Robert Seethaler - A Whole Life

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.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That might work out.’

For a whole week Egger led the two old people over increasingly challenging paths and showed them the beauties of the region. The work gave him pleasure. Hillwalking came easily to him, and the mountain air blew the gloomy thoughts from his head. There was also, in his view, an agreeable lack of conversation, partly because there wasn’t much to talk about in any case, and partly because the couple behind him were too out of breath to wring unnecessary words from their quietly whistling lungs.

When the week was over the two of them bade him an effusive farewell, and Mr Roskovics stuck a couple of banknotes in Egger’s jacket pocket. He and his wife were positively misty-eyed when they finally got into their car and headed home, disappearing along a road still thick with early morning fog.

Egger had enjoyed this new task. He painted a sign which he felt contained the most essential information and was also somehow interesting enough to entice tourists to engage his services, stationed himself with it directly beside the fountain in the village square, and waited.

IF YOU LIKE THE MOUNTAINS

I’M YOUR MAN.

I (with practically a lifetime’s experience

in and of Nature) offer:

Hiking with or without baggage

Excursions (half or full day)

Climbing trips

Walks in the mountains (for senior citizens,

disabled people and children)

Guided tours in all seasons (weather permitting)

Guaranteed sunrise for early birds

Guaranteed sunset (in the valley only,

as too dangerous on the mountain)

No danger to life and limb!

(PRICE IS NEGOTIABLE,

BUT NOT EXPENSIVE)

The sign evidently made an impression because business was good from the start, such that Egger had no reason to go back to his old work as an odd-job man. As before, he often got up when it was still dark, but now instead of going out into the fields he went up into the mountains and watched the rising sun. In the reflection of its first rays the tourists’ faces looked as if they were glowing from the inside, and Egger saw that they were happy.

In summer his tours often went well beyond the crests of the nearest mountains, while in winter he mostly confined himself to shorter walks, which in wide snowshoes were scarcely less exhausting. He always led the way, with an eye on potential dangers and the tourists panting at his back. He liked these people, even if some of them did try to explain the world to him or behaved idiotically in some other way. He knew that during a two-hour uphill climb, if not before, their arrogance would evaporate along with the sweat on their hot heads, until nothing remained but gratitude that they had made it and a tiredness deep in the bones.

Sometimes he would pass his old plot of land. Over the years scree had accumulated on the spot where once his house had stood, forming a sort of embankment. In summer white poppies glowed between the lumps of stone, and in winter the children jumped over it on their skis. Egger would watch them whizzing down the slope, taking off with a whoop and sailing for a moment through the air before landing skilfully or tumbling through the snow like brightly coloured balls. He thought of the threshold where he and Marie had sat on so many evenings, and of the little wooden gate with the simple hook he had fashioned from a long steel nail. After the avalanche the gate had vanished, like so many other things that failed to reappear once the snow had melted. They were simply gone, as if they had never been. Egger felt the sadness well up in his heart. He thought that there would have been so much more for her to do with her life, probably far more than he could imagine.