The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘Of course, people can shave themselves, but it’s something a lot of people resent when you can actually outsource it. People absolutely want to give up certain responsibilities, that is very clear, we live in an age in which we want to transcend our bodies.

  For a confused proletarian with a football scarf tucked into his leather jacket and a corroded bunch of keys hanging from his neck, Ferdinand expressed himself in a remarkably sophisticated way. I felt an irrepressible desire to see the hole, and the more time that passed, the less I could defend myself against this urge, so I soon paid my bill and prepared to leave.

  ‘Do you know where I could go on a short walk today?’ I asked, trying to seem casual.

  ‘Over there is the edge of the town boundary,’ Ferdinand said. ‘You can happily walk ten or twenty kilometres inland. Maybe we’ll see each other at the salon soon!’ I thanked him and left him with his third beer.

  I decided that before I betook myself into nature, as Ferdinand had advised, I would pace every corner of the walled town centre. It was broken up into four quadrants like a spliced cake, separated from one another by walls — North Town, South Town, East Town, West Town. So there were four quarters, which were visually very distinct from one another, and which I now explored in a clockwise fashion. Greater Einland was incredibly beautiful, similar to the scenery of a film set in the Middle Ages, in which the highpoint of handcraft was evident along its immaculate facades. Everywhere people were sitting happily chatting on the cobblestones drinking their white wine spritzers, even though it was already autumnally cool. You couldn’t get away from the idyll. Of course, I found the conservatism disquieting, as I always did — many of the social formations resembled election campaign material: families sitting, having lunch, with a bowl of water under the table for their dog; young couples whose body language seemed to be relentlessly expressing: Don’t worry, we’re already engaged. But then I arrived at the main square.

  In the light of day I finally noticed what I hadn’t been able to see yesterday evening: the whole market had sunk elliptically a good metre, reaching its lowest point, concavely, in the centre. Worse still, behind the town walls you could see the church spire, which had tilted to the right at a dangerous angle. The hole, I thought excitedly.

  The mosaic that I was now looking at, however, was still undamaged. One immediately understood that there wasn’t any danger from the statics, that a decades-long process was at work here, but the caution that prevented me from even carelessly stepping on a glass bridge was a powerful deterrent that kept me away from this pit. I didn’t want to cross the square; it appalled me — something subterranean seemed to have pulled the square into the depths with its earthy lips, which rasped sphincter-like on the insides of the houses. In fact, none of the passers-by walked in the middle of the square; everyone intuitively made their way around the edges. I read an information board that had been installed in the corner of the square, but the letters suddenly began to swim in front of my eyes:

  The floor mosaic to be admired here reveals, when viewed from the air, a picture of the Archangel Michael falling into hell — how he chokes the serpent Satan and dashes it into purgatory with his sword. It is a reproduction of the motif on the former Market Square, which was restored in 1946, based on drawings, in the wake of it being filled in. Since the paver and restorer of the original mosaic, Georg Springinsfeld, had fallen in the war, his apprentice, Karl Weigand, created the new version, which was much less artistically executed than the original and, due to cheaper materials, did not defy the weather conditions as well; which is why the serpent Satan is often interpreted by non-residents as a dark-brown dachshund, and the archangel, with his green breastplate, as a woman in a bustier.

  A feeling of uncanniness crept over me in broad daylight; the few characters who were on the move, housewives and newspaper delivery men, cast deep shadows that didn’t seem to fit the position of the sun. My gaze was drawn towards the castle, which tapered into a grey vortex. And yet I found more and more details that caught my eye: at the top, on one of the three gables, someone had begun attaching figures. A Napoleonic sinewy horse in the middle, and two putti to the left and right, enthroned on the roof. A tower looming up in the middle glinted as if a battle believed lost had been won.

  In a moment of lucidity I realised that I was two hours late to take my medication; I jogged the way back on the waxy ground, and, inside the inn, crushed up the last half tablet of oxycontin that I had, and snorted it deeply. The table creaked at right angles with a groan, my spine straightened itself back out, the world became smoothed out, and I lay sweating on the flor.

  I looked in my bag of toiletries from where I’d taken the tablet; after a week on this trip I had nearly reached the end of my supplies and had no idea where I would be able to procure more. I dragged myself to bed until I was sure my ancestral brain metabolism had been restored, then I stood up, went downstairs, and greeted the landlady as if nothing had happened.

  I set off on my walk much more soberly. As I passed the South Gate, I saw a sign announcing that the cemetery was in this direction, and I followed it, suddenly driven by rationality. I would have to visit the cemetery anyway, see the grave, prepare everything for the funeral. This part of the town corresponded far more to the general image of a middle-class residential neighbourhood. The street was lined with carefully pruned chestnut trees, and from the detached houses parked behind picket fences, a harmless family idyll issued forth from all sides. It was barely a five-minute walk: to reach the cemetery, a steep footpath led to a walled plateau, which squatted like a fortress in the hollowed-out quarry. There was, of course, a small chapel with mandala-like stained-glass windows. The obligatory florist cowering on the left, a few shamefaced grace metres away for the sake of decency, so that the business of mourning wouldn’t be exposed at first glance.

  I vaguely surmised that now I was fighting for my life, I would have to come face to face with death, that it would come to a confrontation between me and my feelings, which I hadn’t yet encountered in the town. Nevertheless I stood utterly business-like between the tombstones, infinitely far away from connecting the thousands of dead that lay here with my parents.

  I walked along the rows of graves in search of my grandparents’ resting place, but this turned out to be more difficult than I thought, because there were at least ten names on every stone. As a general rule, the deceased carried the same last names and were carefully laid out in family groups — but they were sometimes also mixed up and separated from one another by hyphens, as if randomly stacked according to the date of their departure. Up to twenty of them fitted on the upright rectangular stones in question, and from these it could be read that the only thing that united these dead was their death, which had occurred shortly after one another. I imagined these graves stretching twenty metres deep into the ground; how the slab of land was pierced through by towering cavities, where those who had been strangers in life were now resting cheek to cheek.

  Their names were soon dancing before my eyes — the sun was already going down, and it wasn’t easy keeping my concentration. Schwarz or Schalla, Schwarz or Schalla; I searched obsessively, but the later it got, the more impossible it became. I had to crouch in front of the gravestones to be able to read the tiny engraved letters. I was finding it all unpleasant when I heard someone coming down the gravel path and I made a backwards jump away, but the man spoke to me from afar.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘Our family grave. My grandparents, or rather, Petra and Joseph Schalla.’ I scraped the tips of my shoes in the stones, as if to pretend I hadn’t been standing on the grave.

  ‘Come with me!’ he called. I brushed the earth from my knees. Even close up I couldn’t make out the man’s age; the sun was as if swallowed by the nearby mountains.

  ‘I’m from the gardening shop over there, and work on the side as a gravedigger, too. What’s your name?’
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  ‘Gravedigger on the side? Ruth Schwarz,’ I said distractedly. ‘And yourself?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied, and I wasn’t surprised at this statement for even a second, because it really didn’t matter at all. He led me to a beautifully tended grave complete with a black monolith. From its centre rose an iron bar with two fat cherubs dancing around a butterfly: repulsiveness without parallel.

  ‘Here, that’s it, isn’t it? Leopold Schwarz. Petra and Joseph Schalla. Heinz Schalla, Reinhard Markovic, Peter and Liese Schwarz. Richard Schalla, Ernst Schalla,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ I confirmed, even though seven of those names didn’t mean anything to me.

  ‘Then you’re the granddaughter? Good that you’re here. I’ve already told your parents that we’ll have to remove the ivy soon.’

  ‘No, I think you have me confused with someone else; my parents haven’t been here for years. My parents are — were, sorry — Elisabeth and Erich Schwarz.’

  ‘What do you mean, were?’

  ‘They passed away. That’s why I’m here,’ I began, as if hoping to clear up an unpleasant misunderstanding.

  ‘No, that’s ghastly. What happened? They were tip-top when they were here last week doing the grave.’ Now the man pulled his cap from his head and sloped his eyebrows together to form a pointed roof, which I only saw because he suddenly came uncomfortably close to my face. (Ridiculous, I thought, how he’d perfected this rehearsed gesture; he probably received news like this on a daily basis.)

  ‘What do you mean, last week?’ I was stunned, but the shudder for what I’d learned only reached me as if I were insulated in cotton wool, as if there was an eternity lying between me and the realisation. Now wasn’t the time for this, I thought, and pushed these thoughts away.

  ‘And you’re sure that they were here?’

  ‘Almost always on Thursdays, as long as I’ve worked here. They were only flying visits, but that grave was always lovely, freshly cared for all year round. That’s how you can know they’re stand-up people. Respect for the dead. Incidentally, my condolences. Did your parents not tell you about their visits?’

  ‘We didn’t see each other very often,’ I said.

  ‘Shame. Do you live far away then?’

  ‘No,’ I said absentmindedly, ‘we just had our differences.’

  ‘Maybe there just wasn’t an opportunity to mention their visits.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘I knew your grandparents; I was two years below your grandfathers at primary school. They were inseparable for a lifetime. They always used to say they were baptised together when they were two weeks old, and were best friends from then on. And then Joseph raised your father like his own son, when Leo disappeared. Oh well, old stories. If you need help with the funeral, I’m practically always here.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, and suddenly saw in the light of the chapel that the man was geriatric. ‘I’ll come by again tomorrow,’ I said slowly, pulling up the hood of my coat. ‘Good night.’

  The earth squelched beneath my steps; whether I was walking over graves or paths, was impossible to say. The ground pressed against my soles, under which I noticed a slight movement and suddenly thought I had caught trails of ants, earthworms, beetles feasting on the freshly sunken corpses. I stumbled once or twice and only caught myself at the last moment, before I would have plunged in the fresh earth like into a black, velvety swimming pool.

  6

  From day one in Greater Einland my productivity exploded. On the second morning, after a hearty breakfast, I sat at my desk and noticed how everything that I had tried to get on track to no avail over the last few years flowed of its own accord onto the paper. I worked ten or twelve hours, forgetting to count the chimes of the bell in the nearby church tower, until the sun went down.

  Long before I had a clear idea of how I could get the funeral preparations underway, I had found a modus operandi in which I could function like clockwork. A system I had been seeking all of my life up to that point: I got up every morning at six after a heavenly and always undisturbed night, found my way to the always already lit and warm dining room where the landlady Erna, who soon had a soft spot for me, put down a bowl of steaming porridge with nuts, pieces of apple, and raisins. After eating, I jogged to Kastelburg — exactly four kilometres away — and back in around forty-five minutes, often cooling myself in dry weather in a secluded reservoir. At eight I sat at my desk, alert and invigorated by the cold, working on drafts in which I thought I could already discern the final characteristics of my postdoctoral thesis. I occupied myself, completely entranced among the piles of papers, my laptop, and the physics books I’d brought with me, until 1pm, when I had arranged for Erna to knock at my door and bring me lunch. I didn’t have to interrupt my work for even a minute, as they’d had someone bring a drip-filter coffee machine to my room, from which I now brewed cup after cup, and which transformed the cloudy, whitish mixture that flowed from the pipes due to the limestone content of the soil into aromatic coffee. Complete privacy, blissful simplicity. So I put off the funeral and all of its requirements for a few more days, even though I knew my meagre savings would soon run out.

  I always finished working around six, and, wrung out but happy, went for a walk in the forest, which I fell in love with more and more every day. I sat on fallen tree trunks and looked out with an empty mind at the misty valleys; I pulled up the moss with my hands and inspected the black earth’s crust for scents and concealed creatures. The force with which the formation of the landscape in these mountains had advanced captivated me. Up to that point I had only known it from textbooks: the birth of a mountain was preceded by the massive subsidence of sediment in the oceans, and billions of tonnes of soft, liquid organic material was pressed and conglomerated into plates in the depths. The sea took hold of me for the first time: a long time ago the mountains had been just an unified flux, and it took aeons before the concentrated layers began to rise again through the collision of the continental blocks. I contemplated the force it took for the earth’s layers to unfold, like a stocking pulled up over a knee, and what a microorganism I was in comparison to them, alone on my walk through the forest. Over time, mountain ridges had collided with other mountains, creating an interference pattern, as if someone had thrown a pebble into a lake. Stony waterfalls formed in those places where the earth’s crust hurtled down in free fall. In the blink of an eye of a planet, this undulating lake had become an unchanging stone monument. Every evening I came home, breathless with happiness.

  This sequence of activities seemed to me, even though I had only carried it out for a few days, as if it had always been this way or as if its strength had always been within my basic nature and had only been waiting for this place in order to burgeon. At the time, I still thought that it would be a kind of holiday and that my stay in this freedom would be temporary. Returning promptly for dinner at eight in the tavern was the only compulsion that I submitted to each time — and only there did it become inevitable every evening to encounter the characters of the town.

  I understood the rules immediately: either one had the reputation for appearing in a certain inn every day, or one didn’t — in the first case, one showed up at the same table with almost nomological dependability, so as not to be a cause of concern for those persons already waiting for you. In the latter case, one probably never frequented these places. Nobody made a change for change’s sake. There were, in individual inns, villages-within-a-village, microcosms, in which veritable parallel societies formed.

  At eight, the locals were lined up like figures in a large music box on which cardboard cut-outs were pulled along a steel rail to the tune of their little melodies. I was on the scene punctually, too, as if it were a sacred duty. I studied their social interactions with the utmost concentration, in the beginning I even noted down the relationships: people became objects of observation, whose inter
actions with one another I learned to appreciate after only a few days. Although the dynamics of this system were formidable, each of its elements served a specific purpose.

  The mixing of these people in these places was incomprehensible to me at first, though: proletariats sat at the same table as the self-evident aristocratic excellencies who appeared in tails and ascot ties to discuss their land over the cheapest set menu or to nonchalantly describe themselves as ‘men of independent means’. Others were wrapped from head to toe in the colours of their local football team, TSV Einland, every day without exception. Among them, however, were individuals who apparently embodied cliched types — the priest, the town-hall clerk, the nurse, the professor, etc. — that rationally I knew had to exist, but who added something of the commedia dell’Arte for the townspeople gathered together. What almost everyone had in common was the habit of being tremendous drinkers. More or less every table was conducted as a regulars’ table, and even I as an immigrant was assigned one on the third day.

  In one corner was Hat-Maker Schlaf, whom I immediately recognised as the man from the petrol station. He was an old-fashioned industrialist with modern means, who had retained the Austro-Hungarian variant of Manchester capitalism. His age was difficult to determine — though he spoke enthusiastically of the fifties, he looked barely older than forty when he shaved. He shipped everything possible and impossible to China, always had his own crystal glass with him, which he had the landlady fill with hundred-year-old madeira wine, and reported to an ever-growing gaggle of polo-wearing young conservatives about tax breaks. He glorified the old currency, from the schilling right up to the krone, yet in the same breath, he extolled the creation of gigantic online retailers.

  Near the bar sat the entourage of the Master-Builder Keinermüller, who was the coarsest, most uncultivated person I’d ever seen, barely able to read the daily menu, so that one of his girlfriends had to spell it out for him.