A Whole Life

by Seethaler, Robert

  It was weeks before the fragments of individual accounts were pieced together and the valley dwellers were able to put what had happened that night into some kind of order in their minds. The avalanche had come at two thirty in the morning. A huge lump of snow had detached itself from a cornice about fifty metres below the Almerspitze and had plunged down the mountain with considerable force. As the terrain where it broke off was almost vertical, the avalanche swiftly gained speed, leaving a trail of devastation as it hurtled down into the valley. The mass of snow thundered past just behind the village and all the way across to the far side of the valley, where it triggered a smaller, secondary avalanche whose northern fringes reached as far as the Bittermann & Sons camp, finally coming to a standstill just an arm’s length from Thomas Mattl’s old bathtub. The avalanche uprooted the forest and swept it along with it, leaving a deep trough that extended all the way to the hillock beside the village pond. The villagers reported hearing a muffled detonation followed by a rushing or roaring sound, like the galloping of an enormous herd of cattle descending the mountain and rapidly approaching the village. The shock wave made windows tremble, and everywhere Madonna figurines and crucifixes fell from the walls. People fled their houses and ran out into the street, ducking their heads beneath a cloud of snow dust that seemed to swallow the stars. They gathered in front of the chapel, and the avalanche’s dying rumbles were accompanied by a whispered chorus of women praying. Slowly the snow cloud settled, coating everything in a fine white layer. A deathly silence lay over the valley and the inhabitants knew that it was over.

  The damage was devastating, far worse even than the great avalanche of 1873, which a couple of the oldest villagers thought they still remembered: at the Ogfreiner farm sixteen crosses carved into the family altar bore silent witness to its sixteen buried souls. This time four farms, two large haystacks and the mayor’s little mill in the mountain stream as well as five workers’ cabins and one of the camp latrines were completely destroyed, or at least substantially damaged. Nineteen cows, twenty-eight pigs, countless chickens and the only six sheep in the village all met their deaths. Their cadavers were dragged out of the snow by tractors or with bare hands and burned with the wooden debris that couldn’t be reused. The stench of burnt flesh hung in the air for days and masked the smell of spring, which had now definitely arrived, melting the snow masses and revealing the full extent of the disaster. Nonetheless, on Sunday the villagers gathered together in the chapel and thanked the Lord for his goodness, for only divine mercy could explain why the avalanche had taken the lives of no more than three people: the venerable old farming couple Simon and Hedwig Jonasser, whose house had been completely encased in snow and who were found, after rescuers had worked their way through to the bedroom, lying in bed in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek, asphyxiated; and the maid from the guesthouse, Marie Reisenbacher, Andreas Egger’s young bride.

  The men from a rescue team hastily assembled on the night of the disaster found Egger’s cabin swallowed by the snow and Egger himself lying doubled up beside a hole he had dug in the snow with his bare hands. They told him afterwards that he didn’t stir as they approached the scene, and none of them would have bet so much as a groschen that there was any life left in that dark heap of a man. Egger couldn’t remember a single detail of his actual rescue, but the dreamlike image of torches emerging from the darkness of the night and moving slowly towards him, wavering like ghosts, remained with him till the day he died.

  Marie’s body was recovered, laid out in the chapel beside the Jonassers, and buried in the parish cemetery. The funeral took place in radiant sunshine with the first bumblebees buzzing over the turned earth. Egger sat on a stool, sick and rigid with sorrow, accepting people’s condolences. He didn’t understand what they were saying to him, and their hands felt as if they were foreign objects being given to him to hold.

  In the weeks that followed, Egger found accommodation at the Golden Goat. Most of the time he lay in bed in a tiny room behind the laundry which the innkeeper had offered for him to use. His broken legs took a long time to heal. The bonesetter Alois Klammerer had died years earlier (cancer ate away his palate, half his jaw and the side of his face so that by the end you could see his teeth through his open cheek as if through a window), so they had to call in the young local doctor, who had moved to the village just last season and was making a living primarily from the sprained, twisted or broken limbs of the tourists who came in ever-increasing numbers for hiking and skiing. Bittermann & Sons paid the doctor’s bill and Egger got two dazzling white plaster casts around his legs. At the end of the second week they stuffed a thick straw pillow behind his back and he was allowed to sit up and drink his milk from a mug instead of slurping it from an earthenware dish. At the end of the third week he was sufficiently recovered that every day, around noon, the innkeeper and the barman would wrap him in a horse blanket, lift him out of bed, and set him down outside the door on a little birchwood bench. From here he could see the slope where his house had stood, and where now all he could make out was a pile of debris illuminated by the warm spring sun.

  Towards the end of May Egger asked one of the kitchen boys for a sharpened meat cleaver. He used it to cut and hack away at the plaster casts until he was able to break them into two halves, and his legs emerged. They lay there on the sheet, thin and white like two debarked sticks, looking to him almost more peculiar than a few weeks earlier when he had pulled them, stiff and cold, from the snow.

  For a few days Egger dragged his emaciated body back and forth between the bed and the birchwood bench, until at last he felt that his legs belonged to him again and would be strong enough to carry him further. He slipped on a pair of trousers for the first time in weeks and headed off to his plot of land. He walked through the forest where it had been flattened by the avalanche; he looked up at the sky, which was full of small, round clouds, and at the flowers springing up everywhere between the stumps and the uprooted tree trunks: white, egg-yolk yellow, bright blue. He tried to see everything precisely so as to memorize it for later. He wanted to understand what had happened, but when, after several hours, he reached his plot and saw the beams and planks scattered about he knew there was nothing to understand. He sat on a rock and thought of Marie. He imagined what had happened that night, and saw terrible pictures in his mind’s eye: Marie sitting upright in their bed, arms outstretched on the blanket, listening, wide-eyed, into the darkness a second before the avalanche smashed through the walls like a giant fist and drove her body into the cold earth.

  * * *

  In the autumn, almost half a year after the avalanche, Egger left the valley, moving on to work elsewhere for the company. But he couldn’t do the heavy woodcutting any more.

  ‘What are we supposed to do with someone like you?’ asked the general manager. Egger had limped in soundlessly across the carpet and was now standing in front of the desk, hanging his head. ‘You’re no good for anything any more.’ Egger nodded, and the general manager sighed. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ he said. ‘But don’t go getting the idea that the blasting had anything to do with it. The last blast was a couple of weeks before the avalanche.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Egger.

  The general manager put his head on one side and stared out of the window for a while. ‘Or do you think perhaps the mountain has a memory?’ he asked abruptly. Egger shrugged. The manager leaned over, made a gargling noise and spat into a tin dish at his feet. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Bittermann & Sons has constructed seventeen cable cars so far, and believe you me, they won’t be the last. People are all going crazy about slithering down mountains on their planks.’ He pushed his dish under the desk with the tip of his shoe and looked at Egger solemnly. ‘God alone knows why,’ he said. ‘At any rate, the cable cars have to be maintained: cables checked, impeller wheels lubricated, cabin roofs seen to and so on. You don’t need solid ground under your feet all the time, do you?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ s
aid Egger.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ said the general manager.

  Egger was assigned to a small team, a handful of taciturn men whose bearded faces, burned by the mountain sun, betrayed almost nothing of their emotions. They travelled along mountain roads – more and more of which were tarmacked – perched on pallets in the back of a delivery truck, going from one cable car to another to take care of maintenance work that was too demanding for local workers. Egger’s task was to sit in a wooden frame attached to the steel cables by nothing but a safety lanyard and a hand-braking roller mechanism, and to slide slowly down towards the valley, removing dust, ice and encrusted bird droppings from the cables and ball joints and lubricating them with fresh oil. No one else was keen to do this job. Word had got around that in previous years two men, both experienced climbers, had fallen to their deaths, through carelessness, or because of a material defect, or simply because of the wind, which sometimes made the cables swing out several metres on either side. But Egger wasn’t afraid. He knew that his life hung from a thin rope, but as soon as he had scaled a girder, attached the roller mechanism and fastened the safety carabiner, a sense of calm came over him, and little by little the black cloud of confused, despairing thoughts that shrouded his heart dissolved in the mountain air, until nothing was left but pure sorrow.

  For many months Egger moved on like this from valley to valley, sleeping in the truck or in cheap boarding-house rooms at night and dangling between heaven and earth by day. He saw winter settle over the mountains. He worked in thickly falling snow, scratched ice from the cables with his wire brush, and from the struts of girders he knocked long icicles that shattered quietly in the depths below him, or were noiselessly swallowed by the snow. Often, in the distance, he would hear the muffled rumble of an avalanche. Sometimes it would seem to come closer and he would look up the slope, anticipating an enormous white wave that would sweep him up for an instant and then overwhelm him, along with the cable, the steel girders and the whole world. But each time the rumbling died away and the clear cries of the jackdaws could be heard again.

  In spring their route took him back to the valley, where he stayed for a while to clear brush and debris from Blue Liesl’s forest aisle and fix small cracks in the girder foundations. He found lodgings at the Golden Goat again, in the room where he had spent so many days with his broken legs. Every evening he came back from the mountain dead tired, ate the remains of his daily ration sitting on the edge of his bed, and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Once he awoke in the middle of the night with a peculiar sensation, and looking up at the small, dusty window under the ceiling he saw that it was clouded by hundreds of moths. The creatures’ wings seemed to glow in the moonlight, and they beat against the pane with a barely discernible papery sound. For a moment Egger thought their appearance must be a sign, but he didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, so he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. They’re only moths, he thought, a few silly little moths; and when he awoke early the next morning they had vanished.

  He stayed several weeks in the village, which as far as he could tell had largely recovered from the impact of the avalanche, and then moved on. He avoided going to look at his plot of land or visiting the cemetery, and he didn’t sit on the little birchwood bench. He moved on, hung in the air between mountains, and watched the seasons change beneath him like colourful paintings that meant nothing to him and had nothing to do with him. Later on he recalled the years after the avalanche as an empty, silent time that only slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to fill with life again.

  One clear autumn day, when a roll of sandpaper slipped out of his hand and sprang down the slope like an impetuous young goat before eventually sailing out over a spur of rock and vanishing in the depths, Egger paused for the first time in years and contemplated his surroundings. The sun was low, and even the distant mountaintops stood out so clearly that it was as if someone had just finished painting them onto the sky. Right beside him a lone sycamore burned yellow; a little further off some cows were grazing, casting long, slim shadows that kept pace with them step for step across the meadow. A group of hikers was sitting beneath the canopy of a small calving shed. Egger could hear them talking and laughing amongst themselves, and their voices seemed to him both strange and agreeable. He thought of Marie’s voice and how much he had liked to listen to it. He tried to recall its melody and sound, but they eluded him. ‘If only I still had her voice, at least,’ he said aloud to himself. Then he rolled slowly over to the next steel girder, climbed down and went in search of the sandpaper.

  Three evenings later, after a cold, wet day spent scrubbing rust off the base rivets on a top station, Egger jumped down off the back of the truck and entered the little boarding house where he and the other men were staying. The way to his quarters took him past the landlady’s living room with its smell of pickled gherkins. The old woman was sitting alone at the table. She had propped up her elbows and buried her face in her hands. In front of her was the big wireless set, which at this hour was usually blasting out brass-band music or Adolf Hitler’s furious tirades. This time the radio was silent, and Egger could hear the old woman breathing quietly and heavily into her hands. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.

  The landlady raised her head and looked at him. Her face retained the imprints of her fingers, pale stripes to which the blood only slowly returned. ‘We’re at war,’ she said.

  ‘Who says so?’ asked Egger.

  ‘The radio,’ said the old woman, throwing a hostile look at the wireless. Egger watched as she reached behind her head and in two swift movements loosened her bun. The woman’s hair fell onto her neck, long and yellowish, like flax fibres. For a moment her shoulders shook as if she was about to start sobbing; then she stood up, walked past him down the corridor and out into the open, where she was greeted by a grubby cat that wound itself about her feet for a while before the two of them disappeared around the corner.

  The next morning Egger set off home to register for military service. His decision wasn’t prompted by any particular considerations: it was simply there, all of a sudden, like a call from very far away, and Egger knew he had to follow it. He had been called up once before, when he was seventeen, for the army medical examination, but back then Kranzstocker had successfully lodged an objection, arguing that if they were to tear his beloved foster-son (who was also, incidentally, the most capable worker in the family) from his arms to use him as cannon-fodder against the wops or (worse still) the baguette-scoffers, they might as well in God’s name just burn his whole farm down right under his arse. Back then, Egger was secretly grateful to the farmer: he’d had nothing in his life to lose, but at least he’d still had something to gain. That was different now.

  As the weather was reasonably calm, he set off on foot. He walked all day, spent the night in an old hay barn and was up again before dawn. He listened to the steady hum of the telephone wires, recently strung along the roads between narrow poles, and he saw the mountains grow out of the night with the first rays of the sun, and although it was a spectacle he had watched thousands of times before, this time he found himself strangely moved by it. He couldn’t remember ever in his life seeing something at once so beautiful and so terrifying.

  Egger’s stay in the village was brief. ‘You’re too old. And you limp,’ said the officer who, along with the mayor and an elderly female typist, formed the examination committee. He was sitting in the Golden Goat, at one of the guesthouse tables, which was covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with little swastika flags.

  ‘I want to go to war,’ said Egger.

  ‘Do you think the Wehrmacht can use someone like you?’ asked the officer. ‘Who do you think we are?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Andreas, go back to your work,’ said the mayor. And that was the end of the matter. The typist stamped the single sheet of paper that constituted his file, and Egger returned to the cable cars.

  Just over
three years later, in November 1942, Egger stood before the same committee, not as a volunteer this time but as a conscript. He had no idea why the Wehrmacht suddenly could use someone like him after all: at any rate, it seemed that times had changed.

  ‘What can you do?’ the officer asked.

  ‘I know about mountains,’ answered Egger. ‘I can sand steel cables and make holes in rock.’

  ‘That’s good,’ the officer remarked. ‘Have you ever heard of the Caucasus?’

  ‘No,’ said Egger.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the officer. ‘Andreas Egger, I hereby declare you fit to go to war. You have been assigned the honourable task of liberating the East!’

  Egger looked out of the window. It had started to rain: fat drops smacked against the window, darkening the restaurant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mayor slowly hunch over the table and stare down at its surface.

  Egger spent a total of more than eight years in Russia. Less than two months of this were at the front; the rest was in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in the vast steppe north of the Black Sea. Although in the beginning his mission still seemed fairly clear (as well as liberating the East it was also about securing oil reserves and defending and maintaining planned production facilities), after just a few days he could no longer have said exactly why he was there, or for what or against whom he was actually fighting. It was as if in these pitch-dark Caucasian winter nights, when shell-fire blossomed like blazing flowers over the mountain crests on the horizon, casting its light on the soldiers’ fearful or despairing or blank faces, any thought about purpose or the lack of it was stifled before it could be formulated. Egger questioned nothing. He carried out orders, that was all. Besides, he was of the opinion that he could have had it an awful lot worse. Just a few weeks after his arrival in the mountains, two taciturn comrades who were clearly familiar with the area brought him by night to a narrow rocky plateau at an altitude of around four thousand metres. One of his superiors had explained to him that he was to stay there until he was recalled, firstly to set a series of blast holes, secondly to secure the forward position and, if necessary, to hold it. Egger had no idea what forward position they were referring to or even what such a position might be, but he wasn’t dissatisfied with his task. His two comrades left him there alone, with tools, a tent, a crate of provisions and the promise to return once a week with fresh supplies, and Egger made himself at home as best he could. During the day he bored dozens of holes in the rock, for which he often had first to hack away a thick layer of ice, and at night he lay in his tent and tried to sleep despite the biting cold. His equipment included a sleeping bag, two blankets, his fur-lined winter boots, and the thick, quilted jacket worn by mountain troops. He had also pitched the tent half inside a frozen snowdrift, and this provided him with at least a little shelter from the wind, which often howled so loudly that it drowned out the roaring of the bombers and the muffled explosions of the anti-aircraft guns. Yet all this was not enough to keep out the cold. The frost seemed to creep in through every seam, under clothing and under the skin, digging its claws into every fibre of his body. Making a fire was forbidden and punishable by death, but even had it been permitted, the plateau lay far above the tree line and for miles around there wasn’t so much as a twig that Egger could have burned. Sometimes he would light the little petrol stove he used to heat the tinned food, but the tiny flames just seemed to mock him. They burned his fingertips and left the rest of his body to freeze all the more. Egger feared the nights. He lay huddled in his sleeping bag and the cold brought tears to his eyes. Sometimes he dreamed: confused dreams, filled with pain and hideous faces that materialized in the blizzard of his mind and hunted him down. Once he awoke from just such a dream because he thought that something soft and mobile had crept into the tent and was staring at him. ‘Jesus!’ he gasped softly. He waited until his heart had calmed again, then slipped from his sleeping bag and crawled out of the tent. The sky was starless and profoundly black. Everything around him was wrapped in darkness and altogether silent. Egger sat on a stone and stared out into the night. Again he heard his heart pounding, and at that moment he knew he was not alone. He couldn’t say where this feeling came from; he saw only the blackness of the night and heard his heartbeat, but somewhere out there he sensed the presence of another living creature. He had no idea how long he sat like that in front of his tent, listening out into the darkness, but before the first pale strip of light appeared over the mountains he knew where this other creature was located. About thirty metres away, on the other side of the ravine that marked the western edge of the plateau, there was a spur that jutted out of the face of the rock, scarcely wide enough for a goat to gain a foothold. On the ledge stood a Russian soldier, his shape rapidly becoming clearer in the growing light of dawn. He was just standing there, inexplicably motionless, looking across at Egger, who for his part remained sitting on his stone, not daring to move. The soldier was young and had the milky face of a city boy. His forehead was smooth and snowy white, his eyes oddly slanting. He carried his weapon, a Cossack rifle without a bayonet, on a strap over his shoulder; his right hand lay calmly on the stock. The Russian looked at Egger and Egger looked at the Russian and around them was nothing but the silence of a Caucasian winter morning. Later, Egger could not have said which of them was first to move: a spasm passed through the soldier’s body and, at the same time, Egger stood. The Russian removed his hand from the rifle stock and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Then he turned and quickly, nimbly, without looking back, climbed up a few metres and disappeared between the rocks.