Vertigo (17 page)

Around noon — the Tyrolean women had long since got out at Reutte, WeiEenbach, Haller, Tannheim and Schattwald - the bus, with me as its last passenger, reached the Oberjoch customs post. Meanwhile, the weather had changed once again. A dark layer of cloud, verging on the black, lay across the entire Tannheim valley, which made a
lightless and godforsaken impression. There was not the slightest sign of movement anywhere. Not even a single car could be seen on the stretch of road disappearing far into the remoter depths of the valley. On one side the mountains rose up into the mists; on the other lay wet boggy grassland, and behind it, from out of the Vilsgrund, arose the wedge of the Pfronten forests, consisting solely of blackish-blue spruce. The customs officer on duty, who told me he lived in Maria Rain, promised to drop off my bag at the Engelwirt inn when he finished work, on his way home through W., which left me free, once I had exchanged a few generalities with him about the dreadfulness of this time of year, to set off carrying nothing but my small leather rucksack over my shoulder, through the boggy meadows bordering the no man's land and down through the Alpsteig gorge to Krummenbach, and from there to Unterjoch, past the Pfeiffermühle and through the Enge Piatt to W. The gorge was sunk in a darkness that I would not have thought possible in the middle of the day. Only, to my left, above the brook invisible from the path, there hung a little meagre light. Spruce trees, a good seventy to eighty years old, stood on the slopes. Even on those growing up from the depths of the ravine, the evergreen tops did not appear until far above the level of the path. Time and again, whenever there
was a movement in the air above, the drops of water caught in the countless pine needles came raining down. In places where the spruce stood further apart, grew isolated beech trees that had long since shed their leaves, their branches and trunks blackened by the persistent wet. It was quite still in the gorge save for the sound of the water at the bottom, no birdsong, nothing. Increasingly a sense of trepidation oppressed me, and it seemed as if the further down I walked, the colder and gloomier it became. At one of the few more open places, where a vantage-point afforded a view both down onto a waterfall and a deep rockpool and upwards into the sky, without my being able to say which was the more eerie, I saw through the apparently-infinite loftiness of the trees, flurries of snow high up in the leaden greyness, but none of it had yet found its way down into the gorge. After a further half-hour's walk, when the gorge opened out and the meadows of Krummenbach lay before me, I stopped for a long time beneath the last trees, watching from out of the darkness as the whitish-grey snow fell, its silence completely extinguishing what little pallid colour there was in those wet deserted fields. Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled
cell I sat for a while. Outside, snowflakes were drifting past the small window, and presently it seemed to me as if I were in a boat on a voyage, crossing vast waters. The moist smell of lime became sea air; I could feel the spray on my forehead and the boards swaying beneath my feet, and I imagined myself sailing in this ship out of the flooded mountains. But what I remember most about the Krummenbach chapel, apart from this transformation of the stone walls into the hull of a wooden boat, is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand around the mid-eighteenth century, and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes, little could be made out with any degree of certainty - faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated limbs, an arm raised to strike. The garments, painted in dark colours, had merged beyond recognition with the background, which was equally unrecognisable. Insofar as anything was still visible at all, it was like looking at some ghostly battle of faces and hands suspended in the gloom of decay. I could not then and cannot now recall whether I was ever in the Krummenbach chapel as a child with my grandfather, who took me with him everywhere. But there were many chapels like that of Krummenbach around W., and much of what I saw and felt in them at the time will have stayed with me - a fear of
the acts of cruelty depicted there no less than the wish, in all its impossibility, that the perfect tranquility prevailing within them might sometime be recaptured. When the snow had eased off, I started on my way again, through the Brànte and along the Krummenbach as far as Unterjoch, where I ate bread soup and drank half a litre of Tyrolean wine at the Hirschwirt inn, to warm myself and prepare for the next stretch, which would be twice the distance. Perhaps prompted by the pitiful pictures in the Krummenbach chapel, my mind turned to Tiepolo once again, and the belief I had held for a long time that, when he travelled with his sons Lorenzo and Domenico from Venice across the Brenner in the autumn of 1750, he decided at Ziri that, contrary to the advice he had been given to leave the Tyrol via Seefeld, he instead made his way westward via Telfs, following the salt wagons across the Gaicht Pass, through the Tannheim valley, over the Oberjoch and through the Iller valley into the lowlands. And I beheld Tiepolo, who must have been approaching sixty by that time and already suffered badly from gout, lying in the cold of the winter months at the top of the scaffolding half a metre below the ceiling of the grand stairway in the palace at Würzburg, his face splattered with lime and distemper, applying the colours with a steady hand, despite the pain in his right arm, onto the wet plaster of the immense, miraculous painting he was creating little by little. With imaginings such as these, and thinking about the Krummenbach painter who had, perhaps in the very same winter, toiled just as hard to represent the fourteen small Stations of the Cross as Tiepolo with his magnificent fresco, I walked on, the time being now about three o'clock, through the fields below the Sorgschrofen and the Sorgalpe, till I struck the road shortly before reaching the Pfeiffermühle. From there it was another hour to W. The last of the daylight was fading by the time I got to the Enge Piatt. To my left was the river, to the right the dripping rock faces through which the road had been blasted at the turn of the century. Above, in front and presently behind me there was nothing but the unstirring black pine forests. The last stretch of the journey was as never-ending as I remembered it from the old days. In the Enge Piatt in April 1945, a so-called last skirmish took place, in which, as it says on the iron memorial cross which still stands in the cemetery in W., 24-year-old Alois Thimet of Rosenheim, 41-year-old Erich Daimler of Stuttgart, 17-year-old Rudolf Leitenstorfer (place of birth unknown), and Werner Hempel (year of birth unknown) of Bòrneke, died for their Fatherland. In the course of my childhood in W. I heard people speak of that last skirmish on various occasions,

and imagined the combatants with soot-blackened faces, crouching behind tree trunks with their rifles at the ready or leaping from rock to rock across the deepest chasms, suspended motionless in mid-air, for at least as long as I could hold my breath or keep my eyes shut.

It was dusk by the time I had passed through the Piatt. White mists were rising from the meadows, and below, by the river, now a good distance away, stood the black sawmill, which, together with its timberyard, burned to the ground in the 1950s, a few days after I started school, in a huge fire that lit up the whole of the valley. Darkness now descended on the road. In former times, when it was made up with crushed limestone, it had been easier to walk on, I remembered, and almost the colour of white. Like a luminous ribbon, it had stretched out before one even on a starless night, I recalled, realising at the same time that I could scarcely lift my feet for weariness. Also, it seemed strange that not a single vehicle had overtaken me, or had come from the other direction, on the whole stretch from the Unterjoch. I stood for a long time on the stone bridge a short distance before the first houses of W., listening to the steady murmur of the river and looking into the blackness which now enveloped everything. On a piece of waste land beside the bridge, where willows, deadly nightshade, burdock, mulleins, verbena and mugwort used to grow, there had always been a gypsy camp in the summer months after the war. Whenever we went to the swimming pool, which the council had built in 1936 to promote public health, we would pass the gypsies, and every time as we did so my mother picked me up and carried me in her arms. Across her shoulder I saw the gypsies look up briefly from what they were about, and then lower their eyes again as if in revulsion.

I do not believe that any of the locals ever spoke to them, nor as far as I know did the gypsies come into the village to hawk goods or tell fortunes. Where they came from, how they had managed to survive the war, and why of all places they had chosen that cheerless spot by the Ach bridge for their summer camp, are questions that occur to me only now - for example, when I leaf through the photo album which my father bought as a present for my mother for the first so-called Kriegsweihnacht. In it are pictures of the Polish campaign, all neatly captioned in white ink. Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out, smiling, from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of the

Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war.

A good thirty years had gone by since I had last been in W. In the course of that time - by far the longest period of my life - many of the localities I associated with it, such as the Altachmoos, the parish woods, the tree-lined lane that led to Haslach, the pumping station, Petersthal cemetery where the plague dead lay, or the house in the Schray where Dopfer the hunchback lived, had continually returned in my dreams and daydreams and had become more real to me than they had been then, yet the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me than any other place I could conceive of. In a certain sense it was reassuring, on my first walk around the streets in the pale glow of the lamps, to find that everything was completely changed. The house of the head forester, a small shingled villa with a pair of antlers and the inscription "1913" above the front door, together with its small orchard, had made way for a holiday home; the fire station and its handsome slatted tower, where the fire brigade's hoses hung in silent anticipation of the next conflagration, were no longer there; the farmhouses had without exception been rebuilt, with added storeys; the vicarage, the curate's lodge, the school, the town hall where Fürgut the one-armed clerk went in and out of with a regularity that my grandfather could set his watch by, the cheese dairy, the poorhouse, Michael Meyer's grocery and haberdashery - all had been thoroughly modernised or had disappeared altogether. Not even when I entered the Engelwirt inn did I have any sense of knowing my way around, for here too, where we had lived in rented accommodation on the first floor for several years, the whole house had been rebuilt and converted from the foundations up to the very rafters, not to mention the changes to the furnishings and fittings. What now presented itself, in the pseudo-Alpine style which has become the new vernacular throughout the Federal Republic, as a house offering refined hospitality to its patrons, in those distant days was a hostelry of disrepute where the village peasants sat around until deep into the night and, particularly in winter, often drank themselves senseless. The Engelwirt inn owed its local standing, which remained unassailable despite everything, to the fact that, in addition to the smoke-filled bar beneath the ceiling of which ran the longest and most crooked stove-pipe I have ever seen, it had a large function room in which long tables could be set up for weddings and funerals, with enough seating for half the village. Every fortnight the newsreel would be shown there and feature films such as
Piratenliebe, Niccolò Paganini, Tomahawk
and
Monche
, Màdchen und Panduren.
The cavalry irregulars referred to in this this last title could be seen charging through dappled birch woods; Indians rode across limitless plains; the crippled violinist reeled off a cadenza at the base of a prison wall while his companion filed through the iron bars of his cell window; General Eisenhower, on his return from Korea, got out of an aeroplane, the propeller of which was still revolving slowly; a hunter whose chest had been torn open by a bear's paw staggered down into the valley; politicians were seen in front of the new parliament, climbing out of the back of a Volkswagen; and almost every week we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin or Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered them a natural condition of all larger cities. Of all the events ever put on in the Engelwirt function room, it was an amateur production of Schiller's
The Robbers,
staged there several times during the winter of 1948 or 1949 which made the greatest impression on me. Half a dozen times, at least, I must have sat in the darkened Engelwirt hall among an audience some of whom had come over from neighbouring villages. Scarcely ever has anything that I have seen in the theatre since affected me as much as the
The Robbers
- Old Moor in the ice-cold exile