At school Fràulein Rauch, who meant no less to me than Romana, wrote up on the blackboard in her even handwriting the chronicle of the calamities which had befallen W. over the ages and underneath it drew a burning house in coloured chalk. The children in the class sat bent over their exercise books, looking up every so often to decipher the faint, faraway letters with screwed-up eyes as they copied, line by line, the long list of terrible events which, when recorded in this way, had something reassuring and comforting about them. In 1511 the Black Death claimed 105 lives. In 1530, 100 houses went up in flames. 1569: the whole settlement devastated in a blaze. 1605: another fire reduced 140 houses to ashes. 1633: W. burned down by the Swedes. 1635: 700 inhabitants died of the plague. 1806-14: 19 volunteers from W. fell in the wars of liberation. 1816-17: years of famine in consequence of unprecedented rainfall. 1870-71: 5 fusiliers from W. lost their lives in battle. 1893: on the 16th of April a great conflagration destroyed the entire village. 1914-18: 68 of our sons laid down their lives for the fatherland. 1939-45: 125 from our ranks did not return home from the Second World War. In the quiet of the classroom the nibs of our pens scratched across the paper. Fràulein Rauch walked along the rows in her tight-fitting green skirt. Whenever she came close to me, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. That day it never grew light outside. The greyness of the early hours lasted almost until noon and was followed immediately by a gradual nightfall. Even now, at one o'clock, half an hour before school ended for the day, the lights had to be on in the classroom. The white luminous globes hanging from the ceiling and the rows of children bent over their work were reflected in the darkened window-panes through whose mirrored surface the just discernible tops of the apple trees were like black coral in the depths of the ocean. All day an unwonted silence had spread out and taken possession of us. Not even when the caretaker at the end of the last lesson rang the bell in the hall did we break into our customary uproar; rather, we got up without a sound and packed our things away in an orderly fashion without so much as a murmur. Fràulein Rauch helped this or that child, struggling in thick winter clothes, to straighten the satchel on his back.
The schoolhouse stood on a rise at the edge of the village, and, as always when we came out at lunchtime, on that, for me, memorable day too, I looked over the open valley to my left across the rooftops to the forested foothills, behind which arose the jagged rocky ridge of the Sorgschrofen. The houses and farmsteads, the fields, the empty roads and tracks — all was deadened and still under a thin dusting of white. Above us hung the leaden sky, as low and heavy as it only ever is before a great fall of snow. If you put your head right back and stared long enough into that incomprehensible void, you could believe you saw the first flurries of snow swirling out of it. My way took me past the teacher's house and the curate's house and by the high cemetery wall, at the end of which St George was forever driving a spear through the throat of the griffin-like winged creature lying at his feet. From there I had to go down Church Hill and along the so-called Upper Street. A smell of burnt horn
came from the smithy. The forge fire had died down, and the tools, the heavy hammers, tongs and rasps were lying abandoned all round. In W., noon was the hour of things deserted. The water in the tub, into which the blacksmith, when working at his anvil would plunge the red-hot iron so that it hissed, was so calm, and shone so darkly in the pale light that fell on its surface from the open gateway, it was as though no one had ever disturbed it, as though it were destined to remain preserved in this inviolate state for ever. In the shop where Kòpf the barber practised his trade, the padded chair with its extendable headrest stood abandoned. The cut-throat razor lay open on the marbled top of the washstand. Since father had returned home from the war, I was sent once a month to have my hair cut, and nothing frightened me more than old Kòpf setting about shaving the fuzz from my neck with that freshly stropped knife. The fear became so deeply engrained in me that many years later, when I first saw a representation of the scene in which Salome bears in the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter, my thoughts immediately turned to Kòpf. To this day I cannot bring myself to enter a barber's, and that I should have gone of my own accord a few years ago at Santa Lucia station in Venice to have my overnight stubble removed still strikes me as a bizarre aberration. The fear that seized me at the sight of Kòpf's cabinet gave way to feelings of hope when I paused in front of the small co-op to gaze into the display window at the golden pyramid constructed by Frau Unsinn, the shopkeeper, entirely of Sanella margarine cubes, a sort of pre-Christmas miracle which, every day on my way home from school, touched me like a beacon heralding the new age which was now about to begin even in W. In contrast to the golden sheen on the Sanella cubes, everything else you could buy in Frau Unsinn's shop, the flour in the barrel, the soused herrings in the large tin drum, the pickled gherkins, the massive block of ersatz honey which resembled an iceberg, the blue patterned packets of chicory coffee, and the Emmental cheese wrapped in a damp cloth, seemed to have passed into oblivion. The Sanella pyramid, I knew, towered into the future, and while, before my mind's eye, it grew higher and higher, so high that it almost reached up to the heavens, a vehicle such as I had never seen appeared at the far end of the deserted Long Road which I had now reached. It was a lilac limousine with a lime-green roof and huge tail fins. Infinitely slow and quite soundless it came gliding towards me. Inside, at the ivory-coloured steering wheel, sat a black man who showed me his teeth, also ivory-coloured, grinning as he went past, perhaps because I was the only living soul he had seen while driving through this remote place. Since among the little clay figures assembled round our Christmas manger, it was the black-faced one of the three Magi who wore a purple cloak with a lime-green border, there was no doubt in my mind that the driver of the car that had drifted past me at that sombre midday hour was none other than King Melchior, and that he bore with him in the vast boot of his streamlined lilac limousine several ounces of gold, a frankincense caddy and an ebony box filled with myrrh. It may well be that I became quite convinced of this only later when, in the afternoon, I re-imagined that scene in the minutest detail as the snow began to fall more and more heavily and I sat at the window watching it twirl down without cease from on high and covering everything by nightfall, the stacks of firewood, the chopping block, the roof of the shed, the redcurrant bushes, the water trough and the kitchen garden in the nunnery next door.
On the following morning, the light still burning in the kitchen, my grandfather came in from clearing paths and told us that word had just reached him from Jungholz that Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine. He had evidently fallen while crossing by the narrow footbridge which was dangerous even in summer, and as good as impassable in winter, said my grandfather, waiting as he did every day till my mother was not watching to pour down the sink the milky coffee which was always kept for him on the hotplate of the range. In my grandfather's opinion it was out of the question that Schlag, who must have known his own territory like the back of his hand, should have ended up on the other side purely by mistake. By the same token, nobody knew what the hunter, if he had deliberately gone out of his way, had been doing there, over the Austrian border, at this time of year of all times and with the weather closing in. Whichever way you looked at it, concluded my grandfather, it was a queer and perplexing business. I, for my part, was not able to get the matter out of my mind all day long. When I was at my schoolwork, all I had to do was lower my eyelids a little and I beheld Schlag the hunter lying dead at the bottom of the ravine. And so it was no surprise to me when, at midday, I came upon him on my way home from school. I had heard the jingling of a horse's harness for some time before, out of the grey air and the gently swirling snow, a woodcutters' sledge drawn by the heavy bay belonging to the proprietor of the sawmill, appeared, bearing upon it what was plainly the body of a man under a wine-coloured horse blanket. The sledge, led by the saw-mill proprietor and accompanied by the Jungholz gendarme, halted at the crossroads at the very moment when Dr Piazolo approached, as if by prearrangement, ploughing through the knee-deep snow astride his Ztindapp. Dr Piazolo, who had evidently already been informed of the tragedy that had occurred, switched the engine off and walked over to the sledge. He drew the blanket down halfway, and beneath it, in what one might say was a peculiarly relaxed posture, there indeed lay the body of the hunter Hans Schlag from KoEgarten on the Neckar. His grey-green attire was hardly disturbed, quite as though nothing had happened. One might have supposed that Schlag had simply fallen asleep, had it not been for the dreadful pallor of his face and the wild hair and beard, streaked with frost and hard as ice. Dr Piazolo had taken off his black motorcycle gloves and, with a cautiousness uncharacteristic in him, was feeling different parts of the body, gone rigid with the cold and rigor mortis, which had set in some time ago. He voiced a suspicion that the hunter, who did not seem to have been injured, had to all appearances initially survived the fall from the footbridge. It was quite possible, he said, that the hunter had lost consciousness through sheer fright at the moment when he slipped, and that his fall had been broken by the saplings growing in the ravine. Death probably did not occur until some time afterwards, as a result of exposure. The gendarme, who had followed Dr Piazolo's conjectures and concurred with them, now reported for his part that the unfortunate Waldmann, who now lay as stiff as a poker at the feet of the hunter, had in point of fact still been alive when the tragedy was discovered. In his opinion, the gendarme said, the hunter had put the dachshund in his rucksack before crossing the bridge, and the rucksack had somehow been dislodged during the fall, for it was found a short distance away, with a trail leading from it across to Schlag, by whose side the dachshund had dug through the-snow into the forest floor, which was frozen only on the surface. Strangely enough, as soon as the hunter and his dog had been approached, Waldmann had suddenly gone raving mad, even though there was little more than a breath of life left in him, and he had to be shot there and then. Dr Piazolo bent down once more over the hunter, fascinated, it seemed, by the fact that the snowflakes lay on his face without melting. Then he carefully pulled the horse blanket up over the motionless figure, whereupon, triggered by God knows what slight touch or movement, the repeating watch in the hunter's waistcoat pocket played a bar or so of the song "Ob immer Treu und Redlichkeit". The men looked at each other with expressions of bewilderment. Dr Piazolo shook his head and climbed onto his motorcycle. The sledge moved on and, still unobserved, I slowly walked the rest of my way home. I have since learned that an autopsy was carried out on the body of Schlag the hunter, who apparently had no relatives of any sort, at the district hospital; it did not, however, yield any further insight beyond the cause of death already established by Dr Piazolo, except for the fact, described in the post-mortem report as curious, that a sailing ship was tattooed on the left upper arm of the dead man.