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:
My dear Marie,
I am writing to you from Russia. It is not that bad here. There is work and something to eat, and because there are no mountains the sky is wider than the eye can see. The only really bad thing is the cold. It’s a different cold to back home. If only I had just one little paraffin sack, like the ones I had so many of back then, it would be all right.
But I don’t mean to complain. There are people lying stiff and cold in the snow and I am still looking at the stars. Perhaps you can see the stars, too. I’m afraid I have to end here. I only write slowly and it’s already getting light behind the hills.
Your Egger
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.