Mountainish E-Book

Zsuzsanna Gahse

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations. Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat. In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.

Leseprobe

(                  )

Zsuzsanna Gahse, born in Budapest in 1946, has lived in Vienna, Kassel, Stuttgart and Lucerne, and is now based in Müllheim (Thurgau, Switzerland). Her literary work moves between prose and poetry, narrative and scenic texts. She has published more than thirty books, most recently Bergisch teils farblos (2021) and Zeilenweise Frauenfeld (2023), both with Edition Korrespondenzen in Vienna. A number of her stage projects have also been performed. To list only two prizes: she was awarded the Johann Heinrich Voss Prize of the German Academy in Darmstadt for her translations from Hungarian to German in 2010, and the Swiss Grand Prix for Literature in 2019.

Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for over 20 years. Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers, including Inka Parei, Heike Geissler, Olga Grjasnowa, Annett Gröschner and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was the winner of the 2018 Straelener Übersetzerpreis (Straelen Prize for Translation), longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and shortlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. She occasionally teaches translation and co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show. She helped to establish the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, awarded annually since 2017.

Mountainish

Zsuzsanna Gahse

Translated from the German

by Katy Derbyshire

Mountainish

It ain’t necessarily so

1

From the passenger seat on the drive from Venice to Munich, I saw the rock faces ready to collapse; above all, I saw their ability to collapse, and that collapse as hostility. Mile after mile of bare, rough, impersonal walls of stone.

These mountains never intended to contend as natural beauties, though people do like speaking beautifully about them. They say that they call, the mountains; the mountains are calling you. And yet all mountains have in mind is collapse, and that’s no empty accusation; a person can be buried alive in the wink of an eye in the Alps, beneath scree, falling rocks, by avalanches and murky masses of mud.

The mountains are kneeling, even the three-thousanders and two-thousanders crouching and kneeling, and they pounce in the process. From inside a moving car, barely anyone will register the graunching and grinding in the rocky slopes, I assume, but a falling chunk of stone will suddenly hit the car roof, beneath which I’ll be squashed flat after a short, sharp shock.

A drive through the Alps is not everyone’s cup of tea.

The driver of the car was a fellowship-holder from Romania who, like me, had spent a short time in Venice, and since he spoke only broken German we were mostly silent, driving quietly through the brittle mountain ranges.

Nur Autos und Alpen, he said at one point, and we laughed, though I won’t list the many different reasons why a person might laugh.

2

The Julier Pass, the one below the lumpen Piz Julier, is an ideal mountain crossing, the kind I’d wish for everywhere in the Alps and other highlands. Even on my first approach from the north, I liked this sedate pass. A comfortable road winds from west to east up to the wide col, and having reached the top I was relieved; on that very first approach I was surprised and relieved to find such a generous, open place. The road down to Engadin too, continuing eastwards, has its good moments. It is possible after all, I thought, to conquer mountains without fear and oppression. I shall set aside the geological aspect (granite, towers of chaotically stacked, unstable blocks), and since I was aware that even the Romans knew and loved this mountain crossing, I felt supported in the cultivated landscape named Julier after the Roman patrician family. Julius Caesar and the long-conquered area were mountainous reassurance.

Except that Julius Caesar or Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with the Julier. Still, the harmless incline on the way up is as noble as the view from the top of the pass. There is a serenity up there, at least on clear days without snow or rain. And without the formidable view up to the Piz. Another good thing is when no cars approach, since drivers especially like the speed in the bends of the road, whether upwards or downwards. I am familiar with these muscle men and adrenaline junkies, not necessarily mountain-lovers, from the Furka Pass; I’ve made their acquaintance a number of times, including in fog. The vehicles would drive up inches away from my rear bumper, or from the person driving the car, who from their point of view obviously did not belong to the area or in the landscape, otherwise she would have driven just as fast as those behind her. They wanted to blow up the foreign driver (foreign body) in my car, those bend-drivers, bend-braggers, possibly with Alpine roots and thus likely racist, they wanted to point out to me that there are Alpine people and then there are foreigners, whatever their skin colour. Those were the kind of thoughts they had at the very back of their minds. Back then, perhaps not these days. And I too had my thoughts, as I drove on. But perhaps some of the pushy drivers were Dutch. Many people in Holland grow tired of their flat land and hurl themselves, ravenous, upon everything formidable, including the rocky Alps, where they like to prove they can cope with mountains’ quirks and passes and therefore push away the more cautious drivers, scatter them. They almost latch on mid-switchback, nudging the car in front off the road, or they’ll chuck a bomb into my car and overtake. The question is, who is the better speed freak; who is braver and more at home; above all, who is more at home? And a question like that is disturbing.

3

At the Furka Pass, I took a little walk and my dog walked ahead. He did not run away; he was just faster than me and then stopped by a path at the unpaved edge. I thought he was about to leap off the steep face, but he merely inspected the rock calmly, his expression alert.

4

Where is the wit in the mountains? Forget it.

5

Beautiful words like gneiss, flysch, quartzite, granite and shale. Then there are things to point out such as copper deposits, salt sediments, possibly also gold deposits, and crystals and semi-precious stones are sure to be mentioned. These terms describe what is called the dead matter of the mountain regions, and some of the words awaken desire, which might even be called greed. Greed feels antiquated, but as long as the word is not overused I do like it, because it describes a craving that goes all the way to the gut.

Often, the various types of stone with their beautiful names lie close beside and below one another. They are a society of stones. They have to sustain (tolerate) one another, which does not always work and can lead to landslides and falling rocks.

Life leaps surprisingly into play in the dead rock, though it is emphasised as lifeless material, not just in limestone, in the Limestone Alps, in the deposits of living creatures, though those living creatures are not alive. Yet the deposits do at least contain former life.

One thing I especially like about moun-tains is all they con-tain.

But independently of the former life in limestone rock, frozen creatures lurk beneath the glaciers, thawing, breaking through, popping up as the ice masses retreat. Bacteria. Ancient, sleeping types of bacteria, unknown to date, awaken. It is seen in Siberia too, where the permafrost is also giving way.

Only recently have there been reports of unfamiliar bacteria, previously enclosed calmly beneath the ice mantle, quasi- lifeless. Now they are popping and plopping up, and this new word suits them. Perhaps they are harmless clowns that take pleasure from plopping.

6

At the top cable-car station, I started with a coffee while I watched the approaching and departing cable cars, and then I headed uphill, slipped and landed in a rocky hollow, a kind of dugout, and because both my feet demanded a pause after the slip, after the misstep, I sat down on the dirty, dusty ground, where no one had surely sat for a long time. I had no trouble with the view. I saw no steep rock faces nearby, the valley boasted pale-roofed, quiet houses, and I had a voluntary time-out of at least twenty minutes.

The only thing that was not beautiful or calming was the hairpin road contorting in tight bends, which I tried to overlook.

7

On a short residency in Venice years ago, I met a man who kept five different diaries in parallel. This fellow resident, a newly qualified architect full of zest for life, rage for life, must have had a quintuple brain.

In one of his diaries he listed each day’s activities, in another he kept notes on conversations, and a third book was reserved for comments on architectural aesthetics, though these comments inevitably overlapped with the conversational notes. I cannot remember other content areas; all I know is that I found one of the books funny. Perhaps he collected jokes as well, or his sexual escapades were amusing; this young man in Venice saw himself as something of a Casanova.

Those separate entries must be a drain on the brain, I thought at the time, and his thoughts seemed to me like single segments of an orange, but now I am interested in fragmentation like this, now I see it as a challenge. I could outdo him with a tenfold diary system, yet there is still something that troubles me about his books, probably the adamant way he explained them.

Aside from the architect, a philosopher was also staying at the house, a successful philosopher who had developed a system for centrally controlling traffic lights and was travelling the world with that system of his, all the way to India. To this day, traffic lights that change too quickly or slowly remind me of him; above all, I know that traffic lights have a philosophical background.

8

One of my thematically structured portfolios could contain portraits, and that is where I would sketch that philosopher named Gregor – his surname escapes me. He was no taller than me, very slim, inclining to skinny, dark eyes and dark bushy hair; he was always in motion, restless, I could say, and despite that restlessness he had carefree, relaxed lips. He and the diarist never appeared at the same time. The architect, usually wearing pale linen suits, was blond, tall and always spoke standing up; I cannot imagine him sitting down, though we – he, the philosopher and I – ate communally with three other residents because there was only one kitchen, where, incidentally, the unwashed crockery stacked up, and there would be plenty to say about that (some of us could keep separate notes on kitchen rotas, I suspect), and aside from that we had a communal bathroom with a single shower, which we used one after another and never communally.

9

From the train heading north from Milan, the surroundings looked subdued. Neat stone walls on either side of the tracks, now and then a gleaming giant in the distance, stoically eroding. An eroding giant. It sounds obscene. What was up with the mountain? Its head held high, something mountainish was happening to it in the distance.

In Brig we had twenty minutes to change trains; two of us were travelling together with the dog, not much luggage, so we could go down through the tunnel to the Rhône for a moment from the platform.

The Alps, the Rhône, the dog and a little green.

There was plenty more green in our immediate vicinity as we continued our journey, all sorts of deciduous trees, later conifers.

10

We were driving to Stels at the top of the Prättigau valley, the dog on the back seat, and once again I was evidently driving too slowly in the hairpin bends for the locals, though the road up to Stels is an easy drive compared to the Maloja Pass.

We could talk to seasoned drivers for days about the steepest, narrowest, longest bends in the entire Alpine region, trying to determine whether driving these stretches upwards or downwards is more impressive or unpleasant.

The road to Stels is not a comfortable one, and if the postbus comes along it is not clear at first which of the two vehicles will plummet, the postbus or your own car. The decisive factor is which vehicle is driving on the valley side. Cars on the mountain side can only be squashed. Everyone must have such conditions clear in their mind. I was driving upwards, a pale green sports car following behind me, inching ever closer, and eventually it latched on to push me uphill.

11

Who wants to see a full view of the Alps?

12

This respected mountainscape contains guesthouses, cabins, old and new hotels and pensions, and aside from a few blind, never-visited areas, it is a region where transient travellers can easily find a place to stop and eat.

13

Check under the bed, never trust the toothbrush glass. The floor is suspect, particularly if carpeted. If a personal message appears on the TV screen in better hotels, a welcome message especially for the guest, for you, with your name, then the message is pseudo-personal, the opposite of personal, purely technical, an intrusion into your business, dishonest from the outset. They want to control you, invade your privacy. Be careful what you do in such a room, including at night.

14

When I can’t sleep I count up the hotel rooms I have stayed in so far. I take a topographical approach, country by country, city by city, town by town, including villages. So far, I have not stayed in an endless number of hotels.

15

When crossing the Alps, be it from west to east or in some other direction, travellers are mainly interested in the changing perspectives, which is the whole reason for tourism existing. One could claim that.

16

In Brig, the station forecourt is a starting point for seven postbus lines, including the route to the Simplon Pass.

The yellow buses arrive one after another from various departure points and depart simultaneously for their set destinations. It is a choreography easy to observe at many bus stations. I recently saw such a performance in the Jura, in Gelterkinden, where four buses in a row set out in single file like a gaggle of geese, huge birds migrating together through the small community, but all at once they parted ways and all four of them accelerated. That too was beautifully coordinated.

17

In Bergell, outside the Hotel Bregaglia in Promontogno, only two or three buses arrive simultaneously and the hotel forecourt is not a bus station but a stopover; yet the postbuses depart together for their further destinations, and the hotel guest watching from a window might think the hotel’s solidity had come about in parallel to the excellent travel service, which may be partly true, since the building was not designed with cheap guests in mind but for arrivals in chic hats and ankle boots, the kind everyone knows from film footage of days gone by.

18

Now I have invoked the well-known olden days of the Alps as advertising, seeing as the classier hotels present themselves that way, anyway.

19

The yellow buses’ simultaneous arrival at various places and carefree departure is down to digital planning these days. The buses and thus also the drivers are carefully scheduled. Behind the choreography of arrivals and departures lies topographical knowledge of the area, bearing in mind different altitudes and obstacles for the drivers to overcome on each route, depending on the weather and depending on the roads and the tourist traffic. The calculation of the various bus journeys, which works perfectly down to the minute, can only be performed by philosophical mathematicians.

20

Which brings me once again to the successful young philosopher in Venice, a man I have lost sight of and would not recognise now.

For a while there was a shortage of philosophers, only two or three names of general philosophers were named, but the tide has since turned and there are now many specialised applied thinkers.

21

I am planning to live in a hotel room for some time. Postal address: Hotel Bergblick. Clean laundry is delivered to the room, breakfast awaits the guest in a bright space, with the added bonus of a friendly morning greeting from the waitress or waiter; otherwise, quiet prevails. Not a word falls upon the daily-tidied room or upon my papers on the desk by the window, with its eponymous mountain view.

22

This hotel, in which I hope to spend around two months, is located in a safe valley, no rocks collapsing above me.

A gigantic peak at an appropriate distance would not bother me. That is the difference from the horrific forms, called monsters for simplicity’s sake, that display their catastrophic past through their vicinity, exerting a threatening effect. Their nearby unpredictability makes them monsters, and in contrast to them, even gigantic mountains in the distance are nothing but silhouettes of stone.

23

Vals. / I leaned on the high balcony / and light lay everywhere. / Up above, the peaks, / and I was down.

24

I spent three days in Lech. On the second evening the owner joined me at my table with a glass of wine, and we talked among other things of the difference between alabaster and plaster. At night I heard rumblings now and then outside and was troubled, not knowing the area or the noises.

On the second morning my hostess again brought me breakfast in bed. Breakfast in the room was something the pension offered. Here we have your breakfast, and I’m bringing you the sugar today in an alabaster bowl, she said, her tone confiding. Hot coffee, pale eggs from summer hens, pale bread rolls and summer honey.

Once I was alone again, I drew the curtains half-closed to spare myself the view of the craggy Hasenfluh, although since then I’ve faced more terrifying chunks of rock.

25

Below the wooded hills lie buildings with flower-cluttered balconies, and most of these balconies run all the way across the front of the houses. Someone waters the geraniums in the morning, and otherwise no one is to be seen.

26

Such houses with their elongated balconies are a component of a montane architectural fashion that has persisted for centuries.

27

After a terse climb to a peak, after a failed attempt, I have ended up in the village hospital. My room is lovingly decorated. A wooden bed, a painted wooden wardrobe. I have a balcony and on the balcony are geraniums, tended daily. Later, no one will be able to explain what I died of.

28

There are non-smoking rooms, non-drinking rooms, non-loving rooms and the stone peaks. Nothing but stones.

29

I shall try to find out, through a survey, who travels the Alps and why. I’ll assume from the outset that many people would be ashamed not to travel, to stay at home, and they don’t want to be ashamed when comparing themselves to others. They’d be embarrassed, they’d be down, and why should they labour with a predictable depression if they can instead toil their way around the Alps? Perhaps they are not aware that those in need can get support on the telephone, on the subject of travel taboos or geographical taboo zones. And even if they are already in the Alps and are feeling out of place and lacking orientation, upon their reluctant arrival, there is plenty of help to be had. In many cases, even individual mountain houses and hotels offer their support, finding the simplest routes back home for their guests.

30

The decisive factor is that the homeward-bound do not come into direct encounter with the enthusiastic mountain climbers and alpinists, and not because the rock-lovers would jeer at them, for instance. Such things rarely occur and are barely worth mentioning, besides which, any halfway healthy homeward-bound individual could simply jeer back. But despite their composure, the homeward-bound who have just abandoned the mountains would be bound to see boundaries between two types of natures, between those inclined towards mountains and those disinclined towards mountains. Suddenly, every party to such an encounter might think there were two basic types of people.

31

It’s best to float up to the destination on balloons. The first step is to calculate how many gas-filled balloons are necessary for your own body weight, and then to select the correct clothing. Don pantaloons before affixing a baker-boy cap, followed by face paint. Wide, smiling mouth painted red, red button nose, and as the audience in the valley and on the slopes applauds, the clown floats up to the mountaintop.

Another means of transport in the mountains is the helicopter. Against blue skies and clear mountain silhouettes they resemble dragonflies, and when they appear above a mountain and fly downwards with their noses aslant, they too look parodic.

32

With Ruth and her friends Sam and Manu, I came from Brig to Leukerbad by helicopter. We wanted to see the Rhône valley from above; split between the four of us, the price was acceptable. We ought to treat ourselves to a thirty- or forty-kilometre propeller trip every five years, said Ruth. Plenty of places worth seeing are not far apart: Sitten, Interlaken or Thun, we just have to overcome the confusing mountain obstacles, and we’d have the best view from a copter. We’d even get to know the obstacles over time. Yes, and get addicted, said Manu.

33

We could not see the Rhône from the hotel in Leukerbad, just walls of concrete, man-made mountains, instead.

34

I drove up the Julier again to see the rock from close up and to sketch it. There were stones of different sizes by the side of the road, rocks that I could inspect with my magnifying glass. I had a folding chair with me, my dog sat alongside me and I sketched as best I could without looking up at the Piz.

35

I know that the highest peaks mean proximity to the sky. Up in the celestial vaults sit deities, and when we look up and yearn our way up, up, up to the peak, we are closer to the gods. What a beautiful old view of the world that is. We have abiding instincts for an old view of the world with no universe. Tales of mountains as pinnacles, with no universe around us.

The mountain regions are clearly visible on modern satellite photos. As such, partly as such, they are interesting, but seen from the perspective of Earth’s history they are above all ruffles, pimples. Unsettled regions, catastrophes. People are constantly clambering up to the gods, and the closest they get to them is on Mount Everest. Up there is either nirvana or Eldorado or gold in the sky.

Or people clamber up to overcome the sky.

And all along, the mountains driven into the sky are actually in dialogue with the goings-on in the Earth’s interior; as such: in dialogue with the depths.

36

Mountain flanks with clear vertical or oblique lines. Often, these lines have a surprising kink, as though the entirety of the rock had been snapped, and sometimes the lines are horizontal (though this is trivial), the way the layers were originally deposited, without being subsequently shifted. I sketch them to get closer to them, and as I sketch, the stories – not harmless – through which the mountains came about become visible to some extent.

37

There are the self-overcomers and then there are the risk-averse. I can only shake my head at the audacious climbers prepared for the most outlandish of ascents; I shake it in shame because I do not understand those people, cannot understand that they have nothing better to do than climb; I scatter shed hair with my shock-headed shaking. Their strange successful distraction from current affairs is shocking, but shucks, some achieve decent TV audiences for their travails and their travels.

38