24

Arlscharte

My films were always films on foot. I don’t mean it metaphorically either. The walking that I had in common with Bruce Chatwin contributed to a sense of the world that is always palpable in my work, however varied its themes are otherwise. Even before his death, I was wearing his rucksack, or a copy of it that he had made for me in England, on a crossing of the Alps in 1986. Let me stress that I’m just as lazy as the next person; I walked at moments that were existentially important for me. I kept a diary; here are some extracts.

Thursday, 8 May 1986

Tegernsee—Rottach-Egern—Sutten—Valepp. Along the Rottach; it rained all day. A chunk of wood kept drifting into the little whirlpool under a weir, was thrown out, and kept being drawn back into the vortex that pulled it under the frothy surface of the water. I watched it for a long time, and a childhood memory came back to me with ever-greater clarity. I was by the stream in back of the house and was watching a piece of wood in great apprehension. Then a freshly severed branch came down from the waterfall. There were hardly any leaves left on it, and almost all the bark had been scraped off it too. The branch was caught up in the same whirlpool. Then, after spinning for a long time, it knocked the original piece of wood clear. Darkness had fallen, and they were starting to look for me. Lenz, the farmhand who worked on the big farm, found me. He gave me his big rough hand and I wasn’t cold anymore.

In Enterrottach there was a curling association. They played on asphalt. With a barrel of beer and their own dialect, they were truly among themselves. The rain persists. Spring, trees in flower, the happiness of songbirds. A little higher up, at one thousand meters, there was delicate snowfall.

The host in Valepp showed me his lottery ticket for the last quarter. His six numbers were all off by one. The pub used to keep a tame deer called Hansi. As he grew older, he grew mean; finally, he attacked customers with his horns and had to be put down.

On the mountain hut beyond the frontier, there was once a white billy goat that drank schnapps and smoked cigars. After his death, they had his head stuffed and mounted, and put him on show in the bar with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. I asked what the goat had died of. “Liver cirrhosis,” replied the host, pouring himself a glass of gentian spirits. “Watch out, liver, here it comes,” he said to himself, lowering his head and knocking the glass back. Whereupon I ordered one as well. “Yes,” said the landlord, he had heard about the deer in Valepp too. Back in 1936, the time of Hitler and so forth, it had gored one of the guests. That was the last of it. In those days, there were no second chances for anyone.

Friday, 9 May

Outside a mountain chalet, I opened out my hammock. Several of the surrounding buildings were occupied, and my shyness around people forced me to secretiveness. I was trembling so hard that when I held the railing to pull up the hammock the whole of the veranda shook with me.

Sunday, 11 May

At night I got so cold, I had to get up and walk around on my veranda; after that, I slept a little. This morning the whole of a stone sea lay before me. The birds woke me. The morning was like purified ore. I walked up the steeply forested slope in deep snow and even deeper silence. Among the firemen in the inn was a youth with Down syndrome in fireman’s uniform.

From Mühlbach the straight way, following the compass, to St. Johann. Very steep forest path, too steep even for deer. At my first stop, I took out a needle and popped all my blisters. I was conscious of needing more and more courage to be among people in their towns and villages.

On walking: again and again (and again), the significance of the world is derived from tiny details never otherwise noted; this is the stuff from which the world may replenish itself. At the end of a day of walking, the wealth of a single day is past counting. When you walk, there is nothing between the lines; everything is in the most immediate and rabid presence: the fences, the meadows, the birds not yet fledged, the smell of newly chopped wood, the puzzlement of the deer. Today is Mother’s Day.

Above Dienten, I emerged from the woods and stumbled upon a derelict-looking old man, small and stooped, who through a half-blind pair of binoculars was watching a funeral procession trail up to a church. He jumped at my sudden appearance and seemed to feel shame for his broken windows and the bleached, loosened tiles on his roof. His hands and hair looked as though they hadn’t been washed for years. Behind his collapsing hut, someone had parked a VW that was without an engine, doors, and wheels. “Yes,” he told me, he lived here alone. Had I come over the mountain through all that snow? He didn’t want to let me carry on down the extremely steep slope; to please him, I took the path instead, following the serpentines.

Grossarl—Hüttschlag. Hüttschlag would seem to be the last place on earth where I can find anything in a little general store. I’m going to spend the night at an inn. The main ridge of the Tauern Alps looks high, very high, and covered with deep snow. I’ll pick up a loaf of bread to take, and some bacon.

Monday, 12 May

Hüttschlag. After making my purchases in the morning, I cut myself a stout stick about an arm’s length longer than I am, then I followed the course of the stream upward. The landscape quickly turned wilder and more dramatic. Deep snow, a flock of chamois, waterfalls. I kept crashing through the surface up to my hips in wet snow. I swore, then was reconciled to the God of the early mountaineers. My gaiters and my staff acquire a worth, I thought to myself, that no one will ever guess. That made me a little more contented, like a person totting up his two valuables.

I followed a two-week-old human trail that then stopped. No one has been here. Extraordinarily steep ascent along several snow courses, then I saw a hunting lodge plastered with warnings, private property secured by automatic spring guns. Snow hens fled from me. I barely saw them because, even though the weather was bad and the sky was gray, I was starting to get snow-blind. I didn’t have sunglasses with me, which was stupid. My eyes were sore and the lids were puffy, but I could still just about see where I was going. My aim at the Arlscharte, the ridgeline, was different in the snow than I had assumed originally, but I mustn’t miss it for anything in the world. So I spent a very long time on a snow mound brooding over the map and compass. The last place I’d been, they’d told me not to attempt, not on any account. They warned me that at the end of the war, in these same days of May, a lot of soldiers, young, strong fellows, had tried to reach their home in Carinthia, and many of them had come to grief in the Arlscharte trying to get over the main ridge of the Alps. They were buried in avalanches or disappeared forever.

Way up, toward the ridge, I often sank up to my chest in snow—incredibly labored climbing. Right at the Arlscharte, a short, very steep avalanche slope that I avoided by climbing the rocks flanking it. Suddenly south of me lay the Malta valley and its imposing dam. Spots of ice were floating on the lake. The hotel by the dam is still closed, but with my weeping, sore eyes, I saw three men. Then I saw that there was an extraordinarily steep snowfield in front of me to the south and that there was no getting around it because the rock above was not manageable without equipment—crampons, spring hooks, and a rope. What to do? Turn back all the way, a detour of maybe a hundred kilometers? I thought for a long time and walked up to the avalanche slope and contemplated it. It looked somehow sinister. The slope creaked and made a strange sound, a hiss like the hissing of a snake. Something wanted to burst, but it held. Without my having made any sort of decision, I saw myself leaping across the slope in quick bounds. When I reached the middle, there was a bang, as though a very large, not quite fully inflated balloon had burst. It was both sharp and muffled. When I had forded the steep slope, I saw with heart racing that the snow directly below my tracks had a deep crack about a meter wide that went all the way across. The snowfield had not broken though.

At the Kölnbreinsperre, the technical team was servicing the dam. They had been there all winter and were still snowed in and cut off from the outside world. A helicopter brought them food from time to time, and they had a telephone. They couldn’t believe that I’d come down from the Arlscharte. They studied my tracks in the snow with their binoculars and conferred quietly with one another. Their assumption seemed to be that I was an escaped convict. Why had I done it? They wanted to know why I had come down that way. I replied that actually I wanted to tell no one in the world, but I was on my way to propose to my wife, and that was something best done on foot. The men then showed me their work on the inside of the dam. In endless galleries inside the concrete walls hung pendulums by which they were able to read the deformations of the wall. Several measuring stations. Dams have a very complicated inner life.

One of the engineers dictated a school paper to his daughter over the telephone on the subject of spring even though he was still stuck in winter. One man spent hours each day on various fitness equipment; another one looked after the hydroponic plants of the entire hotel, which he had clustered in the lobby all the way to the office. I slept on the fourth floor of the empty hotel. I was given the choice of floors. At the end of the day, I strained my ears—I thought I heard a very distant cuckoo down the valley.

Tuesday, 13 May

Clear, blue day. Later this afternoon, as luck would have it, the team is being relieved; a helicopter is on its way. They are packing. One of them is doing the dishes, several days’ worth, down in the kitchen. I help the one called Norbert Gigler sweep the floors.

They wanted to give me a torch for the tunnels farther down the valley, but impulsively I turned it down. Still there were avalanches and rockslips coming across the road. Ghostly feeling, groping through a pitch-black tunnel with no light. The lower end of the topmost tunnel is almost completely choked off by an avalanche, clumps of wet snow and ice are pressed deep inside the tunnel. Right up at the top under the vaulted roof there is a narrow opening through which I can dig my way out. Farther down in the valley, I meet teams of road workers starting to clear the tunnels. The first worker I met as I crawled out of the top of the tunnel was sitting on his snow blower eating a sandwich. In his bewilderment, he stopped chewing. I greeted him and walked on.