In the weeks that followed, Egger found accommodation at the Golden Goat. Most of the time he lay in bed in a tiny room behind the laundry which the innkeeper had offered for him to use. His broken legs took a long time to heal. The bonesetter Alois Klammerer had died years earlier (cancer ate away his palate, half his jaw and the side of his face so that by the end you could see his teeth through his open cheek as if through a window), so they had to call in the young local doctor, who had moved to the village just last season and was making a living primarily from the sprained, twisted or broken limbs of the tourists who came in ever-increasing numbers for hiking and skiing. Bittermann & Sons paid the doctor’s bill and Egger got two dazzling white plaster casts around his legs. At the end of the second week they stuffed a thick straw pillow behind his back and he was allowed to sit up and drink his milk from a mug instead of slurping it from an earthenware dish. At the end of the third week he was sufficiently recovered that every day, around noon, the innkeeper and the barman would wrap him in a horse blanket, lift him out of bed, and set him down outside the door on a little birchwood bench. From here he could see the slope where his house had stood, and where now all he could make out was a pile of debris illuminated by the warm spring sun.
Towards the end of May Egger asked one of the kitchen boys for a sharpened meat cleaver. He used it to cut and hack away at the plaster casts until he was able to break them into two halves, and his legs emerged. They lay there on the sheet, thin and white like two debarked sticks, looking to him almost more peculiar than a few weeks earlier when he had pulled them, stiff and cold, from the snow.
For a few days Egger dragged his emaciated body back and forth between the bed and the birchwood bench, until at last he felt that his legs belonged to him again and would be strong enough to carry him further. He slipped on a pair of trousers for the first time in weeks and headed off to his plot of land. He walked through the forest where it had been flattened by the avalanche; he looked up at the sky, which was full of small, round clouds, and at the flowers springing up everywhere between the stumps and the uprooted tree trunks: white, egg-yolk yellow, bright blue. He tried to see everything precisely so as to memorize it for later. He wanted to understand what had happened, but when, after several hours, he reached his plot and saw the beams and planks scattered about he knew there was nothing to understand. He sat on a rock and thought of Marie. He imagined what had happened that night, and saw terrible pictures in his mind’s eye: Marie sitting upright in their bed, arms outstretched on the blanket, listening, wide-eyed, into the darkness a second before the avalanche smashed through the walls like a giant fist and drove her body into the cold earth.
* * *
In the autumn, almost half a year after the avalanche, Egger left the valley, moving on to work elsewhere for the company. But he couldn’t do the heavy woodcutting any more.
‘What are we supposed to do with someone like you?’ asked the general manager. Egger had limped in soundlessly across the carpet and was now standing in front of the desk, hanging his head. ‘You’re no good for anything any more.’ Egger nodded, and the general manager sighed. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ he said. ‘But don’t go getting the idea that the blasting had anything to do with it. The last blast was a couple of weeks before the avalanche.’
‘I’m not,’ said Egger.
The general manager put his head on one side and stared out of the window for a while. ‘Or do you think perhaps the mountain has a memory?’ he asked abruptly. Egger shrugged. The manager leaned over, made a gargling noise and spat into a tin dish at his feet. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Bittermann & Sons has constructed seventeen cable cars so far, and believe you me, they won’t be the last. People are all going crazy about slithering down mountains on their planks.’ He pushed his dish under the desk with the tip of his shoe and looked at Egger solemnly. ‘God alone knows why,’ he said. ‘At any rate, the cable cars have to be maintained: cables checked, impeller wheels lubricated, cabin roofs seen to and so on. You don’t need solid ground under your feet all the time, do you?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Egger.
‘That’s all right, then,’ said the general manager.
—
Egger was assigned to a small team, a handful of taciturn men whose bearded faces, burned by the mountain sun, betrayed almost nothing of their emotions. They travelled along mountain roads — more and more of which were tarmacked — perched on pallets in the back of a delivery truck, going from one cable car to another to take care of maintenance work that was too demanding for local workers. Egger’s task was to sit in a wooden frame attached to the steel cables by nothing but a safety lanyard and a hand-braking roller mechanism, and to slide slowly down towards the valley, removing dust, ice and encrusted bird droppings from the cables and ball joints and lubricating them with fresh oil. No one else was keen to do this job. Word had got around that in previous years two men, both experienced climbers, had fallen to their deaths, through carelessness, or because of a material defect, or simply because of the wind, which sometimes made the cables swing out several metres on either side. But Egger wasn’t afraid. He knew that his life hung from a thin rope, but as soon as he had scaled a girder, attached the roller mechanism and fastened the safety carabiner, a sense of calm came over him, and little by little the black cloud of confused, despairing thoughts that shrouded his heart dissolved in the mountain air, until nothing was left but pure sorrow.
For many months Egger moved on like this from valley to valley, sleeping in the truck or in cheap boarding-house rooms at night and dangling between heaven and earth by day. He saw winter settle over the mountains. He worked in thickly falling snow, scratched ice from the cables with his wire brush, and from the struts of girders he knocked long icicles that shattered quietly in the depths below him, or were noiselessly swallowed by the snow. Often, in the distance, he would hear the muffled rumble of an avalanche. Sometimes it would seem to come closer and he would look up the slope, anticipating an enormous white wave that would sweep him up for an instant and then overwhelm him, along with the cable, the steel girders and the whole world. But each time the rumbling died away and the clear cries of the jackdaws could be heard again.
In spring their route took him back to the valley, where he stayed for a while to clear brush and debris from Blue Liesl’s forest aisle and fix small cracks in the girder foundations. He found lodgings at the Golden Goat again, in the room where he had spent so many days with his broken legs. Every evening he came back from the mountain dead tired, ate the remains of his daily ration sitting on the edge of his bed, and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Once he awoke in the middle of the night with a peculiar sensation, and looking up at the small, dusty window under the ceiling he saw that it was clouded by hundreds of moths. The creatures’ wings seemed to glow in the moonlight, and they beat against the pane with a barely discernible papery sound. For a moment Egger thought their appearance must be a sign, but he didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, so he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. They’re only moths, he thought, a few silly little moths; and when he awoke early the next morning they had vanished.
He stayed several weeks in the village, which as far as he could tell had largely recovered from the impact of the avalanche, and then moved on. He avoided going to look at his plot of land or visiting the cemetery, and he didn’t sit on the little birchwood bench. He moved on, hung in the air between mountains, and watched the seasons change beneath him like colourful paintings that meant nothing to him and had nothing to do with him. Later on he recalled the years after the avalanche as an empty, silent time that only slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to fill with life again.