by Peter Stamm
Astrid thought of a different version. Thomas hadn’t died of his fall, he had merely ripped his jacket and sustained a slight injury. He had clambered up out of the crevasse and walked back to the pass. When the huntsmen found the shred of material weeks later, it was nothing of significance. By then Thomas had completely disappeared. She looked for a map to see where he might have gone. There was the pass, on the road map with its scale of one to three hundred thousand, but the area of scree to the southeast was just an expanse of white with some gray shadings to suggest its topography. The names of the peaks, the various altitudes, the names of places and the colored roads, highways, and motorways were just claims, more facts that wouldn’t be translated into any reality and would only make Astrid sad. She folded up the map and closed her eyes. Now she could see Thomas climbing out of the crevasse and walking over the plateau; he was walking with a limp, but he was walking fast. He stopped to eat something at an Alpine hut, and walked on over snowy pastures. The track gave way to an unmade road and then a narrow paved mountain road. Thomas was walking through a fir wood down into a valley. The snow had given way to rain, he was freezing, but he was energized by his scrape with death. It was just beginning to get dark when he came to a village, a bleak-looking place in a narrow valley. He found an inn, and ate and drank. The heat wasn’t on in his room, no one was expecting a visitor so late in the day. Even though the landlady had said the rooms were all nonsmoking, there was a smell of cold smoke and air freshener. Thomas switched on the TV and slid under the thick down comforter. The late news came on, reports of conflicts, crises, catastrophes, but nothing could disturb Thomas’s contentment. He was safe and everything to him was delicious, every color, every sound, every word. He was alive.
Thomas awoke with a headache. It was dark in the room, but a few slivers of dazzling light pierced the cracks in the shutters. When he got up, he felt faint and was forced to sit down again. After the dizzy feeling had left him, he got up again and walked slowly and carefully down the stairs. Every step he took seemed to hurt his head. He lit the stove and put water for coffee on the gas burner. He put away the half-empty bottle of träsch; the very sight of it seemed to bring on his headache.
After drinking two cups of coffee with a lot of sugar, he felt better and stepped outside. The sun was shining, but a foot of snow had fallen overnight. Thomas’s footprints from the day before were covered, the landscape shone white and intact, as though it was a new world that had come into being overnight. He started to wonder what it would be like to spend the winter here, with the lake frozen over and snow to a depth of many feet. He would only be able to leave the hut via an upstairs window and couldn’t move without the help of skis or snowshoes. His supplies of food would only keep him for two or three months, and the wood and gas would probably run out long before that. He studied the map on the wall. Even going back to the pass now would be treacherous, with snow blanketing the cloven limestone karst and concealing the holes, and yet not firm enough to take his weight. All he could see around him were mountains and uninhabited valleys, the nearest village was a day’s walk away. He had every reason to feel anxious, but he was happy. The hut didn’t feel like a prison to him; on the contrary, he felt free here in a way he had rarely felt before. And he had the absurd feeling he could survive the winter even without food, so long as he moved quietly and unobtrusively like the animals who stuck it out here, somehow, and lived on god knows what.
The days passed imperceptibly in aimless busywork. Thomas was never short of things to do. He carried wood to the hut, fetched water from the little lake, made sure the fire never went out. He cooked on the gas burner, and after the gas ran out, on the wood-burning stove. He cleaned the hut, got more wood from the cow barn, mixed up dough, and after several failed attempts, managed to bake a sort of flat-bread. It was cold, but when the sun shone, its warmth was so intense that he could sit in front of the hut in his shirtsleeves, whittling crude figures from firewood or reading one of the books he had found. The fantasy worlds of novels did nothing for him, but he studied the books about plant and animal life, and learned that marmots and chamois lived around here, and snow hares, eagles, black grouse, and Alpine snow grouse. The male of the snow grouse, so he was informed, molted four times a year, the female three times. They put such faith in their perfected camouflage that they didn’t take flight until the very last moment, when you were about to step on them, and then they would pretend to be injured, to lure the invader away from the nest. They mimed their injury so well, wrote the author, that even he would fall for it every time. In a book about the valley, Thomas read that hunters must have come into the area shortly after the last ice age. In some of the innumerable caves thousand-year-old animal bones were found, bearing traces of human workmanship. Some of the Alps had been planed away for hundreds of years. The book had stories of folk customs, freak weather events and natural catastrophes, and life in the Alps. Sometimes it might happen, he read somewhere, that herdsmen would forget a goat in the Silberen or be unable to find it. If the animal managed to survive the winter, then, come spring, it would have lost its entire covering of hair through lack of salt.
Thomas hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but he must have been on the mountain for a week when the foehn winds set in, and the temperature leapt up overnight. In the space of a single day the snow almost completely melted away. Everywhere now were the sounds of thaw, a dripping and gurgling from the roof, a plashing and rushing and pouring. In among it were the distant occasional clangs of cowbells from a pasture much lower on the mountain. Once, when he smoked his very last cigarette outside the hut before going to bed, he heard a long-held yelping and shortly afterward the murmured benediction of the Alpsegen.
Every day Thomas had rubbed his sprained ankle with schnapps. The swelling had gone down, the pain had eased, and he felt sufficiently strong to begin to reconnoiter. His circles grew wider by the day. The hut lay at the edge of a flat hollow from whose edge one could see far down into a barren valley. Thomas climbed a narrow side valley, bounded on one side by a tall, apparently unscalable cliff. At its foot was a gigantic scree, and in the valley bottom, perhaps half an hour away, was a substantial lake with turquoise water that was so clear when you approached that you could count the stones on the bottom. By the lake’s edge were scraps of snow, but the water was less cold than Thomas had anticipated. He swam a few strokes and then sat on a rock to dry out. A gentle breeze cooled his skin, burning in the sun. While he ate his pack lunch, he looked around. On the horizon, between the limestone peak in the north and the cliff to the south, there was a crossing, a broad saddle of moraine. After Thomas had rested, he walked on in the direction of the saddle. The path was longer and steeper than he had thought, it was hard to judge distance in the treeless, featureless terrain. Even before he had reached it, he heard a gunshot ricocheting off the rocks and seeming to rumble at him from every side. He scanned the area, but saw no human being, no animal, nothing moving. Even so, he turned around and set off for home. He was almost there when he heard two more shots, one after the other. The last stretch he was almost running. He was afraid the hunter might track him down to his hiding place like a wild animal.
It was as though the hunters’ appearance had broken a spell, Thomas’s feeling of security was gone, and he understood how exposed he was up here. Even if the hunters didn’t find him, it could get cold again at any moment and start snowing, and the next lot of snow would probably stay there and not melt until springtime. That afternoon he took down the chimney and covered the opening in the roof with the piece of board. He closed the shutters and didn’t leave the hut without first peeking through the cracks to check that the coast was clear. In the evening, he packed his rucksack.
Astrid afterward could hardly remember the initial period of grieving. The episodes of it were so visceral and so detached from everything else that she was unable to incorporate them into a chronology of her life. Sadness was like a body of water, indivisible, and s
he kept falling into it. She was incapable of thinking, incapable of feeling, incapable of breath; she dissolved in the heaviness of this other element; nor did time itself have any significance, it seemed not to exist. Nothing could get through to her; her spirit was encapsulated in her body, which continued to function by itself. She looked after the children mechanically, almost without noticing them. Each time that she resurfaced and it was all over, as unexpectedly as it had begun, all that remained in her was a dull sense of exhaustion.
Everyone offered help and support, above all, everyone wanted to talk about it with her: her parents, Thomas’s parents, Manuela, friends, and neighbors. Astrid didn’t want to talk. She did what she had to do, what she was called upon to do. She talked to the minister, organized a funeral, sent out death announcements, replied to letters of condolence. She talked to the authorities, the bank, filled in forms, made calls, put Thomas’s affairs in order. She held on to these concrete tasks, the illusion that even a fatality could be settled, that processes existed that could restore order to chaos. And all the time she had the feeling of watching herself from outside, as though she were playing a part in someone’s movie that had nothing to do with her life.
The children’s grief was more insidious than Astrid’s, but thereby all the more profound, like an illness that over the years almost imperceptibly weakens and finally destroys the human body. The teachers had addressed their classes and asked them to show utmost consideration. Konrad’s classmates had given him a large sheet of paper on which each one of them had drawn a flower and sent him a good wish. Ella had come home with a number of brightly colored notes and had shown some of them to Astrid, awkward sympathy notes, written in glitter pen and plastered with weeping hearts and little stuck-down animal shapes. Ella had looked mutely at her mother, as though to ask what she should do. And they gave me some chocolate as well, said Ella. That’s okay, said Astrid, and put the cards back in their gaudy envelopes. They didn’t mean any harm by it.
With Christmas coming up, and Astrid in reasonable shape, all seemed well. The children drew up lists of Christmas wishes and made presents for their grandparents and godparents. Ella was rehearsing a part in the school nativity play, and Konrad helped Astrid bake cookies. Their disturbance showed itself in different ways, after the holidays were over, during the rain and chill of January and February. Ella read more than ever, and was quieter and quieter. She threw herself into her schoolwork as though her life depended on getting good grades and getting a place in the gymnasium. Meanwhile, Konrad, who had always been a good pupil, seemed to give up and became troublesome, often acting cheeky to his mother and sister, and his teacher.
Sometimes for hours or days on end, they were all one heart and one soul, for instance when they watched a film on TV on Friday evening, or visited the grandparents, when they went on a trip to the Ticino over Easter, to friends who had invited them repeatedly and had been put off time and time again. Then they were able to behave as though this was how it was supposed to be, and they enjoyed themselves. Astrid didn’t notice how many sweets the children ate, how long they played computer games, or what time they went to bed. So long as they were content.
On the advice of the school psychologist, she sent Konrad to a therapist. But it did little to change his behavior, and after a couple of sessions, he refused to go anymore. Only after he’d gone up a grade in the new school year and had a young woman teacher who had only just qualified did he calm down, and his performance started to improve. Joining a judo club and attending twice-weekly practice sessions seemed to help as well. But there was always a shadow hanging over Ella and Konrad, an indefinable air of sadness and reserve. Sometimes Astrid would come upon the children sitting vacantly in their rooms, lost in thoughts they either wouldn’t or couldn’t share with her.
Sometime that summer, as though Astrid’s family and friends had consulted with one another while her back was turned, she felt a growing impatience from her surroundings, some expectation that she settle down, think of herself, and begin to look for a new partner. As if it was her duty to forget Thomas and make a fresh start. Almost a year had passed since his death, she was only forty-four, a good-looking woman, and it would be better for the children too to have a father. They have one, said Astrid. No one seemed to understand that her relationship with Thomas wasn’t over just because he wasn’t around anymore.
Without having intended to, she was living a double life. She got through her day, packed the children off to school, kept the house tidy, cooked, gardened, helped Ella with her homework, which was harder now that she was in secondary school, and took Konrad to judo. She played with the children, chatted with the neighbors, went swimming most mornings when the kids were at school, to plow up and down a few lanes. But in bed at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would think about Thomas and was perfectly sure he wasn’t dead. It was less a thought than a feeling. A thought was something she might have been able to oppose with facts, but this she couldn’t overturn. She didn’t want to either; it helped her more than grief, which made nothing better, explained nothing, was no help and no proof. Her nightly fantasies were no wish-fulfillment images either, invented by her to comfort herself. Thomas was gone, there was no doubting that, but he wasn’t dead. She saw him walking through deserted landscapes, seeking shelter under the jutting eaves of roofs, or in gas stations, or chapels. He was buying food in small general stores, sat in bars all by himself, spent the night in cheap pensions or haylofts. When he needed money, he did temporary work, helped a farmer with the harvest, worked on a chicken farm, did the dishes in a restaurant. After a few weeks he moved on, on foot, never mind the weather.
Once, he was picked up by the police. He had attracted their attention by walking along the highway in the rain. The patrol car had drawn up alongside him, and the officer in the front passenger seat, who resembled Patrick, asked him if everything was all right and asked to see his ID. But Thomas’s name was no longer on the wanted files, for everyone bar Astrid his case was closed.
She didn’t talk to anyone about her fantasies, not because she was afraid they would think she was crazy but because she wanted to keep these scenes to herself, not share them with anyone else. She thought that Thomas was probably alive for Ella and Konrad as well. She had no other explanation for the fact that the children never wanted to talk about their father, and would either go quiet or else run away if Astrid so much as mentioned him. They never wanted to accompany her to the cemetery to tend his grave. The more time passed, the less she believed he was actually there. She felt like a swindler, a cheat, going to tend an empty grave.
She had uprooted a few blown primroses and dropped them in the compost. As she planted fresh heather, she heard Thomas’s voice as though he were standing directly behind her: Don’t bother with that, he said, that’s no good to either of us. Come along. She stood up and left the cemetery, went out onto the street. Only when she reached the station did it dawn on her that this was her childhood village, that the barrier had not yet been replaced by an underpass, that the storehouse that burned down one night was still standing, and so was the old villa next to the post office, with the tangled garden. When Thomas told people about how they had first met, Astrid would always claim that she couldn’t remember, but now she saw the scene distinctly in front of her. It was spring, she had started on her apprenticeship just a few weeks before, and she wasn’t used to the long working days yet. She was in the back room, unpacking the new orders, when the bell rang. Her boss had stepped out to get something, so Astrid went out to serve whoever it was. In the middle of the store — as though he wanted not to get too close to the books — stood a young man, barely older than she was. He went up to the desk and said he was looking for the civil law book and the part about the Code of Obligations. We’d have to order that for you, said Astrid. The boss had briefly walked her through the catalogue of books in print, but she didn’t really know her way around it, and it took her a while before she found it, and fille
d in an order form. She could feel Thomas looking at her, and every time she looked up he was smiling at her and nodding encouragingly. She asked him for his name and address. And then he asked her for hers. Astrid in Wonderland, he said. No, she said, you’re thinking of Alice. Oh, right, he said, I never read it. Me neither, said Astrid, and laughed. But you’d rather read law books anyway, she said, serious things. I won’t read that either, he said, I just need it for the trainee school. What books do you read? The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, said Astrid. What’s that about? Everything under the sun, she said and laughed again. It’s a family history over three generations. It’s not a book men would like. So what would she recommend for him? asked Thomas. She stepped out from behind the desk, and while she led him up to one of the shelves, she played the bookseller. She felt foolish, dancing about in front of him, pulling books off the shelves and telling him the plots, but she couldn’t help herself. In the end, Thomas bought a book, one of the Maigrets that she recommended, after he had told her he liked books with a bit of excitement to them. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just buying it for her sake. Once you’ve read it, will you come and tell me how you liked it?
Thomas spent the winter in the Gotthard area. For the first few days he was put up by a Capuchin monk who was in charge of two small parishes down in the valley. He was a kindly man and very busy. He asked no questions and helped Thomas find work with a carpenter in the village. Thomas wasn’t especially good with his hands, but the carpenter had a large order to fill from a nearby ski resort and was glad of the cheap labor. Thomas found lodgings with an old widow, who let a couple of rooms to long-term tenants. The house was at the bottom of a narrow valley and got practically no sun in the winter. The poorly lit rooms never got properly warm and had a sour dusty smell. The other tenants were a retiree and a young teaching assistant who was just doing her final bit of in-post training. By the time Thomas got off work, it would be dark already, and when he walked into the sitting room and turned on the light, the retiree would often be there. The first time, Thomas thought he must have woken him, but then he noticed that the old fellow liked to sit in the dark fully awake, as though hiding or lying in wait for something or someone. Thomas showered, then he would take a stroll through the village or go up to his room until it was dinnertime. The widow was very parsimonious, forever reminding Thomas to turn off the lights when he left a room, or to switch off the heat at night. In the room beside his was the young teacher, who had introduced herself to him simply as Priska. Over dinner she talked animatedly about her pupils and colleagues. Sometimes the widow would put in, What was the name of that teacher who would let the kids go five minutes early, or, Is the headmaster’s wife still in charge of the library? Then she would inform them that one woman was the daughter of the stationmaster who lived in the yellow house at the end of the village, that his wife was the baker’s sister and had MS, that the teacher’s brother had studied in the seminary in Lucerne but had gotten married and was now working in an advertising agency in Zurich, endless tangled family histories that Thomas instantly got lost in and was left with the impression that everyone here was related by blood or marriage or both. Sometimes the widow would talk about her gifted son, who worked in finance and was living in London. She spoke in raptures about him and his achievements and his huge salary, but Thomas couldn’t help feeling she would have liked it better if he had stayed in the village and led a modest life close by.