To the Back of Beyond(30)

Thomas went out into the open to look around. Slightly above the hut was a small lake; the water was perfectly clear, but he couldn’t see the bottom. The cow barn, which was slightly below the hut, was narrow but fully thirty yards in length. In the hayloft, Thomas found fence posts and staples with rolls of yellow twine and a big pile of kindling. He carried an armload of wood back into the hut and lit a fire in the stove. But it wouldn’t draw, no sooner had Thomas lit it than the room filled with acrid smoke. He threw open the door and windows. Outside he saw that up on the roof, a plank had been laid across the chimney opening.

By noon there was a fire going in the stove, and the hut was toasty warm. Thomas was eating noodles with a ready-made tomato sauce he had found in the food chest. After lunch he sat on the bench outside the hut in the sun. Again, he was amazed by the absolute silence. From the east, clouds were getting up.

In the afternoon Thomas lugged as much wood as he could carry into the hut. He was still at work when it began to snow, and it was still snowing when he stepped outside late at night, to smoke one of his last cigarettes. He had spent the evening drawing up a list of all the food he had. He had drunk some of the powerful tr?sch, which had gone to his head in no time at all. As he climbed the steps to bed, he had to grab hold of the balustrade so as not to fall.

The ice-cold bedroom was so tiny that Thomas had the sense he was lying in a box. Though tired and a little drunk, he couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. He lay in bed, staring into the darkness. When he shut his eyes, everything seemed to spin, and he saw this image in his mind’s eye: himself lying at the bottom of the crevasse, spread-eagled and with shattered limbs. It was as though he was a long way up, staring down at the torpid body lying there, covered with snow and with an unnatural smile etched into the rigid face, the smile of a dead man.



Among all the thoughts that filled Astrid’s mind in the next few days, there was one that never let go of her: that this was not necessarily real, rather just one among many possibilities. Sometimes she thought it was something she had in her power, to decide in favor of one or other of these possibilities. Thomas’s death was the simplest because it was so specific, so unambivalent and clear. A hiker loses his footing, takes a fall, and is dead on the spot. How many times she had seen such reports in the papers without really taking them in. And then every year the statistics of deaths in the Alps, neatly compiled, a hundred and fifty, two hundred incidents, distributed among the various types of accident, rockfall, icefall, avalanche, slip.

Thomas had fallen, no one could say quite how or why. Presumably he had died as a result of his fall. Perhaps not right away, perhaps he had bled to death, or frozen or died of thirst, the autopsy would provide clarity on that. It had snowed overnight, an early onset of winter of the sort that was not unusual at that altitude. Snow had sheeted over the corpse, but after a few icy days there was a break in the weather, the snow melted, and huntsmen had found the body. If a shred of his jacket hadn’t got caught at the rim of the crevasse, he might never have been found, or not for fifty or a hundred years, when Astrid and even the children would be long gone.

All the details were in the police report, the place, date, and time of the find, even the names and addresses of those who had made it. There was confirmation that Thomas had spent the night before the accident in the dormitory on the pass and had entered his name in the summit log. It must have been during the descent, perhaps he had gained his objective and had turned around and was on his way home. Later, there would be more detailed medical reports, the manner and gravity of his injuries, the presumed cause of death. There was a body that had been found by people with names, professions, and families; there were clothes and shoes and a rucksack with food and a few pieces of hiking gear. All these were facts being brought to bear, but what did they signify? Anything, the merest trifle, and everything could have happened differently. If, on that last day of the vacation, Thomas and not Astrid had gone up to see to Konrad, if she had checked the banking transactions earlier, if the police dog had had more stamina. The tiniest detail, the least circumstance was enough to split reality in two, in four, eight, sixteen versions, into an unending number of worlds.

Thomas had disappeared a month ago. From the very beginning, Astrid had sensed he wasn’t coming back. His death was the simplest solution; it cleared away all possible questions, removed all the issues, the reason for Thomas’s disappearance, the road he had chosen, why he had used his credit card even though he must have known it would lead to his discovery, why he had written his name in the summit log. Nor would anyone now want to hear Astrid’s own confused and contradictory explanations, her lies and evasions. Thomas’s work colleagues would offer their sympathy to the bereaved family, stand around uselessly at the funeral, and at the wake sit at a separate table, swapping stories about him. His parents and Manuela would tell stories, his friends from the handball team, the neighbors, simple stories that were supposed to keep him alive, keep his memory green, but in fact over the years would come to stand in for him and finally, ironically, cause him to disappear.

Astrid thought of a different version. Thomas hadn’t died of his fall, he had merely ripped his jacket and sustained a slight injury. He had clambered up out of the crevasse and walked back to the pass. When the huntsmen found the shred of material weeks later, it was nothing of significance. By then Thomas had completely disappeared. She looked for a map to see where he might have gone. There was the pass, on the road map with its scale of one to three hundred thousand, but the area of scree to the southeast was just an expanse of white with some gray shadings to suggest its topography. The names of the peaks, the various altitudes, the names of places and the colored roads, highways, and motorways were just claims, more facts that wouldn’t be translated into any reality and would only make Astrid sad. She folded up the map and closed her eyes. Now she could see Thomas climbing out of the crevasse and walking over the plateau; he was walking with a limp, but he was walking fast. He stopped to eat something at an Alpine hut, and walked on over snowy pastures. The track gave way to an unmade road and then a narrow paved mountain road. Thomas was walking through a fir wood down into a valley. The snow had given way to rain, he was freezing, but he was energized by his scrape with death. It was just beginning to get dark when he came to a village, a bleak-looking place in a narrow valley. He found an inn, and ate and drank. The heat wasn’t on in his room, no one was expecting a visitor so late in the day. Even though the landlady had said the rooms were all nonsmoking, there was a smell of cold smoke and air freshener. Thomas switched on the TV and slid under the thick down comforter. The late news came on, reports of conflicts, crises, catastrophes, but nothing could disturb Thomas’s contentment. He was safe and everything to him was delicious, every color, every sound, every word. He was alive.