Ulrike Draesner

Father has created a bubble: we’re driving, father smokes, father munches chocolate, the mountains come into view, the car is a metal room, it appears in the mountains, it drives into them until it can go no further, it keeps driving. Headless bodies everywhere, an array of humpback mountain ridges; above the car’s passengers, their pale, crumbling, bare-boned shoulder blades drift past so slowly that Hilde can barely detect a change in their positions. High up in the distance, the stony torsos overlap and hide each other, reappear, shadowy, but without getting any nearer, so that they seem to be driving on the spot, caught in a kind of viscous, lukewarm slime, a blend of rocks, lichen and water vapour.

At first it’s a joke, she can laugh out loud: the size of ants, being driven under the grey-white overhanging rims of the sheer, smooth mass of the Dolomites. But then the silence in the car thickens with the din of the engine and the river, narrow and brown, icy and frothing, leaping along beside the road: the Adige. There’s nothing else. The road, the river, no room for anything else. Between walls that are nothing but rock, splintered, barren stone closing in inch by inch. Then the car, that’s not a beetle, says mother, crawls up the serpentine hairpin bends, as if it really was one, thinks Hilde, crawling up the snake. She sees herself sitting there, her hands in her lap, as if she was old, her arms touching the slippery upholstery, and her over-the-knee skirt is so short than even her thighs, inside leg, right up inside, are stuck to the plastic seat. And so they drive along in the sweaty box, inside father’s idea, on into the mountains, that continue to unfold, collide, face off, a confusing tangle, and during the drive up they become ever higher.

The car comes to a halt at the edge of the road, overhanging the void. Overhead the gutter of the cowshed, says father. They get out, the five houses in the village huddle round the church to form a square. The square is a car park, the village is a picture. Which makes the holiday more family-like than ever before, more sun, more cows, more food, more rooms, except, says the landlady, they haven’t finished the extension on the farmhouse, so new arrivals are deposited in the ubiquitous damp of the new building.

Every afternoon now, facing into the August sun, father drinks a beer, a special holiday treat, on the low wooden platform in front of the house that counts in Schnauders as the veranda, beer garden and terrace. On the downhill side, the boards go straight into the shed where the cows stand, grey with sunken eyes, and their smell goes uphill out of the shed onto the terrace.

In the shed, Hilde strokes the straw. It breaks up into individual stalks, she strokes the stalks, the stalks break into pieces, she strokes the pieces, she strokes between them, she strokes nothing. The cows’ eyes are glued to Hilde. She stares at the ground, the broken straw, the shed’s holey boards: splinters stand out from the wood, the cows’ hairs bend away from the cows’ bellies, the short horns protrude from their heads, the bucket hanging on its nail strains at the wall, the open top half of the shed door flips back and forth – everything stands out of its own accord, as far as it can. Chinks, cracks, gaps, everywhere.