Robert Seethaler - A Whole Life

‘We can’t choose our neighbours,’ said the teacher, ‘but one thing’s for sure: you are an ill-mannered oaf! You burst into the middle of my lesson, uninvited, unshaven, hair uncombed, and to cap it all still in your underpants, or what’s that supposed to be you’ve got on?’

‘Leggings,’ murmured Egger, who was already bitterly regretting having come round. ‘They’ve been patched a few times.’

Anna Holler sighed. ‘You will leave my classroom immediately,’ she said. ‘And when you have washed, shaved, and dressed properly you may come back again, if you wish!’

Egger didn’t come back again. He would put up with the noise, or stuff moss in his ears if necessary: for him, the matter was settled. And that would probably have been the end of it, had there not been three loud knocks on his door the following Sunday. Anna Holler was standing outside with a cake in her hands.

‘I thought I’d bring you something to eat,’ she said. ‘Where’s the table?’

Egger offered her his only seat, a milking stool he had made himself, and placed the cake on his old storage chest in which, out of a secret fear of hard times, he kept a few cans of tinned food — ‘Haggemeyer’s Finest Beef with Onions’ — and a pair of warm shoes. ‘Cakes like this are often very dry,’ he said, and as he set off with his earthenware jug to the fountain in the village square, he thought about this woman who was right now sitting in his room, waiting to cut the cake. He thought she might be about his age, but the many years of teaching had visibly taken their toll. Her face was wreathed in tiny wrinkles and under her dark hair, which she wore tied back in a tight bun, the snow-white roots shimmered through. For a moment a peculiar image thrust itself upon him: he saw her not simply sitting waiting on his stool, but had the impression that her mere presence had altered the room he had inhabited alone for so many years, had expanded it, had in some unpleasant way opened it up on all sides.

‘So this is where you live,’ said the teacher, when he returned with the jug full of water.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘One can be happy anywhere, really,’ she said. She had dark brown eyes that were warm and friendly, yet Egger found it uncomfortable to be looked at by her. He glanced down at his piece of cake, pressed out a raisin with his forefinger and let it fall discreetly to the floor. Then they ate, and he had to admit that the cake was good. Actually, he thought, the cake was probably better than anything he had eaten in recent years; but this he kept to himself.

Later Egger could not have said how the whole affair came to pass. Just as Anna Holler had quite naturally appeared outside his door with the cake in her hands, she quite naturally walked into his life, where within a very short time she was claiming the space that she clearly assumed was hers. Egger didn’t really know what was happening; besides which he didn’t want to be rude, so he went for walks with her or sat beside her in the sun and drank the coffee she always brought along in a thermos, which she declared was blacker than the soul of Satan. Anna Holler was constantly coming out with comparisons like these; in fact, she talked virtually non-stop, telling him about her lessons, about the children, about her life, about this one man who had long since got what was coming to him and whom she should never, never, never have trusted. Sometimes she said something Egger didn’t understand. She used words he had never heard before, and he secretly assumed she just made them up when she had run out of all the right ones. He let her talk. He listened, nodded from time to time, occasionally said yes or no, and drank the coffee, which made his heart race as if he were scaling the north face of the High Kämmerer.

One day she persuaded him to take Blue Liesl up to the Karleitner summit. From up there you could look out over the whole village, she said; the school looked like a lost matchbox, and if you squinted a bit you could just see the bright dots of the children around the village fountain.

When the gondola started with a slight jolt, Egger positioned himself at one of the windows. He felt the teacher come and stand right behind him and look over his shoulder. He thought of the fact that he hadn’t washed his jacket in years. At least he had hung his trousers in the clear water of the spring for half an hour last week, drying them afterwards on a sunny rock.

‘You see that girder down there?’ he said. ‘When we were pouring the foundation, someone fell in. Drank too much the day before and keeled over at midday. Face down in the concrete. Lay there and didn’t move. Like a dead fish in a pond. It was a while before we managed to get him out; the concrete wasn’t that liquid any more. But he made it. He’s been blind in one eye ever since, though. Hard to say whether it was the concrete or the Krauterer.’

Once they reached the top they stood on the platform for a while looking down into the valley. Egger felt as if he ought to entertain the teacher, so he pointed out various things in the village: the remains of a burnt-out cattle shed, the complex of holiday homes hastily built on a beet field, the huge cauldron, overgrown with rust and purple broom, that the mountain infantry had left standing behind the chapel at the end of the war and which the children had used ever since for their games of hide and seek. Anna Holler laughed out loud every time she made out something new. Sometimes her laugh was completely swallowed by the wind, so that it looked as if she was just beaming away silently to herself.

When they got back to the valley station in the early evening they stood side by side for a little while and watched the cabin heading back up the mountain. Egger didn’t know what he was supposed to say, or whether he was supposed to say anything at all, so he kept his mouth shut. The muffled whirring of the engines could be heard coming up from the machine room in the basement of the building. He felt the teacher’s eyes upon him. ‘I’d like you to take me home now,’ she said, and walked off.

She was living in a little room right behind the town hall which the municipality had put at her disposal while she covered at the school. She had prepared a plate with a couple of slices of bread and dripping garnished with onion, and outside on the window ledge were two cold bottles of beer. Egger ate the bread and drank the beer, trying not to look at the teacher as he did so.

‘You’re a man,’ she said. ‘A real man with a real appetite, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, and shrugged.

It was beginning to get dark outside. She stood up, took a few steps across the room, and stopped in front of a little dresser. From behind Egger saw her lower her head as if she had lost something on the floorboards. Her fingers were playing with the hem of her skirt. Earth and dust still stuck to her heels. It was dreadfully silent in the room. It was as if the silence that had withdrawn from all the valleys long ago was gathering right at this moment, right here in this little room. Egger cleared his throat. He put down his bottle and watched a drop run slowly down the glass and spread out on the tablecloth in a round, dark stain. Anna Holler stood in front of the dresser, motionless, eyes lowered. She raised first her head, then her hands.

‘People are often alone in this world,’ she said.

Then she turned around. She lit two candles and placed them on the table. Closed the curtains. Pushed the bolt across the door.

‘Come,’ she said.

Egger was still staring at the dark stain on the tablecloth. ‘I’ve only ever lain with one woman,’ he said.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said the teacher. ‘I’m fine with that.’

Later, Egger looked at the sleeping old woman who lay beside him. After they had gone to bed she had placed her hand on his chest, and beneath it his heart had pounded so loudly that he thought the whole room was moving. It hadn’t worked out. He wasn’t able to overcome his inhibitions. He had lain there motionless, as if nailed to the spot, feeling the hand grow heavier and heavier on his chest until finally it sank between his ribs and settled directly over his heart. He looked at her body. She was lying on her side. Her head had slipped off the pillow and her hair lay in thin strands on the sheet. Her face was half turned away. It looked haggard and emaciated. The nocturnal light spilling into the room through a narrow slit in the curtains seemed to have got caught in all the wrinkles. Egger fell asleep, and when he woke again the teacher was curled up on her side and he could hear her soft crying, muffled by the pillow. For a while he lay there beside her, irresolute, but then he realized there was nothing in this world that could be done about it. He got up quietly and left.