And then he saw something that touched the very depths of his heart. A young woman was emerging from an aeroplane. It wasn’t just any woman who was walking down the narrow staircase to the runway; it was the most beautiful creature Egger had seen in his life. She was called Grace Kelly, a name that to his ears sounded strange and outrageous, but at the same time it seemed to be the only name that was fitting. She was wearing a short coat and waving to a huddled crowd of people who had gathered at the airfield. A handful of reporters dashed up, and as she answered their breathless questions the sunlight flowed over her blonde hair and across her smooth, slender neck. Egger shivered at the thought that this hair and this neck were not just an illusion, but that somewhere in this world there might be someone who had touched them with their fingers, perhaps even stroked them with the whole of their hand. Grace Kelly waved again, laugh-ing with a dark, wide-open mouth. Egger got up and left the inn. For a while he walked aimlessly about the village streets before finally sitting down on the steps at the entrance to the chapel. He stared at the ground, trodden flat by countless generations of sinners, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Grace Kelly’s smile and the sadness in her eyes had churned up his emotions and he didn’t understand what he was feeling. He sat there for a long while until, some time after darkness had fallen, he realized how cold it was, and went home.
That was in the late Fifties. It was only much later, in the summer of 1969, that Egger had a second encounter with the television — which in most households by then already constituted the central focus and primary purpose of the evening family gathering — that made a profound impression on him, albeit in an entirely different way. This time he was sitting with almost a hundred and fifty other villagers in the assembly room of the new parish hall, watching two young Americans walk on the Moon for the first time. There was a tense silence in the room for almost the whole of the broadcast, yet scarcely had Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon’s dusty surface than everyone started cheering, and for a few moments at least it was as if some kind of burden fell from the farmers’ heavy shoulders. Afterwards there was free beer for the adults and juice and doughnuts for the children, and a member of the parish council gave a short speech about the tremendous endeavours that made such marvels possible and would probably drive humanity on goodness knows whither. Egger applauded with everyone else. As the ghostly apparitions continued to move within the television set before them — the Americans who, incomprehensibly, were at that moment high above their heads, strolling across the surface of the Moon — he felt mysteriously close and connected to the villagers down here on the darkened Earth, in a room in the parish hall that still smelled of fresh mortar.
The very day he got back from Russia, Egger had headed straight to the camp of the firm Bittermann & Sons. If he had asked someone beforehand he could have saved himself the walk. The barracks were gone. The camp had been dismantled. Here and there a patch of concrete or a wooden beam overgrown with weeds still indicated that people had once worked and lived here. Little white flowers now blossomed on the spot where the general manager had sat behind his desk.
In the village Egger discovered that the company had gone bankrupt just after the war. The last remaining workers were pulled out a year earlier, as the firm responded to the Fatherland’s by then desperate call and switched production from steel girders and double cable winches to weaponry. Old Bittermann, a fervent patriot who in the First World War had left one forearm and a splinter of his right cheekbone in a trench on the Western front, concentrated on the manufacture of carbine barrels and ball-and-socket joints for assault guns. The joints were sound, but part of the magazine warped in extreme heat, which resulted in a number of dreadful accidents at the front and finally led old Bittermann to believe he was in no small measure complicit in the loss of the war. He shot himself in a copse behind his house — with his father’s old hunting rifle, to be on the safe side. When the forest ranger found his body under a stunted crab apple, a metal plate engraved with the date 23.11.1917 glinted out at him from inside the shattered skull.
The cable cars were now built and run by other enterprises, but wherever Egger presented himself they sent him away again. He wasn’t quite right any more, they said. The few years since the war had been enough for many of the old procedures to be updated, which was why, regrettably, in the world of modern transport engineering there was no longer any place for a man like him.
At home in the evenings Egger sat on the edge of his bed and regarded his hands. They lay in his lap, heavy and dark as bog soil. The skin was leathery and furrowed like the skin of an animal. The many years on the rock and in the forest had left scars, and each of those scars could have told a tale of mishap, effort, or success, if Egger had been able to remember their stories. Ever since the night when he had dug in the snow for Marie, his fingernails had been brittle and ingrown around the edges. One of his thumbnails was black, with a small dent in the middle. Egger brought his hands close to his face and contemplated the skin on the backs, which looked in places like crumpled linen. He saw the calluses on his fingertips and the gnarled bulges on his knuckles. Dirt which neither horse brush nor hard soap could dislodge had settled in the cracks and creases. Egger saw the pattern of the veins beneath the skin, and when he raised his hands against the half-light of the window he could see that they trembled very slightly. They were the hands of an old man, and he let them fall.
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.