The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  The supermarkets were, in fact, Potemkin villages, with counterfeit Coca-Cola brewed in pharmacies, locally produced toilet paper in mass-produced packaging, and salamis that according to the label were from Hungary, but in reality came from the butcher around the corner. This reversal of proportions amused me for a while, and I wondered where the oysters on my plate, which had been carried in on great platters, were really from. Puddles in the hole?

  ‘We could task our town council with creating a campaign that blames the cold chain for the slightly different taste. But the message must always be conveyed that the products are still palatable, that it only affects the taste, not the quality, maybe even that the quality increases because of it,’ the dirndl-wearing woman said, anxiously watching the Countess’s reaction.

  I neither understood many of the personal references that were made, nor the measures or resolutions, which always depended on the Countess’s opinion. Nothing had progressed by the time the next item was called.

  ‘The art action,’ called out Engineer Heinzelmann, in the middle of the discussion already underway. Everyone fell silent.

  ‘The art action will be taking place, that’s it, the end,’ was the Countess’s decree. ‘Now everything’s settled, I can let Frau Schwarz in on our intentions. You’re already up to speed about the hole. And that we’ve been struggling with certain issues since the beginning of the year,’ she said, and pointed incongruously at the parquet floor.

  ‘I’ve seen the main square,’ I said, to show my lack of clarity on the matter. A certain embarrassment spread around the room, which only the Countess herself seemed to confidently command.

  ‘For many centuries we had an extremely lucrative mine in our town, which, over a long period of time, has unfortunately softened the soil a little. The thing is, at the moment the subsidence is happening faster than expected. At times certain properties on the top lip of the main funnel show subsidence of about a centimetre a day. Centuries-old marble floors breaking asunder, and people sitting in their living rooms on the stone foundations, which is admittedly an unpleasant situation,’ she explained. ‘Of course it doesn’t look nice when buildings warp, and visitors notice it, too. Not long ago a tractor was swallowed up, luckily without the farmer, who was in the pigsty at the time. In the last few decades we have tried everything possible to stop the subsidence, but pouring concrete into the hole was futile. We’re talking about tens of millions of cubic metres. Herr Loipold, our geologist, can perhaps explain further.’

  It was the previously so very intrusive Philipp who now stood up with a plan in his hand, which he laid out on the table for all to see. It showed a lateral view of Greater Einland: the urban area that lay flat like a large birthmark on the muscular shoulder of the Hochwechsel, the mountain range’s highest summit, and sloped profoundly to the left and right. The diagram revealed a gigantic hollow space beneath the town, which, airily underpinned like a gothic cathedral, was only held up by thin stalactite columns. The most calamitous thing about it, which I immediately recognised, even as a layperson, were the water reservoirs spread out over multiple levels — underneath the cavity was another one, and even a third underneath that. As thin as layers of dough, only spongy crusts, on which water was resting, separated the levels from one another.

  ‘The hole is of unknown depths, bifurcations and dampness,’ Philipp explained. ‘The layers of earth surrounding it have become so wet from the seepage that the walls of the shafts are wet all year round. This ensures that the water trickling down from the reservoirs on the upper levels quickly leads to further breaches. You can imagine the slow slackening of a sand castle that has been built too close to the waterline, and is therefore borne away from below. We also have high concentrations of methane here and here.’ He pointed at zones that had been flecked with ochre. A smouldering core of inflammation seemed to extend into the rock like a deep boil — beneath the market, in particular.

  ‘We examined the mountain like a precious body — as minimally invasive as possible.’ Philipp winked at me. ‘That means endoscopically: We put cameras and other probes into its guts and, interestingly enough, we have found time and time again what would be found in human intestines.’

  ‘Bacteria,’ I elaborated.

  ‘Precisely. Due to the ongoing geological activity, fine bifurcations are tearing into the rock — these layers are chemically very active and lead to new cultures. The upper layers of earth, here, as well as directly below the leakages of water are downright teeming with life. The metabolic waste products of these little animalcules — completely harmless in normal forest floors, and even important for the biosphere — lead to stability problems in the slag left behind by mining.’ The salon attendees were scratching their heads furtively or eagerly refilling each other’s water glasses.

  ‘We have to support the main shaft first, otherwise the most valuable real estate, the historic buildings, will collapse. The subsidence goes back to the sixties,’ Philipp said.

  ‘To the fifties, if you must know,’ interrupted the Countess. ‘And we will support everything, it’s about eliminating the overall syndrome.’

  I was struck by the way the Countess would always let her counterpart speak first, only to then strike at all the weak points in their speech like a viper.

  ‘You also know, of course, that our beautiful town was badly damaged in the turmoil of the Second World War, and that after the bombing, two-metre-high mounds of earth were added so buildings could be placed on top in their original positions.’

  She gave a dramatic pause. ‘Unfortunately, in the course of the subsidence, sections of buildings keep breaking through, which is also regrettable for the appearance of the town. Summa summarum, we have decided’ — the Countess stood up — ‘that our erosion ought to become one of the greatest art actions in the world.’

  Now the previously bored listeners broke out into a frenetic applause, which the Countess calmed with royal nonchalance: ‘We will declare the subsidence as Actionism and bring together tourists on a grand scale. This is primarily about relevant, lasting art, but earning a little from it would not be undesirable to us. Of course, Frau Schwarz, as you can imagine, a comprehensive concept such as this needs time to be developed. Great art also takes a great amount of effort — and it will take a few months, if not years, until the ideas we have in mind are market-ready. It’s for precisely this reason that we need you.’

  The idea was absurd. How would mass tourism fit into such a sleepy hollow? There wasn’t even a road into the town.

  ‘I have to disappoint you — I’m not artistically talented,’ I said.

  ‘No, you stupid girl. You will, of course, find a way of slowing down the subsidence and buying us some time until we have more concrete ideas for the art action. We need a physicist who can develop a filling agent for us that can be injected, and in such a way that brings effective publicity.’

  ‘Frau — Countess, I cannot do that. Again: I am not a biophysicist, but rather concern myself with theoretical physics. With time. Up to now I’ve never even done a single experiment, I only work on paper.’

  ‘Wonderful, with time. Then you can slow down the time it takes for the Market Square to sink. It’s a matter of giving people hope, do you understand?’

  Stunned by the conviction the Countess displayed, I was no longer able to insist.

  ‘I’ll read up on it and see if I can contribute,’ I said. This was a relief to everyone — the group broke out into applause again, and I myself was relieved not to feel all expectations on me anymore. A communality had developed around us — that is, I had wandered from an outside to an inside, as if petals had closed over us. In my promise to the Countess I had already become one of her own, and, shockingly, I liked it for a moment, before I really considered what I had just announced. It didn’t matter; after I’d organised the funeral I would just disappear anyway.

  ‘As already di
scussed, we’re planning a major exhibition that is designed for several hundred thousand visitors,’ said a young woman, whom I now recognised as the librarian, Anita. ‘We’re thinking two to three times the capacity of Dokumenta. The first step will be to have the hole declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inclusive of the subsidence, of course.’

  I rummaged in my handbag, my fingers stiff, found my tablets, and swallowed a Xanax. I impatiently waited for the drug to kick in, to feel its cushioning effect, the non-appearance of which unsettled me even more. I would excuse myself, I thought, but already didn’t know what for. I had washed down the sedative with a copious amount of alcohol. Someone grabbed my shoulder and asked if everything was alright. I saw statistics being daubed on a flipchart. Freshly served goose cuts were flying into mouths, making me feel very numb. I could barely keep up with the pace.

  The talk became more and more fragmentary and incoherent, as if it were a piece of equipment in need of assembly: ‘The goal we are aiming for is to be able to celebrate the grand opening in around twenty months. To do this, we need to replenish the brass band, and we don’t have enough personnel in the volunteer fire department to provide security. In the underground chamber of the town there’ll be a real Chagall, which our Countess is allowing us to use’ — more applause — ‘and the necessary struts have already been ordered from China. The local population will be initiated bit by bit, there will possibly be a referendum. The working title is, as you know: Project Underground.’

  In the middle of the lecture I stood up with such gusto that the plates I’d loaded over and over again with food fell to the floor. ‘I don’t feel well. I’ll be leaving early today,’ I said, as if I’d been going to the salons for years. I raised my hand to wave, but recognised in the middle of the movement how inadequate the gesture was, and left my hand hanging in the air until I’d finally found the resolve to remove myself from the table. No one came after me, and I flew down the stairs, where I got away through the mercifully unattended entrance hall. The fresh air sobered me up. But the relief of being by myself again was accompanied by the feeling that it had been wrong to leave — as if I would now miss something that I would forevermore be deprived of. An icy, ghostly quiet night still needed to be traversed, and as I turned back again, the tenderly illuminated window seemed enticing once more. Only then did it hit me again: barely two weeks ago, my parents had been sitting up there.

  On one of my very first days in Greater Einland I had discovered the so-called memorial while running an errand. It was in close proximity to the supermarket, and yet so inconspicuous that someone could walk by the hedge their whole life without seeing it. I climbed the four steps to the grassy plateau on which a few gladioli were growing around a marble rectangle.

  ‘In Memory of the Incidents’ it said on the stone, and for several minutes I wondered which incidents it could be referring to. As I crouched down and touched the plate with my fingertips, I noticed that another sentence had been engraved underneath it, so eroded that I could hardly decipher it: ‘In this place some perished who ought not to be forgotten,’ I read, and found everything even more cryptic.

  A little chapel stood nearby, seemingly independent from it, with a crying Mary in the window. This in turn read: Thirty-four bodies rest here.

  Since I hadn’t let go of the matter even after my return to the tavern, I decided to speak to Frau Erna about it directly. In reply she pressed a folder into my hands and cheerfully asked me how the Countess’s salon had gone. I looked at the slips of paper inside the folder, which, in their aloofness, had something disarmingly open about them: no graphic elements, no typographical emphasis adorned the block of text. To this day I am amazed that the information was given as easily at first glance as it had been forgotten by the public consciousness.

  I read the history over lunch. It was a sober report with a few isolated contemporary citations mixed in. It was fashioned like this:

  On Easter Monday, 2 April 1945, all two thousand prisoners of the annex camp III / Mauthausen / Gau Greater Vienna were removed from the shallow mine, where they had been tasked with screwing together airplane parts for the last thirteen months. When they had been grouped in squares of a hundred on the meadow in front of the barracks near the main descent, it was decided, since the sheer number of them could not be contained, to send one thousand two hundred of them on a death march towards Burgenland. While the bells were ringing for a second time for mass, and the children were screeching with pleasure looking for the colourful Easter eggs in the nearby gardens, the column filed out as quietly and wordlessly as it had come. The villagers who were on their way to church later irregularly reported having seen this exodus, but most of them claimed to have still been sleeping on the day in question.

  It was a cold morning, with temperatures barely above freezing, and the remaining eight hundred men stood barefoot in the grey snow. The camp guards that had been left behind — ten men, six of whom were barely of age — trembled agitatedly. They blocked out the sense of being overwhelmed, the sheer quantity, but not least the cutting cold. The order was given; the utterly exhausted and emaciated prisoners were locked back in the barracks around eight o’clock so that they could be processed in small groups of forty people. They were told to lie on their backs, in the hoarfrost, with their arms stretched out at their sides. Then their striped, soiled uniform was unbuttoned and a petrol injection was administered just under the breastbone.

  The inexperienced security guards had orders to save money for the inevitable defence of Vienna. They were slapdash and not up to the task, so that the injections completely missed in a third of the cases. If the heart is punctured precisely with an injection of petrol, death occurs within a few minutes, but if the lungs are punctured, a process of cramps, paralysis, and finally suffocation, which lasts for many hours, sets in.

  By that afternoon the ten guards — of which two groups of five took turns digging a pit and giving the injections — had killed two hundred people, of whom at least seventy were still in the throes of mortal agony. Now, since digging a mass grave presented a considerable effort, the men started to get nervous. So it was decided to bury the remaining prisoners alive as quickly as possible.

  The bodies were rolled into the pits forty at a time, and the loose earth was tipped over them while the next forty were being fetched from the barracks. It would take more men to dig; it would take the next forty to prepare the ground for the next forty. The guards were frozen and tired when they heard strange noises as they came out of their quarters. In the increasingly blacker scenery it was hardly noticeable at first, when suddenly bodies from below, that is, out of the already filled pit, began to squirm, the last ones still alive, who had worked their way out of the graves, gasping for air. Then shots.

  But what I didn’t understand was this: if around eight hundred people remained in Greater Einland, and only thirty-four were at rest in the memorial, as had been written, what had happened to the other seven hundred and sixty-six?

  9

  It was a biting cold morning as I walked into the suburbs. I found the funeral parlour only after some delay, and I even considered allowing the appointment to fall through again to avoid the inevitable. After leaving the guesthouse I had still hoped for something fortuitous, something unforeseen. Something that could keep me from getting there.

  The route led past staggered semi-detached houses, each painted in two different colours in order to pretend that they were separate buildings that did not belong together. But the rooms were cheek to cheek, garage to garage — like mirrors facing each other, stretching down the street into infinity. The atmosphere called for rain, and the bourgeois asphalt frayed into puddles at the edges, which, on days like these, the very damp earth of Greater Einland pushed to the surface.

  Like every funeral parlour, the name of the company was a composition that was supposed to have a calming effect, and which I can no longer remember because i
t was so interchangeable: Heavenward or Pale Blue, Chiming Teardrop, Dreamwater, Music from the Heart, Pain Fire, Ever Earth, Life’s Drum, Springsummer, Rushing Wind, Autumn Feeling, Swaying Eyes, Green Thought, Fruit of Love, Flight of Air, Eternal Sun, or something similar. Soundless fully automatic doors inhaled me. The employee who received me had evidently been instructed in trauma work and reassured me with verbal cotton balls. Soft swirls of colour hung on canvasses everywhere, and the staff was dressed in pastel, from the cleaner to the receptionist.

  I was shown into a meeting room, where I discussed the details of the funeral with a funeral director. After only a few minutes I was exhausted from the list of invitees I’d drawn up in my head, while the woman presented me with a selection of pieces of music: I nodded at everything immediately, my body suddenly bereft of all strength. It had been a long time since I’d thought about the extraordinary ceremony I’d initially decided upon, and I put little crosses under the first coffin, the first flower arrangement and priest’s speeches that were brought to me. Everything began to add up to a stately sum, which I eventually signed off on. It wasn’t overly expensive — maybe even a bargain for a funeral — but certainly enough that I had to pay for it with my credit card, and immediately suppress the consequences of this payment.

  ‘Good,’ the woman said gently. ‘When can we expect them, your parents?’ Even though I’d anticipated this question, I was caught off guard. It was an irrevocable sign that I would now have to make the call I’d been putting off for so long.

  ‘I have to clarify that quickly,’ I said. ‘May I use your phone?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, visibly surprised that I didn’t have any exact dates, but not wanting to disturb the general piety. With quiet professionalism, she turned the telephone on her desk towards me. I called the directory assistance to request my aunt’s phone number. Every digit was a torture that could no longer be avoided.