A Whole Life

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Robert Seethaler

A Whole Life

Translated by Charlotte Collins

PICADOR

A Whole Life

On a February morning in the year 1933 Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, known to all the valley dwellers as Horned Hannes, off his sodden and rather sour-smelling pallet to carry him down to the village along the three-kilometre mountain path that lay buried beneath a thick layer of snow.

A strange intuition had prompted him to call on Horned Hannes in his hut, where he found him behind the stove, which had long since gone out, curled up under a heap of old goatskins. The goatherd stared at him out of the darkness, emaciated and ghostly pale, and Egger knew that Death already crouched behind his eyes. He picked him up in both arms like a child and placed him gently on the wooden frame, padded with dry moss, that Horned Hannes had used all his life to carry firewood and injured goats on his back over the hillside. He wrapped a halter around his body, tied it to the frame and pulled the knots so tight that the wood let out a crack. When he asked him if he was in pain, Horned Hannes shook his head and twisted his mouth into a grin, but Egger knew that he was lying.

The first weeks of the year had been unusually warm. The snow in the valleys had melted and in the village there was a constant dripping and splashing of meltwater. But a few days earlier it had turned icy-cold again, and the snow fell so thickly and incessantly from the sky that it seemed softly to swallow the landscape, smothering all life and sound. For the first few hundred metres Egger didn’t speak to the trembling man on his back. He had enough to do keeping an eye on the path, which wound down the mountain in front of him in steep hairpin bends and was barely discernible in the driving snow. From time to time he felt Horned Hannes stirring. ‘Just don’t die on me now,’ he said aloud, to himself, not expecting an answer. However, after he had been walking for almost half an hour with only the sound of his own panting in his ears, the answer came from behind: ‘Dying wouldn’t be the worst.’

‘But not on my back!’ said Egger, stopping to adjust the leather straps on his shoulders. For a moment he listened out into the soundlessly falling snow. The silence was absolute. It was the silence of the mountains that he knew so well, but which still had the capacity to fill his heart with fear. ‘Not on my back,’ he repeated, and walked on. After each bend in the path the snow seemed to fall even more thickly, relentlessly, soft and entirely without noise. Behind him Horned Hannes stirred less and less frequently, until at last he didn’t move at all and Egger feared the worst.

‘Are you dead?’ he asked.

‘No, you limping devil!’ came the reply, with surprising clarity.

‘All I mean is, you have to hold on till we get to the village. Then you can do whatever you want.’

‘And what if I don’t want to hold on till we get to the village?’

‘You must!’ said Egger. He felt they’d talked enough now, and for the next half-hour they progressed in silence. Almost three hundred metres above the village, beside the Geierkante, where the first mountain pines stooped like hunchbacked dwarves beneath the snow, Egger strayed from the path, stumbled, landed on the seat of his trousers and slid some twenty metres down the slope before he was stopped by a boulder as tall as a man. It was calm in the lee of the rock, and here the snow seemed to fall even more slowly, even more quietly. Egger sat on his bottom, leaning back slightly against the wooden frame. There was a stabbing pain in his left knee, but it was bearable and his leg was still in one piece. For a while Horned Hannes didn’t move; then suddenly he began to cough and eventually to speak in a hoarse voice so quiet he could barely be understood: ‘Where do you want to lie, Andreas Egger?’

‘What?’

‘What earth do you want to be buried in?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Egger. He had never considered this question, and in fact in his opinion there was no point wasting any time or thought on such things. ‘The earth is the earth; it makes no difference where you lie.’

‘Maybe it makes no difference the way nothing makes any difference in the end,’ he heard Horned Hannes whisper. ‘But there will be a cold. A cold that gnaws the bones. And the soul.’

‘The soul too?’ asked Egger, and a sudden shiver ran down his spine.

‘The soul most of all!’ answered Horned Hannes. He had stretched his head out as far as he could around the edge of the frame and was staring at the wall of fog and falling snow. ‘The soul and the bones and the spirit and everything you’ve been attached to and believed in all your life. The eternal cold will gnaw it all away. That’s what’s written, because that’s what I’ve heard. People say death brings forth new life, but people are stupider than the stupidest nanny goat. I say death brings forth nothing at all! Death is the Cold Lady.’

‘The . . . what?’

‘The Cold Lady,’ repeated Horned Hannes. ‘She walks on the mountain and steals through the valley. She comes when she wants and takes what she needs. She has no face and no voice. The Cold Lady comes and takes and goes. That’s all. She seizes you as she passes and takes you with her and sticks you in some hole. And in the last patch of sky you see before they finally shovel the earth in over you she reappears and breathes on you. And all that’s left for you then is darkness. And the cold.’

Egger looked up into the snowy sky and for a moment he feared something might appear there and breathe in his face. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, through clenched teeth. ‘That’s bad.’

‘Yes, it’s bad,’ said Horned Hannes, and his voice sounded raw with fear. Neither man stirred again. The silence was now overlaid by the quiet singing of the wind as it swept over the ridge, dusting up wispy pennants of snow. Suddenly Egger felt a movement, and a moment later he tipped over backwards and lay on his back in the snow. Horned Hannes had somehow managed to loosen the knots and, quick as a flash, clamber out of the frame. He stood there, spindly beneath his ragged clothes and swaying slightly in the wind. Egger shuddered again. ‘You get straight back in,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch something else otherwise.’

Horned Hannes paused, his head craned forward. For a moment he seemed still to be listening to Egger’s words, but the snow had swallowed them. Then he turned and began to run up the mountain in great leaps. Egger struggled to his feet, slipped, fell again, cursing, onto his back, pushed himself up off the ground with both hands and got to his feet once more. ‘Come back!’ he yelled after the goatherd, who was bounding away with astonishing speed. But Horned Hannes could no longer hear him. Egger slipped the straps off his shoulders, dropped the frame and ran after him, but after only a few metres he had to stop, gasping for breath: the slope was too steep here, and with every step he sank up to his hips in the snow. The scrawny figure ahead of him quickly diminished until at last it dissolved entirely in the impenetrable whiteness of the blizzard. Egger put his hands to his mouth like a funnel and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Stop, you stupid fool! No one has ever outrun Death!’ To no avail: Horned Hannes had disappeared.

Andreas Egger walked the last few hundred metres down to the village to revive his profoundly shaken spirits with a bowl of greasy doughnuts and a glass of homemade Krauterer at the Golden Goat inn. He found himself a spot right beside the old tiled stove, placed his hands on the table and felt the warm blood flow slowly back to his fingers. The little door of the stove stood open and the fire crackled inside. For a brief moment he thought he saw the face of the goatherd in the flames, staring out at him, unmoving. Quickly he closed the door and knocked back his schnapps with his eyes screwed tightly shut. When he opened them again a young woman was standing in front of him. She just stood there, hands on her hips, looking at him. Her hair was short and flaxen blonde, and her skin shone rosy in the warmth of the stove. Egger was reminded of the newborn piglets he had sometimes picked out of the straw when he was a boy, burying his face in their soft bellies that smelled of earth, milk and pig muck. He glanced down at his hands. Suddenly they seemed strange to him, lying there: heavy, useless and stupid.

‘Another one?’ the young woman asked, and Egger nodded. She brought a fresh glass, and as she leaned forward to put it on the table she touched his upper arm with a fold of her blouse. The touch was barely perceptible, yet it left a subtle pain that seemed to sink deeper into his flesh with every passing second. He looked at her, and she smiled.

All his life Andreas Egger would look back on this moment, again and again: that brief smile that afternoon in front of the quietly crackling guesthouse stove.

Later, when he stepped back out into the open, it had already stopped snowing. It was cold and the air was clear. Scraps of fog were creeping up the mountains, and the peaks were already glowing in the sun. Egger left the village behind him and trudged home through the deep snow. A group of children were playing by the mountain stream a few metres beyond the old wooden footbridge. They had tossed their schoolbags into the snow and were scrambling about in the bed of the brook. Some were sliding down the frozen watercourse on their bottoms while others crept across the ice on all fours, listening to the quiet burbling beneath. When they spotted Egger they ganged up and started shouting, ‘Gammy Leg! Gammy Leg!’ Their voices rang out bright and clear in the glassy air, like the cries of the young golden eagles that circled high above the valley, plucking fallen chamois from ravines and goats from the pasture. ‘Gammy Leg! Gammy Leg!’ Egger put down the wooden frame, broke off a fist-sized chunk of ice from the overhanging bank of the stream, drew his arm back and flung it in their direction. He aimed far too high, and the chunk of ice sailed well over the children’s heads. For a moment, at the highest point of its trajectory, it looked as if it would just hang there, a small celestial body flashing in the sun. Then it plunged down and disappeared soundlessly in the shadow of the snowbound fir trees.

*   *   *

Three months later Egger was sitting on a tree stump at the exact same spot, watching a yellowish cloud of dust darken the mouth of the valley, from which, moments later, the construction team of the firm Bittermann and Sons – consisting of two hundred and sixty labourers, twelve machinists, four engineers, seven Italian cooks and a small number of unspecified auxiliary staff – emerged and approached the village. From a distance the throng resembled an enormous herd of cattle; only by squinting was it possible to discern, here and there, a raised arm or a pickaxe carried over a shoulder. This group was merely the vanguard of a convoy of heavy horse-drawn vehicles and trucks loaded with machines, tools, steel girders, cement and other building materials that proceeded along the unpaved road at walking speed. For the first time the muffled rattle of diesel engines reverberated through the valley. The locals stood silently by the side of the road, until suddenly the old stable hand Joseph Malitzer snatched his felt hat from his head and flung it into the air with a shout of delight. Now the others also began shouting, cheering, yelling. For weeks they had been waiting for the onset of spring, and with it the arrival of the construction team. A cable car was to be built. An aerial cable car powered by direct-current electricity, in whose light-blue wooden cabins people would float up the mountain, enjoying a panoramic view of the whole valley. It was a massive undertaking. Cables twenty-five millimetres thick and intertwined like pairs of mating adders would slice through the sky across a distance of almost two thousand metres. There was a difference in altitude of one thousand three hundred metres to overcome; there were gorges to be bridged and overhanging rocks to be blasted. With the cable car, electricity too would come to the valley. Electric current would flow in along buzzing cables and all the streets and houses and barns would glow with warm light, even at night. People were thinking of all this and much more as they threw up their hats and sent their shouts of delight up into the clear air. Egger would have liked to cheer with them, but for some reason he stayed sitting on his tree stump. He felt despondent, without knowing why. Perhaps it had something to do with the rattling of the engines, the noise that suddenly filled the valley. Nobody knew when it would go away again, or whether it ever would go away again. For a while Egger remained seated: then he couldn’t hold out any longer. He jumped up, ran down, joined the others by the side of the road and shouted and cheered as loudly as he could.