna Holler was constantly coming out with comparisons like these; in fact, she talked virtually non-stop, telling him about her lessons, about the children, about her life, about this one man who had long since got what was coming to him and whom she should never, never, never have trusted. Sometimes she said something Egger didn’t understand. She used words he had never heard before, and he secretly assumed she just made them up when she had run out of all the right ones. He let her talk. He listened, nodded from time to time, occasionally said yes or no, and drank the coffee, which made his heart race as if he were scaling the north face of the High Kämmerer.

  One day she persuaded him to take Blue Liesl up to the Karleitner summit. From up there you could look out over the whole village, she said; the school looked like a lost matchbox, and if you squinted a bit you could just see the bright dots of the children around the village fountain.

  When the gondola started with a slight jolt, Egger positioned himself at one of the windows. He felt the teacher come and stand right behind him and look over his shoulder. He thought of the fact that he hadn’t washed his jacket in years. At least he had hung his trousers in the clear water of the spring for half an hour last week, drying them afterwards on a sunny rock.

  ‘You see that girder down there?’ he said. ‘When we were pouring the foundation, someone fell in. Drank too much the day before and keeled over at midday. Face down in the concrete. Lay there and didn’t move. Like a dead fish in a pond. It was a while before we managed to get him out; the concrete wasn’t that liquid any more. But he made it. He’s been blind in one eye ever since, though. Hard to say whether it was the concrete or the Krauterer.’

  Once they reached the top they stood on the platform for a while looking down into the valley. Egger felt as if he ought to entertain the teacher, so he pointed out various things in the village: the remains of a burnt-out cattle shed, the complex of holiday homes hastily built on a beet field, the huge cauldron, overgrown with rust and purple broom, that the mountain infantry had left standing behind the chapel at the end of the war and which the children had used ever since for their games of hide and seek. Anna Holler laughed out loud every time she made out something new. Sometimes her laugh was completely swallowed by the wind, so that it looked as if she was just beaming away silently to herself.

  When they got back to the valley station in the early evening they stood side by side for a little while and watched the cabin heading back up the mountain. Egger didn’t know what he was supposed to say, or whether he was supposed to say anything at all, so he kept his mouth shut. The muffled whirring of the engines could be heard coming up from the machine room in the basement of the building. He felt the teacher’s eyes upon him. ‘I’d like you to take me home now,’ she said, and walked off.

  She was living in a little room right behind the town hall which the municipality had put at her disposal while she covered at the school. She had prepared a plate with a couple of slices of bread and dripping garnished with onion, and outside on the window ledge were two cold bottles of beer. Egger ate the bread and drank the beer, trying not to look at the teacher as he did so.

  ‘You’re a man,’ she said. ‘A real man with a real appetite, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, and shrugged.

  It was beginning to get dark outside. She stood up, took a few steps across the room, and stopped in front of a little dresser. From behind Egg
er saw her lower her head as if she had lost something on the floorboards. Her fingers were playing with the hem of her skirt. Earth and dust still stuck to her heels. It was dreadfully silent in the room. It was as if the silence that had withdrawn from all the valleys long ago was gathering right at this moment, right here in this little room. Egger cleared his throat. He put down his bottle and watched a drop run slowly down the glass and spread out on the tablecloth in a round, dark stain. Anna Holler stood in front of the dresser, motionless, eyes lowered. She raised first her head, then her hands.

  ‘People are often alone in this world,’ she said.

  Then she turned around. She lit two candles and placed them on the table. Closed the curtains. Pushed the bolt across the door.

  ‘Come,’ she said.

  Egger was still staring at the dark stain on the tablecloth. ‘I’ve only ever lain with one woman,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said the teacher. ‘I’m fine with that.’

  Later, Egger looked at the sleeping old woman who lay beside him. After they had gone to bed she had placed her hand on his chest, and beneath it his heart had pounded so loudly that he thought the whole room was moving. It hadn’t worked out. He wasn’t able to overcome his inhibitions. He had lain there motionless, as if nailed to the spot, feeling the hand grow heavier and heavier on his chest until finally it sank between his ribs and settled directly over his heart. He looked at her body. She was lying on her side. Her head had slipped off the pillow and her hair lay in thin strands on the sheet. Her face was half turned away. It looked haggard and emaciated. The nocturnal light spilling into the room through a narrow slit in the curtains seemed to have got caught in all the wrinkles. Egger fell asleep, and when he woke again the teacher was curled up on her side and he could hear her soft crying, muffled by the pillow. For a while he lay there beside her, irresolute, but then he realized there was nothing in this world that could be done about it. He got up quietly and left.