Half a lifetime or almost four decades later, in the summer of 1972, Egger stood on the same spot watching the shining silver gondolas of what was once Blue Liesl glide swiftly along, high above his head, accompanied by an almost inaudible buzzing. Up on the platform the cabin doors opened with a drawn-out hiss and discharged a crowd of day-trippers who streamed off in all directions, dispersing like bright insects over the mountain. These people who clambered about so recklessly on the scree annoyed Egger. They seemed to be constantly searching for some sort of hidden miracle. He would have liked to plant himself in their way and give them a piece of his mind, but he didn’t really know what exactly he would reproach them for. Secretly — this much at least he could admit to himself — he envied them. He saw them jumping over the rocks in trainers and shorts, putting their children on their shoulders and smiling into their cameras, whereas he was an old man, good for nothing any more and glad still to be able to move about more or less upright. He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun.
* * *
The weeks and months after the opening ceremony at the top station were the happiest of Andreas Egger’s life. He saw himself as a small but not unimportant cog in a gigantic machine called Progress, and sometimes, before falling asleep, he would picture himself sitting in the belly of this machine as it ploughed inexorably through forests and mountains, contributing, with the heat and sweat of his brow, to its ongoing advance. He had taken the words with the heat and sweat of his brow from a tattered magazine Marie had found under one of the benches in the inn, and from which she would sometimes read to him in the evenings. In addition to all kinds of ideas about urban fashion, gardening, the keeping of pets and general morality, the magazine also contained a story. It was about an impoverished Russian nobleman who drove his lover, a peasant’s daughter blessed with strange gifts, across half of Russia one winter to rescue her from persecution by some fanatically religious village elders, including her own father, and bring her to safety. The story ended tragically, but it contained a large number of so-called romantic scenes which Marie read out with an almost imperceptible tremor in her voice, and which evoked in Egger a strange mixture of disgust and fascination. He listened to the words coming out of Marie’s mouth and sensed a heat slowly spreading beneath his blanket which, it seemed to him, would soon fill the entire cabin. Whenever the impoverished nobleman and the peasant’s daughter dashed across the snow-covered steppe in their carriage, at their backs the clattering of horses and the furious cries of their pursuers, and the terrified girl threw herself into the count’s arms, brushing his cheek as she did so with the seam of a dress already dirty from the journey, Egger could stand it no longer. He would kick away his blanket and stare with inflamed eyes into the flickering gloom beneath the roof beams. Then Marie would place the magazine carefully under the bed and blow out the candle. ‘Come,’ she whispered in the darkness, and Egger obeyed.
At the end of March 1935, Egger and Marie were sitting on the threshold after sunset, looking out over the valley. It had snowed a lot in the last few weeks, but for two days now a sudden warm spell had been announcing the arrival of spring: all around the snow was melting, and already during the day the baby swallows’ beaks were peeping out over the edge of their nest under the eaves. From morning till night the adult swallows flew to their young with worms and insects in their beaks, and Egger commented that ‘all that bird shit would be enough to lay a new foundation’. But Marie liked the birds; she thought of them as fluttering good-luck charms keeping evil away from the house, so he resigned himself to the mess and the nest was allowed to stay.
Egger’s gaze travelled all across the village and the opposite side of the valley. In many houses the windows were already lit up. The valley had had electricity for a while now and some days, here or there, an old farmer could be seen sitting before a lamp in his room and staring in astonishment into its bright glow. The lights were already on in the workers’ camp, too, and smoke was rising almost vertically from narrow iron pipes into the cloudy evening sky. From a distance it looked as if the clouds were attached to the roofs by thin threads, suspended over the valley like huge, shapeless balloons. Blue Liesl’s cabins were still, and Egger thought of the two maintenance engineers who right at this moment were crawling around the engine room with their little cans of oil, lubricating the machinery. Another cable car had already been completed, and they had started to cut an aisle in the forest in the neighbouring valley for a third, longer and wider than the first two put together. Egger looked at his steep, snow-covered land spread out before him. He felt a small, warm wave of contentment well up inside, and would have liked to leap to his feet and shout out his happiness to the world, but Marie was sitting there so quiet and still that he too remained seated.
‘Maybe we can have some more vegetables,’ he said. ‘I could extend the garden. Behind the house, I mean. Potatoes, onions and things.’
‘Yes, that’s not a bad idea, Andreas,’ she said. Egger looked at her. He couldn’t recall her ever having addressed him by name. It was the first time, and it felt strange. She passed the back of her hand across her brow and he looked away again. ‘We’ll have to see whether all that can grow in soil like this,’ he said, poking the tip of his shoe into the frozen earth.
‘Something’s going to grow. And it’s going to be something wonderful,’ she said. Egger looked at her again. She was leaning back slightly, and her face was barely visible in the shadow of the doorway. All he could make out were her eyes, two shining drops in the darkness.
‘Why are you looking like that?’ he asked quietly. Suddenly he felt uneasy, sitting there beside this woman who was at the same time both so familiar to him and so alien. She leaned forward a little and placed her hands in her lap. They seemed to him unusually delicate and white. Impossible that just a few hours ago they had been splitting firewood with an axe. He stretched out his arm and touched Marie’s shoulder, and although he was still looking at the white hands in her lap, he knew that she was smiling.
In the night Egger was woken by a peculiar noise. It was no more than an intimation, a soft whisper stealing around the walls. He lay in the dark and listened. He felt the warmth of his wife beside him and heard the quiet sounds of her breathing. Eventually he got up and went outside. The warm föhn wind buffeted against him, almost wrenching the door out of his hand. Black clouds were racing across the night sky, a pale, shapeless moon flickering between them. Egger trudged a little way up the field. The snow was heavy and wet and the meltwater was burbling all around. He thought about the vegetables and about all the other things he needed to do. The soil didn’t yield much, but it would be enough. They could have a goat or perhaps even a cow, he thought, for the milk. He stopped. Somewhere way up high he heard a sound, as if something deep inside the mountain were splitting with a sigh. Then he heard a deep, swelling rumble and a moment later the ground beneath his feet began to tremble. Suddenly he was cold. Within seconds the rumbling had increased to a high, piercing note. Egger stood stock-still and heard the mountain start to sing. Then he saw something big and black hurtle silently past about twenty metres away and before he had even grasped that it was a tree trunk he began to run. He ran back through the deep snow towards the house, calling to Marie, but an instant later something seized him and lifted him up. He felt himself being carried away and the last thing he saw before a dark wave engulfed him was his legs, sticking up above him into the sky as if disconnected from the rest of his body.