The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  Suddenly the tension was broken. The entire philosophical promise was nothing more than a prelude to a sales pitch. In a few seconds the table was covered with masks.

  ‘Here, for instance, we have a wonderful piece, a so-called Bremen mask, made in Bamberg by a family of carvers that have lived there for a hundred years. Ideal for a masquerade ball.’ He pointed to a stylised bird’s head that would come down as far as one’s nose, an abomination.

  ‘Fine, I’ll buy it,’ I said.

  ‘And perhaps this, too. A particularly magnificent piece from Mali, the eye of truth. It’s made of bronze and brass, for ritual purposes naturally, but there’s no need to fear it. For over the fireplace, perhaps?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll get this one to complement the first one,’ I replied, without even looking at the mask.

  ‘Gladly,’ the mask dealer said hastily. ‘That will be one hundred euros.’

  I was glad that I had the sum with me in cash, and, even though it would have seemed like a ridiculously high amount under normal circumstances, I couldn’t put it down on the table fast enough.

  ‘Thank you, and I’ll now excuse myself for the evening,’ the mask dealer said, already getting up from the table.

  ‘It was a pleasant discussion,’ I replied, but he was already in such a hurry to put away his masks that he only replied with a hand gesture that was most probably intended to be a wave, but which appeared far more like he wanted to dispel an unpleasant odour. Then he went to the bar and briefly debated with the landlady in a manner that made me assume that he owed her money. In fact, she took a large part of the money I’d just paid him. He left the inn without looking back.

  Shortly afterwards, the waitress came to my table and told me that my room was ready.

  I awoke from a night of deep, undisturbed sleep and saw the past week for what it was for the first time: a delusion lasting several days. It is one of the strangest facets of life, how that which previously appeared to be the most natural of all actions shifts in an invisible, sudden drift. Idiocy now pervaded the last few days, just like when you realise in sobriety that you had danced on the table while drunk the night before. More importantly: I felt the strength to admit and correct my own mistake. After breakfast I would gather my things, telephone my relatives, and return to Vienna to carry out the funeral preparations. That was the only sensible thing to do. While I was putting on my socks, I worked everything out — I would eat eggs, bacon, and muesli, wash it all down with several glasses of water to get rid of the oppressive hangover, and rush to the nearest telephone as soon as possible to convey my decision to my relatives. I jumped into my trousers; I suddenly couldn’t be in enough of a hurry. There was something deeply comforting about the idea of being in Vienna before lunch — sleeping in my bed, finally talking to my friends about what had happened. I threw my things into my suitcase without arranging them, as one does when they know they are going home, and sprang down the steps into the breakfast room. But when I entered it, everything had already been cleared away.

  There was only one waitress standing in front of the sideboard, who, as in a Hans Moser film, was rhythmically rattling the glasses and building them up into a huge pyramid-like monument for the next morning.

  ‘Why is there no more breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, bypassing my question, but with a friendly smile.

  ‘What time is it? I should have been woken at seven.’

  ‘It’s half past eleven,’ the waitress replied and, as if she were thinking of some great piece of bad news, she turned away from her glass tesseract. ‘Oh dear. Frau Rosenthaler went to the hospital last night with her husband. He had a heart attack.’ I vaguely remembered that Frau Rosenthaler was the landlady to which I had given my urgent request to be awoken punctually. I expressed my sympathies to the waitress, and she promised to at least bring me a cup of coffee — unfortunately, there was nothing left to eat.

  While I was sipping the milk foam, I felt a strange stirring within me: the powerful images of my journey home, of my early arrival in Vienna that I had imagined since waking, and the whole momentum attached to them, had faded. An ineffable effort towered up before the task of now getting behind the wheel. It didn’t matter, though — I had to get it over with. I looked at my watch — if I set off right now, at least I would be back home that afternoon.

  No sooner had I started the engine and was driving down the first autobahn than I heard the piercing warning alarm of my petrol tank: I remembered that I had been near empty when I’d arrived at the inn yesterday. I tried to remember how to drive in a way that would conserve fuel, and let the car roll on the downhill roads — even leaning forwards to use my negligible body weight to gain a few metres. I turned off at the next junction, passed through a town, and managed to reach what appeared to be a small, old-fashioned service station.

  The petrol station was a model of desolation: a little single-storey hut with East German character, and directly behind it was a coffee kiosk with yellowed, tin Coke advertisements. The petrol station attendant, a young man in a Ducati jacket who was smoking confidently in front of the pumps, was responsible for fulfilling all needs, and was just bringing two other customers cups of espresso, which he set down on their car roof.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as I clicked the nozzle into place at this most old and miserable model of petrol station. This was the end of my odyssey, the last abidance of this parallel dimension of the Austrian wasteland. In a few hours I would be back in my apartment, in my orderly everyday; I would sit at my desk and plan the funeral in peace. While I was waiting for my tank to fill up, the two figures at the neighbouring pump caught my eye. They tore me from my daydream. One of them was a stocky man with a pointy beard, who filled a colossal double-breasted suit and had a monocle in his eye. He was offering the other man, who was unscrewing the petrol cap, a cigar from a kind of portable humidor, which the latter refused with a wave of his hand. He, too, caught my interest: he was a direct opposite to the first, a gaunt, you could almost say dwarfish, little man, who busily tinkered with the car, polishing the windows, checking the oil level, and finally lighting the fat man’s cigar. He was wearing silk trousers and a dirty shirt, with which he cleaned his glasses from time to time.

  ‘So if we can pull it off — and there is no doubt that we can do it’ — began the fat man — ‘we should lay a foundation within a week, put up three of the walls — the last thing, the facade, ought to be made of marble, you understand — so, if we pull it off, I say to Blumenkranz, putting in the arcade hall, orchestra pit, thirty-seven dressing rooms, two thousand seats and so on at that speed, I also want something from you!’ He tapped the ash from his cigar onto the ground before continuing.

  ‘In short: if we keep that promise to build your opera house on the Glatzalm by October, two hundred parking spaces within twelve hundred metres, then you will have to pay me and Master-Builder Keinermüller in pure gold.’ He laughed uproariously; his companion’s shirt sprang upwards as he tried to put the car antenna back up. I delayed refuelling as long as I could in order to follow the conversation for longer. While the one who was apparently a business man — who, incidentally, was wearing a wide-brimmed hat — looked freshly polished to a high shine, the car cleaner had something dull about him; even his trouser buttons were tarnished.

  ‘We still have the gold standard, I told him, and that’s when he fell right over, not literally, of course, but he fell back into his chair. Cat’s out of the bag! I told him we wouldn’t do it for less than three million. Otherwise I’d be pauperised!’ With these words he slapped his hand down on the windscreen, leaving a grease mark, which the other man had to wipe off.

  ‘Did Huber quote the estimate?’ he asked jubilantly, rag in hand.

  ‘Schlaf, I don’t have three million, please, the inflation, the economy, I’m still feeling the effects of the schilling,’ mimicked the fat man. ‘Fine, I say,
then a hundred thousand. Handshake! Suits him. There’ll be a made-to-measure hat and two boxes of nail clippers on top.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ the little one said. ‘Are you going to build a funicular that goes up there?’

  Even though my car wasn’t particularly dirty, I now began to wash the windows, so very fascinated was I with this strange set-up. A moss-scented wind slammed my car door shut. For a moment both of the men looked at me. I averted my gaze.

  ‘I’ll take care of everything,’ pontificated the other man, who had his expensive cigar burning in his right hand as if it were nothing more than an accessory. ‘There are very few people nowadays that do everything, Fredi. People think you need knowledge about something in order to get started. I’ll tell you something: knowledge is absolutely useless! Thinking is a beginner’s error. Everything consists of transactions — trade is the root of world affairs, especially Austrian retail.’

  ‘You’re a genius, you’d even make it in America,’ came Fredi’s muffled reply, his head under the open car bonnet.

  ‘This is how we have always grown rich in the town. The Countess paved the way, and we follow her lead,’ the big guy said and tossed away the cigar. ‘Look, I’m just a man, unlike you.’

  In spite of this obvious insult, Fredi very carefully closed the doors and bonnet, shook the other’s hand, and they exchanged envelopes. I had assumed that the small guy was a kind of broker or servant for the first man; I couldn’t figure out what else could have brought the two of them together. But that didn’t seem to be the case: ‘It’s always wonderful doing business with you,’ Fredi said casually. Their interaction was a mystery fraught with tension, but to my chagrin they both started making a move to leave.

  ‘Ditto. Shall I take you home?’ the small man asked.

  ‘No, I have to go back to Greater Einland,’ the other replied.

  ‘Fine by me — I’ll take you there, got nothing else to do.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’ And the two of them left the petrol station.

  Greater Einland.

  I had heard it clearly and yet it took a moment for me to realise I hadn’t imagined it. I threw the attendant fifty euros and ran after them to the carpark. I wasn’t able to catch up with them before they reached their car, and as I was about to jump into mine, I noticed that I hadn’t removed the pump. I had to awkwardly pull it out, hands shaking, before I could get in and start the engine, panicking that both men had already turned out of the exit. I accelerated without paying attention to the speed limit, and yet I’d lost them by the first intersection. We were in the middle of the village, and the houses were too close to be able to see very far. I caught sight of them again as they turned down a forest road far off in the distance. I had to reverse to be able to follow them, but then they were already gone again, and I stopped, without a clue to go on, on the dirt lane that had led me through a field and to a hill. There weren’t any turnings, so the car could have only gone in one direction, but the uphill path was anything but suitable to get around quickly. The road ended at a steep forest. The only option to get down the other side of the slope was an even smaller trail that couldn’t even be described as a road. And even this trail, probably intended for hikers, soon ended. The only way left to proceed was through a gap that led steeply through the trees.

  4

  I clearly remember driving along the bumpy path, which swayed in my rear-view mirror as if suspended between the trees. The improvised access road seemed anything but an authorised road-construction measure: the spruce trees had been sawed through with a chainsaw so close to the ground that larger cars could have gone straight over them. Even though the trunks had been trued up in this way, new branches were already pushing up from the ground. I immediately lost my bumper, even though I was only moving at a walking pace. My progress was combined with substantial difficulties because the topsoil — on which I was driving — shifted in all three spatial directions. As I was attempting to go downhill, a moment of momentum sent my car sideways against a tree trunk. While driving out of the ditch I’d been forced into, I carved into a bush, which ripped off my left side mirror. Even though it was only 3pm, the forest had become so dense that the light was weak. My car became stuck between two fir trees. I had to get out and push it from behind through the bottleneck, before rolling a bit further forward as soon as I was sitting in it again. An hour had gone by, and I had barely moved.

  The forest finally ended in a meadow, but better than that: I could see another surfaced road beginning in the distance, leading into a town. I let my car, which was already creaking from all axles like an insect fallen on its back, roll for the last hundred metres out of the forest. Branches were wedged all over the bonnet, and dents in the doors made me question whether I’d be able to get out at all. When I was finally driving on asphalt again, I saw a sign looming before me as if it had just been erected: GREATER EINLAND.

  In the timeless universe, all possible worlds lie next to each other in perfect simultaneity. Wherever our mind wanders within this infinite space of possibility and what it experiences as the present is influenced by a fog-like quality that lies above the configuration space. This fog, also called ‘mist’ in literature, is, of course, only to be understood metaphorically: what is meant is a distribution of probability that something will be experienced as the present — the capricious wave function that in quantum physics predicts the occurrence of an event. The crucial question is what ensures that this is concentrated in some areas but thins out in others — why does such a seamless plausibility seem to prevail in the succession of thoughts? Herach and Tocker suspect that the mist mainly collects where a particularly large number of time capsules can be found: The configurations are joined to one another because they contain a large number of reciprocal links. So the preferred whereabouts of consciousness is therefore where it and others have already remembered many things.

  I was never more aware of what an Austrian town looks like than in the moment I let my shameful vehicle roll through the openwork town wall. About a hundred metres after a small settlement, I crossed over a stone bridge and arrived in the town centre. In the well-ordered manner that only a medieval market can achieve, the epicentre of the everyday goings-on came into view right at the town gate. A rectangular main square framed by picturesque buildings; a dollhouse-like primary school; a post office painted red with a golden horn insignia; a bakery with a shiny pretzel bobbing outside its doors; an inviting, cosily lit tavern; and a milk bar, gloomy in the already sparse light. Because I hadn’t visited any busy urban areas for a week, the sight of the buildings, the cobblestones, the lanterns seemingly lit by hand, made me feel overblown happiness. Small, winding streets advanced in every direction and mysteriously disappeared behind cornerstones. Everything was incredibly clean and intact — a perfection such as I’d never seen in any square metre of Vienna. To the right, far behind the town on a rugged cliff, a four-turreted, brightly lit castle could be seen proudly towering upwards.

  In the middle of registering these impressions I heard a gentle knocking on my side window. From inside the car I saw nothing but an erratic flickering beside me. When I rolled down the window, I saw a figure wearing strangely old-fashioned garments. He was a short, compact man with a moustache and wiry hair, dressed head to toe in a black uniform and, befitting of his cape and hat, carrying an antiquated gas lantern in his left hand. In his right, he was holding a halberd.

  ‘Are there driving restrictions here, officer?’ I asked, assuming that a costumed policeman officer had been installed as a tourist attraction.

  ‘I am the night watchman,’ he replied. ‘And there are no restrictions.’ The man was obviously not in the mood to joke, because he was already jotting down my number plate on a notepad.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked me brusquely. ‘You won’t get very far as an outsider.’ He kicked the curb with the tip of his shoe, making a metallic clang, and I saw that h
e had steel toecaps on his boots.

  ‘I’m looking for a place to stay tonight,’ I replied. The night watchman turned away from my car and blew his nose incredibly thoroughly; for a full fifteen seconds neither of us said a word. ‘Do you know where I can find somewhere? A guesthouse maybe? As you can probably see, my car is practically ready for scrap, I must have lost my way in the forest …’

  ‘I can see that, but you won’t get a room here.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  The night watchman laughed and shook his head, then shrugged four times in a row, shook his head again, and rocked back and forth several times.

  ‘Because you’re not a resident — you’re not registered in Greater Einland.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite true,’ I said quietly, ‘ but if I were a resident, why would I need a room in a guesthouse?’

  That seemed to be too much for the night watchman: he writhed like a man attacked from all sides.

  ‘Look, it is simply a requirement that you need a registration form to get a room in a guesthouse as a tourist. You can try, but they’ll tell you the same thing that I have. It’s a question of regulations.’

  ‘But that can’t be a law. Who stipulated that?’

  This question made my interlocutor break out in a sweat.

  ‘The Countess,’ he said at last.

  ‘The Countess?’ I asked, sure that I’d misheard.

  ‘Obviously the Countess. Well, listen. I see that you are in dire straits, and I don’t want to be a monster. Go to the inn called the Jolly Pumpkin, and tell them that the night watchman sent you and that you will fetch your registration and your special pass tomorrow. For this one night.’