The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘Boo, only the best is good enough for the Professor,’ Ferdinand said, flicking the glass bottle before throwing his deck of cards on the table. Now that I had been socially accepted after my first official visit to the castle, I often sat long after midnight, drinking and playing skat, while I listened to stories about the town. The mythical world around the hole, especially, electrified me. On one of these evenings, after we’d ordered the fifth round of pear schnapps, Master-Builder Keinermüller paused in the middle of one of his obscene toasts and stared enraptured at the wall.

  ‘Ah, he’s seeing martyrs again,’ Ferdinand said, poking him in the ribs and laughing.

  ‘Martyrs?’ I asked. Everyone apart from Ferdinand seemed a little embarrassed.

  ‘Saint Thomas, the patron saint of room carpenters and builders, appeared before my blessed grandfather in the mine,’ Keinermüller said at last with a husky voice, and then was silent for a long time before he continued speaking. ‘Saint Thomas was very muscular and his eyes shimmered turquoise, my grandfather told me. He was barefoot and only wore a thin tunic, and yet he wasn’t cold.’

  ‘Maybe that was because of his holiness. You don’t freeze so quickly,’ Sister Elfriede interjected.

  ‘My grandfather took a vow the very next morning. Every house that springs loose from the subsidence, should in days to come be renovated by his business, and only with the limestone from the hole itself at that.’

  I watched, with disgust, the thick water in my glass swaying back and forth. Then Sister Elfriede spoke up. ‘I remember the Master-Builder from my childhood, may he rest in peace. He had a serene aura, with his soft eyes and wavy hair. Like in an Italian fresco.’

  ‘And back then he already knew that it was ne’er long now that the hole once more belongs to us,’ Kainermüller finished, and Sister Elfriede nodded vigorously.

  ‘What do you mean, that the hole belongs to us again?’ I asked.

  ‘And we’ve had important traditions on St Thomas’s Day ever since. The young men go to the old entrance to the mine and hammer a nail into the locked wooden gate blindfolded. With a rock they must have found themselves. And the nail is forged from pewter.’

  ‘Pewter from the region,’ Sister Elfriede added.

  ‘Sorry, but who was the hole taken over from?’ I asked again.

  ‘Well, from the ones back then, that specific time,’ Keinermüller said. ‘Where we’d been occupied to a certain extent. It was an expropriation.’

  ‘Only if the victim sacrifices something themselves will they be free again,’ Sister Elfriede said.

  These stories amazed me: the priest in Greater Einland was a respected man, and some people took pride in appearing at mass on Sundays, but it seemed more of a habit, a long-held custom rather than true piety. I’d never seen anyone in the Pumpkin pray. ‘I had no idea Greater Einland was so religious,’ I said.

  ‘Come off it, religious! This goes far beyond religion. It’s about sacrifice, because we hold certain things in very high esteem here. Indeed, man is wedded to where they come from, with the ground from which we all come.’

  ‘What things do you hold in high esteem?’ I asked, but suddenly everyone went silent and couldn’t turn back to the skat quickly enough. I had to ask something innocuous to bring the conversation to an amicable end.

  ‘So, is that why you became a Master-Builder?’

  ‘Spades trump,’ Keinermüller murmured, and I played.

  8

  It wasn’t until a few days after the strange encounter with the Countess that it occurred to me that I’d had missed my appointment for the funeral arrangements. I hurriedly called the company’s office from the reception and invented a tall tale about a psychological breakdown. The lady in the secretary’s office gave me a new appointment for the following day without complaint, and asked me whether I happened to already know when my parents would be transferred.

  I said that I didn’t, and promised to be in touch again soon. Too restless to work, I listened, lying on the floor back in my room, to a couple of Chet Baker albums I’d bought in a second-hand shop, which fused with the autumn weather. It had been damp for the last few days, and, from sunrise to sunset, twilight had covered everything — there was the perpetual sneaking feeling that rot had already set in beneath the autumn leaves.

  Heavy-limbed I went back downstairs to do my duty — there was no Internet, so I had to consult the telephone book in discussion with Frau Erna.

  I dialled my aunt’s number, slowly and almost fearful of the final last digit, which my index finger swiped into the rotary dial — but as soon as the second ring tone sounded, I hung up the receiver and went outside.

  On all of the ten days that I’d spent in Greater Einland up to that point, I had roamed the landscape like a restless animal. I, who had always been a passionate city dweller, now became anxious if I spent more than three or four hours in an enclosed space. I would begin to get up every five minutes and look at the nature outside of my window, which hid itself like a ghost behind the house fronts. Everything seemed to take place in this landscape. Storms and downpours, clouds of fog, but especially thunder gave off an irresistible allure that in a few minutes could compel me into my boots and out onto the rounded, wooded mountain top — in the forest, on the heath, and near the entry points to the hole. There were three or four of them — former exits for the miners who had still been driving into the mountains a few decades previously.

  I never tired of exploring the extensive topographies here, for several hours a day. I often didn’t notice that I had been walking through clotted mud and that hard clumps of dirt had trickled into my waistband. I had a particularly intense relationship with moss: a soft field was hard to resist. Lying on the foothills of the rocks, I breathed in its earthy scent. It was an endless enticement that changed with the seasons and never lost its charm. Every blade of grass, a sensitive extension of my own nerves — as if everything were made from the same thoughts, and as if that which had covered the meadows with dew after a cool night was now bedewing me, too. On some days, the harshness of nature affected me far too much to resist, and I dropped my work to rush outside. On others, I felt this desire as an analytical thirst for knowledge, borrowed a nature guide from the library, and categorised the plants and beetles until it got dark or my dose of codeine wore off. Even the pine cones seemed to me to be an innate expression of a deep truth that had to be understood from the soil in a hard, knotty language. I didn’t have anything in common with the people of Greater Einland — on the contrary — instead, I began to melt into the nature around the town. After just a few days I found my way around intuitively; later, after weeks, the forest had become an extension of my own body. In short, this was a long sought-after sense of belonging, an identification that connected me to the landscape. I would almost say: I’d found a home.

  When I came home one evening from one of my sprawling walks, I was stopped by Frau Erna.

  ‘Ruth,’ she called, ‘someone phoned you back, I wrote it down. Your aunt, can that be right? She said she had a missed call from you, and has tried to call four or five times since then. It sounded urgent.’

  ‘Thank you very much, but I can’t call her back till tomorrow. I’ll be with the Countess tonight,’ I said as a form of deflection, which I immediately regretted when I saw the effect it had on Erna.

  ‘In the salon? You? Ruth, that’s incredible, after barely two weeks — Ruth Schwarz has been invited to a salon!’ she called into the parlour, and, to my horror, everyone turned in my direction and exuberantly raised a glass to me. Erna was downright beside herself. ‘I don’t know if you know how exclusive it is, most of us will never get to be at a salon. Our Philipp is sometimes invited, too, he’s a geologist.’

  The whole scene put me in a tight spot, as I’d only wanted an excuse to delay calling back.

  ‘Philipp will certainly accompany you, if you like. P
hilipp, when are you going?’

  ‘That’s not necessary, I’d like to go on my own,’ I said quickly.

  ‘I’ll be on my way in ten minutes,’ a young man called from the bar, loudly zipping up his jacket. He looked to be around my age, and had the kind of haircut that would go with a band shirt just as well as it would with a polo shirt.

  ‘Together it is,’ Erna said. ‘And tomorrow at breakfast you can tell everyone what was discussed. We’re always curious about what’s going on up there.’

  Up there, they said when they talked about the castle — a phrase that embodied both awe and admiration simultaneously, because ‘up there’ referred to a place of longing that was, as long as one still longed for it, as a precaution, always also subliminally despised. Otherwise you would have had to despise yourself for not having yet been there. The whole room trembled gleefully with envy, like a sulky block of aspic. Nothing more could be done; I would have to make an appearance at the salon. Appallingly, Philipp now appeared, the so-called geologist, hat ready to put onto his head. I could tell from his facial expression that he was psyching himself up to flirt, while Frau Erna had clenched both her hands over her pressed thumbs in an ominous good-luck gesture right in front of my face. No sooner had we closed the door behind us and turned onto the main square than I remembered that I was still wearing jeans, which were rigid with mud.

  One of the most enigmatic facets of human existence is the speed with which we are able to adapt and take what had seemed so bizarre as a given. When I saw the castle for the second time in my life, it seemed to me the most normal thing in the world that the staff took the coats of the guests being loaded out of expensive cars. I was relieved to be able to part from the geologist, who, as expected, tried to hit on me several times on the way. First, probably to prolong the conversation, he led us unnecessarily through countless cumbersome suburban plots. The highpoint of the conversation was an invitation to his thirty-fifth birthday, which was to be celebrated with a big party in a remote hall in Oberschenkelbach next weekend. ‘Bad Taste Party. Motto: Bad, worse, worst, worstest. You should be ashamed of yourself. That’s the theme,’ he had begun abruptly and huddled close to me, claiming that he couldn’t see anything in the dark. Then he went a step further. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Erich and Elisabeth. I had got so used to their visits up at the castle.’

  ‘At the castle?’ I asked. ‘Why were they at the castle? And when?’

  ‘Well, every week, with the Countess. After all, that’s why they were — you know, they’d even spent the night there on the day of the accident. But maybe I’m remembering it wrongly. See you shortly.’

  We had turned onto the castle grounds and were, weirdly, separated according to gender at the cloakrooms.

  ‘I may ask you to come to the tables,’ said a young woman in an apron, her phrasing as awkward as the old man’s had been a few days previously. The reception hall was lavishly decorated. It looked as if Jay Gatsby and Austrian country aesthetics had celebrated their nuptials: abundant arrangements of gentian flowers were placed among the deer antlers, and pumpkin kitsch (floral arrangements, wreaths, macramé), presumably meant to create an autumnal atmosphere, lay inelegantly about the room while people peeled off their winter coats.

  The other guests evidently knew one another, and flung themselves about each other with embraces, cheek kisses, low bows, and handshakes. I was a foreign body in this tightly woven network of acquaintances, and considered fleeing one last time. Instead I sloshed upstairs, driven by the crowd, and into the right wing of the building — the one I hadn’t yet been in. No one apart from me had transgressed the evident formal dress code. I tried unsuccessfully, as we entered the splendidly decorated salon, to hide my now brown jeans and the coarse-knitted jumper under my coat. The glances were unavoidable, though; I looked like a vagrant.

  Name cards for each guest were set out on a long ornate table, but while everyone else found their seats with magnetic assuredness, I was like an aimlessly fluttering insect while searching for mine. It was only when the last person was seated that I could determine my place as a gap between the others. As soon as I sat down, an oppressive silence fell over the company at the table, which lasted almost a minute before the melodramatic clacking of steps could be heard. In a floor-length skirt and matching jacket, the Countess entered the salon and sat at the head of the table.

  ‘Welcome to the tenth salon of this year,’ she said. ‘Please, be at ease.’ An exhalation went through the group, as if they had collectively emerged from the water. Only then did I realise that I, too, had been holding my breath and now, breathing heavily, gripped the table.

  ‘We have a new guest in our midst, the young physicist Ruth Schwarz, who in the future may act as my advisor. In matters of stability, in relation to our great indisposition.’

  I protested weakly, but still couldn’t catch my breath — I briefly raised my hand, which was only taken by the others as an indication that I wanted to make myself known as the person being referred to. The Countess continued with her introduction: ‘Frau Schwarz, here at this table are the most significant personalities in our wonderful town. I will skip an explicit round of introductions, but you will get to know everyone in time. Honoured friends, I plan to initiate Frau Schwarz in all of our projects. She is a native,’ the Countess explained.

  ‘Only my parents are from here,’ I finally interjected.

  ‘So native,’ the Countess cut off. ‘Frau Schwarz, this is the town council. If you wish, you may feel extremely ennobled to be present here.’

  I raised my hand again. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for the mayor?’

  Everyone except the Countess laughed, as if a child had asked something adorable and dumb.

  ‘Frau Schwarz, the mayor is not part of our business,’ the Countess said calmly. ‘You see, in this town, as in our country as a whole, there are two bodies that operate separately. There is the old order as we practise it here, and then the new one, which at a certain point was simply spread over the first, without considering the grown, organic structures. These now grind up against one another, which creates a number of problems.’ At this point she waved in the waiters, and the topic was over. ‘The appetisers and today’s agenda, Engineer Heinzelmann.’

  Four young women now carried in tray after tray, heavily laden with antipasti, truffle salami, French speciality cheeses, olives, vol-au-vents, pieces of roast duck in cranberry sauce, and dozens of bread baskets full of baked goods. In addition, fine red wines were served. Everything was exquisitely delicious. I was only vaguely aware that an elderly gentleman with a rattling voice had begun to voice the day’s agenda. ‘Preliminary meeting one, prolegomena for a trade regulation. Main point one, art actions to make use of the collapses; point two, discussions on the allocation of properties on the Wastl-Hohe —’

  The rest became a blur to me while I enjoyed a scallop, which, with its orange and garlic sauce and roasted rosemary, triggered an ecstatic response within me. I would just sit in silence at this table, get intoxicated from the culinary delights, and before anyone could infiltrate me, start walking home again. Engineer Heinzelmann was like a debutante, responsible for every curtsy and opening of the floor for every plan point, but was time and time again reprimanded by the Countess, who took the lead on his little dances.

  ‘We have received complaints that people would like to have one of the large supermarket chains that are prevalent in the rest of Austria represented in town, instead of our tried and tested system of grocers,’ he said. ‘But that’s nothing new.’

  ‘Absolutely not, that’s out of the question. The discussion is open,’ the Countess said with the finality of a judge’s verdict.

  ‘Of course, we have no interest in the products of globalisation,’ a man in an old military uniform began. I could read the name on his chest: Colonel General Heidenthal. But the longer I studied his regalia, the more unsure I was whe
ther it was a made-up uniform, as there were subtle differences that distinguished it from the normal army uniform. ‘So the question can be reduced to how we convey the impression that they are nevertheless there. So far, we have been able to replicate around fifty per cent of the products in demand.’

  ‘Lilly, what do the salespeople say?’ the Countess asked an old woman wearing a dirndl and apron.

  ‘We are still working on Coca-Cola. People keep complaining about a liquorice smell. The cream cheese often clumps together, and sometimes we have to write up new lids with different best-before dates on a daily basis. So it’s a bit inconvenient,’ she said.

  ‘From my point of view, we have to desensitise people and, through public intervention, persuade them that we shouldn’t be so sensitive when it comes to tastes. This kind of conversation must be stopped,’ the Countess said.

  The matter was structured like so: because local products were promoted as part of an almost gigantic initiative, but the population longed for international brands, they had begun to have the latter reproduced by local companies and passed off as originals using self-printed labels. It seemed, however, to have led to a problem not thought through in advance: people wondered why the gummy bears from the adverts were already available, but other sweets of the same brand weren’t, and now a legion of food technicians and grocers were constantly working on copies of a variety of offerings that never quite matched the original.