Euphoria

by Heinz Helle

  We leave the linden tree and the field behind us and plunge back into the forest on the far side. It is a thick, dark forest, it is wet and muddy and hard to walk through, and when, in the middle of all that green, we suddenly come across an empty motorway, it comes as a shock. We follow it north, it’s good to be walking on tarmac again, and a few hours later we spot a couple of buildings with a long flat roof projecting out over the motorway, nothing underneath it apart from a few small metal-and-glass booths at regular intervals, one for each lane of the motorway.

  Gruber says: There, the border.

  Drygalski says: Something’s not right.

  I imagine that if, after us, someone rebuilds the world, it will be a silent world. People will only exchange glances, careful gestures and gentle touches, and they will use their vocal cords only for laughing or sighing. People will point to the things they mean, and anything that you can’t point to – either because it isn’t there or because it’s an abstract concept – you simply won’t be able to mean any longer. And so people will keep silent, day by day, year by year, until not even the faintest memory will remain of the ancient custom of using the mouth and the tongue to give form to the sounds the human body can produce, of dividing them up – articulating them – and of studying and classifying the individual parts, dividing them into ever smaller units, and then of inscribing the signs that supposedly correspond to these smallest possible units, on stone, or on silicon, or on paper. And all knowledge of these skills will disappear for ever, gradually and irrevocably, expelled like air from the lungs, and with it this immense realm of bodiless propositions will also disappear, this alien, transparent world that is language, this sea of ghosts.

  And so no one will ever again be able to say the words Nation, or You or I, or Love, or I’m afraid I don’t love you any more, or Economic equality, or We would like to welcome you aboard this Boeing 737 aircraft travelling to Frankfurt am Main, or Why have they not torn down the border between Germany and Austria by now? We’ve been in Schengen for more than twenty years, or Better safe than sorry, or If push came to shove it would be relatively easy to get a site like this operational again, or Depending on how you look at it, or Wait a minute, or What happened here?, or Burning tyres atop barricades of cars and debris, or Breached barbed wire fences, or Dead soldiers in unmarked uniforms, or A path right through the middle, cleared by the bulldozer ploughing right through the rubbish and the people, or Why is the bulldozer on the other side lying on its side?, or How can something that broad tip over like that?, or The crater next to it in the tarmac, or Its tracks are broken, or Of course we’re moving along as fast as we can, what else are we supposed to do? We want to get out of here, but we don’t want to go back, so we have got to go through there, boys, or Some people are always quicker than the others, or It isn’t me or Drygalski, or Somehow I’ve got a bad feeling about this, or Then of course at that exact moment there’s a yellow flash, or Noise, a physically palpable noise, or Wind, a gale that knocks you to the ground without warning and then kicks you a few times for good measure, or Blood, empty skin, entrails and pulverised bones, or Teeth, a friend’s teeth that are suddenly stuck to the outside of your own cheek, or Gruber, or What exactly is the difference between an anti-tank mine and an anti-personnel mine?

  And a few generations later, people will once more live as molecular aggregates equal to other molecular aggregates, things among other things. They will be quick trees with eyes, or slow, soft stones with hair.

  I stay on the ground for a little while. My ears feel as though they have sealed themselves of their own accord, hermetically, each one trapping a wasp inside. I postpone opening my eyes for the time being. The smell of wet tarmac. There are small stones lodged in my forehead.

  Drygalski, I shout, but I can’t hear a thing, except the angry buzzing in my head. I can distinctly feel the movements my mouth is making, which to me have to do with his name, but I am no longer certain what it is that I am saying, if I am even saying anything at all. I open my eyes. They seem to be working. Carefully, I raise my head. I turn it to the left. I can see chunks of tarmac, shreds of clothing, of Gruber. I can see Drygalski. He is still there. He is lying on his side, and I can see his face, and can I see that his mouth is moving. I have no idea what he is saying.

  60

  Walking together as a pair is something completely different from walking together as a group. The other’s position is clearly defined, as, by implication, is one’s own. The Others don’t exist any more, there is no longer the illusion of different individuals who all need to be treated differently. There is only the singular Other, the singular Not Me. There is only a singular You.

  Do you remember that time we found Gruber’s father’s air rifle in the basement and went and shot eggs in the hallway? How we called for each other and we all came, and then we shot and shot and were all excited. The rifle had a cherrywood stock, and the greased barrel shone in the light from the halogen spots.

  And then we ran out of eggs but still had a lot of ammunition, so we all got into Fürst’s old Mazda, he’d just got his licence, and by then it was dark, and you shouted, Drive-by, baby!, and we drove off, three of us on the back seat holding the rifle, and Golde and Fürst were in the front, and we listened to NWA’s ‘Approach to Danger’ and whistled along to the sine wave.

  We took a later turning out of the city in order not to arouse suspicions and then we were on the right side of the B304 and we were going exactly 61 km/h, just over the speed limit, and there was hardly any traffic because it was a week night, summer holiday, and then we could finally see the Upper Bavarian Horticultural Show grounds up ahead, and we saw the tents and combine harvesters and tractors and it was all empty and quiet, protected by a tall fence, and we got closer and closer and we could see the giant inflatable elephant – what is an elephant doing at a garden show anyway? – and we put a pellet right between its eyes.

  Or maybe not between the eyes, maybe it was behind one ear, or in the stomach, but we definitely hit it, I mean it was huge, and we weren’t complete idiots, and Fürst and Golde both distinctly heard the impact, and so did I.

  The fucking thing just stood there as if nothing had happened, but we had to get going, we didn’t have the nerve for a second drive-by, supposedly there were security guards there, so we drove back to Gruber’s house, parked the car and got our bikes and rode back again, this time with Gruber’s combat knife, just you and me, the others couldn’t be bothered, they wanted to watch some horror film, but we went back there to finish that fucking beast off.

  We hid our bikes in the bushes and climbed the fence, and we could hear the elephant just whistling faintly as we skulked in the shadows from tent to tent, like special forces on a mission in Kandahar. It was just whistling faintly when we realised that there probably weren’t any security guards, why should there be?, and it kept whistling faintly even when we rammed the blade into the thing, once, twice, three times, after nothing had happened the first time because you had forgotten to take the leather sheath off, but even then nothing happened, it just whistled a little more, and then all you could hear was the hum of the giant compressor pumping air into the elephant, more air than could escape through the tiny holes we were able to make, and so we rode back and never mentioned it again. And the others were tactful enough never to ask us about it either.

  Yes, I remember.

  61

  We are heading for a mountain, and the mountain has a hole in it. Right in the spot we are heading for, they have dynamited the rock. The hole is round and walled with stones. A short distance into the hole, the road, which outside is covered in mud and broken stones, suddenly regains its original smooth surface; there is even a dashed white line, here, just past the entrance, before it disappears into the darkness inside the mountain. The entrance has a museum-like quality to it, recalling an order within which one could move about freely, even through solid rock if need be. As we step out of the grey light and the cold wind and t
he incomprehensible circumstances and into this tunnel everything becomes calmer, clearer, smaller. Our footfalls once again make a sound that clearly distinguishes each contact between foot and ground from the next, no more scuffing through gravel, no more wading through mud, no more trudging through snow. We are walking, our feet on solid ground, and suddenly we realise that we are wearing boots and clothes and hold our heads high, feeling civilised, as we march deeper into the blackness.

  The time it takes for our eyes to adjust to the darkness grows longer the less light there is, and when our eyes can no longer keep up with our feet we stop as if on command.

  What if we can’t go on? What if the tunnel is blocked and there’s no way through?

  Then we will turn around.

  There are no objections or better suggestions. And so we start moving again, slowly, holding our hands out in front of our bodies, pathetic little breakwaters in the blackness, stepping carefully, feeling for solid ground, in case there’s a rock, or a corpse, or a hole in the ground.

  I imagine every logically possible obstacle, arranged in order of the likelihood of their occurrence in a tunnel in the alpine upland following the total collapse of organised society: cars, intact, abandoned; cars, burnt-out shells; lorries, intact or burnt out; military vehicles, armoured personnel carriers; busloads of refugees; lorryloads of food for cut-off areas; motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, hundreds, thousands, intact, left behind, burnt. Aeroplanes, helicopters, hidden away for a covert counter-strike; secret stockpiles of ordnance and small arms, secured by anti-personnel mines, anti-tank barriers, barbed wire; depots full of food, chemical weapons or cultural heritage to be preserved for posterity; bunkers where people have found refuge, men, women and children; or perhaps just women, a private brothel for some regional separatist army; or perhaps the final batch of beer brewed by the Ducal Bavarian Brewery, Tegernsee.

  We start walking faster, our arms no longer stretched out in front of us. We walk on, the air stands still in here, the echoes of our footfalls are nice and clear, the ground is still solid, the world before us is black. We are not afraid of it. But then at some point we begin to slow down again, until only one of is still moving and soon thereafter neither of us is, and then there is complete silence.

  We can hear each other’s breathing as we stare intently into the blackness in front of us, so close it burns our eyes. We look around. Behind us there is only the faintest glimmer, impossibly far away, a memory of the fact that we came into this tunnel at one point, and this memory looks very fragile, and we are afraid that it will disappear if we take so much as a single step farther.

  Don’t you think we’d better turn around?

  Yes.

  We turn around. And with each passing metre on the way to the entrance, or exit, our steps grow faster and more confident, we know the way, we have a goal, it feels good, and when the greyness ahead of us begins to look truly grey and there are only two or three hundred metres between us and it, we break into a run, we run and run until finally we are back out in the wind, happy to know where we are and where we are not, we are standing out in the wind and we can see mud and trees and sky and for a few minutes we are just happy and cold, happy and cold.

  62

  On our way back we give the border crossing a wide berth. We stay in the forest as much as possible. In an abandoned hunting lodge we discover eight tins of ravioli and an olive green cagoule. On the first day we take turns wearing it, switching every thousand paces, with the result that that night we are both just as wet as if we had never found the thing. That evening we decide only to swap once per day, each morning, regardless of the weather. We draw straws to determine who gets to wear it first. I win.

  Every day we eat one tin, cracking it open on a rock, licking any spilt sauce off the ground and then taking turns slowly eating one raviolo at a time, until we finish the tin. Drygalski’s jacket pockets are big enough to hold one tin each, mine are not. I loosen my belt and stuff them down the back of my trousers. The chafing sores have stopped weeping by the time we finish the last tin.

  We’ll be there soon, says Drygalski.

  Yes, I say.

  I’m looking forward to returning to the last place where everything was still good. Perhaps we should just have stayed there. Perhaps we never should have looked down into the valley.

  63

  When we get to the cabin we can see right away that someone has been there. The door is open. We definitely closed it, and whoever has been or still is in there and who hasn’t closed the front door is definitely not one of us, nobody we know, since we know Gruber’s father and he won’t stand for doors being left open. We do not slow our pace, our hearts do not beat faster than they are already beating from the ascent, we simply keep heading for the cabin, even though we know that there might still be someone in there, someone who may want to kill us. We make a slight detour via the shed where Gruber’s father keeps the tools for clearing snow and chopping wood.

  The man is asleep. We stand there, looking at him. He is lying on his back. We can see his chest rise and fall, his face is turned to one side, into the pillow he is clutching with his right hand. I am clutching a shovel, Drygalski an axe. Our breathing slows to match that of the sleeper. We look at him. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen someone sleeping who isn’t one of us, or breathing, and I think to myself, what a fantastic invention the heart is, 36 million beats per year, times 82.7 for the average European, all by itself. The only thing you have to do is eat, drink and breathe.

  His clothes are similar to ours. He is roughly the same age as we are. His skin is a similar colour to ours, as is his hair. Similar height, insofar as you can tell when someone is lying down. We can’t see his eyes. I ask myself when I should put the shovel down, lean it against the bed, or the wall, when Drygalski will put down the axe, when we will put the tools back in the shed where they were, where they belong. I watch this man breathe, he is breathing more calmly than me, more slowly, peacefully. He seems content. I can feel the cold, smooth wood in my hands, the weight of the steel blade in my left. I don’t know whether Drygalski is waiting for me to put down the shovel, or whether I’m waiting for him to put down the axe. All I know is that I keep holding the shovel, it’s not heavy, the wood is smooth, the curvature is perfect. The edges of the rust-coloured blade are marked by silver scratches from hacking away at the ice on the stone steps leading down to the road. The man stops breathing. I tighten my grip on the shovel. He opens his eyes. I am holding the shovel tightly. He doesn’t look at us; he stares into the pillow. Drygalski shifts his weight to his other foot. Then the man leaps out of bed.

  I don’t know whether things would have gone differently if he hadn’t got up. I don’t know whether he should have tried talking to us. I have no idea which changes to the past might have produced which changes to the present, any more than I have any idea about the future.

  He jumps up and lunges away from the bed, ramming his shoulder into Drygalski’s stomach, knocking him off his feet, and perhaps I wouldn’t have gone after him if Drygalski hadn’t fallen over or if he hadn’t got back on his feet so fast. I manage to raise my arm before my head collides with the door the man has slammed behind him. I throw the door back open in time to see him at the end of the corridor bolting for the whiteness outside the cabin. I hear Drygalski’s footsteps behind me, he’s running fast, faster than me, so I run faster as well, and then we are already on the slope and we can see the man ten, twenty metres ahead of us, making his way diagonally upward through the snow. Every three paces he slips and falls and gets back up. So do we. The distance remains the same. We are running as fast as we can, and so is he, I assume. He is slow, but so are we. We are carrying a shovel and an axe. We gain on him. I am beginning to think we can catch him, and I am amazed; after all, there’s only one of him and two of us and we are getting in each other’s way, overtaking each other, perhaps that’s why we’re that little bit faster. I have the distinct impression that the dis
tance is shrinking, and I’m not sure whether I think that’s good or bad. I am running through wet snow up the side of a mountain in pursuit of a man and I am gaining on him. Why would I stop now?

  When we’re still three metres away he falls down, just shy of the young fir trees by the stream, and this time he’s not getting back up, and we don’t stop or slow down, we keep running, getting closer and closer, and then for the first time I am looking him straight in the eye and I am still busy wondering what human qualities you can possibly discern from someone’s eyes when our fists go out in front of us, automatically, as the logical continuation of our motion, the motion of pursuit, no more and no less, the pursuit of nothing in particular except of course happiness, change, of a life that is somehow different from this one, and in our fists are our weapons – tools which you could use to build houses, to make chairs and tables where you could sit and enjoy meals or establish universal systems of value – and our fists holding these weapons land in the middle of his face, on his pale cheeks, his forehead, in the gaping holes that have suddenly opened up, merging at first with his wide-open eyes and then coming together to form a single dark abyss at the bottom of which lies the single, definitive grey that unites us all, until that too is broken down and carried off by the flies and the ants, fed to larvae, digested and excreted. So this is what a brain looks like.

  I’m glad Drygalski hit him just as hard as I did and just as often. I’m glad he’s not saying anything. We stand and inspect our handiwork for a while. The dark halo around what’s left of the man’s head is spreading astonishingly quickly, and I take a deep breath, feeling the cold air in my lungs, and as I do so I am thinking one single thought, for the first time in a long while: it is better to be alive.