‘We’ll soon fix this,’ said Mattl, wrapping his handkerchief around the wound. ‘Nobody bleeds to death that quickly!’ One of the men suggested cutting branches to make a stretcher. Another started to rub the stump with a handful of forest herbs, but was quickly pushed aside. Eventually they agreed that it would be best to carry the injured man down to the village as he was, strap him to the back of a diesel truck and drive him to hospital. The machine fitter from Lombardy lifted Grollerer off the ground and laid him across his shoulders like a limp sack. A brief discussion ensued as to what should happen to the arm. Some suggested they should pack it up and take it with them: perhaps the doctors could sew it back on. Others contradicted them: not even the most fiendish of doctors had ever sewn an entire arm back on, and even if they somehow managed to do such a thing it would just hang there at Grollerer’s side for the rest of his life, slack and ugly and making things difficult for him. It was Grollerer himself who put an end to the discussion when he regained consciousness, lifted his head from the fitter’s shoulder and said: ‘Bury my arm in the forest. Maybe a blackcurrant bush will grow out of it!’
While the other men headed down to the village with Gustl Grollerer, now an ex-lumberjack, Egger and Thomas Mattl stayed behind at the scene of the accident to bury the arm. The leaves and earth it lay on were dark with blood and its fingers felt waxen and cold as they prised them from the handle of the axe. A little jet-black long-horned beetle was sitting on the tip of the index finger. Mattl held the stiff arm out in front of him and examined it with narrowed eyes. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘A moment ago this was still part of Grollerer. Now it’s dead and worth not much more than a rotten branch. What do you reckon — is Grollerer still Grollerer now?’
Egger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? He’s Grollerer, with only one arm.’
‘What if the tree had ripped off both arms?’
‘Then too. He’d still be Grollerer.’
‘And say it had ripped away both arms, both legs, and half his head?’
Egger considered. ‘He’d probably still be Grollerer, even then… somehow.’ Suddenly he was no longer quite so sure.
Thomas Mattl sighed. He placed the arm gently on the toolbox and together, with a couple of cuts of the spade, they dug a hole in the ground. In the meantime the forest had begun to breathe again and birds were singing over their heads. It had been a chilly day, but now the blanket of clouds dispersed and sunlight fell in shimmering bundles through the canopy of leaves, making the earth muddy and soft. They placed the arm in its little grave and shovelled it in. The fingers were last to disappear. For a moment they stuck up out of the earth like fat mealworms, then they were gone. Mattl pulled out his little pouch of tobacco and filled his pipe, which he had carved himself out of plum wood.
‘It’s a messy business, dying,’ he said. ‘As time goes on there’s just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, then an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there’s nothing left. Then they chuck what’s left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that’s your lot.’
‘And there will be a cold,’ said Egger. ‘A cold that gnaws the soul.’ The old man looked at him. Then he twisted his mouth and spat just past the stem of his pipe at the treacherous splinter of pine, its edges sticky with Grollerer’s blood. ‘Rubbish. There won’t be anything, no cold and certainly no soul. Dead is dead and that’s that. There’s nothing after that — no God, either. Because if there were a God, his heavenly kingdom wouldn’t be so bloody far away!’
Thomas Mattl was taken from this world nine years later, almost to the day. All his life he had hoped he would die on the job, but it happened differently. While bathing in the only bathtub in the camp, a battered monstrosity of galvanized iron that one of the cooks rented out to the workers for a small sum, Thomas Mattl fell asleep. When he woke the water was icy, and he caught a cold from which he never recovered. For several nights he lay sweating on his pallet, babbling incoherently, about either his long-dead mother or ‘bloodsucking forest demons’. Then one morning he got up and declared that he was now well and wanted to go to work. He pulled on his trousers, stepped outside the door, craned his head towards the sun and fell down dead. He was buried next to the village cemetery, in the steeply sloping meadow the company had purchased from the local authority. Virtually all the employees who were able to gathered there to say goodbye, and listened to the short funeral address that one of the foremen had cobbled together, which talked about the hard work on the mountain and Mattl’s pure soul.
Thomas Mattl was one of an official total of thirty-seven men who died while working for Bittermann & Sons, up until the firm went bankrupt in 1946. In truth, however, many more gave their lives for the cable-car industry, which expanded ever faster from the 1930s on. ‘For every gondola someone goes underground,’ Mattl had said in one of his final nights. By then, though, the other men were no longer taking him all that seriously; they thought the fever had already burned the last vestiges of his wits from his brain.
And so Andreas Egger’s first year with Bittermann & Sons came to an end, and the 1st Wendenkogler Aerial Cable Car (this was its official title, though only the mayor and the tourists ever used it — the locals just called it Blue Liesl on account of its two lightning-blue cabins, which also, owing to their rather flat front sections, bore a certain resemblance to the mayor’s wife) was inaugurated in a big opening ceremony at the top station. A whole host of fashionable people from beyond the valley stood on the platform freezing in thin suits and even thinner dresses, and the priest shouted his blessing into the wind with his cassock flapping around his body like the dishevelled plumage of a jackdaw. Egger stood amid his colleagues, who had spread out across the mountain below the Giant’s Skull, and every time he saw the people clapping up there on the platform he threw his arms into the air and let out a cheer of enthusiasm. In his heart there was a curious sensation of expansiveness and pride. He felt that he was part of something big, something that far exceeded his own powers (including the power of his imagination), and which he thought he could see would spell progress, not just for life in the valley but also, somehow, for the whole of humankind. Ever since the test ride a few days earlier, when Blue Liesl had wobbled her way to the top, juddering cautiously but without major mishap, the mountains seemed to have forfeited something of their enduring might. And more cable cars would follow. The company had extended the contracts of almost all its workers and presented plans to build a total of fifteen aerial cable cars, including a hair-raising construction that proposed to transport passengers with rucksacks and skis in free-floating wooden chairs instead of carriages. Egger thought this a rather ridiculous idea, but he secretly admired the engineers who squeezed such fantastical things out of their heads, and for whom neither snowstorms nor the heat of summer could cloud either their optimism or the shine on their immaculately polished shoes.
* * *