From Eurotrash, which was published last month by Liveright. Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles.

Up and up we went, into the ever-thinning air. On each side, the craggy rock faces sped back down into the valley below us, as though merely a trick of the light or of perspective. My mother had taken half an Ambien down in the valley station, and then the other half when the gondola began swinging with particular intensity. She asked me to hurry and tell her a story, very quickly please, because she was so terrified. She clung to my arm, I rummaged around in my memory, and what appeared to me first was a glass cockpit, and then the tale of Roald Dahl.

“As you know, Mama, Roald Dahl was trained as a fighter pilot, in Nairobi and Cairo.”

“In the First or Second World War?”

“In the Second, of course.”

“Yes, and then?”

“Well, he’d written down the coordinates for a rendezvous in the Libyan desert, but not the correct ones, apparently, and so there he was, flying over the desert in his Gloster Gladiator, alone, with nothing to see except sand, sand, and more sand beneath him. It grew dark, and he was running out of gas . . . ”

“ . . . fuel . . . ”

“Yes, of course, fuel. At some point, the display-needle thing was at zero, and he hadn’t found the other planes, so he decided to make an emergency landing. He put down, rather hard, but a stupid rock was in his way, the landing gear snagged on it and sheared off, and his plane came to a halt, instantly catching fire.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes, and since he couldn’t find the seat-belt release, he couldn’t climb out of the burning aircraft and get himself to safety. He pulled and tugged and tore, and after interminable seconds in the fiery cabin, he remembered the pocketknife in his uniform, and he used it to cut the belt apart, crawled out of the cockpit, and fainted beside the airplane from pain. He saw the ammunition explode from his aircraft machine gun from the violent heat of the flames and the bullets strike the sand next to him, but after that, nothing.”

“And what happened then?”

“He lay unconscious for a long time that night, next to the blazing wreckage of his plane. Since he hadn’t shown up at the rendezvous point, his pilot friends had taken to the skies again to look for him. One of them spotted the flames in the desert below, landed, hopped out, and ran to him, dragged him farther away, gave him some water to drink, and Dahl woke up.”

“Luckily.”

“And his friend told him he looked horrible. He asked what do you mean, felt his face with his hands, and where his nose had been he found only a squishy clump of melted flesh.”

“Roald Dahl had a fake nose?”

“Yes, they patched him back together at the military hospital in Cairo or Alexandria or wherever, but he always had a nasal prosthesis later.”

“Ha, yes, that’s a good one. I didn’t know that. He was a very handsome man. A fake nose is a bit like an artificial anus.”

“Uh, if you say so.”

“The stoma just isn’t as visible to everyone. What do you think? As the nose is.” I nodded and smiled.

At that moment, the gondola pulled into the refuge of the mountain station with a sudden jerk.

My mother exhaled; her brow had become moist, in spite of the Ambien. I had not known she suffered from such a severe fear of heights, and I dabbed her forehead with a crumpled paper napkin I took from my pocket.

“Where did you put your walker?”

“It’s being kept by the friendly man in the taxi, down in the valley parking lot. He also has our luggage, you know. Or did I leave the thing back at the restaurant? You’ll just have to support me now. It’s about time you supported me. You’ve haven’t done so in years.”

We were led outside through an automatic sliding door onto a sundeck with wooden tables—an observation platform.

Aside from three older Indian ladies sitting there pensively before three bottles of soda pop, it was empty. A deep ravine gaped to our right. The glacial panorama directly in front of us stretched southward for kilometers, all the way to the Dents du Midi, over in the canton of Valais. Only snow, ice, and rock were visible as far as the eye could see, an unreal wilderness in black and white, with a clear, sunny, enormous sky in purest sapphire above it, stretching up into the midnight blue of space.

“So where are these edelweiss fields?” my mother asked. She put on her hideous Bulgari sunglasses.

The Indian tourists shot us a brief and inscrutable look, smiled, and then turned their attention back to their soft drinks and mobile phones. We took a seat on one of the wooden benches. The lack of oxygen up here went to my head. My mother reached into a plastic bag with a bottle inside and took a large swig. A trace of vodka trickled from the edges of her mouth as she swallowed.

“The edelweiss fields? I have no idea.”

“But why come up here to this horrid wasteland?”

“Maybe they sell edelweiss in the souvenir shop.”

“But I want to see them in nature. You promised me they were here. I would never have traveled with you if I’d known I wouldn’t get to see any edelweiss.” She took another gulp of vodka.

“I can’t do anything about it, Mama. Perhaps there’s edelweiss over on the other side of the glacier, down in Valais. You just can’t get there from here.”

“I can’t believe it. You’re not serious?”

“You know, I don’t think we’re going to see edelweiss up here.”

“It’s always the same thing,” she said. “I could scream. I could really scream. My life has been an absolute pile of disappointments. Are you even aware how horrible my life has been? And you said we’d travel to Africa and I could see zebras one more time before I die, but I put that out of my mind when I realized it wasn’t ever your intention to go to Africa with me. Only to spend my money on senseless, completely gratuitous experiences, without zebras or anything. And yet for years I’ve been hoping that my son, my dear son, would do something with me again, like that time twenty-five years ago when we went somewhere on the Eastern and Oriental Express. Where did we go then?”

“From Bangkok to Singapore.”

“Yes, exactly. And then you only read your books in our compartment the whole time, too. If you’d at least read something proper, Flaubert or Racine, or even Camus or God knows what else—but you just had to read your John le Carré, your trashy spy novels, instead of talking to me.”

“Well, you were always drinking a lot on the train.”

“Ha! I only did that because you paid no attention to me. Those rubbish books of yours were apparently more important to you than talking to me. Plus, you were always putting on makeup on the train. Can you believe that? Makeup. And now we’re here at this godforsaken place, and there’s nothing, no edelweiss, no zebras, no nothing, and you know what, Christian? That’s just what it looks like inside me, too, in my soul. There’s nothing. Nothing left. A blank white nothing.”

“Yes. You’re right.”

“You know what this is? It’s a sign of mental bankruptcy. And it’s a sign of your mental bankruptcy. I once read that in Daniel Kehlmann somewhere. The century wept blind. That captures it quite well, very precisely, in fact. This is my century, wept blind and empty and dead. You ought to write things like that, like Kehlmann. Now, he’s a good author. Not the sort of trivial nonsense you write that no one wants to read anyway.”

“May I say something for a change?”

“This isn’t about you at all. You always twist it so that it’s only ever about you, because you’re an egotistical monster. It’s always just you, you, you. Such an unbelievable wimp. You shouldn’t sit there like a shadow of yourself and always agree with everything; say what you think. Be a man for once, not such a baby.”

“What I think? Nothing, really. Wait. Yes, I think I’ve been hearing the same sermon from you for thirty-five years.”

“Oh sure, of course. Not to worry. Soon you’ll only hear me in your memory anyway, because I’m moribund as it is. But you, you ought to follow the example of, uh . . . what’s his name . . . of Knausgaard or of Houellebecq or Ransmayr or Sebald.”

“Please. Sebald is dead.”

“I mean follow the example of really good literature. Of books that last, not the sort of horrendous guff you write. Go and read Flaubert. You’d see how it’s done. Learn from the masters. But monsieur wouldn’t dream of it. Monsieur is conceited and obtuse, and then monsieur travels to some glacier with his mother in the hope it’ll all work itself out. Preferably to the very glacier near the very chalet in which he was born, to conjure up some sort of catharsis.”

“I . . . ”

“You think I don’t know what you expect from this journey? You said it yourself last night, in your sleep. Catharsis is what you said; there’d be an expurgation between us, you said, if only you remained on the move with me. Your mother. He takes her along to some saccharine melodrama, tragedy, comedy, whatever, starring yours truly. Promises her who knows what, seeing that she’s got to drink herself to oblivion constantly and choke down pills for her unendurable pain. And then he blames everything on Switzerland, the Nazis, and the Second World War.”

What could I have said to that? There was nothing, truly nothing. She was right about everything, in her delusion. She was right. I had been afraid of being unable to stop the juggernaut. I hadn’t thought this through. Perhaps this trip had been given too much to chance; perhaps we shouldn’t have simply traveled off somewhere, at random; perhaps I should’ve just booked us plane tickets to Africa, and we shouldn’t have set out through Switzerland, just because; perhaps that really hadn’t been very wise at all.

I told myself again and again that she was not well read, that she only pretended she was, that she hadn’t ever read anything by Flaubert or Stendhal, either—it was all just a bluff, but it was enacted so well that I fell for it over and over. She knew nothing of Houellebecq or Ransmayr; she only read Bunte and occasionally watched quiz shows on television. She was an expert manipulator. That was her epic, incredible art, which I had known for decades; she lied and twisted things in such a way that everyone believed everything she said.

I had no idea what to say or think, except that my mother certainly needed a new colostomy bag soon. I touched her arm softly. Perhaps she was crying. I faced her. No tears. I turned back to the glacier before us.

At that moment, we both saw, as did the Indian tourists, a small russet fox running about on the ice at some distance. It stopped, turned toward us, and looked at us—looked directly into our eyes.

None of us moved, in order not to scare off the fox. It was still staring at us. Its tail, with a white tuft at its tip, stood straight up as my mother whispered that it was hard to believe people would kill such an animal for its fur. I held my breath and didn’t mention her sable furs scattered about various storehouses in Zurich. The fox turned away and continued trotting onward, across the glacier’s sun-drenched, lucid-cold ice sheet, toward the south.

One of the Indian women took a pair of binoculars from a rucksack and homed in on the disappearing fox, and I saw before me a scene from a Werner Herzog film about Antarctica, in which a king penguin walks off into the icy waste all alone, toward certain death by starvation. The penguin had left on a lonesome pilgrimage, solus rex, and no one had the slightest clue why.

As was my mother’s wont with her denunciations, half a minute later she’d already forgotten she’d spouted certain truths with such hyperbole that mostly you just wanted to kill yourself. Of course, it could’ve been the fox who made her see that her fit of nastiness was unbridled and inappropriate, but this wasn’t very likely. In any case, she grew pensive once the fox had gone, and she closed her eyes. Her hand, almost atremble, moved toward the bag with the vodka, and the glacial sun shone from above, unceasing and relentless, upon our little tableau vivant.