Egger regained his strength. His leg, though, remained crooked, and from then on he went through life with a limp. It was as if his right leg always needed a moment longer than the rest of his body; as if before taking every step it first had to consider whether it really was worth the exertion.
Andreas Egger’s memories of the childhood years that followed were frayed and fragmentary. Once he saw a mountain start to move. A jolt seemed to pass through the side in shadow, and with a deep groan the whole slope began to slide. The mass of earth swept away the forest chapel and a couple of haystacks, and buried beneath it the dilapidated walls of the abandoned Kernsteiner farm, which had been empty for years. A calf, separated from the herd because of an ulcer on its hind leg, was thrown high up into the air along with the cherry tree to which it was tethered: it gawped out over the valley for a moment before the scree surged in and swallowed it whole. Egger remembered people standing in front of their houses open-mouthed, watching the disaster unfold on the other side of the valley. The children held hands, the men were silent, the women wept, and everything was overlaid with the murmur of the old villagers reciting the Lord’s Prayer. A few days later the calf was found a few hundred metres down the mountain, still tethered to the cherry tree, lying in a bend in the stream with a swollen belly, its stiff legs pointing at the sky and the water washing round it.
Egger shared the big bed in the bedroom with the farmer’s children, but this didn’t mean he was one of them. For the whole of his time on the farm he remained an outsider, barely tolerated, the bastard of a sister-in-law who had been punished by God, with only the contents of a leather neck pouch to thank for the farmer’s clemency. To all intents and purposes he was not seen as a child. He was a creature whose function was to work, pray, and bare its bottom for the hazel rod. Only Nana, the farmer’s wife’s aged mother, spared him a warm look or a friendly word now and then. Sometimes she would place her hand on his head and murmur a quiet ‘God bless you’. When Egger heard of her sudden death, during the haymaking – she had lost consciousness while baking bread, toppled forwards and suffocated with her face in the dough – he dropped his scythe, climbed wordlessly all the way up past the Adlerkante and looked for a shady spot to cry in.
Nana was laid out for three days in the little chamber between the farmhouse and the cattle shed. It was pitch dark in the room: the windows had been blacked out and the walls were hung with black cloths. Nana’s hands were folded over a wooden rosary, her face lit by two flickering candles. The smell of decay quickly spread throughout the house; outside the summer was sweltering and the heat penetrated through every chink. When the hearse arrived, drawn by two enormous Haflingers, the farmer’s family gathered around the body one last time to say goodbye. Kranzstocker sprinkled it with holy water, cleared his throat and muttered a few words. ‘Nana’s gone now,’ he said. ‘We can’t know where to, but it’ll be as it’s meant to be. The old die, making way for new. That’s how it is and how it’ll always be, amen!’ The body was hoisted onto the cart and the funeral procession, in which, as was the custom, the whole village participated, slowly began to move. They were just passing the smithy when its soot-covered door suddenly burst open and the smith’s dog shot out into the open. Its fur was jet-black and between its legs its swollen, scarlet sex shone bright as a beacon. Barking hoarsely it hurtled towards the horses drawing the cart. The coachman flicked his whip across the dog’s back, but it seemed to feel no pain. It leapt at one of the horses and sank its teeth into its hind leg. The Haflinger reared up and kicked out. Its enormous hoof hit the dog’s head; there was a cracking noise, the dog yelped and fell like a sack to the ground. In front of the cart the injured horse staggered to one side, threatening to drag the carriage into the meltwater ditch. The coachman, who had leapt off the box and seized his animals’ reins, managed to keep both cart and horses on the road, but at the back the coffin had slid and got stuck sideways. The lid had only been provisionally closed for transportation and was supposed to be nailed down at the graveside: it had sprung open, and the dead woman’s forearm appeared in the gap. In the darkness of the viewing room her hand had been snow-white, but here, in the bright midday light, it appeared as yellow as the flowers of the little Alpine violets that blossomed on the shady banks of the stream and withered the instant they were exposed to the sun. The horse reared up one last time before coming to a standstill, flanks quivering. Egger saw Nana’s dead hand dangling from the coffin, and for a moment it seemed she was trying to wave goodbye to him: a very last ‘God bless you’, meant for him alone. The lid was closed, the coffin pushed back into place, and the funeral procession was able to continue on its way. The dog stayed behind on the road where it lay on its side, shuddering convulsively, paddling in circles and snapping blindly at the air. The clacking of its jaw could be heard for quite some time, before the smith dashed its brains out with a peening anvil.
In 1910 a school was built in the village, and every morning, after tending to the livestock, little Egger sat with the other children, in a classroom that stank of fresh tar, learning reading, writing and arithmetic. He learned slowly and as if against a hidden, inner resistance, but over time a kind of meaning began to crystallize out of the chaos of dots and dashes on the school blackboard until at last he was able to read books without pictures, which awoke in him ideas and also certain anxieties about the worlds beyond the valley.
After the deaths of the two youngest Kranzstocker children, who were carried off one long winter’s night by diphtheria, the work on the farm became even harder as there were fewer arms to share the burden. On the other hand, Egger had more space in the bed now, and no longer had to scrap over every crust with his remaining stepbrothers and stepsisters. He and the other children hardly came to blows any more, in any case, simply because Egger had grown too strong. It was as if Nature had been trying to make it up to him ever since the business with his shattered leg. At the age of thirteen he had the muscles of a young man, and at fourteen he heaved a sixty-kilo sack through the hatch to the granary for the first time. He was strong, but slow. He thought slowly, spoke slowly and walked slowly; yet every thought, every word and every step left a mark precisely where, in his opinion, such marks were supposed to be.
One day after Egger’s eighteenth birthday (since no precise information could be obtained about his birth, the mayor had simply assigned a random summer date, namely the fifteenth of August 1898, as his birthday, and issued the certificate accordingly), an earthenware bowl of milk soup happened to slip out of his hands during supper, and broke with a dull crack. The soup, with the bread he had just crumbled into it, spread over the wooden floor, and Kranzstocker, who had already folded his hands to say grace, slowly rose to his feet. ‘Fetch the hazel and put it in water,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in half an hour.’
Egger fetched the rod from its hook, put it outside in the cattle trough, sat down on the yoke of the plough and dangled his legs. Half an hour later the farmer appeared. ‘Bring the rod!’ he said.
Egger jumped off the yoke and took the rod out of the trough. Kranzstocker brought it hissing down through the air. It flexed smoothly in his hand, trailing a curtain of delicately glittering water drops in its wake.
‘Drop your trousers!’ the farmer ordered. Egger folded his arms in front of his chest and shook his head.
‘Well, look at you! The bastard wants to contradict the farmer,’ said Kranzstocker.
‘I want to be left alone, that’s all,’ said Egger.
The farmer thrust out his chin. There was dried milk stuck in the stubble of his beard. A long, curved vein throbbed in his neck. He stepped forward and raised his arm.
‘If you hit me, I’ll kill you!’ said Egger, and the farmer froze.
In later life, when Egger looked back on this moment, it seemed to him that they stood like that the whole evening, confronting each other, he with his arms folded across his chest, the farmer with the hazel rod in his raised fist, both silent, with cold hatred
in their eyes. In reality it was at most a few seconds. A drop of water ran slowly down the rod, trembled free and fell to earth. The cows’ muffled chomping emanated from the barn. One of the children laughed inside the house, then the farm was quiet again.
Kranzstocker dropped his arm. ‘Get out of here,’ he said, in a toneless voice, and Egger went.
* * *
Andreas Egger was considered a cripple, but he was strong. He was a good worker, didn’t ask for much, barely spoke, and tolerated the heat of the sun in the fields as well as the biting cold in the forest. He took on any kind of work and did it reliably and without grumbling. He was as good with a scythe as he was with a pitchfork. He turned the freshly mown grass, loaded dung onto carts, and lugged rocks and sheaves of straw from the fields. He crawled over the soil like a beetle and climbed between rocks to retrieve lost cattle. He knew in which direction to chop different kinds of wood, how to set the wedge, hone the saw and sharpen the axe. He seldom went to the inn, and he never allowed himself more than a meal and a glass of beer or a Krauterer. He scarcely spent a single night in a bed; usually he slept on hay, in attics, in small side rooms, and in barns, alongside the cattle. Sometimes, on mild summer nights, he would spread a blanket somewhere on a freshly mown meadow, lie on his back and look up at the starry sky. Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it. And sometimes, if he lay there long enough, he had the impression that beneath his back the earth was softly rising and falling, and in moments like these he knew that the mountains breathed.
By the time he was twenty-nine Egger had saved enough money to purchase the lease on a small plot of land with a hay barn. The patch of ground lay just below the tree line, about five hundred metres above the village, and could only be reached via the steep, narrow path to the Almerspitze. It was virtually worthless, steep and barren, littered with countless stones and scarcely bigger than the chicken field behind the Kranzstocker farm. But a little spring of clear, ice-cold water bubbled out of the rock nearby, and in the morning the sun stood on the ridge of the mountain half an hour earlier than in the village, warming the earth under Egger’s night-damp feet. He felled a couple of trees in the surrounding forest, worked them on the spot and dragged the beams to his hay barn to prop up the crooked walls. For the foundation he dug a hole and filled it with the stones from his plot, which rather than decreasing in number seemed to grow back night after night out of the dry and dusty ground. He gathered the stones, and because he got bored doing it he gave them names. And when he ran out of names, he gave them words. And when at some point it became clear to him that there were more stones on his plot of land than he knew words, he just started again from the beginning. He needed no plough and no cattle. His plot was too small for a farm of his own, but it was big enough for a tiny vegetable garden. Right at the end he erected a low fence around his new home and put in a little gate, with the express intention of being able to hold it open one day for some potential visitor who might come calling.
All in all, it was a good time. Egger was content, and as far as he was concerned things could have gone on like that for ever. But then came the incident with Horned Hannes. According to his understanding of responsibility and justice, the goatherd’s disappearance was not his fault; nonetheless, Egger told no one about what had happened in the thick of the blizzard. Horned Hannes was believed to be dead, and although his body was never found, not even Egger doubted it for a moment. Yet he could not forget the image of that spindly figure slowly dissolving into fog before his eyes.
There was something else that, since that day, Egger carried inextinguishably within him: a pain that, after the brief touch of a fold of fabric, had sunk into the flesh of his upper arm, his shoulder, his breast, finally settling somewhere in the region of his heart. It was a very subtle pain, yet it was more profound than any Egger had encountered in his life so far, including Kranzstocker’s blows with the hazel rod.
Her name was Marie, and Egger thought it the most beautiful name in the world. She had appeared in the valley a few months earlier, looking for work, with trodden-down shoes and dusty hair. It was good timing, as the innkeeper had told his maid to go to the devil just a few days before, for unexpectedly falling pregnant. ‘Show me your hands!’ he said to Marie. He inspected the calluses on her fingers with a satisfied nod and offered her the vacant position. From then on she served the guests and made the beds in the handful of rooms furnished for seasonal workers. She assumed responsibility for the chickens, helped out in the garden and in the kitchen, slaughtered animals and emptied the guests’ toilet. She never complained, and she wasn’t vain or squeamish. ‘You keep your hands off her!’ said the innkeeper, stabbing Egger’s chest with a forefinger that gleamed with freshly rendered lard. ‘Marie’s a girl for work, not love, understood?’
‘Understood,’ said Egger, and felt again the subtle pain near his heart. There are no lies before God, he thought, but there are before an innkeeper.
He waited for her after church on Sunday. She was wearing a white dress and had a little white hat on her head. Although this little hat looked very pretty, Egger thought perhaps it was slightly too small. He was reminded of the rootstocks that protruded darkly here and there from the forest floor and on which, from time to time, a single white lily would bloom, like a miracle. But perhaps the little hat was just right; Egger didn’t know. He had no idea about these things. His experiences of women were limited to church services, during which he would sit in the very back row of the chapel listening to their high, clear voices, practically anaesthetized by the Sunday scent wafting from hair that had been washed with soap and rubbed with lavender.
‘I would like . . .’he said roughly, and broke off in mid-sentence, having suddenly forgotten what it was he actually wanted to say. They stood for a while in silence in the shadow of the chapel. She looked tired. Her face still seemed veiled by the twilight of the church’s interior. A yellow speck of pollen clung to her left eyebrow, quivering in the breeze. Suddenly she smiled at him. ‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said. ‘Maybe we could walk in the sun for a bit.’
They walked side by side along the forest path that wound up from behind the chapel to the Harzerkogl. A little stream trickled in the grass and the treetops rustled above them. Everywhere in the undergrowth they could hear the chirping of robins, but whenever they came too close the birds fell silent. They reached a clearing and stopped. High above their heads a falcon hung motionless. Suddenly it flapped its wings and tipped sideways; it seemed simply to fall from the sky and vanish from their sight. Marie picked some flowers and Egger hurled a stone the size of a head into the undergrowth, on impulse, just because he had the inclination and the strength to do it. As they were crossing a rotten footbridge on the way back she grasped his forearm. Her hand was rough and warm like a piece of sunlit wood. Egger would have liked to place it against his cheek and simply stop and stand there. Instead he took a big step and walked swiftly on. ‘Be very careful,’ he said, without turning to look at her. ‘You can easily twist an ankle on this ground.’
They met every Sunday, and sometimes, later on, during the week as well. As a small child, climbing over a rickety wooden fence, she had fallen into the pigsty and been bitten by a startled mother sow. Ever since, she had had a bright red scar across the nape of her neck, about twenty centimetres long and shaped like a crescent moon. It didn’t bother Egger. Scars are like years, he said: one follows another and it’s all of them together that make a person who they are. Marie, for her part, wasn’t bothered by his crooked leg. At least, she didn’t say anything. She never mentioned his limp, not with so much as a word. But then the two of them didn’t talk much. They walked alongside each other, contemplating their shadows on the ground before them, or sat on a rock somewhere and gazed across the valley.
One afternoon towards the end of August he took her up to his plot of land. He bent down, opened the little wooden gate and stood back
for her to enter. He still had to paint the cabin, he said; wind and damp gnawed through wood before you knew it, you see, and then you could forget all about being snug. Over there he’d planted a few vegetables, celery for example, already almost as high as your head. The sun shone more brightly up here than down in the valley, you see. Which wasn’t just good for the plants; it warmed the bones and the spirit, too. Not to mention the view, of course, said Egger, with a sweep of his arm; you could see right across the whole region, even further when the weather was good. He wanted to paint inside as well, he explained to her, with masonry paint. You had to dilute it with fresh milk instead of water, of course, to make it last. And the kitchen still needed to be properly equipped, but at least the essentials were already there, pots, plates, cutlery and things, and when he had a chance he’d sand down the frying pans as well. He wouldn’t need a shed, incidentally, because he didn’t have either the space or time for cattle; after all, he didn’t want to be a farmer. Being a farmer meant spending your whole life crawling around on your clod of land with your eyes lowered, scratching at the earth. His kind of man needed to lift up his eyes and look as far as possible beyond his own small, limited patch of ground.
A Whole Life Page 2