‘That can’t be.’
‘But Wechsel also borders Styria — perhaps it’s in their territory. I’ll give you the number,’ the lady offered; ergo, I called the Austrian Federal Administration to ask the same question, but no, there wasn’t, the Federal lady said this time, a place by that name in her listings. ‘A merger, an incorporation maybe?’ I asked hopefully.
A pause. ‘No. There’s never been a Greater Einland in Austria.’
I hung up without saying anything, and sat silently on the bonnet for a while. Only now, when I had to find it for the funeral, did I realise how little I actually knew about Greater Einland: just that it had to be somewhere in the Wechsel region, because that’s what I’d heard my parents say when others asked. But I hadn’t broached the subject with them for a number of years. Not because I had found it uncomfortable or had considered it taboo: the past just seemed to be irrelevant. Holidays were the opportunity to rush away, to flee the continent with closed eyes, on an aeroplane if possible — but never to dive deeper into our so-called origins or even go skiing like everyone else, whom we secretly despised for it.
It was what was shared between the lines that came back to me most strikingly: I remembered my mother telling me that in Greater Einland you could climb underground with a ladder. ‘In a damp cavern, ten or fifteen metres high at least, there were old aeroplane parts that we used to build dens with as children. Sheet metal doors, armoured glass, and then there were wing parts we would see-saw on,’ she’d said.
Or the no less thrilling story my father would tell: during my primary school days, curled up together in front of the woodstove’s eerily crackling fire in our living room, he spoke of someone called Hans the Woodcutter, who had bought a shed next to his childhood house. It was winter, and whenever my father brought his cup to his mouth in the middle of telling the story, he spilled a little black tea into his beard, which would drip onto my legs as if from a stalactite.
Hans the Woodcutter locked himself away in his shed every evening bang on ten o’clock. This was where, my father whispered into my ear, he had collected the hearts of every mammal, one placed next to the other in glass jars filled with formaldehyde, and among them: a human heart, but no one knew exactly where he had got it from. ‘And as boys,’ he said, ‘we threw stones at the window pane, in silent dread and urgent anticipation that Hans might appear, clutching one of his preservation jars.’
It was the first of those rare moments when I heard him talk a little about his own childhood, but what does a horror story like this tell me? I was lost.
2
I spent the second night kneeling on the floor of a guesthouse in Kirchberg am Wechsel. Bed and nightstand were encased in heavy, dark-wood panelling, a Bible in the armoire and an event calendar from the tourist association from the year 1998 on the wall. The landlady had brought me goulash and a bottle of beer; I was the sole guest. It slowly got dark, and I could hardly make out the work of the elapsed hours that lay before me on the floor: a carpet comprised of countless pieces of paper, from which annotated notes branched out all sides. A memory map, I had said to myself, and had started with a sketch on an A4 sheet. It was supposed to connect all the things my parents had ever told me about Greater Einland. Soon, however, the drawing had proliferated out the sides of the much too small sheet, become too voluminous, so that I attached another one to it with tape without foreseeing that the boundless expansion of my thoughts would soon lead into the dozens. But one recollection simply led me to the next, and I couldn’t write down an event without it throwing up three more. This was how I suddenly realised that six hours had passed; space-time buckled by the gravitation of my thoughts.
Earlier that afternoon, it had suddenly felt like autumn; the air was damp and cool. When I set off from the toilet in which I’d slept, in the first direction I headed, the hoarfrost was already hanging from the branches on the highlands and dripping on the still-warm earth.
The Wechsel fans out before a traveller coming from Vienna wanting to cross the mountain pass to Styria — a lunarscape furrowed by lower peaks. Sloping rock surfaces rise up and fall back into gorges, in which alpine streams have cut deep into the landscape over the course of millions of years. Pyrite stockpiles, gleaming strangely, lead into soft alpine pastures. The Wechsel would have looked like the surface of a remote planet, if there hadn’t also been a hotel complex on every protrusion of this pre-alpine mountain, to which German tourists flock in both winter and summer: groups of pensioners decked out as if intending to climb K2, spending the day shuttling from one ice cream parlour to the next. New money and old money, dressed in polo shirts, lie on the levelled surfaces a foreign entrepreneur had chiselled out of the stone, then concreted over, then given the name ‘Nature Hotel’. I had stopped at one of these places to take out some money, afraid, as I always was, that nothing would come out of the machine in the last week of the month, I still had just under two hundred euros.
At lunchtime, hunger had forced me into one of the hotel cafés: a dining room reminiscent of service station, crammed with Japanese tourists, who were unloaded from the buses every hour and driven back in good time — a few locals among them, who had arranged themselves optimally in this showcase. Stiff from the night before, none of this mattered to me for a moment: I had submitted, passively, to these streams of people and was swept inside with them. We were led past the glass fronts of the confectionary shop in miserably slow-moving columns, only to end up run aground on one of the benches. I was particularly horrified that they were selling punch cakes with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s face on them.
‘What’ll it be, young lady?’
The waitress wore the white, double-breasted imperial-and-royal confectioners’ garb, like the ones in old illustrations. Caught off-guard by the speed with which I had been addressed, I ordered a typical Viennese breakfast and, discombobulated, one of the Wittgenstein cakes, which, when it was brought over, I left untouched like a devotional object.
I clung bleary-eyed to my large white coffee and pieced together yesterday’s route in my road atlas. Essentially, I had driven parallel to Semmeringstrasse, then over it, then back in the other direction and so on, so that I ultimately delineated a circle right over Ramsattel, Steiersberg, and Liesling. Amid the incessant shrieks of the children at the neighbouring table, who were pelting one other with scrunched-up paper napkins, I threw everything back into my handbag and headed for my car. The wind pressure thundered over the mountain ridges in strong, erratic thrusts — every tree trunk swayed and passed on its swaying to a thousand branches, which, in their quirky choreography, passed on their interference to the individual leaf surfaces, which surely couldn’t have known anything of the initial tremoring. There was that strange tension in the world that appears shortly before a rupture; fields of clouds rubbing up against one another, from which something threatens to fall at any moment —
With my legs wet up to my knees, I had decided that I had to seek out proper lodgings. In the next town over, Trattenbach, I found what I was looking for: a sign on the main road had directed me to a taciturn landlady, who handed me the keys for a so-called guestroom. Alone in the dreary, claustrophobically narrow chamber in the middle of nowhere, I once again re-evaluated what could give me useful information regarding Greater Einland, but at some point, I inevitably came back to the fact that all I had left were my parents’ stories. From then until late into the night I was occupied with creating a kind of mind map that soon covered the entire floor of the room and laid bare everything my parents had ever mentioned about their origins. I linked story with story to form a ganglionic network, through which blood finally began to flow in the late hours of the night. The fact that neither of them had had to leave the town in order to attend high school provided information about the dimensions of the place. I also vaguely remembered my mother telling me that she had been looked after by nuns in kindergarten, but my father hadn’t been — in which case it wa
s likely that there were two kindergartens. Then there was the fact I’d heard my father tell how as a boy he had been caught setting off firecrackers on the steps of the evangelical church. The evangelical church — one could only imagine what that meant in rural Austria. I began to estimate Greater Einland to have around 10,000 inhabitants. But then I realised how hasty this conclusion was, for which counterarguments could easily have been made. It was too little — too little proof of everything.
I had to start working from other, more personal nodes, where there was hardly any room for interpretation: it was Easter ’93 or ’94, and I was at the height of adolescent dismissiveness, but still lured outside by the egg hunt, which never lost its charm. I had come across Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening hanging in the apple tree, and my father and I were sitting on the garden chairs underneath the oak in our garden, which we called an English garden, simply so we didn’t have to mow the lawn every week.
I was bent over my game, Dad over some molecular-biology literature; silent harmony in the garden with the scent of spring. At some point a light drizzle set in, and we huddled under the tree. My father heroically held his book over my Gameboy while I tried to save my score.
‘Do you know why I planted this tree?’
I closed my eyes on the floor of the guesthouse and thought I could still recall the exact wording. ‘When I was a child, we went to the Thousand-Year-Old Oak Tavern every other evening. They had an ancient tree, at least ten times as thick as this one, which the tavern had to be built around at some point, because it kept growing for years. An oak that ran right through the middle of the building.’
‘An oak can’t be a thousand,’ I had said.
‘Behind the tavern there were silos, vineyards, concrete pipes that led heaven knows where. And Haflinger horses. The oak was one of the few things that I missed in Vienna, and that’s why I planted this one.’
So there was a perennial wine garden (a Heuriger), not a seasonal wine shop and inn (a Buschenschank), which meant that Greater Einland was on the Lower Austrian side of the Wechsel. The mere fact that the tree had grown so well there narrowed my search even further, as flicking through a nature guide in the guesthouse revealed that oaks didn’t thrive at altitudes of over seven hundred metres above sea level. But those vineyards — how could there be vineyards in the Wechsel, where there are no winegrowers, where the slopes shoot straight down? Or was I remembering it incorrectly? Had it actually been cider?
I had been kneeling on the floor so long that my legs had gone to sleep, and I used that as an excuse to get myself another bottle of beer from downstairs. The goulash on the side table had long gone cold. I lay on my stomach and continued to spin the threads of my memory.
I had been told dozens of times how the two of them met, and I had absentmindedly heard the story whizz by, its provincial romance halting it, giving it the sluggishness of a slow-moving train. My father, Erich Schwarz, grew up in the parental home of my mother, Elisabeth Schalla, from the age of two. The exact reason for this had been fiercely suppressed because in the broadest sense it had to do with the fact my single paternal grandmother was unable to keep him after a series of so-called hysterical breakdowns. This must have been around 1944 or ’45 — in any case it was a time when those living with mental illness weren’t helped by medical professionals, and orphaned boys were not given the security of a state-mediated foster family. In order to spare little Erich the fate of growing up in an orphanage in the now crumbling German Reich, my mother’s family, neighbours of the family Schwarz, took him in. This is what I always found strangest: growing up as siblings; later, the adoption revoked before the family court to circumvent the ban on incest. There was something inappropriate about it, even though there was no blood relation.
The now father of two, the woodcutter Joseph Schalla, had integrated the child so completely and without question into the family that the preparation for the take-up of the mantle began immediately. This, too, was still fresh in my mind because my father had repeated it on every hike, but above all because it was always very special for me to hear something about his childhood: Joseph, he said, had carried him as a small child into the forest on his shoulders, on steep, damp slopes that in spring exhaled all of the mustiness of the winter. He had trained his eye for the strength of one stock and the weakness of another. The weak had to be ignored, but if a tree had grown straight, it would bring him a mischievous pleasure. He would then lean back against the bark, his head tilted so the wood scratched his scalp, look up into the sky, and say: This is good growth.
While my father told me this, he had often lifted me up onto his own shoulders and leaned back against a tree, but mostly against crooked ones, I now remembered. I drew small, branchlike lines of thought leading off from the main story: while my grandfather had tried to hammer home the criteria of the value of wood as a commodity for the boy, he was instead interested in the taxonomy, relation, and internal functioning of those plants, whose international shipping ought to have become his main concern. Since he was a child, my mother always told me, it was impossible to go down a tree-lined road, or take a city trip, without factoring in a couple of extra hours each way, because he lingered over all the branches and buds of the local flora with a classification guide. I struck out these details. They had nothing to do with the point in hand.
I drew a line away from the main story and added four more notes: my mother had inherited the entrepreneurial spirit — had already put on a show at every flea market by the age of ten or twelve, seized every opportunity to mow someone’s lawn. My polyglot mother, who would lie in bed all day with language textbooks, who had carved out her perfect French, and learned Norwegian — everything to prepare for the export.
On top of this I could think of a myriad of situations where I wished I’d listened more carefully. A barbeque, for instance, at which I’m fifteen, and all around us in the little Viennese garden are all my parents’ old friends, who were always at the door on summer evenings: somehow the conversation turned to first loves, and everyone began to tell their story in turn. I can still clearly remember the urgent flight reflex that seized me. I had always avoided conversations that had anything to do with this subject, had attempted to steer the conversation to other areas or had withdrawn to my room on a flimsy pretext, in the hope that no one would notice how on edge I was. But on this day, it had been impossible. We were, after all, in the middle of eating dinner, and I felt captive by the idea that someone could quiz me. Then it was my parents’ turn to tell; my hands were wet with sweat.
They must have been seventeen or eighteen, around the time the two of them decided to move to Vienna, in any case, when they discovered their interest in one another. I knew that during their studies — my mother economics, my father biology, of course — they lived together in a maisonette of around twenty-five square metres: toilet and bathroom in the hallway, one room with a bed, two desks, and a so-called armchair, which my father still hadn’t parted with even decades later. My parents financed this apartment, with its hanging scraps of wallpaper and stain-studded carpet, by working nightshifts in a sausage shop. That must have been 1965–1970, years in which people declared solidarity with all sorts of things and hid dissidents in their houses, demonised nuclear power, and occupied what was in danger of being demolished, all in all just playing at revolution, while secretly working towards a conventionally successful life, because babies were already on the way everywhere. Including me, of course. I crossed out this branch, as it was a one-way street: everything was about Vienna, nothing about Greater Einland.
A dense network of lines, cross-references, and streams of thought had unfurled. Each node led, via a nerve cord of small, anecdotal digressions, to another story, so that soon a web of scraps of the past had formed. I had never really thought about it, but now that I could survey all the pieces, I realised that a rupture must have happened, that in all these stories of excess and exuberance and m
ulticulturalism there had at the same time been something deeply tragic. Wherever there was nothing of Greater Einland, it had been there after all, as a lack, an absent hometown. But why?
I was dazed from the effort of remembering, from all these details: that there had been a hill behind my parents’ house you could ski down in winter. Or a scar on my mother’s neck that I’d felt while learning to swim and that supposedly came from a kick by a horse whose hooves she had scratched out. How my parents had learned to interpret constellations in their childhood bedroom, because a large window was built into the sloping ceiling through which they could see the night sky.
The worst thing was the small, the tender, the intimate: the fleeting touches and the hands laid on my head. I recalled eccentric character traits that I’d found embarrassing about my parents, but now longed for. Events that had taken place so very much between the lines that I would never be able to formulate them adequately, and that were inextricably linked to every memory. Open days aiming towards a future, lipstick marks on my bicycle helmet, favourite muesli bars that found their way into my backpack. And finally, as if a valve had broken, I was able to cry.
Long after three in the morning I folded up my map. I did a recap of the leads I had in order to decide where I had to head the next morning after breakfast. There were a few ideas of regions, a rough idea of how large the town might be, along with a few anecdotes. Nothing that could have revealed anything.
If there is no time, there must be another principle — independent of the automatic continuation of things — that sews the course of the world together. According to Barbour (Oxford, 2008), this consists of so-called time capsules — content-substantive signposts that signal to our minds which path to take through a landscape where everything exists simultaneously. These time capsules are solitary in our world — the only elements that refer to a past. Certificates, photos, history books are part of this — objects of personal memory that seem to prove something that doesn’t really exist: the causal past. In addition, there are the time-pointers that are arranged within the brain structures of organic beings; miniature versions of the universe that are, as it were, frozen, implying a sense of origin to humans. Time-pointers simulate continuity, when in truth they are merely logical connections, not causal ones. Because our world consists of nothing but the present — and while the mind is still clinging to the time capsules, everything stands still.
The Liquid Land Page 2