A Whole Life

by Seethaler, Robert

  ‘We’ll soon fix this,’ said Mattl, wrapping his handkerchief around the wound. ‘Nobody bleeds to death that quickly!’ One of the men suggested cutting branches to make a stretcher. Another started to rub the stump with a handful of forest herbs, but was quickly pushed aside. Eventually they agreed that it would be best to carry the injured man down to the village as he was, strap him to the back of a diesel truck and drive him to hospital. The machine fitter from Lombardy lifted Grollerer off the ground and laid him across his shoulders like a limp sack. A brief discussion ensued as to what should happen to the arm. Some suggested they should pack it up and take it with them: perhaps the doctors could sew it back on. Others contradicted them: not even the most fiendish of doctors had ever sewn an entire arm back on, and even if they somehow managed to do such a thing it would just hang there at Grollerer’s side for the rest of his life, slack and ugly and making things difficult for him. It was Grollerer himself who put an end to the discussion when he regained consciousness, lifted his head from the fitter’s shoulder and said: ‘Bury my arm in the forest. Maybe a blackcurrant bush will grow out of it!’

  While the other men headed down to the village with Gustl Grollerer, now an ex-lumberjack, Egger and Thomas Mattl stayed behind at the scene of the accident to bury the arm. The leaves and earth it lay on were dark with blood and its fingers felt waxen and cold as they prised them from the handle of the axe. A little jet-black long-horned beetle was sitting on the tip of the index finger. Mattl held the stiff arm out in front of him and examined it with narrowed eyes. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘A moment ago this was still part of Grollerer. Now it’s dead and worth not much more than a rotten branch. What do you reckon – is Grollerer still Grollerer now?’

  Egger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? He’s Grollerer, with only one arm.’

  ‘What if the tree had ripped off both arms?’

  ‘Then too. He’d still be Grollerer.’

  ‘And say it had ripped away both arms, both legs, and half his head?’

  Egger considered. ‘He’d probably still be Grollerer, even then . . . somehow.’ Suddenly he was no longer quite so sure.

  Thomas Mattl sighed. He placed the arm gently on the toolbox and together, with a couple of cuts of the spade, they dug a hole in the ground. In the meantime the forest had begun to breathe again and birds were singing over their heads. It had been a chilly day, but now the blanket of clouds dispersed and sunlight fell in shimmering bundles through the canopy of leaves, making the earth muddy and soft. They placed the arm in its little grave and shovelled it in. The fingers were last to disappear. For a moment they stuck up out of the earth like fat mealworms, then they were gone. Mattl pulled out his little pouch of tobacco and filled his pipe, which he had carved himself out of plum wood.

  ‘It’s a messy business, dying,’ he said. ‘As time goes on there’s just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, then an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there’s nothing left. Then they chuck what’s left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that’s your lot.’

  ‘And there will be a cold,’ said Egger. ‘A cold that gnaws the soul.’ The old man looked at him. Then he twisted his mouth and spat just past the stem of his pipe at the treacherous splinter of pine, its edges sticky with Grollerer’s blood. ‘Rubbish. There won’t be anything, no cold and certainly no soul. Dead is dead and that’s that. There’s nothing after that – no God, either. Because if there were a God, his heavenly kingdom wouldn’t be so bloody far away!’

  Thomas Mattl was taken from this world nine years later, almost to the day. All his life he had hoped he would die on the job, but it happened differently. While bathing in the only bathtub in the camp, a battered monstrosity of galvanized iron that one of the cooks rented out to the workers for a small sum, Thomas Mattl fell asleep. When he woke the water was icy, and he caught a cold from which he never recovered. For several nights he lay sweating on his pallet, babbling incoherently, about either his long-dead mother or ‘bloodsucking forest demons’. Then one morning he got up and declared that he was now well and wanted to go to work. He pulled on his trousers, stepped outside the door, craned his head towards the sun and fell down dead. He was buried next to the village cemetery, in the steeply sloping meadow the company had purchased from the local authority. Virtually all the employees who were able to gathered there to say goodbye, and listened to the short funeral address that one of the foremen had cobbled together, which talked about the hard work on the mountain and Mattl’s pure soul.

  Thomas Mattl was one of an official total of thirty-seven men who died while working for Bittermann & Sons, up until the firm went bankrupt in 1946. In truth, however, many more gave their lives for the cable-car industry, which expanded ever faster from the 1930s on. ‘For every gondola someone goes underground,’ Mattl had said in one of his final nights. By then, though, the other men were no longer taking him all that seriously; they thought the fever had already burned the last vestiges of his wits from his brain.

  And so Andreas Egger’s first year with Bittermann & Sons came to an end, and the 1st Wendenkogler Aerial Cable Car (this was its official title, though only the mayor and the tourists ever used it – the locals just called it Blue Liesl on account of its two lightning-blue cabins, which also, owing to their rather flat front sections, bore a certain resemblance to the mayor’s wife) was inaugurated in a big opening ceremony at the top station. A whole host of fashionable people from beyond the valley stood on the platform freezing in thin suits and even thinner dresses, and the priest shouted his blessing into the wind with his cassock flapping around his body like the dishevelled plumage of a jackdaw. Egger stood amid his colleagues, who had spread out across the mountain below the Giant’s Skull, and every time he saw the people clapping up there on the platform he threw his arms into the air and let out a cheer of enthusiasm. In his heart there was a curious sensation of expansiveness and pride. He felt that he was part of something big, something that far exceeded his own powers (including the power of his imagination), and which he thought he could see would spell progress, not just for life in the valley but also, somehow, for the whole of humankind. Ever since the test ride a few days earlier, when Blue Liesl had wobbled her way to the top, juddering cautiously but without major mishap, the mountains seemed to have forfeited something of their enduring might. And more cable cars would follow. The company had extended the contracts of almost all its workers and presented plans to build a total of fifteen aerial cable cars, including a hair-raising construction that proposed to transport passengers with rucksacks and skis in free-floating wooden chairs instead of carriages. Egger thought this a rather ridiculous idea, but he secretly admired the engineers who squeezed such fantastical things out of their heads, and for whom neither snowstorms nor the heat of summer could cloud either their optimism or the shine on their immaculately polished shoes.

  * * *

  Half a lifetime or almost four decades later, in the summer of 1972, Egger stood on the same spot watching the shining silver gondolas of what was once Blue Liesl glide swiftly along, high above his head, accompanied by an almost inaudible buzzing. Up on the platform the cabin doors opened with a drawn-out hiss and discharged a crowd of day-trippers who streamed off in all directions, dispersing like bright insects over the mountain. These people who clambered about so recklessly on the scree annoyed Egger. They seemed to be constantly searching for some sort of hidden miracle. He would have liked to plant himself in their way and give them a piece of his mind, but he didn’t really know what exactly he would reproach them for. Secretly – this much at least he could admit to himself – he envied them. He saw them jumping over the rocks in trainers and shorts, putting their children on their shoulders and smiling into their cameras, whereas he was an old man, good for nothing any more a
nd glad still to be able to move about more or less upright. He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun.

  * * *

  The weeks and months after the opening ceremony at the top station were the happiest of Andreas Egger’s life. He saw himself as a small but not unimportant cog in a gigantic machine called Progress, and sometimes, before falling asleep, he would picture himself sitting in the belly of this machine as it ploughed inexorably through forests and mountains, contributing, with the heat and sweat of his brow, to its ongoing advance. He had taken the words with the heat and sweat of his brow from a tattered magazine Marie had found under one of the benches in the inn, and from which she would sometimes read to him in the evenings. In addition to all kinds of ideas about urban fashion, gardening, the keeping of pets and general morality, the magazine also contained a story. It was about an impoverished Russian nobleman who drove his lover, a peasant’s daughter blessed with strange gifts, across half of Russia one winter to rescue her from persecution by some fanatically religious village elders, including her own father, and bring her to safety. The story ended tragically, but it contained a large number of so-called romantic scenes which Marie read out with an almost imperceptible tremor in her voice, and which evoked in Egger a strange mixture of disgust and fascination. He listened to the words coming out of Marie’s mouth and sensed a heat slowly spreading beneath his blanket which, it seemed to him, would soon fill the entire cabin. Whenever the impoverished nobleman and the peasant’s daughter dashed across the snow-covered steppe in their carriage, at their backs the clattering of horses and the furious cries of their pursuers, and the terrified girl threw herself into the count’s arms, brushing his cheek as she did so with the seam of a dress already dirty from the journey, Egger could stand it no longer. He would kick away his blanket and stare with inflamed eyes into the flickering gloom beneath the roof beams. Then Marie would place the magazine carefully under the bed and blow out the candle. ‘Come,’ she whispered in the darkness, and Egger obeyed.

  At the end of March 1935, Egger and Marie were sitting on the threshold after sunset, looking out over the valley. It had snowed a lot in the last few weeks, but for two days now a sudden warm spell had been announcing the arrival of spring: all around the snow was melting, and already during the day the baby swallows’ beaks were peeping out over the edge of their nest under the eaves. From morning till night the adult swallows flew to their young with worms and insects in their beaks, and Egger commented that ‘all that bird shit would be enough to lay a new foundation’. But Marie liked the birds; she thought of them as fluttering good-luck charms keeping evil away from the house, so he resigned himself to the mess and the nest was allowed to stay.

  Egger’s gaze travelled all across the village and the opposite side of the valley. In many houses the windows were already lit up. The valley had had electricity for a while now and some days, here or there, an old farmer could be seen sitting before a lamp in his room and staring in astonishment into its bright glow. The lights were already on in the workers’ camp, too, and smoke was rising almost vertically from narrow iron pipes into the cloudy evening sky. From a distance it looked as if the clouds were attached to the roofs by thin threads, suspended over the valley like huge, shapeless balloons. Blue Liesl’s cabins were still, and Egger thought of the two maintenance engineers who right at this moment were crawling around the engine room with their little cans of oil, lubricating the machinery. Another cable car had already been completed, and they had started to cut an aisle in the forest in the neighbouring valley for a third, longer and wider than the first two put together. Egger looked at his steep, snow-covered land spread out before him. He felt a small, warm wave of contentment well up inside, and would have liked to leap to his feet and shout out his happiness to the world, but Marie was sitting there so quiet and still that he too remained seated.

  ‘Maybe we can have some more vegetables,’ he said. ‘I could extend the garden. Behind the house, I mean. Potatoes, onions and things.’

  ‘Yes, that’s not a bad idea, Andreas,’ she said. Egger looked at her. He couldn’t recall her ever having addressed him by name. It was the first time, and it felt strange. She passed the back of her hand across her brow and he looked away again. ‘We’ll have to see whether all that can grow in soil like this,’ he said, poking the tip of his shoe into the frozen earth.

  ‘Something’s going to grow. And it’s going to be something wonderful,’ she said. Egger looked at her again. She was leaning back slightly, and her face was barely visible in the shadow of the doorway. All he could make out were her eyes, two shining drops in the darkness.

  ‘Why are you looking like that?’ he asked quietly. Suddenly he felt uneasy, sitting there beside this woman who was at the same time both so familiar to him and so alien. She leaned forward a little and placed her hands in her lap. They seemed to him unusually delicate and white. Impossible that just a few hours ago they had been splitting firewood with an axe. He stretched out his arm and touched Marie’s shoulder, and although he was still looking at the white hands in her lap, he knew that she was smiling.

  In the night Egger was woken by a peculiar noise. It was no more than an intimation, a soft whisper stealing around the walls. He lay in the dark and listened. He felt the warmth of his wife beside him and heard the quiet sounds of her breathing. Eventually he got up and went outside. The warm föhn wind buffeted against him, almost wrenching the door out of his hand. Black clouds were racing across the night sky, a pale, shapeless moon flickering between them. Egger trudged a little way up the field. The snow was heavy and wet and the meltwater was burbling all around. He thought about the vegetables and about all the other things he needed to do. The soil didn’t yield much, but it would be enough. They could have a goat or perhaps even a cow, he thought, for the milk. He stopped. Somewhere way up high he heard a sound, as if something deep inside the mountain were splitting with a sigh. Then he heard a deep, swelling rumble and a moment later the ground beneath his feet began to tremble. Suddenly he was cold. Within seconds the rumbling had increased to a high, piercing note. Egger stood stock-still and heard the mountain start to sing. Then he saw something big and black hurtle silently past about twenty metres away and before he had even grasped that it was a tree trunk he began to run. He ran back through the deep snow towards the house, calling to Marie, but an instant later something seized him and lifted him up. He felt himself being carried away and the last thing he saw before a dark wave engulfed him was his legs, sticking up above him into the sky as if disconnected from the rest of his body.

  When Egger came to, the clouds had disappeared and in the night sky the moon was a radiant white. All around the mountains soared up in its light; their icy crests looked as if they had been punched from a sheet of metal, their sharpness and clarity seeming to cut into the sky. Egger was lying on his back at an angle. He could move his head and arms, but his legs were buried up to the hips in snow. He began to dig. Using both hands he shovelled and scratched his legs out of the snow and when he had freed them he saw them lying there, stunned, as cold and alien as two planks of wood. He pounded his thighs with his fists. ‘Don’t abandon me now,’ he said, and finally gave a hoarse laugh as pain shot into them along with the blood. He tried to stand, but immediately buckled again. He cursed his good-for-nothing legs and cursed his whole body, weaker than that of a little child. ‘Come on, up you get!’ he said to himself, and when he tried again he managed it, and stood. The landscape had changed. The avalanche had buried trees and rocks beneath it and levelled the ground. The deep snow lay like a vast blanket in the moonlight. He tried to get his bearings from the mountains. As far as he could tell, he was about three hundred metres below his cabin, which must be up there behind the mound of piled-up snow. He set off. The going was slower than
he had thought: the avalanche snow was unpredictable, rock-hard in one place as if fused with the bedrock, soft and powdery as icing sugar just two steps further on. The pain was bad. He was particularly worried about his good leg. It felt as if there was an iron thorn stuck in his thigh, boring deeper and deeper into his flesh with every step he took. He thought of the young swallows. Hopefully the shock wave hadn’t got them. The nest was in a well-protected spot, though, and he had built the roof frame sturdy. Still, he would need to strengthen the crossbeams underneath; he would weigh the roof down with stones and protect the back with a supporting wall of interlocking rock fragments that he would work deep into the slope. ‘But the stones must be flat!’ he said aloud to himself. He stopped for a moment and listened, but there was hardly a sound. The föhn wind had vanished, leaving only a delicate breeze that tingled on the skin. He walked on. The world around him was silent and dead. For a moment he had the feeling that he was the last person on earth, or at least the last person in the valley. He laughed. ‘What nonsense,’ he said, and walked on. The last stretch before the mound of snow was steep and he had to crawl on all fours. Beneath his fingers the snow was crumbly and seemed to him curiously warm. Strangely, the pain in his legs had now vanished, but the cold still sat deep in his bones, and they felt as light and brittle as glass. ‘I’m nearly there,’ he said to himself or to Marie or to anyone, but even as he did so he knew there was no longer anyone to hear him, and when he heaved his body up over the crest of the hill he uttered a loud sob. He knelt in the snow and surveyed the moonlit expanse on which his house had stood. He shouted his wife’s name into the silence: ‘Marie! Marie!’ He stood up and walked aimlessly around his piece of land. Beneath a knee-deep layer of powder the snow was hard and smooth, as if pressed by a roller. Shingles, stones and broken wood lay scattered all around. He recognized the iron ring of his rain barrel and, beside it, one of his boots. In one slightly elevated spot a piece of the chimney stuck up out of the ground. Egger went on a couple of steps to where he guessed the entrance must be. He fell on his knees and began to dig. He dug until his hands bled and the snow turned dark beneath him. An hour later, when he had got down about one and a half metres, he felt beneath his raw fingertips, as if embedded in cement, a roof beam that the avalanche had torn away, and stopped digging. He sat back and stared up into the night sky. Then he fell forward and laid his face in the blood-drenched snow.