A Whole Life

by Seethaler, Robert

  That same year a new teacher came to the village, a young man with a boyish face and shoulder-length hair tied back in a little ponytail, who spent his evenings knitting jerseys and carving roots into small, twisted crucifixes. The quiet and discipline of the old days never returned to the school, and Egger got used to the racket behind his bedroom wall. He only saw the teacher Anna Holler once more. She was walking across the village square with a shopping basket. She was walking slowly, with unnaturally small steps; her head was lowered, and she seemed to be completely lost in thought. When she saw Egger she raised her hand and waved to him with her fingers as you would to a little child. Egger quickly looked at the ground. Afterwards he was ashamed of this moment of cowardice.

  Anna Holler left the village as quietly and inconspicuously as she had arrived. One cold morning, before sunrise, she climbed aboard the post bus with two suitcases, sat down in the back seat, closed her eyes, and, as the driver later reported, didn’t open them again once throughout the journey.

  That autumn the snow came early. Just a few weeks after Anna Holler’s departure the skiers were already forming long queues outside the valley stations, and the metallic click of ski bindings and the creak of ski shoes could be heard all over the village until late into the evenings. One cold, clear, sunny day shortly before Christmas, as Egger was on his way home after taking a few elderly hikers for a walk in the snow, a group of excited tourists, followed by a few locals, the village policeman and a horde of screeching children, came walking towards him on the other side of the street. Two young men in ski suits had converted their skis into a kind of stretcher, and on it lay something that could evidently only be transported with the utmost care. The men were handling this something with a curious reverence that reminded Egger of the zeal of servers creeping round the altar during Sunday Mass. He crossed the street to take a closer look at the spectacle, and what he saw stopped his breath. On the makeshift stretcher lay Horned Hannes.

  For a moment Egger thought he must have gone mad, but there was no doubt about it: before him lay the goatherd, or what was left of him. His body was frozen solid. From what Egger could see he appeared to be missing one leg, while the other stuck out over the side of the stretcher, grotesquely dislocated. His arms were wrapped tightly around his chest; dried scraps of flesh hung from his hands, and the bones of his fingers, almost entirely exposed, were crooked like the talons of a bird. His head was tilted right back on his neck, as if someone had yanked it violently backwards. The ice had torn half his face off the bone. His teeth in the blue-black gums were exposed and it looked as if he was grinning. Although both eyelids were missing, the eyes were completely intact and seemed to be staring, wide open, at the sky.

  Egger turned away, took a few steps, stopped again. He felt sick and there was a dark buzzing in his ears. He wanted to say something to the men – but what? The thoughts danced in his head. He couldn’t formulate any of them, and by the time he turned again they had long since moved on. They were right at the bottom of the street, proceeding towards the chapel with their icy burden. On one side walked the policeman. On the other the goatherd’s leg jutted up into the air like a withered root.

  A couple of adventurous cross-country skiers had found Horned Hannes off-piste in a crevasse high in the Ferneis glacier. It took them hours to hack him out of the perpetual ice. The narrowness of the crevasse had, for the most part, kept birds and other animals away, and the ice had preserved his body through the decades. Only the leg was missing. The men speculated: perhaps an animal had got it before he slipped into the crevasse – perhaps a rock had cut it off – perhaps he had severed it himself in an act of desperation, to try and free himself. The mystery could not be solved: the leg had disappeared, and the stump revealed nothing. It was just a stump, coated in a delicate layer of ice, slightly frayed around the edges and blue-black in the centre like the goatherd’s gums.

  The dead man was brought to the chapel so that everyone who wanted to could say goodbye. But no one came, apart from a few tourists who wanted to see with their own eyes the mysterious ice-corpse laid out by candlelight, and if possible to photograph it from every angle. No one knew Horned Hannes, no one could remember him, and as the weather forecast predicted a rise in temperature he was buried the following day.

  Egger was profoundly shocked by this unexpected encounter. Almost a whole life lay between Horned Hannes’ disappearance and his turning up again. In his mind’s eye he saw the translucent figure moving away in great leaps and disappearing into the white silence of the blizzard. How had he made it to the glacier several kilometres away? What had he been looking for there? And what had happened to him in the end? Egger shuddered at the thought of the leg that was probably still stuck somewhere in the glacier. Perhaps in a few years it too would be found and carried down to the valley as an outlandish trophy on the shoulders of excited skiers. Horned Hannes presumably didn’t care about any of this. Now he lay in earth instead of ice: either way, he was at peace. Egger thought of the innumerable dead during his time in Russia. The grimaces of the corpses in the Russian ice were the most dreadful thing he had seen in his life. Horned Hannes, by contrast, seemed strangely happy. In his final hour he had laughed up at Heaven, thought Egger, and hurled his leg down the Devil’s throat as a forfeit. This idea pleased him: there was something comforting about it.

  But there was another thought that preoccupied him. The frozen goatherd had looked at him as if through a window in time. There was something almost youthful in the expression on his face, turned up towards Heaven. Back then, when Egger found him in his hut, mortally ill, and carried him down to the valley on the wooden frame, he must have been about forty or fifty years old. Egger was now well over seventy, and he certainly didn’t feel any younger. Life and the work on the mountain had left their mark. Everything about him was warped and crooked. His back seemed to be heading down towards the earth in a tight curve, and he increasingly had the feeling that his spine was growing up over his head. On the mountain his foothold was still firm, and not even the strong autumn downwinds could make him lose his balance, but he stood like a tree that was already rotten inside.

  * * *

  In his final years Egger did not take up any more offers of work, which in any case became increasingly infrequent. He felt that in his life he had toiled enough; besides, he found the tourists’ chatter and their moods, which changed as constantly as mountain weather, increasingly hard to tolerate. On one occasion he almost boxed the ears of a young townie, who stood on a rock and, overcome with joy, closed his eyes and turned round and round in circles until he plummeted onto the gravel field below and had to be carried back down to the valley by Egger and the rest of the group, sobbing like a little child. After that, Egger ended his career as a mountain guide and retired from public life.

  The population of the village had tripled since the war, and the number of guest beds had increased tenfold, which prompted the municipality to proceed not only with the construction of a holiday resort with an indoor swimming pool and spa garden, but also with the long-overdue extension of the school building. Egger moved out before the construction workers even arrived. He packed his few possessions and moved into a cattle shed several hundred metres above the end of the village, abandoned decades earlier. The shed was worked into the hillside like a cave, with the advantage that the temperature wasn’t subject to much fluctuation throughout the year. The front was constructed out of piled-up, weathered boulders. Egger filled the holes between them, first with moss, then with cement. He sealed the cracks in the door, painted the wood with pine tar, and scratched the rust off the hinges. Then he broke two stones out of the wall and replaced them with a window and a pipe for the sooty black stove he had found on a scrap heap behind the valley station of the Bubenkogel chair lift. He felt at ease in his new home. Sometimes it was a little lonely up there, but he didn’t regard his loneliness as a deficiency. He had no one, but he had all he needed, and that was enough. The view from t
he window was good, the stove was warm, and once the shed had been heated throughout the first winter, if not before, the pungent smell of goats and cattle would have completely disappeared. Above all, Egger enjoyed the quiet. Only a faint suggestion reached him of the noise that now filled the whole valley and, at weekends, surged against the mountainsides in waves. Sometimes, on summer nights, when the clouds hung heavy over the peaks and the air smelled of rain, he would lie on his mattress and listen to the sounds of animals burrowing through the earth above his head; and on winter evenings he heard the muffled drone of the distant snow groomers preparing the pistes for the following day. He often found himself thinking about Marie. About what had been, and about what could have been. But they were just brief, fleeting thoughts that drifted by as quickly as the shreds of storm clouds outside his window.

  As there was no one else for him to talk to, he talked to himself, or to the things around him. He’d say: ‘You’re useless. You’re too blunt. I’m going to sharpen you on a stone. And then I’m going to go down to the valley and buy some fine sandpaper and sharpen you again. And I’m going to wind some leather around your handle. You’ll sit nicely in the hand. And you’ll look good, too, although that’s not the point, you understand?’

  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.