A Whole Life (8 page)

The transfer to a camp near Voroshilovgrad took six days, which Egger spent in the midst of a group of prisoners herded together onto the back of an open truck. It was a terrible journey. They travelled through cold days and icy nights, beneath a dark sky shredded with shell-fire and across white, open snowfields where the stiff, frozen limbs of people and horses jutted from the furrows. Egger sat on the back of the truck and saw innumerable wooden crosses lining the road. He thought of the magazine Marie had read aloud to him so often, and of how little the winter landscape it depicted resembled this ice-bound, wounded world.

One of the prisoners, a small, stocky man trying to shield his head from the cold with the tattered shreds of a horse blanket, said the crosses were really not as sad as they appeared; they were just signposts indicating the direct route to Heaven. The man’s name was Helmut Moidaschl and he laughed easily. He laughed about the snow that lashed their faces, and he laughed about the bricklike crusts of bread that were dumped out of a sack onto the back of the truck for them to eat. You’d be better off using that bread to build good, solid houses, he said, and laughed so loudly that their two Russian guards laughed with him. Sometimes he would wave to the old women examining the snow-covered corpses for useful items of clothing or food. If you’re on the way to Hell, he’d say, you have to laugh with the devils: it costs nothing, and makes the whole thing more bearable.

Helmut Moidaschl was the first in a long line of people Egger saw die in Voroshilovgrad. The very night they arrived he was seized with a heavy fever, and his screams, stifled by the shreds of his blanket, filled the barracks for hours. The next morning they found him lying dead in a corner, half-naked, doubled over, both fists pressed against his temples.

After a few weeks Egger stopped counting the dead. They were buried in a little birch wood behind the camp. Death belonged to life like mould to bread. Death was a fever. It was hunger. It was a crack in the wall of the barracks and the winter wind whistling through.

Egger was assigned to a team of about a hundred workers. They worked in the forest or on the steppe, cut wood, built low walls with stones from the fields, helped out with the potato harvest or buried the previous night’s dead. In winter he slept in the barracks with about two hundred other men. As soon as temperatures permitted he bedded down outdoors on a pile of straw. Ever since the warm night when someone had turned on the electric light by mistake and thousands of bugs had responded by trickling down from the ceiling, he preferred to sleep in the open air.

News of the end of the war reached Egger in one of the communal toilets. He was sitting on a plank above the cesspit with a swarm of glittering, greenish flies buzzing around him when the door was suddenly wrenched open and a Russian stuck in his head and bellowed, ‘Hitler kaput! Hitler kaput!’ Egger continued to sit there quietly and didn’t respond, so the Russian slammed the door shut and walked away, laughing. His fading laughter could be heard outside for some time, until it was drowned by the wail of the mustering siren.

Less than three weeks later Egger had forgotten the guard’s euphoria and the hopes it had awakened in him. The war was undeniably over, but this fact had no discernible repercussions on life in the camp. The work remained the same, the millet soup was thinner than ever, and the flies still circled unperturbed around the beams of the latrine. Besides, many of the prisoners believed that the end of the war could only be temporary. Maybe Hitler really was kaput, they argued, but behind every crackpot another, far worse crackpot was waiting in the wings, and ultimately it was only a matter of time before the whole thing started all over again.

On an unusually mild winter night Egger sat in front of the barracks wrapped in his blanket and wrote a letter to his dead wife Marie. He had found an almost undamaged piece of paper and a pencil stub during a clean-up operation in a burnt-out village, and slowly, in big, wobbly letters, he wrote:

He folded the letter up as small as he could and buried it in the earth at his feet. Then he took his blanket and went back inside the barracks.

It was almost another six years before Egger’s time in Russia came to an end. There was no prior warning of the liberation, but early one morning in the summer of 1951 the prisoners were herded together in the square in front of the barracks, where they were made to strip naked and throw their clothes on top of one another in a great, stinking heap. The heap was doused in petrol and set alight, and as the men stared into the flames the fear that they were about to be shot, or worse, was written on their faces. But the Russians were laughing and all talking loudly at once, and when one of them grabbed a prisoner by the shoulder, pulled him close and proceeded to lead the naked, scrawny spectre in a ridiculous dance around the fire, it began to dawn on most of them that this morning was a good morning.

Furnished with fresh items of clothing and a crust of bread apiece, the men left the camp within the hour to set off on the march to the nearest train station. Egger had slipped into one of the rows at the back. Directly in front of him walked a young man with big, permanently frightened eyes who started gobbling his bread in greedy bites as soon as they set off. When he had swallowed the last scrap he turned again and glanced back at the camp, which already lay some kilometres behind them and was scarcely visible now in the shimmering summer air. He grinned and opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a choking sound, and then he began to cry. He howled and sobbed and the tears and snot flowed down his dirty cheeks in wide streaks. One of the older men, tall with a shock of white hair and a disgruntled expression, walked up to the boy, put an arm round his shaking shoulders and told him to stop crying, firstly because all it did was give you a soggy collar, and secondly because bawling was as infectious as horse-fever and bubonic plague put together and he had no desire to spend the two-thousand-kilometre journey home surrounded by grizzling old women. On top of which he’d be better off saving his tears for when he got back, because there’d be plenty more for him to cry about there. The young man stopped weeping and for a long time Egger, walking two steps behind him, could hear the dry sounds he made as he swallowed his tears and the very last crumbs of bread.

*   *   *

After his return home Egger initially lived behind the newly erected school building, in a wooden shack that the local authority, with the mayor’s benevolent support, made over to him. The mayor was no longer a Nazi these days; geraniums hung outside the windows again instead of swastikas, and in other respects, too, much in the village had changed. The road had got wider. Motor vehicles rattled past many times a day, often at quite short intervals, and the stinking, smoking trucks, those old diesel monstrosities, were increasingly seldom among them. Shining automobiles of every colour came hurtling in from the top of the valley, spitting out day-trippers, hikers and skiers onto the village square. Many of the farmers rented out guestrooms, and the chickens and pigs had disappeared from most of the sheds. Skis and hiking poles now stood in their place, and the pens smelled of wax instead of chicken and pig shit. The Golden Goat had acquired competition. Every day the landlord of the Goat would work himself into a lather again about the Mitterhofer guesthouse that had recently been built across the way, with its resplendent lime-green facade and the sign above the door offering shiny words of welcome. He hated old Mitterhofer. He refused to understand how a cattle farmer could suddenly hit on the idea of setting aside his pitchfork and providing accommodation for tourists instead of cows. ‘A farmer is a farmer and will never be an innkeeper!’ he said. Secretly, though, he had to admit that the competition wasn’t bad for business: on the contrary, it invigorated it. When he eventually died in the late Sixties, a scatterbrained old man, he was able to bequeath to his only daughter, in addition to the Golden Goat, another three guesthouses, several hectares of land, the bowling alley under the stables of the former Loidolt farm, and shares in two chair lifts, which, although she was well on the wrong side of forty, turned this unmarried and rather obdurate woman into one of the most desirable catches in the valley.

Egger accepted all these changes with silent amazement. At night he would hear in the distance the metallic creak of the marker poles on the slopes – or pistes, as they were now called – and in the morning he was often woken by the clamour of the schoolchildren behind the wall at the head of his bed. This would break off abruptly the moment the teacher entered the classroom. He remembered his own childhood, his few years of school, which at the time had stretched out endlessly before him and now seemed as brief and fleeting as the blink of an eye. All in all, time bewildered him. The past seemed to curve in all directions, and in memory the sequence of events became confused, or would constantly reform and re-evaluate itself in peculiar ways. He had spent far more time in Russia than he had with Marie, yet the years in the Caucasus and Voroshilovgrad seemed scarcely longer than his last few days with her. His time with the cable cars shrank in retrospect to a single season, whereas he felt as if he had spent half his life hanging over an ox yoke looking at the ground, his little white bottom stretched towards the evening sky.

A few weeks after his return, Egger came across old Kranzstocker. He was sitting in front of his farm on a rickety milking stool, and Egger greeted him as he walked past. Kranzstocker slowly lifted his head: it was a while before he recognized Egger. ‘You,’ he said, in an ancient, croaking voice. ‘You, of all people!’ Egger stopped and looked at the old man, sitting there, slumped, peering up at him from yellow eyes. The hands on his knees were thin as kindling; his mouth hung half open and seemed to be entirely devoid of teeth. Egger had heard that two of his sons had not returned from the war, whereupon he had tried to hang himself from the pantry doorframe. The brittle wood had not withstood his weight and Kranzstocker had survived. From then on the old farmer had spent his days yearning for death. He saw Death crouched on every corner, and each evening he was convinced that eternal rest would descend on him with the darkness. But he always woke again the next day, even sicker, more morose, more corroded by his yearning than before.

‘Come over here,’ he said, craning his head forwards like a chicken. ‘Let’s see what you look like!’ Egger took a step towards him. The old man’s cheeks were sunken, and his hair, once gleaming black, now hung from his skull as white and thin as cobwebs. ‘It’ll soon be over for me, Death misses no one,’ he said. ‘Every day I hear him coming round the corner, but every time it’s just one of the neighbour’s cows or a dog or the shadow of some other creeping creature.’ Egger stood as if rooted to the spot. For a moment he felt as if he were a child again, and he was afraid the old man might get to his feet and rise up tall as a mountain. ‘And so today it’s you,’ the farmer continued. ‘Someone like you just comes round the corner, and others don’t come anywhere any more. That’s justice for you. I was Kranzstocker once, and now look at me, what’s become of me: a heap of rotting bones with just enough life left in them not to crumble to dust on the spot. All my life I walked upright, I bowed to the Lord and no one else. And how does the Lord thank me? By taking two of my sons. By tearing my own flesh and blood from my body. And because that still isn’t enough for him, the son of a bitch, because he still hasn’t squeezed the last drop of life out of an old farmer like me, he lets me sit outside my farm every day from morning till night waiting for Death. So here I sit, wearing my backside to the bone, but the only things that come round the corner are a couple of cows and a couple of shadows and you – you, of all people!’

Kranzstocker looked down at his hands, at his thin, mottled fingers. His breath came heavily, with a quiet rattle. Suddenly he raised his head, and at the same time one of the hands shot out of his lap and grabbed Egger’s forearm.

‘You can do it now!’ he cried, his voice trembling with agitation. ‘You can strike me now! Strike me, you hear? I’m begging you, strike me! Please, just strike me dead!’ Egger felt the old man’s fingers digging into his arm, and an icy fear gripped his heart. He pulled away and took a step back. Kranzstocker dropped his hand and sat there silently, his eyes again fixed on the ground. Egger turned and left.

As he walked along the road that ended just behind the village, he had a strange empty feeling in his stomach. Deep down, he felt sorry for the old farmer. He thought of the milking stool and wished he could have a chair and a warm blanket, and at the same time he wished he could have death. He went on along the narrow path up the mountain, all the way to the Pichlersenke. Up here the ground was soft and the grass short and dark. Drops of water trembled on the tips of the blades, making the whole meadow glitter as if studded with glass beads. Egger marvelled at these tiny, trembling drops that clung so tenaciously to the blades of grass, only to fall at last and seep into the earth or dissolve to nothing in the air.

It was only many years later that Kranzstocker found release, on an autumn day in the late Seventies, as he sat like a shadow listening to the radio in his room. In order to understand anything at all he had leaned his body right over the table and was pressing his left ear against the speaker. When the presenter announced that the next programme would be a concert of brass-band music the old man gave a sudden cry, pounded his fist repeatedly against his ribs, and finally slid off the chair, stiff and dead, to the music’s tinny, rhythmical accompaniment.