‘Another one?’ the young woman asked, and Egger nodded. She brought a fresh glass, and as she leaned forward to put it on the table she touched his upper arm with a fold of her blouse. The touch was barely perceptible, yet it left a subtle pain that seemed to sink deeper into his flesh with every passing second. He looked at her, and she smiled.
All his life Andreas Egger would look back on this moment, again and again: that brief smile that afternoon in front of the quietly crackling guesthouse stove.
Later, when he stepped back out into the open, it had already stopped snowing. It was cold and the air was clear. Scraps of fog were creeping up the mountains, and the peaks were already glowing in the sun. Egger left the village behind him and trudged home through the deep snow. A group of children were playing by the mountain stream a few metres beyond the old wooden footbridge. They had tossed their schoolbags into the snow and were scrambling about in the bed of the brook. Some were sliding down the frozen watercourse on their bottoms while others crept across the ice on all fours, listening to the quiet burbling beneath. When they spotted Egger they ganged up and started shouting, ‘Gammy Leg! Gammy Leg!’ Their voices rang out bright and clear in the glassy air, like the cries of the young golden eagles that circled high above the valley, plucking fallen chamois from ravines and goats from the pasture. ‘Gammy Leg! Gammy Leg!’ Egger put down the wooden frame, broke off a fist-sized chunk of ice from the overhanging bank of the stream, drew his arm back and flung it in their direction. He aimed far too high, and the chunk of ice sailed well over the children’s heads. For a moment, at the highest point of its trajectory, it looked as if it would just hang there, a small celestial body flashing in the sun. Then it plunged down and disappeared soundlessly in the shadow of the snowbound fir trees.
* * *
Three months later Egger was sitting on a tree stump at the exact same spot, watching a yellowish cloud of dust darken the mouth of the valley, from which, moments later, the construction team of the firm Bittermann and Sons — consisting of two hundred and sixty labourers, twelve machinists, four engineers, seven Italian cooks and a small number of unspecified auxiliary staff — emerged and approached the village. From a distance the throng resembled an enormous herd of cattle; only by squinting was it possible to discern, here and there, a raised arm or a pickaxe carried over a shoulder. This group was merely the vanguard of a convoy of heavy horse-drawn vehicles and trucks loaded with machines, tools, steel girders, cement and other building materials that proceeded along the unpaved road at walking speed. For the first time the muffled rattle of diesel engines reverberated through the valley. The locals stood silently by the side of the road, until suddenly the old stable hand Joseph Malitzer snatched his felt hat from his head and flung it into the air with a shout of delight. Now the others also began shouting, cheering, yelling. For weeks they had been waiting for the onset of spring, and with it the arrival of the construction team. A cable car was to be built. An aerial cable car powered by direct-current electricity, in whose light-blue wooden cabins people would float up the mountain, enjoying a panoramic view of the whole valley. It was a massive undertaking. Cables twenty-five millimetres thick and intertwined like pairs of mating adders would slice through the sky across a distance of almost two thousand metres. There was a difference in altitude of one thousand three hundred metres to overcome; there were gorges to be bridged and overhanging rocks to be blasted. With the cable car, electricity too would come to the valley. Electric current would flow in along buzzing cables and all the streets and houses and barns would glow with warm light, even at night. People were thinking of all this and much more as they threw up their hats and sent their shouts of delight up into the clear air. Egger would have liked to cheer with them, but for some reason he stayed sitting on his tree stump. He felt despondent, without knowing why. Perhaps it had something to do with the rattling of the engines, the noise that suddenly filled the valley. Nobody knew when it would go away again, or whether it ever would go away again. For a while Egger remained seated: then he couldn’t hold out any longer. He jumped up, ran down, joined the others by the side of the road and shouted and cheered as loudly as he could.
As a child Andreas Egger had never shouted or cheered. He didn’t even really talk until his first year at school. With difficulty he had scraped together a handful of words that at rare moments he would recite in random order. Talking meant attracting attention, which was never a good thing. He arrived in the village as a small boy in the summer of 1902, brought by horse-drawn carriage from a town far beyond the mountains. When he was lifted out he stood there, speechless, eyes wide, gazing up in astonishment at the shimmering white peaks. He must have been about four years old at the time, perhaps a little younger or older. No one knew exactly, and no one was interested, least of all the farmer Hubert Kranzstocker, who reluctantly took receipt of little Egger and gave the carriage driver the measly tip of two groschen and a crust of hard bread. The lad was the only child of one of his sisters-in-law; she had led an irresponsible life, for which God had recently punished her with consumption and summoned her to his bosom. At least there was a leather pouch around the boy’s neck with a few bank notes in it. For Kranzstocker, this was reason enough not to tell him to go to the devil, or leave him at the church door for the priest, which came to much the same thing in his opinion. So now here Egger stood, gazing at the mountains in wonder. This was the only image he retained of his early childhood, and he carried it with him throughout his life. There were no memories of the time before, and at some point the years that followed, his early years on the Kranzstocker farm, also dissolved in the mists of the past.
In his next memory he saw himself as a boy of about eight, skinny and naked, hanging over the yoke of the plough. His legs and his head dangled just above the ground, which stank of horse piss, while his small white bottom jutted up into the winter air and received Kranzstocker’s blows with the hazel rod. As he always did, the farmer had bathed the rod in water to render it supple. Now it hissed briefly and sharply through the air before landing with a sigh on Egger’s backside. Egger never screamed, which only spurred the farmer on to thrash him harder. Man was formed and hardened by God’s hand to subdue the Earth and all that moves upon it. Man carries out God’s will and speaks God’s word. Man creates life with the strength of his loins, and takes life with the strength of his arms. Man is flesh and he is earth and he is a farmer and his name is Hubert Kranzstocker. When it pleases him so to do he digs his field, grabs a full-grown sow and hoists it onto his shoulders, begets a child or hangs another over the yoke of the plough, for he is the man, the word and the deed. ‘Lordhavemercy,’ said Kranzstocker, and brought the rod whistling down. ‘Lordhavemercy.’
There were reasons enough for these beatings: spilt milk, mouldy bread, a lost cow or an evening prayer wrongly stammered. Once the farmer cut the rod too thick, or had forgotten to soak it, or struck with greater fury than usual, it was hard to say exactly which: at any rate, he struck, and somewhere in the little body there was a loud crack and the boy stopped moving. ‘Lordhavemercy,’ said Kranzstocker, lowering his arm in astonishment. Little Egger was brought into the house, laid on the straw and brought back to life by the farmer’s wife with a bucket of water and a beaker of warm milk. Something was out of place in his right leg, but as it would be too expensive to have it examined in a hospital the bonesetter Alois Klammerer was sent for from the neighbouring village. Alois Klammerer was a friendly man with unusually small, pale pink hands, but their strength and dexterity were legendary, even among woodcutters and blacksmiths. Once, years ago, he had been summoned to the Hirz family farm where the farmer’s son, a monstrous young man with the strength of an ox, had crashed through the stable roof, drunk as a lord. He had been rolling around for hours in pain and chicken shit, emitting inarticulate noises and successfully deploying a pitchfork to defend himself against every intervention. Nimbly dodging the fork thrusts, Alois Klammerer approached him with a nonchalant smile, stabbed two fingers unerringly into the lad’s nostrils and with one simple movement forced him to his knees, setting first his stubborn head and, immediately afterwards, his dislocated bones to rights.