Some people in the village thought old Egger was completely mad, certainly since a couple of skiers had seen him walk out of his hut stark naked one frosty winter morning and stamp about barefoot in the snow, trying to find a beer bottle he had left outside to cool the previous night. It didn’t bother him. He was aware of his increasing confusion, but he wasn’t mad. Besides, he barely cared what people thought any more, and as the bottle did in fact reappear after a brief search (right next to the gutter — it had burst overnight in the frost and he was able to suck the beer like a lolly on a stick), he considered with quiet satisfaction that, on this particular day at least, his reasoning and conduct had been justified.
According to his birth certificate, which in his opinion wasn’t even worth the ink on the stamp, Egger lived to be seventy-nine years old. He had held out longer than he himself had ever thought possible, and on the whole he could be content. He had survived his childhood, a war and an avalanche. He had never felt himself to be above doing any kind of work, had blasted an incalculable number of holes in rock, and had probably felled enough trees to heat the stoves of an entire town for a whole winter. Over and over again he had hung his life on a thread between heaven and earth, and in his latter years as a tour guide he had learned more about people than he was able fully to understand. As far as he knew, he had not burdened himself with any appreciable guilt, and he had never succumbed to the temptations of the world: to boozing, whoring and gluttony. He had built a house, had slept in countless beds, stables, on the backs of trucks, and even a couple of nights in a Russian wooden crate. He had loved. And he had had an intimation of where love could lead. He had seen a couple of men walk about on the Moon. He had never felt compelled to believe in God, and he wasn’t afraid of death. He couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.
Andreas Egger died one night in February. Not somewhere out in the open, as he had often imagined he would, with the sun on the back of his neck or the starry sky above his brow, but at home in his hut, at the table. The candles had gone out and he was sitting in the faint light of the moon, which hung in the small square of the window like a light bulb dimmed by dust and spider’s webs. He was thinking about the things he was planning to do over the next few days: buy a couple of candles, seal the draughty crack in the window frame, dig a ditch in front of the hut, knee-deep and at least thirty centimetres wide, to divert the meltwater. The weather would cooperate, he could say that with relative certainty. If his leg gave him some peace of an evening, the weather usually stayed calm the following day, too. He was overcome by a feeling of warmth at the thought of his leg, that piece of rotten wood that had carried him through the world for so long. At the same time he was no longer sure whether he was still thinking this, or was already dreaming. He heard a sound, very close to his ear: a gentle whisper, as if someone were speaking to a little child. ‘I suppose it is late,’ he heard himself say, and it was as if his own words hovered in the air in front of him for a few moments before bursting in the light of the little moon in the window. He felt a bright pain in his chest, and watched as his body sank slowly forwards and his head came to rest with his cheek on the tabletop. He heard his own heart. And he listened to the silence when it stopped beating. Patiently he waited for the next heartbeat. And when none came, he let go and died.
Three days later the postman found him when he knocked on the window to bring him the parish newsletter. Egger’s body had been well preserved by the wintry temperatures, and it looked as if he had fallen asleep over breakfast. The funeral took place the following day. The ceremony was short. The parish priest froze in the cold as the gravediggers let the coffin down into the hole they had scraped out of the frozen ground with a little excavator.
Andreas Egger lies next to his wife, Marie. His grave is marked by a rough-hewn limestone veined with cracks, and the pale purple toadflax grows on it in summer.
Not quite six months before his death, Egger had woken up one morning with an inner restlessness that drove him out of bed and out of doors the moment he opened his eyes. It was the beginning of September, and where the sun’s rays stabbed through the blanket of cloud he could see the gleam and flash of the commuters’ cars: people who for some reason couldn’t make a living in tourism and so threaded their way along the road every morning to arrive on time at their workplaces beyond the valley. Egger liked the look of this colourful string of cars snaking its way along the short stretch of road before its contours finally blurred and vanished in the misty light. At the same time, the sight of it made him sad. He thought of the fact that, apart from trips to the Bittermann & Sons cable cars and chair lifts in the surrounding area, he had only left the neighbourhood on one single occasion: to go to war. He thought about how once, along this very road, back then little more than a deeply rutted track acrossthe fields, he had come to the valley for the first time on the box of a horse-drawn carriage. And at that moment he was overcome with a longing so searing and profound he thought his heart would melt. Without looking back he got up and ran. He limped, stumbled, raced down to the village as fast as he could, where the yellow number 5 bus — the so-called Seven Valley Line — was waiting at the stop outside the lofty Post Hotel with its engine running, ready to depart. ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, without looking up. Egger knew the man: he had worked for a few years fitting ski bindings in the repair shop run by the former blacksmith, until arthritis twisted his joints and he found work with the bus company. The steering wheel looked like a little toy tyre in his hands.
‘To the last stop!’ said Egger. ‘You can’t go further than that.’ He bought a ticket and sat in an empty seat at the back amid the tired villagers — some of whom he knew by sight — who either didn’t have the money for a car of their own, or were already too old to master its speed and technique. His heart beat like mad as the doors closed and the bus drove off. He sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. For a while he stayed like that, and when he sat up and opened his eyes again the village had vanished and he saw things passing by along the road. Little boarding houses that had sprung up out of nowhere in the fields. Service stations. Petrol signs. Advertising hoardings. A guesthouse with bedding hanging from every single one of its open windows. A woman standing at a fence with one hand on her hip, her face indistinct, blurred by cigarette smoke. Egger tried to think, but the torrent of images made him tired. Just before falling asleep he tried to recall the longing that had driven him from the valley, but there was nothing there. For a moment he thought he could still feel a slight burning round his heart, but he was imagining it, and when he woke again he could no longer remember what it was he wanted or why he was sitting on this bus at all.
At the last stop he got off. He took a few steps across an expanse of concrete overgrown with weeds, then stopped. He didn’t know which direction to go in. The square where he was standing, the benches, the low station building, the houses behind it all meant nothing to him. He took another faltering step, and stopped again. He was shivering. In his hasty departure he had forgotten to put on a jacket. He hadn’t thought to pick up a hat, and he hadn’t locked the hut. He had simply run off, and he regretted that now. Somewhere far off he could hear the babble of voices, a child being called, then the slamming of a car door, an engine growing louder and then rapidly fading away. Egger was now shivering so hard he would have liked to have something to hang on to. He stared at the ground, not daring to move. In his mind’s eye he saw himself standing there, an old man, useless and lost, in the middle of an empty square, and he was more ashamed than he had ever been in his life. Just then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and when he slowly turned around the bus driver was standing before him.