by Peter Stamm
The secretary from Thomas’s place of work called several times and asked how he was doing, and if there wasn’t a doctor’s note. Finally Astrid was forced to make an appointment with his boss. When she walked in on the morning in question, the secretary greeted her with a hesitant smile and asked if Thomas was doing better. Astrid shook her head, and the secretary started talking about her mother’s shingles again.
Thomas’s boss hadn’t been there for long. His predecessor had gone into retirement just a year ago, and there had been considerable competition for his job. In fact, the only one not to throw his hat into the ring had been Thomas, who said he’d rather work with his clients than deal with various personnel issues. In the end, the old boss had brought in an outsider to succeed him. The situation had resolved itself, but the new boss was not popular. Astrid felt relieved that she didn’t have to talk to one of Thomas’s long-term associates, most of whom she knew and with whose wives she went on company trips and other jollies.
The boss jumped up and stepped out to greet Astrid. Shall we sit at the low table? Would you like some coffee? Astrid declined and dropped into one of the low chairs around the table. Thomas has disappeared, she said quickly, to get it behind her. The boss looked at her inquiringly. What do you mean disappeared? Astrid explained the situation to him. She was surprised at how cool she sounded. The boss remained perfectly practical and offered no reaction. He suggested not telling any of the others for the moment. We’ll just say he’s sick. He won’t be gone forever, after all. He’s not coming back, said Astrid. The boss looked at her, as though he thought that was her wish. I’m sure he’s not coming back, she said. Well, let’s just wait and see for now, said the boss. We’ll continue to pay his salary during the normal severance period. And so long as it’s not more than a month or two, we can treat the whole thing as time out, a sabbatical. In view of Thomas’s long service, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that.
Astrid hadn’t even thought about the money. While she slunk through reception, hoping not to run into the secretary again, she calculated that by November at the latest the company would stop paying his salary. Thomas had always dealt with their money matters, after all that was his job. He didn’t earn badly, but they hadn’t any great savings salted away, and there was a mortgage on the house.
Astrid spent the rest of the morning trying to gain an insight into their financial position and to estimate how long they would manage to survive on their reserves. The sums left her confused and frightened, until eventually she scooped up all the papers and stuffed them back into Thomas’s desk drawer.
What she would most have liked would be if no one else had known about Thomas’s disappearance. But of course Manuela had to mention it to her parents. Thomas’s mother had phoned. She didn’t even seem to be that alarmed. In the course of a long and mostly nonsensical conversation, she tried to apologize for her son’s behavior. She related episodes from his childhood that Astrid had heard dozens of times, talked about Thomas’s problems with authority, his thick skull, his obstinacy, as though Astrid didn’t know all that herself, and as though it could explain anything. At the end of their conversation, Thomas’s mother claimed that he would be back soon, and it was all just a misunderstanding, probably. Astrid didn’t even bother to argue with her. If we can do anything to help, she said. Thank you, said Astrid, I’ll call you if I need anything. After that she heard nothing more from Thomas’s parents. Manuela called from time to time offering her help and sending her best wishes from the parents. We’re fine, said Astrid, thanks all the same, but we’re doing fine. She hadn’t told her own parents anything, and one time when visiting them, she dinned it into the children not to say anything either. Astrid’s mother asked how Ella and Konrad would like to spend a few days in the fall vacation with them. The children were thrilled, but Astrid rudely turned down the offer. Are you going away then? asked her mother. I don’t know yet, said Astrid, we don’t know.
Patrick hadn’t called since the aborted search. So Astrid was surprised to see him standing outside the door one afternoon in late September with a solemn expression on his face. Even before she could ask him inside, he said, We’ve found him.
Thomas’s initial sensation was of a burning pain. Thereafter cold and damp. He was lying bent double on a sloping surface, his whole body hurt. He tried not to move, producing in his mind an index of everything that hurt him, from superficial things that felt like scrapes and cuts, to his throbbing ankle and shoulder, and a deafening pain in his head, dull sensations in his hands and feet, which felt like shapeless lumps. Then there were little pinpricks of snowflakes falling on his face, tiny contacts. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was lying on a wide and fairly deep shelf of rock. He must have fallen twelve or fifteen feet. The slice of sky over him was gray with falling snow and the oncoming dark. It was eerily quiet. Thomas thought about the snow grouse that had caused his fall. He asked himself how it managed to survive in such bleak country, where it found anything to eat in winter when everything was covered with snow, how and where it spent its time. Cautiously he twisted his head first one way then the other, and as he did so, he realized he was lying on the little mossy, ferny spot he had glimpsed while falling. Next to him was a little outcrop of rock, and the crack narrowed and led on down. Everything was thinly covered with snow, his jacket was ripped, and there were dark bloodstains on his pants. Cautiously he pulled himself up, moved first his arms, then his legs. He seemed not to have any major injuries. His ankle was swollen, but presumably sprained, not broken. He had abrasions over a wide area but no deep wounds. His head hurt, possibly he had a concussion. He kept thinking he might easily have died, but he pushed the thought away in order to be able to concentrate on the moment and on the danger in which he still found himself. When he stood up, he felt so dizzy that he had to grab hold of the cold rock. He swung his arms back and forth like pendulum weights until the feeling returned to his hands. His first impulse was to climb out of the crack right away, but after brief reflection, he decided to spend the night down here, where he would at least be slightly protected from the weather. He wouldn’t have been able to go for long in the dark over the karst with his damaged ankle. If he pressed himself right up against the cliff, he was hidden under a small overhang. He spread his rain jacket over him, and ate bread and dried fruit and a whole bar of chocolate. He didn’t drink much, though, he needed to economize on his water, he only had half a flask. After eating, he rolled himself up and tried to sleep. The heavy snowflakes landed on the thin material of his jacket with faint sounds like little sighs.
He spent the greater part of the night in a state between sleeping and waking. His mind was churning, images surfaced that were more like dreams, and then for moments at a time he knew only pain and cold and exhaustion. His jacket grew heavy with snow. Thomas tried to think of home, his warm bed, Astrid and the kids. But the scenes escaped him, he saw mountains lit from within under a starless sky, he flew up never-ending sheer surfaces, so close to the rock that he could make out the tiniest details. He was sustained by an air current that picked him up and dropped him, but even when he fell he didn’t lose control, he fell and fell down along the vertical wall. Then he was suddenly wide awake and could feel only cold and pain and the hard rock beneath. He had to get up and move around. He pushed back the jacket and saw that it had stopped snowing. It was completely dark in his little crevasse, but there were stars in the sky. He took the headlamp out of his rucksack and saw that his watch had stopped at half past seven. It must have been damaged in the fall, the casing was scratched and the glass cracked. Although there were no indications that the night was nearly over, he began to clamber up the wall. His headlamp lit only a small circle that trembled up and down in front of him. He climbed slowly and cautiously, testing every hold before trusting it. The rock was wet and slippery, snow had settled on little ledges and in cracks that now burned his fingertips. It took a long time before he reached the top and hauled himself up o
ver the rim. He knelt in the snow and directed the beam of his light like a searchlight in the nearest vicinity. Then he switched it off, to force his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
The starry sky was of an overpowering beauty, the stars seeming to vibrate with cold. Even though there was a half-moon the barren waste of the landscape was surprisingly easy to see, it was as though the snow was giving off a pallid illumination. Even so, Thomas set himself to wait for it to get light before moving off.
The terrain was still gently uphill. Thomas wanted to reach the highest point, where he would surely find a marker. No more than six or eight inches of snow had come down overnight, but it was enough to make progress appreciably harder than the day before. The snow blanketed the uneven terrain, and small hollows and cracks were barely discernible. The sun had yet to crest the horizon, but the sky was already light. The snow had lost its luminosity, it just looked gray now, and much darker than in the night. His sprained ankle hurt, and Thomas walked very slowly, stopping frequently. Finally, on the horizon before him, he saw a cairn of stones. He felt so relieved that for a moment all strength drained out of him, and he almost sank to his knees. On the wide plateau there were several six-foot piles of rock like sentries staring out in all directions. From the tallest of them a rusty iron cross poked out, and next to it were yellow markers, one of which pointed him back down to the pass, another to an upland farm an hour away. Between two stones in the cairn was a discolored tin can that contained a summit book—a simple ring binder and a ballpoint pen. Thomas turned the pages of the binder. Some climbers had just entered their name and the date, others made a note of the route they had walked, while others again had offered a comment: the beauty of God’s earth, we’ll be back, fog all day, reached the top much too late. The newest entry was a week old, just a single name in spidery handwriting. Thomas tried to work out what day of the week it was, but he couldn’t be sure, and finally just put his name.
As he was descending to the farm, the sun rose and it got so bright that he had to shut his eyes against the glare. Farther down, where the limestone scree gradually gave way to pastureland and the terrain flattened out, the snow was only half as deep as on the exposed summit, and in some places he saw bunches of grass poking through it.
It took him twice as long to the alp as the marker had promised. Finally, though, he saw a long cow barn and a small hut beside it, which he soon reached. The lower floor was of quarry stone, the wood above was old and weathered, only the fiber-cement roof seemed to have been replaced recently. The windows were shuttered, but the door wasn’t bolted. Hesitantly, Thomas stepped in. It was colder inside than out. It took a while for his eyes to get used to the dark. Even after he had pushed open all the shutters, it didn’t make much difference.
The hut seemed to have been abandoned for the winter. He looked around. The room was sparsely furnished, apart from a table with a corner bench and a few chairs, there was a two-ring gas cooker and a kitchen unit above it. Thomas hoped he might find something to eat, but the cupboard contained only a few spice jars, a box of sugar cubes, some packets of various teas and a half-full jar of Nescafé. Next to the table was a wood-burning stove, in a corner a large wooden chest containing blankets, some items of clothing, and various odds and ends in sealed plastic boxes. Above it was a wall shelf with maps, walking guides, books on the flora and fauna of the region, and a few novels. There were also board games, a set of playing cards, and a leather tumbler with a pair of dice. On the walls there was a walking map of the area, a few children’s drawings, and photographs, all showing the same woman, now sitting in the sun outside the hut, now scaling a rock, now milking a goat, now herding a few cows. In the back wall of the hut was a locked door. Thomas went through the chest and the kitchen cupboard and finally found the key in an old cracked cup full of thumbtacks and rubber bands.
The back room was even darker. From there a steep flight of steps led upstairs where there was a tiny bedroom on the mountain side, and at the front a slightly bigger one. The mattresses had been stood up against the wall, the woolen blankets hanging on lines. Climbing back down he noticed a second door, behind which was a chemical toilet and a big wooden box resembling a sea chest. He lifted the lid and saw by the light of his lighter all kinds of dry goods, rice, noodles, sugar, salt, cans with vegetables, and even meat. There were some bottles of wine, and three one-liter bottles containing a clear liquid; according to the handwritten labels these contained träsch, the local fruit brandy.
Thomas went out into the open to look around. Slightly above the hut was a small lake; the water was perfectly clear, but he couldn’t see the bottom. The cow barn, which was slightly below the hut, was narrow but fully thirty yards in length. In the hayloft, Thomas found fence posts and staples with rolls of yellow twine and a big pile of kindling. He carried an armload of wood back into the hut and lit a fire in the stove. But it wouldn’t draw, no sooner had Thomas lit it than the room filled with acrid smoke. He threw open the door and windows. Outside he saw that up on the roof, a plank had been laid across the chimney opening.
By noon there was a fire going in the stove, and the hut was toasty warm. Thomas was eating noodles with a ready-made tomato sauce he had found in the food chest. After lunch he sat on the bench outside the hut in the sun. Again, he was amazed by the absolute silence. From the east, clouds were getting up.
In the afternoon Thomas lugged as much wood as he could carry into the hut. He was still at work when it began to snow, and it was still snowing when he stepped outside late at night, to smoke one of his last cigarettes. He had spent the evening drawing up a list of all the food he had. He had drunk some of the powerful träsch, which had gone to his head in no time at all. As he climbed the steps to bed, he had to grab hold of the balustrade so as not to fall.
The ice-cold bedroom was so tiny that Thomas had the sense he was lying in a box. Though tired and a little drunk, he couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. He lay in bed, staring into the darkness. When he shut his eyes, everything seemed to spin, and he saw this image in his mind’s eye: himself lying at the bottom of the crevasse, spread-eagled and with shattered limbs. It was as though he was a long way up, staring down at the torpid body lying there, covered with snow and with an unnatural smile etched into the rigid face, the smile of a dead man.
Among all the thoughts that filled Astrid’s mind in the next few days, there was one that never let go of her: that this was not necessarily real, rather just one among many possibilities. Sometimes she thought it was something she had in her power, to decide in favor of one or other of these possibilities. Thomas’s death was the simplest because it was so specific, so unambivalent and clear. A hiker loses his footing, takes a fall, and is dead on the spot. How many times she had seen such reports in the papers without really taking them in. And then every year the statistics of deaths in the Alps, neatly compiled, a hundred and fifty, two hundred incidents, distributed among the various types of accident, rockfall, icefall, avalanche, slip.
Thomas had fallen, no one could say quite how or why. Presumably he had died as a result of his fall. Perhaps not right away, perhaps he had bled to death, or frozen or died of thirst, the autopsy would provide clarity on that. It had snowed overnight, an early onset of winter of the sort that was not unusual at that altitude. Snow had sheeted over the corpse, but after a few icy days there was a break in the weather, the snow melted, and huntsmen had found the body. If a shred of his jacket hadn’t got caught at the rim of the crevasse, he might never have been found, or not for fifty or a hundred years, when Astrid and even the children would be long gone.
All the details were in the police report, the place, date, and time of the find, even the names and addresses of those who had made it. There was confirmation that Thomas had spent the night before the accident in the dormitory on the pass and had entered his name in the summit log. It must have been during the descent, perhaps he had gained his objective and had turned around and was on his way home. Later,
there would be more detailed medical reports, the manner and gravity of his injuries, the presumed cause of death. There was a body that had been found by people with names, professions, and families; there were clothes and shoes and a rucksack with food and a few pieces of hiking gear. All these were facts being brought to bear, but what did they signify? Anything, the merest trifle, and everything could have happened differently. If, on that last day of the vacation, Thomas and not Astrid had gone up to see to Konrad, if she had checked the banking transactions earlier, if the police dog had had more stamina. The tiniest detail, the least circumstance was enough to split reality in two, in four, eight, sixteen versions, into an unending number of worlds.
Thomas had disappeared a month ago. From the very beginning, Astrid had sensed he wasn’t coming back. His death was the simplest solution; it cleared away all possible questions, removed all the issues, the reason for Thomas’s disappearance, the road he had chosen, why he had used his credit card even though he must have known it would lead to his discovery, why he had written his name in the summit log. Nor would anyone now want to hear Astrid’s own confused and contradictory explanations, her lies and evasions. Thomas’s work colleagues would offer their sympathy to the bereaved family, stand around uselessly at the funeral, and at the wake sit at a separate table, swapping stories about him. His parents and Manuela would tell stories, his friends from the handball team, the neighbors, simple stories that were supposed to keep him alive, keep his memory green, but in fact over the years would come to stand in for him and finally, ironically, cause him to disappear.