I told this idea to an old man who had renounced corn and settled on a grass islet. He was a sage, one of those whose wisdom had reached the stage which makes it possible for him to live on the air, which is supposed to be very nourishing here.
The sage told me, however, that it was not a new idea. It had even been tried before, the last time less than thirty years ago, and many corn people had died, for only those who are born here, or have a particularly strong constitution or great will power can tolerate the swamp air. Some managed to survive the change, but never learnt to tread properly and only brought up a few grains. On the other hand the swamp people, when they first reached the corn country, had gone wild in the storehouses, the sage told me, and destroyed, scattered or eaten much of the stocks. It had taken a great effort for them to learn how to store the corn properly, so that it didn’t go musty, and how to manage large supplies economically and efficiently. The consequence was that during the next twenty-five years there was more hunger and suffering than ever, and many people had died before the relocation was carried out. That was some time ago and now things were back to normal. And now here I was on my grass islet, trying start the same trouble again. With that he threw something at me that a swamp bird had laid in his hand and was definitely not an egg because he had caught a swamp-cock by mistake. He was very old, and wisdom is no substitute for keen eyesight.
I assumed he meant well, even with the thing he threw at me, so I thanked him for his explanation. Perhaps he was right, perhaps wrong. The horses always run in pairs.
Not surprisingly, at the beginning, when I was sucked into the swamp, I was angry, then bitter, then sad, until I eventually accepted my fate and calmed down. I stopped thinking about it, but then I felt the hunger even more, and to take my mind off it I started singing. To avoid opening my mouth in a wide oval like the poets, I kept my lips closed and hummed softly to myself. I remember that first time I sang as clearly as if it had been yesterday:
Darkness was spreading slowly over the swamp. The moon set its pointed shoe lightly on the treetops. The swamp people were silently treading, their hands clasped behind their heads, their eyelids lowered. They trod gently, steadily and tirelessly, even though they were sleeping. Not only did they not stop treading, their treading was even more intensive while they were asleep because all their strength had withdrawn from their senses and brains into their legs. Masses of bright grains welled up and swirled around on the surface, like reflections of the stars. Seen by no one, pursued by no starving lips, they floated more slowly into the canals than by day and, carried along on the waves into the silos, they piled up inside those pyramids of stored fruitfulness against the fine-meshed nets that stopped them continuing on their way with the water.
And so every morning the corn people find a huge shining sun over their land and a rich harvest piled up in their dark storehouses, effortless as a draught of fish in the trout mating season.
The swamp people know nothing of that. Exhausted, they sleep soundly at nights. But I know about these things because I have lived in both places. I know both worlds. Two worlds which for me combine in a familiar and varied picture of great beauty and great sadness, like the two interweaving voices of a song. It was these harmonies that enticed me to start humming.
Later I slipped from my grass islet back into the swamp, held up my hands, trod very slowly and hummed. My humming could not penetrate the dense air. It circled round my head and slowly rose to my hands. Its vibrations imparted slight, rapid movements to my fingertips and bore my hands up so that they did not tire. Instead, they hovered in the air above my head, fluttering and warbling like larks. Attracted by the buzzing of my fingertips, swamp birds circled round my hands. Perhaps the delicate oscillation makes them think they are insects.
It was quite still.
The feet of the people treading as they slept made no sound. They were deep down and mute as the silent activity of roots.
And since I know about both worlds and have felt much within me, root-quiet and corn-joy both flow into my song. I sing, for myself alone, absorbed in my song, mute and breathless. And there is no end to my hymn of praise.
Something to Say for the Rain
Rudolf Bayr
They got the police to force an entrance to my apartment and just because I’m lying in bed – I think and think after the scene was all over.
It’s raining, it’s been raining for days and nights, lines can be seen against the darker windows opposite, the lighter ones absorb them, and the lead goes black in the rain, and the water turns some of the skylights into mirrors, and individual roof tiles stand out as more reddish while the others remain an inconspicuous dull grey, and the wind peppers the roof with rain, throws pellets of rain on tin and tiles, I can hear everything quite clearly, the attic roof is immediately above the ceiling, you can hear the water gurgling in the gutters and the drops spattering on the flashing, in ones, twos, a lot at once, and the wood in the room is moving, the dampness, for days and nights on end…
The policemen took a statement and apologised. But I had to understand, they said, that it was happening more and more often that people shut themselves in and laid themselves down to die, being sick and without hope.
Yes, I understand, you don’t need to apologise.
Mostly, one of them said with a laugh, because I understood and apologised, mostly people don’t realise someone’s gone until you can smell them from the stairs – you, he said to me, as if to distinguish me from someone you can already smell, you had simply gone missing, they didn’t know where you were at the office either.
They’ll soon know. The company doctor will note that I am lying in bed, although not confined to bed for medical reasons. Company doctors are the medical arm of the employer, they balance the usefulness of a person against the content of the Hippocratic oath. The company doctor will say he cannot give me a sick note because I am well…
I went to bed when the storm finally came, and I stayed there after it had left the rain behind, pushing the house, the street, the town into the dull lighting which wipes up the shadows, the lighting in which no light can be made out and the wet blocks out the colours.
Rain, says the radio announcer, continual, abundant rain, and the wind peppers lead and tiles with pellets of rain, they make the silence lined up behind the wind crumbly, porous, I lie there and sometimes I get up to see the lines against the dark windows and I tell myself that it’s raining and the differences are shrinking, and it is as if earth were clawing its way upwards, and darkness.
No, I’m not mad, I’m just doing loosening exercises, I’m trying to loosen my connections with the room where I’m lying, the ownership connections with things I like to have, with my table, my chest, the drawings on my walls, my books, to practise separation by imaginative anticipation.
One night when I was eight I lost a lot of blood after a not entirely successful operation, the pain I had been suffering disappeared with the blood, I felt light, weightless. With a thin sleep cooling my eyes, I asked my mother if I was going to die, I couldn’t see my toys because of all the tubes I was hooked up to, and my mother said, no, I wasn’t going to, and I remember it was a disappointment.
I have seen people take that one long, last look, turn round one last time, look back at the room, at the house they are being carried out of, driven away from, and then I have seen them look forward, in the direction they are being carried, driven, and I have heard the people carrying or driving them say that’s right, loosen up and leave it all behind, and I have heard them describe the decor for the final scene, they talked of peace, lots of peace and greenery and gravel paths and benches, years of it, years in which the sun will never set and the nights will carry no fears in the folds of their mantles.
I have to practise that, I tell myself, take myself away before they carry me away, I would like to spare myself that one last look, not have any reason to turn round one last time, not cling on, not to anyone, not to anything, practise, prac
tise and keep the door closed.
This morning the windows were opaque, condensation had gathered on the glass, it has turned colder and the wind is still peppering the roof above me and spattering the flashing, and the lighting has no light and I stay lying in bed and think that I will stay there and practise, and that that is how it will turn out, how it will be one day, more or less…
Ebb and Flow
Anton Fuchs
For generations our family has lived in a spacious house formed of stone and dark beams. It stands halfway up the hill in that funnel-shaped valley with a fortress at the bottom. Seen from the dormer windows of our bedrooms, the two-storey building, with its massive projections, six towers, battlements, parapets and permanently closed shutters, gives the impression of being uninhabited.
A dangerous illusion to which anyone will fall victim who lacks the patience for prolonged observation. For at irregular intervals, mostly around midday, the two doors of the main entrance will suddenly fly open. Then you can see the military police march, in goose-step and close formation, to the parade ground, where they halt and stand to attention for a while in an open-sided square at the flagpole before – presumably at a command, from that distance we cannot hear anything – falling out. Scarcely have they dispersed into the country, however, than they can only be made out with difficulty in the brush on the surrounding slopes. Only with the aid of a telescope on its sharpest setting can you see one or other of them, earnestly searching the ground for clues. Then sometimes you can identify here and there a piece of braid, a star on a collar, a shoulder strap, a belt buckle, occasionally a rifle with fixed bayonet.
As our father sometimes tells us, when he was a child he was always afraid of these patrols combing the hills which could strike at any moment. But those times are past. Our generation has become used to seeing them. We know from experience that they will not detain us as long as we have not broken any law. Some of my brothers and sisters go so far as to feel comfortable under their protection. They even think of them as ‘keepers of the peace’, remembering how close behind all reality terror and anarchy lurk, just waiting for the opportunity to destroy the residence our kindred raised in days beyond recall. After all, they add, we have learnt to toughen ourselves up against many other, often far worse afflictions. We’ve survived a good fifteen thousand wars, massive earth- and seaquakes, whirlwinds, hurricanes, not to mention the ice ages, erupting volcanoes, avalanches. Once there was even persistently dense rain. It didn’t stop raining. For forty days and forty nights. Until the fortress at the bottom of the valley was covered by the muddy waves with only the towers still above them, and the police on the battlements, packed together, with wet helmets, looking up at the skies to see if they were going to clear at last.
We’ve survived all these catastrophes, they continue. They went as quickly as they came. People would surely have soon forgotten them if some historians hadn’t recorded them in their chronicles.
That’s the way they talk today, and that’s the way they’ve always talked when our large family’s sitting together round the table, each with his pewter mug in front of him. I love watching their carefree faces, the serene, southern grandezza of their gestures. The fact that I prefer to listen rather than join in their conversations has nothing to do with either timidity or a sense of superiority. More with coolness, with observing from a distance and the enjoyment I get from drifting along on the sound waves from their voices. Above all, however, I must be careful not to mention the rumour that was reported to me recently, late in the night, when they were all asleep.
Entangled in chaotic dreams after the usual evening spent drinking and roused with a sudden start, I at first stubbornly insisted on confusing the man, who was bending over me holding his hurricane lamp, with someone else, until I began to comprehend who he was and what he was saying.
He was, he repeated in a whisper, a messenger from below and he had a message for me, the implications of which none of us would probably grasp. A tap had started to leak, he went on, bringing his lips even closer to my right ear, in one of the extensive, pitch-black dungeons of the fortress where no one had set foot for decades, and had been dripping ever since without stopping for a single moment.
‘But …’ I said, turning towards the shadow-filled face illuminated from below, ‘how can you …’ But before I could finish my question, he had switched off his lamp and silently disappeared.
I could not get back to sleep that night. It was no use trying to take my mind off the message by working out mathematical formulae in my head or trying to remember as far back into my childhood as possible to see if I could get to the moment of my birth … My concentration only had to slacken slightly and the news I had just heard was back. Sometimes it seemed more frightening than anything I had ever heard, at others a harmless, even ridiculous exaggeration. Indeed, there were times when I felt my encounter with the messenger from below had been nothing but a dream.
In the morning, however, I set out earlier than usual. I climbed between rocks and withered juniper bushes up the steep slope, debating with myself all the time whether it was not my duty to bring the impending danger to the attention of my relatives, even at the risk of my news meeting with nothing but disbelief or laughter.
When I had finally reached the ridge, I spent a long time looking down on the gigantic basin in the form of a crater which has exerted a strange pull on many of us. The fortress still lay in semi-darkness, but the outlines of its courtyards could already be clearly distinguished. And once more the two-storey building with its massive projections, six towers, battlements, parapets and permanently closed shutters gave the impression of being uninhabited.
After a while I turned round and looked through my prismatic telescope out into the desert. In the first rays of the morning sun, the hills of wavy sand seemed to recede even farther into the distance than usual.
If the nocturnal messenger is right, was the thought that came into my head as I set off down again, then at some time in the future these uninhabited dunes, completely uncontaminated by vegetation, will be all that our planet will leave behind.
Now I’m sitting among my people again. Again I let them do the talking. So as not to arouse suspicion, I nod from time to time, or order my hands to make a vague gesture. Inside, however, I am ceaselessly picturing the water rising in the fortress. Picturing it filling all the cellars, then all the rooms, halls and stair-wells, finally rising higher and higher, from one landmark to the next, up the surrounding slopes of the basin.
It will probably be several centuries before the flood can reach us. But one day its playful waves will flow over the threshold of our entrance hall. And after a few more centuries, or even just moments, our house, I say to myself as the others raise their goblets, assuring each other it will stand for ever, our house, far below the surface of a huge reservoir that has long since grown into an ocean, in darkness and temperatures close to freezing, under the weight and pressure of a huge mass of water, will disintegrate until it is beyond recognition.
*
Flow and Ebb
On the bottom of the ocean, in darkness and temperatures close to freezing, under the weight and pressure of a huge mass of water, disintegrated and beyond recognition.
There are drowned cities of the ancient world, their streets, courts and backyards under three fathoms of mud and mire, and floating high above them, as brightly transparent as glass, the billowing skirts of the jellyfish with their reddish-brown, stinging tentacles.
And there are shipwrecks from all ages, in the landlocked seas and on the continental shelf close to the shore and in the unexplored depths of the three oceans. Sunken galleys and triremes, Hanseatic cogs, junks, carvels and countless warships and peace-ships from our epochs. Ships, whose sinking almost no one has ever heard of, and others which still arouse our imagination, like the Titanic.
I saw, to the east of Labrador, icebergs slowly drifting southwards. Once by sunlight and once by the light of the star
s.
And I saw on the fourteenth of April in the year nineteen hundred and twelve – it was approaching midnight – a ship immensely long, immensely wide and seven stories high, a ship such as had never been seen before. It was crossing the Atlantic, transporting from one continent to the other, at more than twenty-two knots per hour, dining-rooms with chandeliers and laid tables, smoking rooms, swimming pools, dance floors, winter gardens, carpeted stairs, long corridors, lift shafts and three thousand beds with many passengers already asleep in them; all the while below, in the extensive catacombs of the ship, full holds, coal bunkers, dynamos and pumps were making their way through the black waters; the crew’s quarters as well, stables, garages and five dozen bulkhead hatches; between them, dark passageways, steep, narrow iron ladders and the echoing, dazzlingly lit rooms where eighteen giant boilers with one hundred and twenty-six burners ceaselessly produced fifty thousand horsepower, driving the three propellers, each nine metres in diameter, full speed ahead, to the west, through chilly darkness and banks of mist, towards the iceberg the current has left off Labrador…
Four hours later this gigantic ship, which was claimed to be unsinkable, had altered course for good. It was now, on 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 50 degrees 14 minutes west, rushing at increasing speed almost vertically towards the ocean bed. It finally hit the bottom, sending the mud and mire of millions of years swirling up in a huge cloud, which took months to calm down and settle.
I can no longer remember how many hundreds of miles it is south-south-eastwards to where another wreck is disintegrating in a depth of twenty-three thousand feet. And another one, ninety miles closer to the shore, with cephalopods living in it, the deep-sea octopus and the giant squid. Shipwrecks of all ages on the bottom of the three oceans, scattered far and wide, occasionally close together. Broken hulls, planks, overgrown with plant life. Figureheads, funnels and sirens, portholes, wire-mesh and wickerwork all eaten away by bristle worms and rust, by the salt of the sea. And many a wreck sunk so deep into the covering mire that no one could ever find it.
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000 Page 27