by Heinz Helle
Now let’s look for the boiler, said Drygalski, breaking the lengthening silence. The rest of us nodded hopefully, politely wiping our mouths – the last remnant of the illusion of dinnertime – with our hands, not our sleeves. We got up and walked, sauntered almost, through the restaurant. We were in good spirits as we ascended the ski-boot-proof staircase. We paused by the entrance; hadn’t we seen some doors here when we came in? Yes, indeed: there they were, two of them. Somewhat larger than ordinary. Painted white. Probably just pressboard. That’s good; wood can be broken. Golde leant against one of them, Gruber against the other. They each pushed off and fell back against the door, repeatedly, each time farther, falling back harder. When their shoulders began to hurt, they tried with their feet. Fürst and I went back to the restaurant and looked in the kitchen. It wasn’t particularly clean. There were half-empty pots here and there, some pasta, a basket full of rock-hard pretzels. The gas had been turned off. No electricity either, obviously. By now we could hear the sound of Golde and Gruber kicking at the door all the way down here. With a dull feeling in our stomachs, Fürst and I went back up the too-soft stairs. Just as we arrived at the top, the right-hand door gave way, and suddenly we were a horde of raiders, ready for anything. Panting and blind, we stumbled through dark hallways and down stairs, until we arrived at another set of locked doors. Steel this time. Nothing to be done. Nope, nothing at all. Our offensive crumbled at the first real obstacle. And what a stupid obstacle it was. We hammered on the door, shouting and cursing. Fürst started crying. As we headed back, beaten and exhausted, I felt strangely relieved at the thought that we hadn’t found the boiler room. It would have been much more dispiriting to find ourselves face to face with the five-hundred-thousand-euro high-capacity HVAC system in a modern Alpine ski hut, freezing cold, in our thirties, with advanced degrees in architecture and microbiology and absolutely no clue how to get the thing working.
The other wooden door led into the owners’ apartment. Apart from a few pieces of traditional furniture and a television, it was empty. There were no clothes or blankets. They had even taken the mattresses. Not that we had expected to find a working Primus or a pack of firelighters, but perhaps some pieces of firewood or at least some newspaper. The only thing we found was a package of paper napkins decorated with blue and white diamonds, which we put on the stone floor in the kitchen and, holding a wooden spoon over them, lit first one napkin, then two, then three, then four at a time, each time bringing a moment’s delight as the flame from the lighter caught the paper, quickly spreading but also growing less bright, and we smelt the smoke and watched the Bavarian colours slowly vanish, curling feebly out of existence without having been of any use to us. The spoon didn’t even turn black.
Then the package was empty and the lighter astonishingly hot, and although we presumed it would be pointless, we waited for it to cool down and then held it up to the varnished chairs and benches and tables until it once again grew too hot, at which point we would again wait and try again and wait and try again, and of course it had no effect, even though the things were made of wood, for fuck’s sake, but of course this wood had been approved for use in the catering industry by the local fire safety authority, a long time ago.
So we went back to the last place where we had felt good. Our table at the panorama restaurant. We cleared it, Fürst even wiped it. And then we waited.
Before the sun went down the weather cleared. It got colder. It got dark. Then it got cold. It got cold in a way that is hard to describe. When you have grown up in a Western country, you assume that you have sufficient personal experience to allow you to make appropriate use of the concepts ‘cold’ or ‘freezing’. You’re wrong. What we experienced that first night in the abandoned mountain station was something completely new to all of us. The empty dining hall. The white moonlit slopes outside the panorama window. How beautiful they were. And how we hated them and their beauty, because we could suddenly feel nothing but a visceral fear of death. And so we danced. The five of us. We danced. We danced in the darkened dining hall, we couldn’t see each other’s faces, we could hear each other’s surprised snuffling, panting, in between panicked exhalations and careful inhalations, fresh air, cold, much too cold. And above all the disbelief that such temperatures were possible in an enclosed space.
We stayed on our feet all night, shifting from one numb foot to the other. We rubbed against each other, and our tiredness was infinite and not worth mentioning, it went without saying, a meaningless constant like gravity, of which it was the direct, definitive continuation, straight through into the middle of our consciousness: whoever falls down now won’t be getting up. We stayed on our feet. When it got lighter, it got easier. The temperature didn’t change at first, but clearly it is comforting to be able to see where you are when you die.
In the end we didn’t die. For a while we stood still in front of the panorama window and saw that day truly was dawning. Then we went on our way. Our first footsteps in the snow sounded unreal. Breaking the thin frozen crust, the powder beneath compressing, the soft, slowly dissipating scratch of the miniature avalanches spreading across the gleaming slope. With every step it started anew, with every foot laboriously lifted out of the whiteness, times two, times five. A susurration. It was calm. We avoided making eye contact, fearing a confirmation of our own feelings. Now there was no greater comfort than the sight of a familiar back in front of you, leading away from this situation, slowly, stooped and uncertain, but still moving. We followed the support towers of the ski lift down the mountain. Under the large bullwheels we rested and listened for the sound that belongs to this place, but steel cables don’t sing when they are standing still.
50
Walking through the snow on the slope. Breathing in. Walking on the slope through the snow. Breathing out. Walking on the slope, breathing in, walking through the snow, breathing out. Walk, breathe in, walk, breathe out, breathe in. Think about how slipping would be bad, breathe out. Slip, fall, breathe in, breathe out. Think about how bad it is to slip, breathe in. Freeze, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Snow in every minuscule crevice in your clothes and in your shoes, breathe in. Snow down the back of your neck, snow on your wrists, snow in your ears and mouth, breathe out. Think, You’ll never be able to get back up, breathe in. Get up. Breathe out, breathe in.
51
We are finding it increasingly hard to put the characteristics of our bodies that distinguish us from one another into words. Concepts like character or personality no longer have any meaning in our little group. Conversations mostly revolve around establishing daily necessities: who’ll get water, who’ll make a fire, who’ll find a dead animal for us to eat? The answers to these questions are ‘me’, ‘you’ or ‘him’, rarely anything so romantic as a proper name. Other questions become rarer. We have become a single will distributed among several bodies, and beyond the portion of that will that each of us carries there is no room in our minds for anything else.
The will to live.
52
When it is dark, we try to walk quietly. We don’t know why exactly. We have never encountered anyone either by day or at night who might have heard our footsteps or been a threat to us, and by day we always just walk the way we walk. Because we can see that there isn’t anything. At night we can’t see anything, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing there. And so we move through the blackness, arms stretched out in front of us, trying not to step in places where there are twigs and branches that might crack. We have no idea where those places are.
Presumably the only thing keeping us together in single file now is our shared familiarity with the words that we have used with similar frequency and in similar ways for decades. Mum, dad, God, Hitler, De Bello Gallico, the second binomial formula, foreign trade balance and the citric acid cycle, depending on what we studied – it wasn’t really until uni that we began to drift away from one another, each of us pursuing the path that we assumed would lead to happiness, or money. We
were always confident we would be able to turn around at any time, just let go, and then we would be back to what there was before there was what there is: us.
Us, so fearless.
Us, so full of laughter.
Us, with the coolest trainers in the whole school.
Us in the car cruising down Hansastraße: how much for a blowjob, and what if these four boys want to watch? Fuck off.
Us, confused: when did it start being alcoholism, when did it stop being just partying? All those times we stayed up all night, all those buckets of vodka Red Bull, the Weißwurst breakfasts where each of us had only one sausage but four beers.
Us, so clever, so stylish, so elegant, taking our parents’ season tickets to hear Smetana or Mussorgsky. So inventive, with our stag nights full of love and lots of feeling, surprises, abductions, costumes, parachuting and of course a stripper at the club at night.
Us men.
Us boys.
Us children.
Us, on our way home from school, on a Friday, talking enthusiastically about the eyes and hair and clothes of the girls in our class, about lines from rap songs, about football players, about cars we would never be able to afford, about parental subsidies for driving lessons, about how it was Friday, about the party we would be going to, later, see you at eight.
Us, on the bike path through the fields at sunset, somewhere between the beer garden and the youth centre. Us, pedalling ever faster. Us, one by one, breaking into the darkness of the forest, with nothing but the wind in our wide-open eyes.
Us, guided safely by our cries.
53
In a clearing, red, yellow and blue shipping containers are strewn across the forest floor, rust creeping up the sides from below. They are locked. My heart begins to race. This could be something decisive. These things, in this place, what’s inside them; us, aimless, hungry and cold, in a situation we cannot properly describe because we don’t know enough about it, and probably never will. Which is bad, very bad. But this here could be something good, something that could save us. Something warm, soft. Something beautiful. Of course it could also be disappointing. Something unsettling, or horrible. Something terrible, or else completely insignificant. Either way: it could be something.
Why haven’t they already been opened? Gruber asks, before he spots the padlocks, and I wish I still had the hammer. More than I wish we still had Golde.
We need a rock.
So we look. For a rock. In the middle of the forest. In the forest you can find wood, fir needles, the occasional abandoned fridge, but not usually rocks. Not a rock big enough to smash a padlock.
Give it here.
Gruber inspects the stone I’ve found under a root. It’s about an inch across. He holds it with the tips of his fingers and knocks it on the padlock on the first container – Hamburg Süd – pats it more like, tock-tock. It sounds like he’s using the brass knocker on an old villa in Blankenese. He stops. He makes a fist around the stone, holding it so that a piece of it sticks out between his index and middle finger. A tiny piece of stone, a hint of the universal symbol of hardness. He strikes the lock carefully, meaning that he doesn’t really strike it, he tries to move his fist with the stone towards the lock in such a way that the stone makes contact with it but his flesh does not. On his first attempt, he succeeds. On his second as well. On the third, which is harder, the first real strike, we do not hear the sound of stone on steel, but rather just a dull thud. Gruber cries out and jumps away, rubbing his hand.
From the forest comes the sound of something being dragged. Panting, a groan, the sound of branches being stepped on till they break, the small ones right away, the thicker ones only after a while. Then more panting, dragging, splashing and the reverberation of metal.
Give me a hand with this.
Drygalski drags a fridge out into the clearing. We bend over, our backs creaking, this isn’t the way to lift something, then our knees creak too, and the dirty white shimmering block of metal glides towards the middle of the clearing, towards the container, towards the padlock.
The noise is impressive. The impact reverberates for a long time inside the container, and it seems unfair that the noise we have made should already be where we want to be but can’t. Not yet. Another blow. Another blow. And another. The fridge falls on the grass with a dull thud. We pick it back up and smash it against the lock, actually hitting it this time for a change, the next two times we don’t, and then we drop the fridge again and we leap to one side, getting our tired legs out of harm’s way. Our knees creak. We pick it back up, bang it against the container again, and this time the lock breaks. We don’t really dare to open the door. Golde is dead. Fürst got left behind. And Gruber and Drygalski aren’t sure, so I raise the latch and carefully pull on the door. It swings open surprisingly easily. In the dim light we see something white, lots of white, boxes, blocks of white, faintly gleaming, metallic, with rounded edges. Refrigerators. A whole container’s worth.
Later, a fire. There has to be a fire, there always has to be a fire when you have nothing to do besides carrying on exactly as before. The light in which civilisations are built and torn down. Really we ought to be dancing, but, as is so often the case, the euphoria is just in the mind. Just a word.
It wasn’t easy getting the fire started, but the warnings printed on the packaging gave us hope and determination, and in the end it worked with the coolant from the compressors. In silence we wait for an explosion, probably because that’s what happens on television. We have to keep moving because of smoke from the polyurethane insulation and the vinyl chloride lining gets in our noses. There is no explosion. When it gets dark, we can see the glow of the fire inside the open container on the surrounding trees, a reddish-yellow quivering square at the edge of the clearing, like a door to a better, warmer forest.
At dawn Drygalski shakes me by the shoulder and then Gruber, and then we get up. Come with me, he says, and we go right up to the container, which now has just a trickle of smoke coming out of it, and then he goes and stands with his back against the side of the container and folds his hands to give Gruber a leg up, and then me, and then Gruber and I both pull Drygalski up, and nothing has ever felt better than these hands holding on to each other tightly. Tired from pulling ourselves and each other up, we lie on our backs and breathe deeply. The sky above us is grey, but so beautiful, particularly because we can feel the metal underneath us. It is still warm.
And then. The repeated One more time. The eternal
54
Once again. The parting of the eyelids. The intake of breath. The partial firing of the most essential and, for the moment, the only available areas of the brain. The sense of belonging to a species that is condemned to believe that belonging to this species makes it something special. Having to get up. Having to go on living. Wanting to go on living. Having to want to go on living. The fear of one day not being able to go on living. The first step. The force of gravity. The exhalation of carbon dioxide. The pointless knowledge of one’s own existence wrapped like cotton wool around the world. The daily wonder at the existence of things.
Shall we go?
Yes.
55
It’s still early in the morning. The sky is clear. We spot a vapour trail. Spot it when we’re still amid the trees, through the widening gaps between the branches at the edge of the forest. We pick up our pace; the gaps grow wider. We step out of the forest, and right then, just as the full expanse of the sky is finally spread out above us again, with that line of white vapour right in the middle, slowly fraying at one end, we see before us an open field buried under a thin, pristine layer of snow.
Let’s write something, says Drygalski. Maybe someone else will come along and see it.
And no one asks what they’re supposed to do, this someone who may or may not come along. Whether they’ll try to land, or drop a bomb, or a food crate, or whether they’ll send a rescue team overland. We don’t care. We’re happy to have a plan, something to do, an id
ea leading to deliberate action and the vague recollection of the word ‘sense’ it brings with it, the associated language, letters perhaps, signs that we can write in the snow with our feet, stepping on that white, loose powder, down to the brown, frozen ground, and step by step, from our movements across the canvas of the field there emerges something that is strangely isolated from those movements. Each individual step is still meaningless, as is even the sequence of steps each of us takes. Only our communal choreography, born in our heads, agreed upon in advance and realised together in accordance with our synchronised conceptions, has the chance of attaining significance. A last dance, the single message that we leave behind for our saviours, for posterity, or for nothingness.