He himself was an ardent admirer of the construction worker Larry Fortensky, the seventh husband of Liz Taylor, and was obsessed with the idea of having a musical written about his life — an endeavour for which he intended to use all of his profits.
At my own table was Sister Elfriede, who reminded me of the Widow Bolte from Max and Moritz, but who possessed quite sophisticated tendencies and who asked me every few days for an interpretation of Maxwell’s equations or something similar. She was a passionate amateur in the field of science, which was remarkable in light of the fact that she ran a soup kitchen on wheels during the day, and was mainly occupied with dicing carrots and celery. She misunderstood each and every one of the derivatives I wrote for her on serviettes between place settings, and mostly brought along her own miracle formulas the subsequent evening: jackalopes of the theory of relativity and the uncertainty principle, which said, for instance, that with the help of a silver coil and a little chlorine solution, one could travel forwards in time.
I was quickly accepted in the circles of locals, as I, too, had had to make an appearance at dinner every day due to the lack of cooking provisions in my study. The pleasant thing was that people neither ignored me, nor perceived me as a foreign body, but instead treated me as if I had left a few years ago and had now returned.
Ferdinand in particular, whom I’d only known for a few days, took me under his wing during this initial period.
‘Come with me, mathematician,’ he said every evening, as soon as I’d eaten the last bite of my dessert — and completely indifferent to the fact that I was a physicist — and led me from table to table, where constantly new wreaths of people stretched out their hands to me. The more time that passed, the more courageous I became in further investigating the structure of the town. Once after dinner, when I didn’t have any cash on me and I apologised to Erna, she answered cryptically. ‘Oh, that’s no skin off my nose, you have to sort that out with the Countess.’
‘But the Pumpkin belongs to you,’ I said, confused.
‘Yes and no,’ Schlaf, who was sitting nearby, replied, because Erna had disappeared behind the servery in embarrassment. ‘Erna owes the Pumpkin to the Countess. That was a scandal last year, when it came out that Erna’s mother hadn’t done any labour in lieu of tax on the building for twenty years. The lazy sow,’ he whispered. ‘It’s now been put back on the inn as credit.’
‘Put back?’ I asked, aghast.
‘Hereditary debt. Now Erna has to be open three hundred and sixty-five days a year,’ Schlaf said, and slurped the soup of the day. ‘Better for us in any case.’
‘But no one talks about it outside of here,’ Ferdinand said, putting his arm around my shoulder. ‘What happens in the Pumpkin stays in the Pumpkin.’ And as if he had quoted a secret motto, everyone said it in unison: ‘What happens in the Pumpkin stays in the Pumpkin.’
The fact that some attempts were made to explain didn’t mean that the really essential things had become clear to me; there were secrets that I could not further penetrate, subtexts, whisperings that I perceived crackling in the air as clearly as I knew that asking about them would be pointless. In the beginning, the most prominent topic and, at the same time, the one that presented the greatest mystery to navigate, was, of course: the hole.
On the following Tuesday I realised that I’d spent a whole week in Greater Einland. I only noticed when my medication was running low, though I could have sworn that I’d only arrived two nights ago, everything had proceeded so marvellously gooeyly. Only now did I realise the urgency with which I needed to attend to the funeral.
I called the funeral parlour right away and made an appointment for that evening to finish what I had come to do. After I hung up, I needed a moment to regain my composure. I once again had a sinking and constricting feeling; a scratching at the back wall of the throat that led to a vision: how the coffins, lowered down by a crank, would merge with the earth. Once my heart had settled down, all that remained was a sense of obligation — the imperative will to organise the best of all funerals for my parents, full of sentiment and dignity, even if I had no idea what that was supposed to be. I would need to find out more about their roots in the town, something that would be the key to their entire lives. Intoxicated by this great sense of duty, I headed for the town hall, as I’d actually been planning to do for days. It was an eclectic white building — Greek columns, but extremely small Greek columns, as if someone had wanted to build the kind of structure one would find on the Vienna Ring Road and had decided at the last minute that they couldn’t stretch to those kinds of proportions.
‘Which way to the town archive?’
‘To the library? And your name?’ asked the woman at the entrance.
‘Exactly. I’m looking for documents about the town history. Schwarz.’
‘Elisabeth?’
I paused for a moment. ‘No, Ruth. Elisabeth is my mother,’ I accidentally replied in the present tense.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon. It’s just that she seems to come very regularly according to the system, a proper local historian. Sorry, I’ve only had this job a week,’ she said, while I just smiled and nodded. I was led to an underground section, with shelves filled with uniform blue-bound tomes set in one wall. It was lit by neon tubes, which lent the greenish room the aesthetic of an air raid bunker.
I looked around for a moment: here were hundreds and hundreds of books about Greater Einland — local chronicles in endless mutations, but also historical works, the contents of which stretched back to the Middle Ages. Thick volumes of historical land registers, entire atlases that named every piece of woodland, and comprehensive plans for every single house that had ever been built in the town. While I skimmed through the magnificent editions, I asked myself who could have written all this in a town with a population of a thousand. There were elaborate copperplate engravings in the encyclopaedias, and an ex libris stamped on the flyleaf in which I recognised the castle. Heritage cultivation must be a kind of popular sport here.
The most obvious thing to do was look for my mother’s parental home: in the map index for 1946, her birth year, there was actually an alphabetical glossary of family names. However, this referred, via a critical apparatus, to another quadrant, which could be found in another volume — just as if it was intentional that the simplest information could only be obtained with great difficulty. The authors weren’t listed alphabetically either, but rather listed according to the number of letters in their last name, so I first spent an hour counting over and over.
I had in mind a poignant ceremony at which I would weave details of my parents’ origins and their later passions into a consistent narrative. Instead I found myself in the folios, amidst trivial details that were absolutely not necessary to know. For example, when I thought I’d found a folder with class lists from the primary school, it broke off half-way through, and only listed the caretakers of the institution, their family relationships, and a log of any renovations they had carried out. Such a quantity of data, this flood of arbitrariness, had exactly the same effect as the inaccessibility of information: it was impossible to deduce anything concrete from it.
‘Excuse me,’ I finally said to the woman at the entrance, who was herself hanging over a book. ‘Is there perhaps a more compact local chronicle than those metres of shelves downstairs? The material is far too extensive.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘You only get access to them once you’ve registered as a resident, madam — it’s not desired for non-residents to read them.’
‘Seriously? Why?’ I asked.
‘There’s no specific reason for it, I guess, apart from the inconvenience of the customary local practices. But you can find enough on all topics, even beyond the chronicles.’
The woman had to have been about my age and bore the insignia of the young, left-wing academic — the first person I’d met here to do so: fashionable glasses, a
bag made from truck tarpaulin, and a mug from a refugee aid organisation. She interested me as a person, because she didn’t seem to fit into the image of the town but still somehow harmonised with it in a completely unique way.
‘I wonder — no, of course you can’t make any exceptions. I couldn’t ask that of you. What’s your name, by the way?’
‘Anita,’ she said, and held out her hand.
‘Anita — we can, I think, dispense with the formalities.’ A tentative nod. ‘So you mean it won’t be possible to take a very quick look at the local history to see what was happening in Greater Einland between 1944 and 1962? I would bring it right back. It’s urgent.’
‘It really won’t be possible,’ she said, but this time with a clearly guiltier conscience towards me; I sensed that she really wanted to grant my wish, but couldn’t. Now every piece of personal information, every trigger of empathy, would move her closer in my direction.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘my parents died recently. Both of them.’ And I left it at that for the time being — because Anita was already melting under the pressure of sentimentality.
‘Dear God — my condolences.’
‘And now it’s a matter of preparing them a dignified farewell. It was all so very sudden, I wasn’t able to say goodbye.’
‘That’s terrible,’ she said, and, as if to show her care, she let the book that she had been holding slip from her hand. It was The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. ‘I also lost my father recently.’
‘Awful,’ I said, then added: ‘You keep thinking about the last thing you said. It was just a week ago. I don’t have any siblings and I have to organise everything on my own.’
I watched her features closely — it was easy to overdo things like this. But I had judged it exactly right: her eyebrows were drawn down by an invisible weight. She wrestled with it.
‘And now I need the local chronicles because I don’t have much research time left in order to find out, well — I basically don’t know much about it. I’ve never actually been here before, and in my current emotional state it would be very difficult to sift through all this material.’
Anita was in a conflict that seemed to rock her body back and forth.
‘Are you an informant?’ she suddenly asked quietly.
‘An informant for who? No, of course not.’
She blushed and looked around. ‘The Countess sometimes checks that we’re keeping to the rules. And I’ve already taken a book without issuing a borrowing slip.’ Now she leaned across the table towards me, her mouth to my ear, so close that I could tell that my plan had worked. I felt guilty all of a sudden. ‘You can never tell anyone about it, okay? If the Countess finds out, I’ll be fired and out on the street.’
I took the book down to the basement and put it on a table, on which I had now gathered the most important volumes for my objective: I wanted to know more about where and how my parents had spent their childhood. With help from this new local chronicle, I ought to be able to find out where the street my mother’s parents’ house had stood on was today. Instead, I came across a section on the subject of estate names.
In Greater Einland, as well as in most of the rural regions of the German-speaking territory, the name of the estate or common name has always been understood as a designation of the place of residence in addition to the surname, which is given to all residents of a estate, even married couples, servants, obligated persons, children, godchildren, and yes, from time to time, animals. In spoken usage, the estate name usually overlays the family name after a certain time. One would say:
‘Hofer, commonly known as The Oakery’ or ‘The Jewry is on the Stocker Estate’ or ‘Lukas Hirtner lives up on Pig Hill Farm, so Pig Hill Lukas’.
One peculiarity of this mentality calls for an explanation. In many communities, people are understood as being part of a landscape. One cannot say that the environment would ever adapt to the residents — rather, the residents must grow into the landscape, adapt to it, belong to it.
In this sense, ownership seems to likewise be the other way around, as the place names suggest: the people work for the farm — the farm is what remains, the people who manage it cease to be.
But it also means: only those who know the name can take possession of the land, and only those who have a specific name can belong to the surrounding area. On the other hand, if you have a name that does not belong to it, you have to remain a foreign body. Only those who know what has happened in the landscape can grow into it; those who are not connected to its past cannot allow themselves any hope of a future in it. It is known that after the death of the so-called ‘owner’ of a farm, people sometimes inherited not only his property, but also his staff and his relatives .
If the traditional appellations were the warp threads, the names newly laid over them are simply the weft threads that weave everything into a tight fabric. Fabric was to be understood mythically here: This has been well-documented at the current Oakery, formerly also known as The Burners, because two different versions of its history were in circulation: that in times of yore a clay burner is said to have sintered the most exquisite goods, is the first. Second, however, that in 1656 a peddler-woman from the village by the name of Anna Halfer was found guilty of witchcraft and was burned with her ten and three-year-old daughters, locked in the hayloft, a few days before the trial. Both explanations could be correct; however, an oak tree was planted on the property around 1860 to end the debate.
I finally understood why it was so difficult to find individual houses or to orientate oneself in the general material. A register of every single house was attached, infinitely extensive and rich with detail, with illustrations of window sills and the most precise calculations for the construction of the roof trusses. The house descriptions weren’t an isolated case; the entire chronicle had a peculiar structure. After the long part about the estate names, there was an account of the history of public buildings with the same thoroughness. This was made considerably more difficult by one factor: on 22 April 1945, the town had been smashed into a heap of ruins. Apparently, the enemy had known that aircraft parts, essential for the war, were being manufactured in the mine, and had reacted promptly:
This wrecked form dragged on for about three hundred and forty days. When the Russians finally allowed it, everyone comprehended the impossibility of clearing the set pieces of the former buildings, although everyone from primary school children to pensioners would have been willing to tackle it. But Greater Einland only had around nine hundred citizens who were even capable of movement — after all, all young men had been sent to the front. So it was collectively decided to pour a total of sixteen thousand cubic metres of concrete and small stones over everything that had once been Greater Einland, and thus the heap of rubble and all the possessions, corpses, parts of buildings, furniture, canals, destroyed vehicles, and buried weapons within it were to be poured into a hardened foundation for the future. After that, the entire town, as it was before the bombing, was rebuilt a few metres higher, and based on historical photos. A true-scale replica. However, no pictures were taken of a few of the buildings and they were simply forgotten during the reconstruction, which is why the grid has slipped imperceptibly. One map had been laid over the other, and this had displaced the first — in some places only by a few centimetres, in others by a few metres. Greater Einland had shifted.
The last chapter was the longest: the historical narration of the town’s history in the Middle Ages. It began with a brief summary of the founding of the high market, the plague epidemic, and so on — but after that I found a strange fable, which took up most of the book, about someone called Pergerhannes. He was — as I gathered from the first sentence — a wealthy craftsman in the seventeenth century, who had surrendered himself to a fanatical goldrush and built an underground tunnel system beneath the town. Just as I was delving deeper, I heard footsteps on the stairs and turned around, hop
ing it would only be Anita. Sure enough, she appeared in the basement. But something didn’t feel right at all. Wearing a grave expression, she rushed over to the table, and took the local chronicle, which she immediately slipped into the pocket of her dress, out of my hands.
‘The Countess wants to see you,’ she said.
7
In front of the steps that led to the town hall, a woman and a man were waiting who weren’t, as I had first thought, Count and Countess, but who informed me that they were supposed to escort me to the castle.
‘We have come to take you to your appointment,’ the woman said after we had gone out into the street. I watched with amusement as they flanked me to the left and right, like I was a criminal being transferred from one prison to another — the situation was so ridiculous that I didn’t know what to say and instead cooperated in silence. Even my escorts didn’t break the silence as they led me through the less-frequented side streets past the main square to the beginning of the hill, on whose peak the castle stood. Apart from its two towers, the windows of which rose up illuminated from the negative space of the treetops, it was concealed by thick woodland. As we left the asphalt road behind the town wall, we were in complete darkness. The dirt path led into a tangle of roots; stones protruded from the forest track, which I tripped on while walking. In these moments one of my two companions, who incidentally found their way around like cats, would always grab me under the arm and pull me on. Their silence had suddenly become eerie to me: no information, no reassurance, no end, no time, no orientation — and worse still: my own silence in response.
But then we were stepping back out of the forest and standing before the castle, which now presented itself to its full scope. The mood had immediately turned into benign baroque: a so-called French garden, in which the bushes had been trimmed into the form of Platonic solids (cylinder, sphere, cone), and at the centre of which was a fountain, home to half a dozen water-spraying putti. The lawn looked as if it had been cut with nail scissors, and as a final flourish someone had, in this perfect lawn, as if in mockery, hammered in a sign that read ‘Keep Off the Grass’. We walked along a white gravel path to an entrance door, which was immediately opened by an incredibly old little man, a person whom I instantly identified from his clothes as a butler. His upper body must have been bent in servitude for so long that scoliosis and age had now cemented him into this position, seeing as he didn’t abandon the right-angle when leading me into the building. But his golden buttons sparkled, and his shoes were freshly polished.
The Liquid Land Page 7