As there was no one else for him to talk to, he talked to himself, or to the things around him. He’d say: ‘You’re useless. You’re too blunt. I’m going to sharpen you on a stone. And then I’m going to go down to the valley and buy some fine sandpaper and sharpen you again. And I’m going to wind some leather around your handle. You’ll sit nicely in the hand. And you’ll look good, too, although that’s not the point, you understand?’
Or he’d say: ‘This weather makes you miserable. Nothing but fog. Your gaze slips because it doesn’t know what to hang on to. If it carries on like this the fog’ll soon come creeping into my room, and it’ll start to drizzle ever so lightly over the table.’
And he’d say: ‘Spring’ll be here soon. The birds have seen it already. Something’s stirring in the bones, and the bulbs are already splitting deep down beneath the snow.’
Sometimes Egger had to laugh at himself and his own thoughts. He would sit there alone at his table, look out of the window at the mountains with the shadows of clouds passing silently across them, and laugh until his eyes filled with tears.
Once a week he went down to the village to get matches and paint, or bread, onions and butter. He had realized long ago that people there speculated about him. When he set off for home with his purchases on his home-made sledge, which he upgraded with little rubber wheels in spring, he would see them out of the corner of his eye, putting their heads together and starting to whisper behind his back. Then he would turn around and give them the blackest look of which he was capable. Yet in truth he didn’t much care about the villagers’ opinions or their outrage. To them he was just an old man who lived in a dugout, talked to himself, and crouched in a freezing cold mountain stream to wash every morning. As far as he was concerned, though, he had done all right, and thus had every reason to be content. He would be able to live well for quite some time on the money from his tour-guiding days; he had a roof over his head, slept in his own bed, and when he sat on his little stool outside the front door he could let his gaze wander until his eyes closed and his chin sank onto his chest. In his life he too, like all people, had harboured ideas and dreams. Some he had fulfilled for himself; some had been granted to him. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands again. But he was still here. And in the mornings after the first snowmelt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks scattered there, the cool stone at his back and the first warm rays of sun on his face, he felt that many things had not gone so badly after all.
It was at this time, the time after the snowmelt, when in the early hours of the morning the earth steamed and the animals crept forth from their holes and caves, that Andreas Egger met the Cold Lady. He had tossed and turned on his mattress for hours, unable to sleep. Later he lay there quietly, arms folded over his chest, and listened to the sounds of the night: to the restless wind, prowling about the hut and knocking on the window with muffled thumps. Suddenly there was silence. Egger lit a candle and stared at the flickering shadows on the ceiling. He extinguished the candle again. For a while he lay there without moving. Finally he got up and went outside. The world was submerged in impenetrable fog. It was still night, but somewhere behind this soft silence day was dawning and the air shimmered like milk in the darkness. Egger took a few steps up the slope. He could hardly see the contours of his hand before his eyes, and when he stretched it out in front of him it looked as if he were plunging it into a deep, fathomless body of water. He walked on, carefully, step by step, a few hundred metres up the mountain. Far away he heard a note, like the long-drawn-out whistle of a marmot. He stopped and looked up. The moon hung in a gap in the fog, white and naked. Suddenly he felt a breath of air on his face, and the next moment the wind was back again. It came in solitary gusts, picking the fog to pieces, shredding it and chasing it apart. Egger heard the wind howling as it swept around the rocks higher up the mountain, and whispering in the grass at his feet. He walked on through streaks of fog that scattered before him like living creatures. He saw the sky open up. He saw flat rocks with remnants of snow on them, as if someone had covered them with white tablecloths. And then he saw the Cold Lady, crossing the slope about thirty metres above him. Her form was completely white, and at first he mistook her for a wisp of fog, but a moment later he clearly recognized her pale arms, the threadbare shawl that hung around her shoulders, and her shadow-like hair above the whiteness of her body. A shiver ran down his spine. Suddenly now he felt the cold. But it wasn’t the air that was cold: the cold came from inside. It sat deep in his heart, and it was horror. The figure was heading for a narrow rock formation, and although it was moving swiftly Egger couldn’t see it taking any steps. It was as if some hidden mechanism in the rock were drawing it on. He didn’t dare move. The horror sat in his heart, yet at the same time he was strangely afraid that he might chase the figure away with a noise or a hasty movement. He saw the wind catch her hair, exposing, for a brief moment, the nape of her neck. And then he knew. ‘Turn around,’ he said. ‘Please, turn around and look at me!’ But the figure kept on receding, and Egger saw only the nape of her neck and the reddish sickle of her scar shimmering upon it. ‘Where have you been so long?’ he cried. ‘There’s so much to tell you. You wouldn’t believe it, Marie! This whole, long life!’ She didn’t turn around. She didn’t answer. All he heard was the noise of the wind, the howling and sighing as it swept across the ground, taking with it the last snow of the year.
Egger stood alone on the mountain. He stood there for a long time without moving, as the shadows of the night slowly retreated around him. When he finally stirred, the sun was flashing from behind the distant mountain ranges and pouring its light over the mountaintops, so soft and beautiful that had he not been so tired and confused he could have laughed for sheer happiness.
Over the following weeks Egger roamed again and again across the rocky slopes above his hut, but the Cold Lady, or Marie, or whoever the apparition may have been, never showed herself to him again. Gradually her image faded until at last it dissolved entirely. Egger was in any case growing forgetful. Sometimes he would get up in the morning and spend over an hour looking for the shoes that he had hung on the stovepipe to dry the night before. Or, thinking about what he had wanted to cook for dinner, he would fall into a kind of brooding reverie so exhausting that he would often fall asleep sitting at the table, head propped on both hands, without having eaten a bite. Sometimes, before going to bed, he would place his stool next to the window, gaze out, and hope that against the backdrop of the night specific memories would surface that might bring at least a little order to his confused mind. More and more often, though, the sequence of events would slip away from him, things would tumble over one another, and as soon as an image seemed to come together in his mind’s eye it would drift away again or evaporate like lubricating oil on hot iron.