The Liquid Land
Page 3
It was the fourth day of my journey in the Alpine foothills, and I’d sat down with neatly split bread rolls in order to plan my trip for the day. As if this inconsequential rhythm of stopping off at inns, contemplation, dinner, sleep, and breakfast buffets were leading me to utter lethargy, I decided every morning to uphold it. I hadn’t yet been able to let go of the hope of finding Greater Einland. I loved the simplicity of the conditions. An inn with guestrooms was just like another inn with guestrooms: identically proportioned chambers with the same floral duvet covers and Bibles in the desk drawer; liver dumpling soup and the same overcooked parsley stalks boiled to tatters, in dishes depicting a rural scene in blue. Sitting next to the same red-faced inebriates who thundered their sausage-fingered fists on the wooden table tops while drinking the completely consistent wine, Zweigelt or Veltliner, from identical curved wine glasses, followed by the schnapps bottles tipped low over the glasses in a synchronised ballet. At last you lie in a wood-panelled room with sloping ceilings, on a double bed with the same gap in the middle, and carry out the same rural sleep, before the landlady, always around forty, always stout, appears rattling the breakfast things at seven. And always the same hostelry all the way to Salzburg and over the border towards Bavaria, where the current of hospitality ebbed away at some point.
That day I drove far out, past Mariensee and down into the Kamp Valley, to a quarry, a furrow in the land, where the tectonic plate had broken away from itself in shock. Here, at last, seemed to be the right place. The autumn was steaming from the gently rotting ground, yet it was still warm enough that I could leave the car window open. The ground was damp; I had to slow down. The fact that my mobile phone had been going off constantly had tormented me for days, as if the messages were waiting at my door like irksome unexpected guests. I would have to take a more radical step, and so here I was: at the cleft in the stone that led into the depths, adjacent to the main road.
Into this abyss I threw my phone. I watched with excitement as it tumbled a hundred metres into the valley, as if I had shaken off an intrusive tracker. I thought I heard it burst against the jagged stone walls and finally come to a stop. Feeling euphoric from this sound, I looked a moment longer into the depths, but was already moving backwards towards the car.
3
Although I was shivering, I adamantly drove the stretch I’d planned that morning to the end. I now regretted not having considered that without my mobile phone I would also be without my navigation device. I was cutting through a place called Puchsberg, when a signpost caught my eye. I braked reflexively, parked the car on the side of the road, and walked closer to a hand-carved sign hanging from a tree to confirm my first impression: THE THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD OAK TAVERN.
The building was on a hill less than five minutes from the town. I had to make four attempts at getting into a parking space, the last available one out front of the inn. I could already see from the outside that the oak had split the building, as if it had been struck by wooden lightning. I stood for a moment in the rain, wondering why the building wasn’t completely overflowing with water, as the tree’s crown protruded unshielded from the hammer-beam roof. It was exactly as my father had described it.
Perhaps on account of the wet weather, the guesthouse was full inside. I could see that from the reception area: every table was fully occupied, and there were another two or three fold-out chairs at each. Entire extended families were sitting on and at sturdy wooden furniture, shouting things to each other across the tables, and, just when you believed that there wasn’t any space left whatsoever, there were a few infants distributed on laps. A Swedish stove crackled in the corner — a buzzing, hot room of animated people.
I briefly worried whether any rooms would be available at all. But of course, said the woman on the reception when I put my question to her, one would be prepared in a few hours, and I ought to order something to eat in the meantime. I was led by a waitress who, like a small child, had taken me by the hand on my entering the dining room and now weaved through the groups with remarkable agility. I couldn’t with the best will in the world imagine how even one more person could be accommodated here. She finally put me at a tiny table with a man who was deeply absorbed in his coleslaw.
As little as I could endure the intimacy of an arbitrary merger, my counterpart looked interesting: he must have been in his forties and was dressed in an extremely strange robe — a kind of violet Coptic tunic that was so different from the clothes of the other patrons that I wondered why no one was staring at him. He wrote in a notebook positioned beyond his coleslaw — and it was in a script I’d never seen before. It resembled Korean, but little hats and tails grew out from the letters in a way that made one consider they might be related to the Slavic family. I ordered bread with a selection of spreads, drank the first quarter of my wine, and wondered how I could hide my indiscreet glances at the man. He was just slipping the most unappetising of all dishes — a so-called jellied brunch — out of its tin onto his plate and began, I assumed, to look for the fish in the yellow mass of egg foam.
Our eyes met for a snip of a second.
‘Fate has not been kind to you,’ he suddenly said, almost to himself, but when I looked up again, he had his finger pointed at my chest as if in accusation.
‘They mixed up your order,’ he said, and I finally noticed that someone had set down a slice of caraway roast pork in front of me.
‘This is your first time here,’ he began, for a third time, and this time, I felt that I had to react despite strong feelings of reluctance.
‘Yes, it is. And only by chance and just passing through. I’m waiting for a room to become free — I’m exhausted from the long drive and would like nothing more than to go lie down, but the inn is terribly overcrowded.’ My answer had got away from me, as was always the case when I was actually trying to break off an interaction. While he was listening, the man had shoved the sardine he had finally discovered into his mouth, the tail of which was poking out from between his lips.
‘You want to go to bed already? At this time?’ he asked, puzzled, and spat out the rear fin. He had a point: it was still broad daylight.
‘Travelling’, I said evasively, as if the word offered an explanation, and, as if out of embarrassment, added: ‘Do you come here a lot? It’s a very nice inn.’
‘Perpetually crusty,’ the man said, drawing out a stained handkerchief from his bell-bottom trousers. ‘The fish, I mean.’ And he coughed hideously into the rag, making the table shake.
No sooner had he composed himself than he placed his elbows imperatively on the table. ‘And you’re travelling for business, too? I’m a travelling salesman — have you ever heard of the Flying Mask Dealer?’
‘No,’ I replied, not knowing which question I was answering. ‘I’m a physicist and I’m here on personal business.’
‘Physicist, how nice. And which field are you devoted to? Theoretical, practical? Mechanics, thermodynamic, the theory of relativity?’ The man, who still had his face turned towards me, moved disturbingly little.
‘I work in research on block universe theory. I’m currently writing my postdoc, well — at least that was my plan a few years ago. I’ve had a recent setback.’
Even though he didn’t ask anything further, I kept talking.
‘Yeah, I know, what does setback even mean,’ I said, now blushing with shame, as if I had been yelled at to provide a justification. ‘I tripped myself up, to some extent. When I began my work on Eternalism years ago, I actually thought it would be liberating. Sure, I was rebelling against my professors, who hardly knew anything about it at the time. But the more I immersed myself in it, the more — how should I put it? Let’s just say that my research expanded into my life, that, like a tumour, it began to displace other tissue.’
Time and time again he nodded while I spoke these words, and the heavy jewellery that lay on his chest clattered each time, as if he wanted to goad o
n an anxious herd of cows.
‘There wasn’t anything else anymore, you know? Twelve hours of work seemed too few to me, fourteen, sixteen was my average in July. Of course it can’t be done without medication. Hardly any contact with anyone, for four years, not even at the institute. I didn’t go to any Christmas parties, nothing.’ And as a form of explanation I clumsily added: ‘I hadn’t been to my parents’ house in ages. I didn’t want to see anyone at all.’
I was shocked by the haemorrhaging of this monologue, which had run unstoppably from my lips.
‘Let me ask you something,’ the man said politely, and began to dig between his front teeth with a toothpick. ‘What exactly is block universe theory?’
‘I beg your pardon, of course.’ I cleared my throat, even though I didn’t need to. ‘It’s an alternative theory of time. Picture the following: if time is unreal, as we know it to be today, then the past, present, and future are actually taking place at the same time. Similar to a three-dimensional block, supposedly consecutive moments can be read as being closer to one another. This means time becomes more a direction in space than something that would ever change things. It’s complicated.’
I folded a serviette into an improvised cube.
‘You see, this cube contains all the situations that have ever happened or will ever happen. The walls here,’ I pointed to the sides of the serviette, ‘are the limits of physical possibility. Now time is measured as distance — but everything happens at the same time, you see? So we can take any path through the cube without consciousness. We call them paths because when viewed from above there is a kind of landscape, through which our brain seeks out paths with the greatest possible probability — but it’s not important for you to understand it right now,’ I added hastily, as I feared that he’d mentally checked out a long time ago. ‘The decisive thing happened away from my thesis. In those moments when, for example, I went to the institute or sat in the cafeteria with my colleagues, I noticed that a state of mental disorder, which at first was not entirely tangible, was becoming stronger. It was this realisation that shone through from my calculations down in the office with the same unalterable luminosity: There is no such thing as time.’
In the middle of this sentence I dropped my cutlery on the floor. I had to dive under the table to retrieve it.
‘There is no such thing as time,’ I repeated, and stabbed my dusty fork into the roasted meat. ‘At first it was only a mild feeling of alienation, as if these streets, which I knew so very well, were fakes. As if I were walking in sets a Hollywood producer had crafted to deceive me. Because I knew there could be no such thing as time. But why did everyone act as if there actually was?’ I blushed again while I said these words.
‘It was a torturous feeling, a constant state of derealisation. And the longer I remained within it, the more I lost my biorhythm — day and night were one and the same thing, I was never tired. Not ever. Instead I was constantly anxious during the day, like before an ever-nearing exam. You see, I had completely lost the passing of time — I had the unmistakable feeling of a static universe: one day identical to another, one hour just the same as the next. Of course, the first thing I did was go to a psychiatrist, but there was no diagnosis. At least, none that could have helped me. So I resorted to self-medicating. At the time, doctoral students were handing out Ritalin on the sly, and I found that it freed me of my swirling thoughts. So I broadened my repertoire, if you can put it that way.’ I gulped down another mouthful.
‘Anyway, I started taking modafinil about five years ago to calm my nerves, two tablets every evening. Yet I was often so spaced out at nine in the morning that I went to sleep in the university toilets. Or I got dressed, ran out of the door, and only then realised that it was still pitch-black outside. And through it all I kept my composure, attended office hours, gave my lectures. That’s how you make your experiences.’
I had tried my best to be brief, but I didn’t succeed. Perhaps because I hadn’t spoken with anyone for four days it all flowed out of me uninhibitedly — but I’d probably not spoken with someone in this way for years. For a brief moment there was a horrendous silence. Then he addressed me as fixedly as he had the first time.
‘Did you know that, in my role as a mask dealer, I spent a long time in Arnhem Land?’
‘Mask dealer,’ I repeated absurdly.
‘I lived there with Aboriginal Australians. I was there because of the masks, of course, but no one wanted to sell me any for a long time on account of their ancestors.’ He coughed several times. ‘Anyway, even though I, of course, wasn’t permitted to take part in rituals, I learned a lot about their Dreaming. I presume that Dreaming means something to you? Well, then you know what I’m talking about,’ he said, even though I had shaken my head in response to his question.
‘Spiritual and physical world are connected in an eternally created present, the Dreaming, a place where we can come into contact with our ancestors. The ancestors influence our world through their actions, and we in turn can alter the Dreaming through what we do.’
‘But how?’ I asked, my voice breaking.
‘And indeed,’ he said, leaning conspiratorially over the table, ‘it takes place via the landscape. What the ancestors — but this includes the metaphorical as much as our actual relatives — do in the Dreaming shapes our landscape, raises them up into mountains and creates rivers. The joke is that we change with them, too. And at such a pace, almost retrospectively, that we believe that the landscape has always had this form. We become incapable of even noticing the change. Is that not a remarkable thought?’
‘I see what you’re getting at,’ I said, but it didn’t mean anything anymore. I wanted to be alone all of a sudden, estranged from the intimate details I had told him moments before.
‘So, very similar to your theory, there’s a cosmic web that binds a topography to time, except that for Aboriginal Australians it is the actual landscape that performs it.’
‘Do keep talking. I’m going to pay my bill in the meantime, as my room could be ready at any moment,’ I said.
‘But what most people don’t want to understand about Dreamtime is that the physical world is already the connection between the spiritual and the physical. That the landscape flows around us just like our perception of things — everything from one single source. So the whole world becomes a metaphor. You are a metaphor, as am I, in all our embodiment —’
‘Excuse me, I have to go,’ I started again. I urgently wanted to bring the conversation to an end, but didn’t know how. The mask dealer did not respond to what I’d said. He gave his monologue as sternly as I had mine to him.
I gestured to the waitress that I wanted to pay, but he caught her as soon as she was near us. ‘We’ll share half a litre of red,’ he said before I could act, and even grasped my hand for a split second, as if he had to prevent me from fleeing. ‘What you said earlier struck me as familiar on account of the fact that Aboriginal Australians also define time as a path — taking a path through a landscape, that becomes transformed in the act of taking a path. Just in constant contact with one’s own ancestors. We cannot take a single step without colliding with our own past. The only option would be not taking one more step, a complete denial of time itself.’ I looked on in desperation as my glass was once more filled to the brim.
‘Would you look at that, I’ve lost my appetite,’ he said suddenly to a passing waitress and threw his hands up from the table; but instead of pushing the plate away or handing it to her, as I had expected him to do, he reached for another piece of bread, which he shoved whole into his mouth. I briefly drew hope that he would, in that moment, not be alert enough to prevent me from leaving, but I immediately lost my courage again, because despite his mouth now being spread wide, he continued speaking with unaltered fervour.
‘I want to be honest with you,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that we didn’t meet by chance. The purpose w
ith which you sat down with me at the table.’ He made a sweeping motion of his hand as if he was conducting an orchestra.
‘No, that we’ve met one another here is of a downright fateful quality. Augustine also said that time as such does not exist, rather that the past and the future are only projections from the present. Everything comes back, so to speak, to this conversation we are having right now, and arises from it. It stands for something.’ He once more took my hand, and although this disgusted me, I lacked the resolve to pull back. ‘A metaphor is successful when it shines forwards and backwards. It has to change the past because it gives it a different meaning, and even more so the future, because it directs our expectations towards what is to come. In this respect, of course, the ancestors are nothing more than metaphors, or much rather, we are metaphors for our ancestors. Think of it in genetic terms.’
I could have easily got up and left, but I just didn’t. ‘Within a suitably charged context such as this one,’ the mask dealer said with increasing intensity, ‘everything becomes a metaphor. You, me, the people in this inn, and everything that goes on in it.’ This made me shake, as if I were standing exposed in the autumn air. ‘You can see for yourself that you are here for a reason and that you intended to do something when you told me about your life before. But what? Perhaps you don’t yet know yourself. Which is why I would like to offer you something. And it is,’ he bowed forward deeply as if to ask for forgiveness, and brought something out, ‘some wonderful masks from my range.’