A Whole Life (9 page)

During the funeral it bucketed down. The road was flooded with ankle-deep mud and the funeral procession could make only slow progress. Egger, himself by this time over seventy, walked right at the back. He thought about the farmer, who had spent all his life thrashing his own happiness away from him. They were walking in the pouring rain past the little restaurant in what used to be the Achmandl farm when a child’s laughter rang out, loudly and with remarkable clarity. One of the windows was ajar and flickering brightly. The landlord’s little son was sitting in the room in front of an enormous television set, his face right up against the screen. The reflection of the images danced across his forehead; he was clutching the antenna with one hand and slapping his thighs with the other as he laughed. He was laughing so hard that through the curtain of rain Egger could make out the glistening drops of spittle spraying against the box. He felt an urge to stop and stand there, to press his forehead against the window and laugh along with the boy. But the funeral procession moved on, dark and silent. Egger saw before him the hunched shoulders of the mourners and the rain running down them in thin rivulets. At the head of the procession the coffin cart rocked like a boat in the gathering dusk as the child’s laughter gradually faded away behind them.

Although in the course of his life Egger did give the idea some consideration, he never got himself a television set. Usually he had no money or no space or no time, and in any case it seemed to him that, generally speaking, he lacked all the necessary prerequisites for such an investment. For instance, he could barely muster the stamina with which most other people would stare for hours into the flickering screen, something he secretly assumed could, in the long run, damage your eyesight and soften your brain. Yet television gave him two moments that made a very deep impression on him, and which in later years he would repeatedly drag up from the depths of his memory, recalling them with a little shock of pleasure. The first was one evening in the back room of the Golden Goat, where a brand-new Imperial television set had stood for some time. Egger hadn’t been to the inn for months, and was therefore surprised when, on entering, he was assailed by tinny television voices over a quiet hiss of static, rather than by the customary public-house murmur. He went to the back, where seven or eight people sat scattered at different tables, staring mesmerized into an appliance the size of a wardrobe. For the first time in his life Egger saw the television images close to. They moved before his eyes with magical ease, bringing to the stuffy back room of the Golden Goat a world about which, until now, he had not had the slightest notion. He saw narrow, soaring houses with roofs that stuck up into the sky like inverted icicles. Scraps of paper were snowing from the windows and the people on the street were laughing, shouting, flinging their hats into the air, and generally seemed to be quite mad with joy. Before Egger could take it all in the screen was torn apart, as if by a soundless explosion, only to recombine less than a second later in an entirely different scene. Men in short-sleeved shirts and workers’ overalls were sitting on some wooden benches watching a dark-skinned girl of about ten, who was kneeling in a cage stroking the mane of a lion that lay sprawled before her. The animal yawned and you could see right into its mouth, which was criss-crossed with thin threads of saliva. The audience applauded, the girl snuggled up to the lion’s body and for a moment it looked as if she was about to disappear into its mane. Egger laughed. He did so more out of embarrassment, as he had no idea how one was supposed to behave in front of the television in the presence of others. He was ashamed of his ignorance. He felt like a child observing the incomprehensible activities of adults: it was all somehow interesting, but none of it seemed to have anything to do with him personally.

And then he saw something that touched the very depths of his heart. A young woman was emerging from an aeroplane. It wasn’t just any woman who was walking down the narrow staircase to the runway; it was the most beautiful creature Egger had seen in his life. She was called Grace Kelly, a name that to his ears sounded strange and outrageous, but at the same time it seemed to be the only name that was fitting. She was wearing a short coat and waving to a huddled crowd of people who had gathered at the airfield. A handful of reporters dashed up, and as she answered their breathless questions the sunlight flowed over her blonde hair and across her smooth, slender neck. Egger shivered at the thought that this hair and this neck were not just an illusion, but that somewhere in this world there might be someone who had touched them with their fingers, perhaps even stroked them with the whole of their hand. Grace Kelly waved again, laughing with a dark, wide-open mouth. Egger got up and left the inn. For a while he walked aimlessly about the village streets before finally sitting down on the steps at the entrance to the chapel. He stared at the ground, trodden flat by countless generations of sinners, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Grace Kelly’s smile and the sadness in her eyes had churned up his emotions and he didn’t understand what he was feeling. He sat there for a long while until, some time after darkness had fallen, he realized how cold it was, and went home.

That was in the late Fifties. It was only much later, in the summer of 1969, that Egger had a second encounter with the television – which in most households by then already constituted the central focus and primary purpose of the evening family gathering – that made a profound impression on him, albeit in an entirely different way. This time he was sitting with almost a hundred and fifty other villagers in the assembly room of the new parish hall, watching two young Americans walk on the Moon for the first time. There was a tense silence in the room for almost the whole of the broadcast, yet scarcely had Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon’s dusty surface than everyone started cheering, and for a few moments at least it was as if some kind of burden fell from the farmers’ heavy shoulders. Afterwards there was free beer for the adults and juice and doughnuts for the children, and a member of the parish council gave a short speech about the tremendous endeavours that made such marvels possible and would probably drive humanity on goodness knows whither. Egger applauded with everyone else. As the ghostly apparitions continued to move within the television set before them – the Americans who, incomprehensibly, were at that moment high above their heads, strolling across the surface of the Moon – he felt mysteriously close and connected to the villagers down here on the darkened Earth, in a room in the parish hall that still smelled of fresh mortar.

The very day he got back from Russia, Egger had headed straight to the camp of the firm Bittermann & Sons. If he had asked someone beforehand he could have saved himself the walk. The barracks were gone. The camp had been dismantled. Here and there a patch of concrete or a wooden beam overgrown with weeds still indicated that people had once worked and lived here. Little white flowers now blossomed on the spot where the general manager had sat behind his desk.

In the village Egger discovered that the company had gone bankrupt just after the war. The last remaining workers were pulled out a year earlier, as the firm responded to the Fatherland’s by then desperate call and switched production from steel girders and double cable winches to weaponry. Old Bittermann, a fervent patriot who in the First World War had left one forearm and a splinter of his right cheekbone in a trench on the Western front, concentrated on the manufacture of carbine barrels and ball-and-socket joints for assault guns. The joints were sound, but part of the magazine warped in extreme heat, which resulted in a number of dreadful accidents at the front and finally led old Bittermann to believe he was in no small measure complicit in the loss of the war. He shot himself in a copse behind his house – with his father’s old hunting rifle, to be on the safe side. When the forest ranger found his body under a stunted crab apple, a metal plate engraved with the date
23.11.1917
glinted out at him from inside the shattered skull.

The cable cars were now built and run by other enterprises, but wherever Egger presented himself they sent him away again. He wasn’t quite right any more, they said. The few years since the war had been enough for many of the old procedures to be updated, which was why, regrettably, in the world of modern transport engineering there was no longer any place for a man like him.

At home in the evenings Egger sat on the edge of his bed and regarded his hands. They lay in his lap, heavy and dark as bog soil. The skin was leathery and furrowed like the skin of an animal. The many years on the rock and in the forest had left scars, and each of those scars could have told a tale of mishap, effort, or success, if Egger had been able to remember their stories. Ever since the night when he had dug in the snow for Marie, his fingernails had been brittle and ingrown around the edges. One of his thumbnails was black, with a small dent in the middle. Egger brought his hands close to his face and contemplated the skin on the backs, which looked in places like crumpled linen. He saw the calluses on his fingertips and the gnarled bulges on his knuckles. Dirt which neither horse brush nor hard soap could dislodge had settled in the cracks and creases. Egger saw the pattern of the veins beneath the skin, and when he raised his hands against the half-light of the window he could see that they trembled very slightly. They were the hands of an old man, and he let them fall.

For a while Egger lived on the demobilization payments for war veterans. However, as the money was scarcely enough for the bare necessities, he found himself forced to take on all kinds of casual jobs, just as he had when he was a young man. Now as then he crawled around in cellars and in hay, hauled sacks of potatoes, toiled in the fields or mucked out the few remaining cowsheds and pigpens. He could still keep up with his younger colleagues, and some days he would get them to pile an impressive three-metre heap of hay onto his back with which he would trudge slowly downhill, swaying, over the steep pastures. But in the evening he would fall into bed convinced that he would never be able to get up again unaided. His crooked leg was now virtually numb around the knee, and whenever he turned his head so much as a centimetre to the side a stabbing pain in the back of his neck ran like a burning thread right down to his fingertips, forcing him to lie on his back and wait, motionless, for sleep.

One summer morning in the year 1957 Egger crawled out of bed long before sunrise and went outside. His pains had woken him, and the exercise in the cool night air did him good. He took the Geissensteig, the goat path, across the communal meadows that curved gently in the moonlight, and circled the two lumps of rock that reared up like the backs of sleeping animals. Finally, after hiking for almost an hour over increasingly difficult terrain, he reached the rock formations just below the Klufterspitze. By now day had announced itself, and in the distance the snow-capped peaks were starting to glow. Egger was about to sit down with his penknife to cut a torn piece of leather off his sole when an old man popped up from behind a rock and approached him with outstretched arms. ‘My dear, dear sir!’ he cried. ‘You are a real human being, aren’t you?’

‘I believe so,’ said Egger, and saw a second figure, an old woman, stumble out from behind the rock. They both looked pitiful, confused and trembling with exhaustion and cold.

The man was about to rush towards Egger when he saw the knife in his hand and stopped.

‘You’re not going to kill us, are you?’ he said, aghast.

‘God in Heaven, have mercy,’ murmured the woman behind him.

Egger put the knife away without speaking and looked straight at the two old people, who stared at him, wide-eyed.

‘My dear sir,’ the man repeated; he seemed to be on the verge of tears. ‘We have been walking around all night in this place where there is nothing but stones!’

‘Nothing but stones!’ the woman agreed.

‘More stones than there are stars in the sky!’

‘God in Heaven, have mercy.’

‘We lost our way.’

‘Wherever you look, nothing but cold, dark night!’

‘And stones!’ said the old man, who now actually did shed a couple of tears that ran down his cheek and neck one after the other. His wife looked at Egger imploringly.

‘My husband was on the brink of lying down to die.’

‘Our name is Roskovics,’ the old man said, ‘and we’ve been married for forty-eight years. That’s almost half a century. You know then what you have in each other, and what you are to each other. Do you understand, sir?’

‘Not really,’ said Egger. ‘And anyway, I’m not a sir. But I can take you down now, if you want.’

When they arrived in the village Mr Roskovics insisted on clasping the reluctant Egger to his bosom.

‘Thank you!’ he said, deeply moved.

‘Yes, thank you!’ echoed his wife.

‘Thank you! Thank you!’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Egger, stepping back. On the way down from the Klufterspitze the couple’s anxiety and despair had quickly dissipated, and when the first rays of sun warmed their faces their tiredness too suddenly seemed to disappear. Egger had shown them how to sip morning dew from the mountain grass to quench their thirst, and they had walked behind him chattering like children almost the whole way.

‘We wanted to ask you,’ said Roskovics, ‘whether you might be able to show us a couple of trails. You seem to know the region like your own back garden.’

‘For the likes of us, a hiking tour of this kind is not a walk in the park!’ his wife agreed.

‘Only a couple of days. Just up the mountain and down again. Money’s no object; we wouldn’t want to leave a bad impression. So – what do you reckon?’

Egger thought about the days ahead. There were a couple of metres of firewood to be chopped, and a potato field that had slipped in the rain and needed to be re-ploughed. The thought of the plough stilts in his hands filled him with dread. After just a few hours they began to burn red-hot beneath the fingers: even the hardest of calluses offered no protection against them.