by Peter Stamm
Most of the men were on to their coffee by now. Astrid went from table to table, asking about Thomas. Over their food, the workers had been joking and laughing and Astrid was worried they would make fun of her and her questions, but it was as though the men sensed the seriousness and urgency of the matter, and they answered politely and without any inappropriate remarks. You should ask the guys over there, said a young man, whose dark blue fleece was covered with sawdust, pointing to a group in orange overalls, they’re from the building site on the main road. The road workers were no less friendly. A small fat man with a bushy beard, presumably their foreman, looked at the picture for a long time before shaking his head and passing it on to a colleague. Have any of you seen him? The landlady had stepped up to the table and looked at the picture over the shoulder of one of the road workers. Is there a hotel in the village? asked Astrid. The Post restaurant has a couple of rooms for guests, said the landlady. And up in Stalden there’s the Alpenblick, and a dormitory in the pass. The radio was playing a popular hit.
After drawing a similar blank at the Post and the Alpenblick, Astrid decided to drive up to the pass. The road was single-lane — it was lucky there were a number of passing places. Astrid was perplexed by the many sports cars coming the other way. Most of them had German plates. She had cracked open the window, and cold, fresh mountain air was coming in.
Fairly near the top, two bearded cowherds were coming down the road with twenty head of cattle, and she was forced to reverse back to the last passing place. The animals trotted past her with loudly clanging cowbells, and the men acknowledged her with a silent nod that had something surly about it. Astrid thought it was early for them to be going down the mountain, then she remembered the forecast had been for snow above six thousand feet.
At the pass, there was a croft with attached café and store. Behind the plain buildings in a fenced-in pasture stood about a hundred cattle, along with a few men and women who were separating them in different groups. The scene had nothing of the joyousness of the Alpine descents with which Astrid was familiar from tourist brochures and cheese commercials; there were no colorful costumes or flower-decked cows, just two heavily laden horses grazing at the edge of the pasture and a small herd of goats.
Astrid parked on the gravel. She was wearing a sweater, but she still felt cold. Dark clouds were massing in the sky, and she could almost smell the coming snow.
Only two of the tables were occupied in the large room. There was a couple at one, a man and a woman of Astrid’s age, both in biker gear and with their helmets on the table, and at the other there were four people playing cards, locals, to go by their dialect. A girl was serving at the bar, terribly shy, giving monosyllabic replies to Astrid’s questions, before finally saying she’d go and get her mother. It felt like much later when a wiry compact woman with black hair emerged. She was wearing rough work clothes and rubber boots. First she looked at the picture of Thomas, then at Astrid. Finally she said, Yes, the man spent the night here, and left in the morning. We have a little dormitory room under the eaves. Is he your husband? she asked. Come with me. She took Astrid to a table away from the other guests, and called to her daughter to bring two cups of coffee and to let her father know she’d be coming soon. I was just on my way to the cowshed, she said apologetically to Astrid. Now tell me about it. My name’s Bernadette. Astrid told her the whole story—she couldn’t say why. The farmer’s wife listened patiently, asked a couple of questions, and gave from time to time a word or two of comfort. When Astrid was finished, Bernadette had neither comment nor advice for her. She just put her hand on Astrid’s forearm and asked if she wanted more coffee. Then she told her what little there was to tell. Astrid’s husband had come in late yesterday afternoon and had asked about the possibility of staying the night. She had put him up in the dorm room, he was the only occupant. He had eaten his dinner here, but not said much. Astrid asked how Thomas seemed to her. Bernadette thought for a moment. Friendly, she said, quiet. A bit distant. No, he hadn’t said where he was going, she said, but if he came up the Wägi, then he was sure to be headed for the Muota valley, that was a popular hike. No one’s seen him there, said Astrid. Of course there’s other ways he could have taken, said the farmer’s wife. She couldn’t remember what time Thomas had set out. He had breakfasted late and paid up. Then she had driven down into the valley to shop, and when she came back at noon or thenabouts, and looked up in the dorm, he was gone. She asked if there was anything else she could do for Astrid. She had to go and milk the cows now.
Astrid walked across the flat upland plain. There were only half as many cows now on the pasture as there had been a moment ago. Where the gradient started to pick up, there was a small open chapel. Astrid spent a long time looking at Christ on the Cross. Her grandmother would have prayed for help; her mother would have crossed herself and had some vague feeling that help was at hand in her extremity. For Astrid it was just a piece of wood and metal.
Down on the road, there were the usual yellow signposts pointing in all directions. Astrid read off the names of the places: Bödmeren, Twärenen, Eigeliswald, Vorauen, Charental, Silberen, Dräckloch. There were dozens of paths Thomas could have taken. Briefly she thought about setting off somewhere at random, just so as not to stand around helplessly anymore. But it was almost four o’clock and about to snow. She could feel the energy that had fired her on from the moment she had gotten up now draining out of her.
The public room was empty when Thomas walked in. Next to the bar was a glass case with Alpine cheese and other milk products. He cleared his throat and sat down at a table to wait. Finally, a rather short, slim woman with black hair walked in, greeted him, and approached his table. There was something Slavic about her, and Thomas thought about the Russian troops who had been this way a couple of hundred years ago. He ordered coffee. When the woman brought it to him, he asked about a room. All they had was the dormitory room, she said, but he was the only guest so far. Dinner was at seven. Thomas watched her as she walked back to the bar and disappeared through the door at the back. She might have been wearing rubber boots, but she moved with a grace that seemed out of keeping with a place like this.
He sipped his coffee and browsed in the local paper that was lying on the table. A while later, the woman came back and said she could show him the lodgings now. She led him past the kitchen and up a narrow set of steps to the attic. In the low, gabled space there were about a dozen narrow mattresses laid out on the floor, with folded gray army blankets on them and pillows in red-and-white-checked slips. A little daylight came in through a narrow window at the front. A single low-watt electric bulb hung over the door. It was cool up here, and there was a clean sour smell of milk and dust and hay. The landlady said again that dinner was at seven and went down. Thomas made up a bed for himself on the mattress under the window. It was just after six, and he lay down and listened to the sounds coming up from downstairs. Shortly before seven he could hear the clatter of silverware, and he went downstairs.
In the public room a long table had been set for ten people, and a little way off, a table for one. Thomas sat down there and watched as the big table filled. The farmer and four children were joined by a young man and an old man, while the farmer’s wife and a plump young woman did the serving. The young woman brought Thomas his dinner and wished him a good appetite. He was starving and began to eat right away, while the group at the long table joined hands and the farmer spoke a blessing so quietly it was as though he felt ashamed in the presence of the unknown guest. For a while after that, nothing could be heard but the scrape and clatter of knives and forks. Only gradually voices joined in the sounds of eating, someone asking for a dish or the tea, the young man made a joke, the plump girl retorted, the farmer’s wife intervened. Thomas could barely understand half of what was being said, but for the first time since he had set off, he felt lonely. All the time he was walking, he felt oblivious of himself, and whenever he thought of Astrid and the kids, he was with them. Now h
e had the painful sensation of no longer belonging to a community, that he was a stranger in this small, familiar world. One setting at the long table had remained free, and he imagined what would have happened had he sat there, and held hands with his neighbors, and said grace with them, and ate and drank and later helped clear the table and do the washing up. In an upland farm an extra pair of hands was always welcome.
Flies buzzed around his table, and irritably he kept having to shoo them away. No sooner had he put down his silverware than three of them alighted on his empty plate. He had ordered a half liter of red. He could feel the alcohol take effect and didn’t finish the jug. He looked at his half-empty glass and remembered that other one he had left outside his house four days ago now. As he stood up, he momentarily lost his balance and had to cling to the back of his chair. He wished everyone a good night, and walked around the long table and up the stairs to bed.
It had been warm in the public room, but the temperature upstairs had plummeted, and even though Thomas spread three of the dampish wool blankets over him, it was a long time before he stopped feeling cold. The voices from downstairs seemed louder now. Then there was another bout of plate rattling, footsteps, and somewhat later, from another corner of the building, a radio and running water, and somewhere else again, the banging of a door and distant shouts.
Thomas woke early the next day, but he couldn’t force himself to get up and drifted off again. When he awoke the second time, it was after nine. Over the past few nights, he’d had all sorts of dreams, some of them almost waking dreams, and during the day too he had been pursued by images, fantasies that seemed more real than the landscapes he was passing through. But this last night he had dreamed nothing at all, and while he washed himself at the small basin in the passageway, he felt that outside of this one moment, the dusty smell, the running water, the distant sounds from the cowshed and the kitchen, the gloomy light, and the cold of the metal tap as he turned it off, nothing else existed.
In the public room the shy little girl was about to sweep the floor. His breakfast was already on the table, and when Thomas sat down, the girl silently brought him a thermos of coffee and a small jug of warm milk. When he asked to settle up, she called her mother, who was busier than she had been the day before and didn’t say much either. Thomas didn’t dare leave a tip. He said thank you and went up to pack. It was after ten when he hit the trail.
The narrow path zigzagged up the slope. Here and there were a few fir trees dotted about, but the higher Thomas climbed, the barer the vegetation grew. Lines of rock showed through the slope. The gray-brown pastureland was full of humps and hollows, in some of the dips cotton grass grew out of the boggy ground, in others tarns had formed in whose water clumping strands of narrow leaves, some two or three feet long, seemed to hang like the hair of drowned women. The sky had clouded over, in the scattered light the karst looked almost white, the water in the tarns bottomless and black.
It was very quiet, only when Thomas was quite a long way up, he could hear dogs barking and cowbells far below, and when he turned to look, he saw a great herd of goats and cows being driven in the direction of the pass. Bringing up the rear were two horses with packsaddles piled high. Thomas sat down on a rock until the column had passed around a promontory, and silence returned.
As he climbed and climbed, he had a sense of going backward in time. Flowers that had withered at the altitude of the pass were in full bloom up here, some hadn’t even opened yet. The flatter the terrain, the more difficult the going became. The cracked and furrowed limestone karst resembled a petrified sea. All over the broken rock were cracks, some of them measuring several yards in width and depth. In other places there were gentle slopes that suddenly fell away or culminated in narrow ridges and crests that Thomas had to cross on all fours. The sharp rocks scratched his hands and cut into his knees.
Progress was exhausting, and Thomas was forced to stop repeatedly to catch his breath, but he wanted to get on and waited until it was afternoon before taking a break to eat. The sky was now thickly clouded, and the light so uncertain that it no longer cast a shadow. When he got up to move on, he no longer knew which way he had come. He tried to orient himself by the panorama, but the peaks all looked the same, stacked one behind the other in every direction. He chose one and decided to keep heading toward it until he encountered a path. He was now totally concentrated on the terrain, every step, every handhold, as though he were in slow motion. He was trapped in a labyrinth of rock, but the vague fear he felt was not so much to do with that as with the thought that even if he should find a path, he would still be lost.
The cloud layer had come down and obscured the peaks. A cold wind chased scraps of mist across the plateau. The rocks seemed to be a little less fissured here, and Thomas stepped out, he needed to find a path before the fog closed in and made orientation impossible. He quivered even before he was aware of the crash, a wild fluttering and at the same moment something gray beside his foot, a panic movement. He pulled his foot back, lost his balance, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a gray bird fly away, before, overbalancing, he spun around and a crevasse opened before him. He rowed with his arms fumbling for support. For a moment he had the sensation of flying.
That morning, for the first time, Astrid became aware that Thomas was with her all along. Whatever she was doing, she had felt his eye on her, with every decision his agreement or disapproval. In the course of the last few days she had often felt as though she were acting for him, he the director telling her what to do, with one of those looks he had occasionally sent her way and that over the years she had learned to read. He had tolerated her behavior with the policeman with a smile; he had never been one for jealousy and had taken Astrid’s occasional flirting with other men with an amused tolerance or a plain indifference that had offended her. He had always been certain of her, more than she of him, even though she would have been unable to come up with any grounds for doubting him. Maybe, she thought, her love was less strong than his, maybe her doubts regarding him were actually doubts of her own love.
Sometimes she felt he was far away, then he was standing behind her, and so close that she had the sensation of feeling the warmth of his body. She withstood the temptation to turn around and look for him. What shall I do? she asked him. Do you want me to look for you? Shall I follow you? Is it that you’re waiting for me somewhere? Or shall I pretend nothing has happened? Do you need time? How much time? He didn’t answer. Now even Manuela would have been welcome to Astrid with her clichés and her cheap comfort, but she had left last night, after telling herself a dozen times that her sister-in-law was doing better now, and that she would get through and no longer needed her help.
Astrid got up and went out onto the landing. There was the plastic bag with Thomas’s clothes and shoes that the police had found in the shopping mall and delivered during the course of the day, while Astrid had been in the mountains looking for him. She felt the officials were making fun of her. Look, this is what’s left of your husband, a crumpled shirt and a filthy pair of pants. Thus far, Thomas’s disappearance had been in some way abstract, his absence not really different than when he’d been away at work or at his handball practice sessions. These discarded things were the first physical proof that he had taken himself out of their life together, that he would not return, and, naked as a newborn, had embarked on a new life alone. Astrid stuffed the old shoes and clothes into the trash, where Thomas had left them. But that wasn’t enough. Though it was only half full, she took the bag out of the trash can, knotted it up, and carried it across to the school building, where the waste container stood. The idea that it would be picked up next week and put in the furnace along with the other stuff had something liberating about it.
The children were still asleep when she got back. Normally, she let them lie in on weekends, but she still felt the sense of being abandoned that she’d had when she woke up, so she went up to be with them. She slipped into bed with Ella and spooned with her.
Her daughter’s hair tickled her nose. Did you have a good sleep? she whispered. Ella yawned and stretched, and turned out of Astrid’s embrace onto her back. Even though the girl tended to take after Thomas more, Astrid recognized herself in the movement. She lay there in the narrow bed and stretched luxuriously. The sky outside was cloudy, no one was about to send her out into the fresh air. Two days of lounging around in bed or on the sofa, reading and watching TV. Then she remembered her father, and her mother. She tried to think of something else, a book she’d read, plans she’d made with a girlfriend. Buying an old farmhouse with stables, keeping horses and chickens and rabbits, and having a lot of cats and a dog. Then they would live together, just the two of them, and do something amazing—she didn’t have any precise idea of what it would be, but the whole world would love and admire her for it. Then from downstairs she heard her mother’s voice, Get up, come along, you’ll be late for school. But it was Saturday. And she hadn’t had to go to school for years and years now. Ella turned away from Astrid, and pressed against her. What shall we do? asked Astrid. What about getting a dog? replied Ella.
Astrid had been afraid the children would be less able to cope with Thomas’s absence than she, but it turned out to be the opposite. On that Saturday morning she had told them their father was doing fine, but that he would be gone for an unspecified time. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with them, or with the family, it was a simple necessity. If their father had been a ship’s captain, it would be completely normal for him to be gone for two or three months at a time. That idea seemed to make sense to the children: Their father was on a big trip, having adventures and seeing different parts of the world. And all the time he was thinking about them every day, and if he had been able to, then he would have sent them postcards too, or texts, or called them. But where he was, there were no postcards, no stamps, no mailboxes. And he had gone without his cell phone. Sometimes Konrad drew pictures of his father on a pirate ship, or a desert island, or at the top of a high mountain. When Astrid mentioned Thomas to them, both children reacted surprisingly apathetically, as though their chief interest was not to be robbed of their fantasies, even though they secretly knew that that’s what they were.