Alb

The Alb is a defining landscape in the narrator’s winter walk: a steep, wooded escarpment that he climbs alone through snow. Its seasonal transformations make the place more than a backdrop, while a remembered sighting of a hare with Frieder briefly sets the desolate present against an earlier shared moment.

Landscape and Seasonal Change

To the south, the Alb rises like a wall covered in vegetation. The narrator has seen it green in summer and yellow and brown in autumn; in winter it is mottled black and white. Looking closely, he can make out individual trees along the escarpment’s edge, their dark forms like spikes against the pale-gray sky. The view gives the region a stark, changing presence, measured through the seasons rather than treated as a fixed landmark.

The Winter Ascent

As afternoon darkens toward gray, the narrator puts a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag and sets out for the foot of the slope. He climbs directly up the steep face through snow and between bare beeches. Christmas trees still stand unadorned among them, their branches coated with what he describes as a mold-like covering of snow. Their dense branches brush his cheeks, and snow slips down the back of his neck. In the growing darkness, the snow seems to release light it absorbed during the day; trees and ground glow faintly as he continues uphill through that light.

A Recalled Encounter and Its Contrast

On a snow-covered field higher on the slope, the narrator remembers seeing an enormous hare there in summer with Frieder. The animal had appeared suddenly at the forest’s edge and stared at them—or past them—with an expression they could not interpret. It then turned toward the grasses and began nibbling, apparently as if the two boys were not there. The memory gives the Alb a history shared with Frieder, but the present climb is solitary: the earlier encounter survives as a brief, unresolved image within the winter landscape.

Narrative Significance

The Alb’s steep ascent and changing light give physical form to the narrator’s isolation. Its trees are at once intimate—their branches touch his face—and part of a dense natural world that continues beyond him. The remembered hare adds another kind of distance: even when Frieder was present, the boys could not know what the animal’s gaze meant. The place therefore holds both an earlier shared experience and the narrator’s present solitude without resolving the gap between them.