‘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.
During the funeral it bucketed down. The road was flooded with ankle-deep mud and the funeral procession could make only slow progress. Egger, himself by this time over seventy, walked right at the back. He thought about the farmer, who had spent all his life thrashing his own happiness away from him. They were walking in the pouring rain past the little restaurant in what used to be the Achmandl farm when a child’s laughter rang out, loudly and with remarkable clarity. One of the windows was ajar and flickering brightly. The landlord’s little son was sitting in the room in front of an enormous television set, his face right up against the screen. The reflection of the images danced across his forehead; he was clutching the antenna with one hand and slapping his thighs with the other as he laughed. He was laughing so hard that through the curtain of rain Egger could make out the glistening drops of spittle spraying against the box. He felt an urge to stop and stand there, to press his forehead against the window and laugh along with the boy. But the funeral procession moved on, dark and silent. Egger saw before him the hunched shoulders of the mourners and the rain running down them in thin rivulets. At the head of the procession the coffin cart rocked like a boat in the gathering dusk as the child’s laughter gradually faded away behind them.
Although in the course of his life Egger did give the idea some consideration, he never got himself a television set. Usually he had no money or no space or no time, and in any case it seemed to him that, generally speaking, he lacked all the necessary prerequisites for such an investment. For instance, he could barely muster the stamina with which most other people would stare for hours into the flickering screen, something he secretly assumed could, in the long run, damage your eyesight and soften your brain. Yet television gave him two moments that made a very deep impression on him, and which in later years he would repeatedly drag up from the depths of his memory, recalling them with a little shock of pleasure. The first was one evening in the back room of the Golden Goat, where a brand-new Imperial television set had stood for some time. Egger hadn’t been to the inn for months, and was therefore surprised when, on entering, he was assailed by tinny television voices over a quiet hiss of static, rather than by the customary public-house murmur. He went to the back, where seven or eight people sat scattered at different tables, staring mesmerized into an appliance the size of a wardrobe. For the first time in his life Egger saw the television images close to. They moved before his eyes with magical ease, bringing to the stuffy back room of the Golden Goat a world about which, until now, he had not had the slightest notion. He saw narrow, soaring houses with roofs that stuck up into the sky like inverted icicles. Scraps of paper were snowing from the windows and the people on the street were laughing, shouting, flinging their hats into the air, and generally seemed to be quite mad with joy. Before Egger could take it all in the screen was torn apart, as if by a soundless explosion, only to recombine less than a second later in an entirely different scene. Men in short-sleeved shirts and workers’ overalls were sitting on some wooden benches watching a dark-skinned girl of about ten, who was kneeling in a cage stroking the mane of a lion that lay sprawled before her. The animal yawned and you could see right into its mouth, which was criss-crossed with thin threads of saliva. The audience applauded, the girl snuggled up to the lion’s body and for a moment it looked as if she was about to disappear into its mane. Egger laughed. He did so more out of embarrassment, as he had no idea how one was supposed to behave in front of the television in the presence of others. He was ashamed of his ignorance. He felt like a child observing the incomprehensible activities of adults: it was all somehow interesting, but none of it seemed to have anything to do with him personally.