To the Back of Beyond(12)
The track he was following led along the edge of a meadow, getting steadily fainter, until it finally came to an end in a rough and ready turning circle at the edge of a wood. Thomas carried on into the wood, which consisted mainly of conifers. The sweetish scent was even more pronounced here—it was as though the air was suffused with honey. The gradient fell away steeply. He thought he could still make out the path a short distance away, zigzagging down into a gully, but then even these last vestiges of it disappeared, and Thomas made the bulk of the descent on the seat of his pants. At the bottom of the gully he had to force his way through thick ferns and bushes. He had spiderwebs smeared on his hands and face. He recognized some plants and was surprised he could remember their names, which his father had taught him when he was a boy: horsetail, herb paris with its blue-black fruit, stinking storksbill, and woodbine with its doubled-up red berries that looked almost like red currants but that he knew were poisonous. He heard a loud rushing sound, and farther below him he saw a waterfall that tumbled a few meters over a pile of conglomerate into a small pool.
Directly above the waterfall was a shallow where Thomas was able to get across. He took the opportunity to wash again and drank some of the water, scooping it up with his hands.
The opposite side of the gorge was even steeper. Thomas had to pull himself up by roots and little saplings. He kept losing his footing. By the time he finally reached level ground, his pants were filthy and he had lost an hour without very much to show for it.
The sky, which had previously been no particular color, now turned blue. A few little clouds burned a reddish yellow in the slanted low light, and when its beams touched the woods and meadows, the whole scene began to glow. Thomas sat down in the grass at the edge of a small, unmown meadow, surrounded on three sides by trees, and finished the provisions he had bought at the station.
When he emerged from the shelter of the trees, he saw not far away a village consisting of a score or so of farmhouses. There was no one to be seen, and a little nervously he approached and walked through it. The gate of one of the cowsheds stood open. Inside, a woman was connecting the cows up to the milking machine. A transistor radio was going, and Thomas heard the perky voice of the host, and the opening bars of a country tune. He walked on quickly, past a cheesery, from where he heard a clatter of metal and the rushing sound of water, over the same tune he had just heard from the cowshed. The narrow street led up to a height, from where Thomas had his first view of the peak of S?ntis and the Churfirsten mountains, gleaming in the morning sun. He turned to look back at the idyllically tidy little village below him. How much sweat was needed to maintain this tidiness, to get up early every morning and do the same unvarying tasks, to milk the cows, to clean their shed, to fertilize and mow the pastures, and to bring in the hay. The work might have gotten easier through the mechanization of the past hundred years, but it wasn’t the physical effort he was thinking of so much as the optimism, the faith, the conviction that it was the right thing to do. He too had once formed part of this quiet consensus, he had functioned in the way that was expected of him, without it ever having been discussed. He had gone to school for nine years, completed a traineeship, done his military duty, and then gone back to being a trainee. He had married Astrid, had kids, moved into his parents’ old house, and slowly, over time, done it up. It had taken persistence and willpower, but now they were living there in the house, which was slowly falling down, imperceptibly but unstoppably. He had read somewhere that a building wasn’t finished until it had collapsed into ruins. Perhaps the same was true for human beings.
Every day Thomas went to the office and did his job; he kept the books for his clients, produced their year-end accounts, and filled out their tax returns. Some of the businesses failed; either the market changed or the people made mistakes or they lacked entrepreneurial spirit, but most of them managed to get through life without any major calamities, achieved a certain degree of comfort, and eventually went into retirement. Then they would sit in his office — the carpenter or the auto mechanic or the butcher and his son, who was to take over his father’s business. They would talk about money, about accommodations and inventories and investments that needed to be made, but never about what really mattered. What was it all for? In the course of their daily exertions, there was never a moment when they could ask themselves such questions; maybe they were scared of them, or they had understood that such questions were impossible to answer and hence should not be asked at all. Thomas was unsure whether to admire or despise them.
In the next village, which was a little bigger, there was already a fair amount of activity, cars driving through the streets, children headed off to school, and outside the general store stood a supply van. Thomas tried to steer clear of the center. Hikers were nothing out of the ordinary in these parts, but the thing was he probably looked like a tramp — he was unwashed, his clothes were filthy, and he didn’t have anything like a rucksack or trekking poles.
He passed an apple orchard, but the apples that were lying in the grass were still unripe. Under an expanse of black netting he found a bilberry patch. The gate in the fence was not locked, and he walked in and picked a few handfuls of the berries, which were far bigger and sweeter than those he remembered picking in the mountains as a child. He heard engine noise coming nearer. Still hungry, he crept out.
Next to one of the farmhouses a few alpacas were grazing and looked at him with their enormous eyes. They had faces like comic animals. Do not feed! it said on the fence that enclosed the pasture, and next to the sign a metal box with a lid that contained bread for the animals. Thomas opened it, and stuffed a few slices of the stale bread in his pocket.