A Whole Life

by Seethaler, Robert

  Three days later the postman found him when he knocked on the window to bring him the parish newsletter. Egger’s body had been well preserved by the wintry temperatures, and it looked as if he had fallen asleep over breakfast. The funeral took place the following day. The ceremony was short. The parish priest froze in the cold as the gravediggers let the coffin down into the hole they had scraped out of the frozen ground with a little excavator.

  Andreas Egger lies next to his wife, Marie. His grave is marked by a rough-hewn limestone veined with cracks, and the pale purple toadflax grows on it in summer.

  Not quite six months before his death, Egger had woken up one morning with an inner restlessness that drove him out of bed and out of doors the moment he opened his eyes. It was the beginning of September, and where the sun’s rays stabbed through the blanket of cloud he could see the gleam and flash of the commuters’ cars: people who for some reason couldn’t make a living in tourism and so threaded their way along the road every morning to arrive on time at their workplaces beyond the valley. Egger liked the look of this colourful string of cars snaking its way along the short stretch of road before its contours finally blurred and vanished in the misty light. At the same time, the sight of it made him sad. He thought of the fact that, apart from trips to the Bittermann & Sons cable cars and chair lifts in the surrounding area, he had only left the neighbourhood on one single occasion: to go to war. He thought about how once, along this very road, back then little more than a deeply rutted track across the fields, he had come to the valley for the first time on the box of a horse-drawn carriage. And at that moment he was overcome with a longing so searing and profound he thought his heart would melt. Without looking back he got up and ran. He limped, stumbled, raced down to the village as fast as he could, where the yellow number 5 bus – the so-called Seven Valley Line – was waiting at the stop outside the lofty Post Hotel with its engine running, ready to depart. ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, without looking up. Egger knew the man: he had worked for a few years fitting ski bindings in the repair shop run by the former blacksmith, until arthritis twisted his joints and he found work with the bus company. The steering wheel looked like a little toy tyre in his hands.

  ‘To the last stop!’ said Egger. ‘You can’t go further than that.’ He bought a ticket and sat in an empty seat at the back amid the tired villagers – some of whom he knew by sight – who either didn’t have the money for a car of their own, or were already too old to master its speed and technique. His heart beat like mad as the doors closed and the bus drove off. He sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. For a while he stayed like that, and when he sat up and opened his eyes again the village had vanished and he saw things passing by along the road. Little boarding houses that had sprung up out of nowhere in the fields. Service stations. Petrol signs. Advertising hoardings. A guesthouse with bedding hanging from every single one of its open windows. A woman standing at a fence with one hand on her hip, her face indistinct, blurred by cigarette smoke. Egger tried to think, but the torrent of images made him tired. Just before falling asleep he tried to recall the longing that had driven him from the valley, but there was nothing there. For a moment he thought he could still feel a slight burning round his heart, but he was imagining it, and when he woke again he could no longer remember what it was he wanted or why he was sitting on this bus at all.

  At the last stop he got off. He took a few steps across an expanse of concrete overgrown with weeds, then stopped. He didn’t know which direction to go in. The square where he was standing, the benches, the low station building, the houses behind it all meant nothing to him. He took another faltering step, and stopped again. He was shivering. In his hasty departure he had forgotten to put on a jacket. He hadn’t thought to pick up a hat, and he hadn’t locked the hut. He had simply run off, and he regretted that now. Somewhere far off he could hear the babble of voices, a child being called, then the slamming of a car door, an engine growing louder and then rapidly fading away. Egger was now shivering so hard he would have liked to have something to hang on to. He stared at the ground, not daring to move. In his mind’s eye he saw himself standing there, an old man, useless and lost, in the middle of an empty square, and he was more ashamed than he had ever been in his life. Just then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and when he slowly turned around the bus driver was standing before him.

  ‘Where exactly is it you want to go?’ the man asked. Old Egger just stood there, desperately searching for the answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and slowly shook his head, over and over again. ‘I simply don’t know.’

  On the return journey Egger sat in the same seat he had picked for his departure from the valley. The driver had helped him on to the bus and accompanied him all the way to the back without asking for the return fare, or indeed saying anything at all. Although Egger didn’t fall asleep this time, the journey seemed shorter to him. He felt better now: his heartbeat slowed, and when the bus dipped into the blue shadow of the mountains for the first time, the shivering stopped as well. He looked out of the window, not really knowing what he should think or feel. It was so long since he’d been away that he’d forgotten what it felt like to come home.

  When they reached the stop in the village, he nodded farewell to the driver. He wanted to get home as quickly as possible, but when he had left the last houses behind, and all that lay ahead was the stair-like ascent to his hut, he succumbed to a sudden impulse and turned left onto a steep, little-used path that wound around a nameless, moss-green pond before snaking all the way up to the Glöcknerspitze. For a while he followed the path along a row of wire fences the municipality had erected to protect the village from avalanches; then he stepped through a narrow crevice, secured by iron bars driven deep into the rock, and finally crossed the Karwiesen meadow in its shady hollow. The grass was damp and gleaming, and a smell of decay rose up from the earth. Egger moved fast: walking came naturally to him, he had forgotten his tiredness and barely felt the cold. He had the sense that with every step he left behind him something of the loneliness and despair that had gripped him down on that unfamiliar square. He heard the blood rushing in his ears and felt the cool wind, which dried the sweat on his forehead. He had reached the lowest point of the hollow when he saw a barely perceptible movement in the air. A little white something, dancing directly in front of his eyes. A second later, another. The next moment the air was filled with innumerable tiny scraps of cloud, floating slowly down and sinking to the ground. At first Egger thought they were blossoms the wind had blown in from somewhere, but it was September already and nothing blossomed any more at this time of year, certainly not this high up. And then he realized it was snowing. The snow fell thicker and thicker from the sky, settling on the rocks and the lush green meadows. Egger walked on. He paid close attention to his footsteps, taking care not to slip, and every few metres he wiped the snowflakes from his lashes and eyebrows with the back of his hand. As he did so a memory rose up in him, a fleeting recollection of something very long ago, little more than a blurred image. ‘Not just yet,’ he said, quietly; and winter settled over the valley.

  ‘Robert Seethaler’s quietly mesmerizing novel – elemental in both tone and subject – shows what joy and nobility can be found in a life of hardship, patience and bereavement. It is at once heart-rending and heart-warming. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book’

  JIM CRACE

  ‘Against the backdrop of a literary world that often seems crowded with novels yelling “Look at me!”, it’s refreshing to read a story marked by quiet, concentrated attention . . . What is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric . . . Deeply moving’

  Sunday Times

  ‘The solitude and remoteness of the mountains inspire remarkable, contemplative passages . . . The book’s prose has a directness and detail that helps to set off the moments of genuine wisdom and re
strained poetry, all of which makes Charlotte Collins’s translation a great triumph. It is at this point that you realize why the novella should be doing so well in Germany, and why it is so urgent for the rest of us: it can guide its readers to make the best of their lives, however they turn out’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Robert Seethaler’s novel is, like its hero, short on words, but in its 150 pages manages to do exactly what it says on the tin: embrace a whole life . . . It’s an unremarked existence, told in simple prose, of a simple man that magically captures the universal in all our lives. A slim masterpiece’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Seethaler shows that for even the most ordinary people, life is an extraordinary adventure – and he does so tenderly and memorably’

  Mail on Sunday

  Robert Seethaler was born in Vienna in 1966 and is the author of four previous novels. A Whole Life is a top-ten bestseller in Germany, where it has brought him huge acclaim.

  First published 2015 by Picador

  First published in paperback 2015 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2015 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-8391-1

  Copyright © Hanser Berlin im Carl Hanser Verlag München 2014

  Translation copyright © Macmillan Publishers International Limited 2015

  Cover Images © Shutterstock, Rucksack Man © INTERFOTO/Alamy

  Design by Matthew Garrett, Picador Art Department

  Author photo © Urban Zintel.

  The right of Robert Seethaler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Originally published in German 2014 as Ein ganzes Leben by Hanser Berlin, an imprint of Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third party websites referred to in or on this book.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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