The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘My special pass?’

  ‘A document that allows official papers to be backdated a day. Then they are already valid before the date of issue.’ Greater Einland was already one of the strangest places that I’d ever been to, but I accepted this explanation. And his good will seemed more than fair when I got out and saw the extent of the damage to my car: two of the tires burst; the bonnet, with perforations on the sides, hanging on only by a hinge; three of the four side windows cracked; the exhaust dangling at an angle over the cobblestones.

  I parked the car and walked in the direction the man had indicated. The way to the guesthouse led down a colossal stairway, along which little shops interlocked with one another like chain links. As I passed under an arcade into a no less picturesque part of the Old Town, I imagined how my parents had walked through these streets as children. This was Greater Einland — I had found it. But the imaginings met no emotions, and I had difficulty recalling their youthful faces, which remained abstract and distant.

  The placid impression continued: a hairdressing salon with an iron statue of a pair of scissors on display; an optician’s in whose window bespectacled bears were taking tea together; a butcher’s with wooden stairs that led to a lovingly carved balcony. Among them, however, as if thrown in at random, were strange shopfronts: ‘Shooting Gallery’ was the first establishment whose name I tripped up on, a shop with a rather makeshift facade and bars over the door, through which one could make out targets. ‘Midnight Shop’ I read on another; ‘Open 24.00 till 24.59 weekdays; film and audio recordings are permitted.’ I didn’t find it remarkable for long, however, seeing as even the tidiest of towns have their mavericks. What had grabbed my attention, on the other hand, was something else: that beside all these shops, next to this apparently flourishing retail trade, in a barely visible street, the asphalt was missing. Steps, invisible in the blackness, led down at this point, making it appear as if a huge mouth had sucked up the paving of the entire street from underground.

  At the end of the subsequent row of houses I alighted upon the Jolly Pumpkin, which was, as I could already establish from outside it, actually more a tavern than a place to stay the night. An overwhelming soup steam hit me on entering the bar, as if an ox had been chopped into pieces and boiled complete with its skeleton, as if the whole animal hung in the air in vapour form among the people. Even breathing was filling. A waitress walked by carrying two dozen beer tankards on a tray — an uncannily cliched sight. I was glad that the reception desk was in a dead corner of the inn, as there was a palpable sense of exclusivity among the patrons of such the like I’d never encountered in any inn before. An unbelievable volume betrayed that everyone was conversing with everyone else at the same time, throughout the entire establishment.

  I rang the bell on the desk as gently as possible, so as not to draw the other guests’ attention towards me. Perhaps I had neglected to draw attention to myself at all, because for ten minutes no one came, and I was getting more and more timid about having to enter the bar. Through the fogged-up window I could make out the shapes of cheerfully huddled human flesh — limbs that hung over the plates like bloated sausages. There were collisions of bodies: handshakes, stumbling into one another, claps on the shoulder.

  ‘Mayor!’ someone shouted from across the room. ‘You’ve still not renovated the entrance to the motorway — are that lot in Wastl von der Hoh breathing down your neck again?’ Everyone laughed uproariously at this question.

  ‘Schlaf the Hat-Maker should take care of it, he knows how to run a business,’ someone else shouted, and a fat man in a suit with an imposing top hat started talking loudly.

  ‘I’ll do it soon,’ the mayor said, barely audibly. The clothes of the men, which I could vaguely make out around the corner, were indistinct: I thought I recognised traditional Janker jackets made from loden fabric, but with bourgeois silk shirts underneath and shiny gold cufflinks. Only the beer was beyond question, and the empty tankards piled up beside the gnawed gristle of the grouse. Everything about the scene repelled me. For a moment I considered spending the night in my car, but that would be in the workshop until tomorrow at least. Fortunately the receptionist showed up behind the desk at that moment — a spritely woman in her fifties, who, as was to be expected, was wearing a green-and-red-patterned blouse with ‘Frau Erna’ embroidered on the chest in Kurrent cursive script. Nothing that I hadn’t seen in a dozen variations in the last few days, except that she only looked at my face once and then resolutely lowered her gaze. I don’t know whether the conversations on this first day only struck me as odd because I didn’t yet know the way people spoke in Greater Einland — and whether that’s the reason I’m hopelessly exaggerating their idiosyncrasies. But at the time, it seemed incredibly strange to me:

  ‘Do you have any rooms available?’ I asked.

  ‘All booked up,’ Frau Erna said without looking up.

  ‘The night watchman recommended this inn to me.’

  ‘Of course we have rooms free. Your name?’ the woman said with as much ease as if she hadn’t just said the opposite. Her closed countenance flipped into a servile expression, like an ambiguous image.

  ‘Ruth Schwarz. But I only have cash. And not an infinite amount at that,’ I said, embarrassed.

  ‘No problem, you don’t pay till checkout. My name is Dorothee — if you need anything, just let me know.’

  I pointed to her chest. ‘But it says Frau Erna?’

  ‘No, no, that’s the name of the inn.’

  ‘Isn’t this the Jolly Pumpkin?’

  ‘Yes, of course, that’s right.’

  Although I had not become any the wiser, I took the towels presented to me, after which my key was finally handed over. On the stairs to the first floor I regained control and confronted myself for the first time with the thought that I was actually in Greater Einland. Other than a rustic double bed, a few manned crucifixes, a table for one’s morning ablutions, and a bathroom with floral tiles there wasn’t anything else to discover — no Bible, strangely enough, no printed matter at all. The windows were comedically small when compared with the rest of the room. I could hardly imagine that I would be able to escape in case of a fire, but I didn’t care in my present state of fatigue. I longed for a hot shower, got undressed, and turned on the water: this was the moment I saw the stale white water for the first time. When the colour didn’t change after five minutes, and because it didn’t smell strange, I got into the cubicle anyway.

  I went to bed just after 8pm. The muffled voices of tavern patrons rose up from below, putting me in a sleepy mood. Before I could form one more clear thought, I stripped naked and wrapped myself in the sheets. When I had closed my eyes and was already almost asleep, I suddenly saw the black cavity in the asphalt once more, gaping in front of me, and thought for a moment that I was falling, before I finally drifted off.

  The hole was of unknown depths, bifurcations, and dampness. It ran like an underground mycelium under the mountaintops and settlements, broke to the surface in the form of ducts and webs, and, like a continental drift, pushed the unstrung soil together into gritty, respiring heaps, beneath which the putrid, fungus-like process of decay had nested. The crust of the soil had become softer and softer over the decades: squishy sediments, carried away beneath the houses and streets, surrendered to liquefaction, which was accomplished through the meticulous work of dew and drizzle, damp autumn evenings and garden hoses. It wasn’t rainfall that, like a spontaneous haemorrhage, almost burst this aneurysm, simmering beneath the town.

  The hole was basically unmanageable. It was an endless exhalation of land, the chest of which sank as far as the ribs, breached them, and displaced the organs. The only blessing was that it had all happened so infinitely slowly that generation after generation had distributed the concern about it — and for the sake of an alibi you could pour concrete into manholes every week and have enough time to swap out the shattering win
dow sills that gave way to the subsidence before the kids got out of school.

  The main chasm, an abyss no less than fifty metres wide and two hundred metres deep, gaped under the Market Square and endangered the equilibrium of the entire city centre, which had its foundations on porous froth like the top of a chocolate-coated marshmallow. This shaft, which was not created by chance, but had rather been driven into the heart of the city through centuries of mismanagement, had a main entrance, now boarded-up and secured, directly behind the church — but also seven or eight side entrances, the ones in the school, in the park, the castle ruins, which were proof that it had been drilled and plundered deeper, century after century. Every side and parallel activity of the exploitative mining, the privately organised explorations, and the glut of commercial access points over the centuries, had made the cave so thin-walled that it was easy for nature to close its fist around the structure. Underground, however, none of these changes were noticed: in absolute tectonic standstill, and in complete darkness, all aliveness found its end. The horses that had dragged the slaked lime out of the rock two hundred years ago had first had their eyes gouged out — a seeing horse would never have willingly descended into the blackness. The animals had to endure these conditions for twenty years or more — that is, the entire life of a horse — in order to serve as transporters for the minerals.

  That I later discovered the history of over-exploitation was not difficult. People would say: it’s all out in the open.

  In 1890 an industrial magnate named Winfried Kneiss began to mine the limestone deposits known of since the Middle Ages, whereby a rumoured legend of gold strikes hung over the entire enterprise. He had equipped himself with a legion of daywage men from Burgenland and western Hungary, who were transported by train to Gloggnitz every Monday, after which the group would cover the twenty-three kilometres to Greater Einland on foot between four and nine in the morning. The streets swelled at this time, and apartment buildings divided into small parcels were bloated from the inside with human material, until the pressure was released again at 9pm on Fridays, and the village turned into a ghost town for the weekend. The lime was removed from the mountain in tons and tons, and pumped into the aortas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s nervous systems, as it was needed in Prague, Krakow, and Lemberg for the flourishing iron industry.

  Nothing happened between the wars — that is, of course, everything happened: after the mine officially came to a standstill due to a spontaneous sale, the population who’d been standing patiently at attention now began to enter unauthorised with improvised materials. The hole exerted a mesmerising force, a collective desire that sought to break through the economic membrane that had separated the country from its people. In a very short time, an underground amusement saloon was set up, and a casino, and, a year later, a brothel.

  But its depths eroticised individuals, too. Groups of young men climbed into the side shafts as a test of courage; impoverished families followed the long-held hunch that gold could be found at the bottom of the stone belly; somnambulistic old people were seen near the tunnel at dawn and disappeared without a trace.

  In 1939 the shafts, which in some places were digging forty metres deep into the mountain, were taken over by the Wehrmacht: an invisible, bomb-proof location for ammunition production. A branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp was established, and now, like fifty years earlier with the Hungarian workers, it was the most normal sight of all to see the malnourished men and women walking through the city centre, moved overland from their barracks behind the woods and into the tunnels.

  All of this had been reviewed and reappraised, framed and consolidated to form information boards, planted into the ground. There was a memorial that allocated remembrance within a precisely circled radius, and in its orbit about two dozen gladioli could be planted. So the hole had a clearly defined biography that nobody shied away from stirring — it was simply that the entire porous, honeycomb-like land threatened to crumble under such contact.

  5

  It took less than ten minutes of expert examination the next morning before the mechanic informed me that a quick repair wouldn’t be possible. Due to the delivery time of specific parts, along with the evaluation of processes that were incomprehensible to me, I had to stay for a further week in the Jolly Pumpkin, which I was actually pleased about. I immediately bought a hairdryer, notepads and pens, a dressing gown, and other household items that could suggest I had just settled in for an entire year. Something about Greater Einland urged me to stay — after the almost superhuman effort it had taken to find the town, I felt the irresistible desire to stay a few more days. I could still take my meals in the tavern; that way I would save myself the need of buying a hotplate and also have the opportunity to get to know some of the locals, a prospect that brought joy for the first time in my life.

  As soon as I had left the garage, I sat down in a coffee house that was a little way from the main square, next to a small church. ‘One-Pot Café’ was the slightly odd-sounding name mounted over the premises. The church’s facade was easily visible from the window: cascades of ivy leaves tumbled over one another and condensed to a chiselled frame, so that the uninformed observer would have to long puzzle over placing the church; it could have been in Cluny or in Oxford. Against this backdrop, I immersed myself in the local newspapers.

  On this very first day I met Ferdinand, who would later become one of my best friends in this place — and who came through the door at that very moment. Gasping under the weight of his considerable gut, he climbed up a ladder to put up posters, before returning to the floor, drenched in sweat. All the tables in the place were occupied, and after he had looked around for a good while, he finally approached me. I hadn’t got five pages into the newspaper when, a bundle of wetness, flesh, and rhythmic puffs of air, he sat down at my table without so much as a greeting.

  ‘Tomorrow’s the day,’ he said, as if we had recently broken off a conversation. ‘Unfortunately I can’t lift that much, what with the umbilical hernia —’ and with these words he pointed at his stomach, on which there was a ball-shaped bulge, which was probably poking through a bandage.

  ‘We have to pour five thousands kilos in the hole this week, otherwise the market place will be hanging a metre lower by March. After the rain last week everything’s sunk about thirty centimetres.’

  ‘I see,’ I said quietly. ‘Well, then you better not lift too much.’

  Even though I had tried to not let it show, when he mentioned the hole I felt a spontaneous excitement — an unconditional desire to find out more on the subject.

  ‘Do people help with this or is it a council matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, actually no one’s really done anything so far,’ he replied, shrugging his massive shoulders, making his vest bulge above his navel.

  He was a man of about forty with a blue flat cap on his head, who so roundly filled out his clothing that I dared not imagine how organs other than his stomach and intestine could fit inside his body. It wasn’t really a surprise that he ordered beer at ten in the morning, but the speed with which he drank it down truly was. Like a hurdler, he picked up the glasses without stopping. What amazed me most was that I immediately liked him.

  ‘How can a market place hang?’ I asked carefully.

  ‘The hole,’ he repeated with complete naturalness. ‘It’s growing. At first, we thought it was only really bad in the spot between the church and the Cultural Association, I mean, twenty years ago. But now the town hall has cracks, too, all over the place — in the plaster, in the parquet, all the renovations are now purely cosmetic really.’ He picked up a pile of three or four coasters and carefully ripped them in two. ‘And now we’ve poured a good hundred tonnes of concrete in it, but the entire hill under Greater Einland is hollow, can you imagine that? I’ve always said that that thing is bottomless. Someday Pergerhannes himself will climb out of it.’

  ‘Who’s
Pergerhannes?’

  ‘No one,’ Ferdinand said quickly. ‘In any case, the pit is getting bigger every day.’

  ‘A pit underneath the town,’ I repeated softly, so as not to interrupt the flow of information.

  ‘We’ve been throwing rubble in it for years anyway. It has to all be done by hand, and it’s horribly dusty like nobody’s business. I’ve got back problems from it, you know, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for five years. The insurance won’t pay for the treatments, but as long as I do my daily rounds through the town and write a report, the Countess will pay me for it.’

  ‘Which countess?’

  ‘Which countess! Which indeed. The only one. Our Countess.’ He had to cough vigorously from laughing. ‘Personally I have my own rituals with the hole, like almost everyone here does. If something is bothering me, I write it on a piece of paper, put a drop of blood on it, and throw the note into it. Brings you luck,’ he said, winking.

  I soon found out that Ferdinand was actually a truck driver. ‘Trained and got stuck up to my knees,’ as he put it — however, due to the bad roads, he hadn’t driven a truck for nine years. As I had correctly ascertained yesterday, there were no intact roads out of the town and only a single carriageway, which, due to a construction error, went in a circle — that is, led from the exit directly back into the entrance.

  Instead of driving trucks, after he’d had to move back in with his mother, he’d opened a shaving salon, which was ‘also and especially for women,’ he told me. ‘I’m there shaving everyone by my own fair hand from 2pm till 5pm for four euros. Four! Two people for eight. Three for twelve, and so on.’

  Alongside his rounds, this ensured him a livelihood and his COPD treatments, to which he went twice a year. However, I refrained from promising him a visit, even though that was obviously what he had in mind. He had the shakes so badly that someone would surely fear for their life while he was shaving them.