The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  At that time, the main entrance and the water tower were bordered by the Korngasse area and today’s Schlossstrasse that now leads directly to the castle. This first tunnel, which was created with gunpowder using the blasting technique customary at the time, is still connected today with various superstitions: In the 1980s, for instance, the new elementary school building was relocated away from the intersection of Siedlungsstrasse/Bachgasse, because a planned football pitch would have been near the uppermost shaft entranceway, and the majority of parents had spoken out against this positioning.

  Little of the story of Pergerhannes can boast real authenticity; the entire set of issues around him was, for the most part, passed on orally. The most detailed written source is only a century old and formulated in an extremely unusual tone. The fact that this report, which was set down in 1897, was not signed by a named author also proves that the material was an orally transmitted local epic long before it was committed to paper:

  Perger Hanns is a wealthy businessman of around forty-five and well known in the town when one day word gets around that he has succumbed to a silver rush.

  Even though Perger Hannes is already served by twenty serfs who scratch the skin off their bones for him from the anthrax tanning agent, he can’t get enough. The stinking holes proliferate on the outskirts of the town and make the surrounding soil rot into infertility through lesions. Nevertheless, one sells the exotic products of this weathering work, which include: cow and goat leather, but above all the wolf hides, which, known far beyond the local borders, attract traders to Greater Einland.

  Pergerhanns is respected, but despised. The symptomatic manifestations of the tanning profession, whose unclean trade always makes one into a leper, ensure that he is avoided. He remains unmarried for life.

  It can be assumed that Hanns Perger solely used his own assets to expand the facility, which he ultimately sold again. The historical report claims a ‘silver rush’ as the reason behind this: in 1629, Perger invested all of his savings in mining, the same year in which the first Greater Einlander borehole bottom was commissioned. However, dealing with the sources becomes difficult at the point where the digging of the very tunnel is described. Here, the report seems almost mythical:

  The conspiratorial stones lie deviously close together as Pergerhann’s men use hand chisels and horse-drawn winches to dig into the rock, driven forward by fifteen sprightly climbers who rotate in shifts. He himself is caught in wet dreams of the mountain, the wet walls of which appear to him like the sweet enthralment of coitus. Once he has been on the surface for more than a day, he can hardly stand it and descends again, where sweet voices whisper promises about the treasures in the deep.

  The exploration team quickly came across exploitable substances, and after a month the rumour spread that silver had finally been found. However, the quantities did not seem to have satisfied the master leather tanner in the least; under the hard hand of Pergerhannes, they dig deeper into the rock. Twenty-four hours, around the clock, the entire course of the sun that nobody sees anymore. They rest and pray and eat and sleep in never-ending darkness. Due to the increasing confusion and the perennial cold below ground, it soon becomes difficult to keep one’s bearings. More and more jeopardies are hazarded for the tunnelling. A sixteen-year-old boy is the first to be devoured by the rock. When the thin youth with his bronze lamp is believed to have been crawling through a narrow shaft with a suspected cave behind it, an unexpected inrush of water occurred, washing in a large amount of debris and restricting the return path and the breathable air of the young miner. For three days, the miners heard his screams while finishing the borehole bottom, then it went quiet.

  This first mining accident was the reason a few passages and side tunnels were created, in order to drain the water that kept seeping in during the work. Deaths are not uncommon in the mining industry, but the adolescent’s painful death had a disturbing effect on the workers, who for the most part were trained tanners and had no underground experience. In view of this, it is all the more remarkable what depth was reached by December 1630.

  Because the tunnel becomes ever more unending, it is soon no longer worthwhile for workers to climb up between one and the next shift, that is, overnight; no lifts to bring you back up from the earth’s crust, no electric light from which the security of permanent illumination could have been granted. Lamps in which animal fats cast a greasy glow over the minerals flicker hesitantly over everything.

  The workers descend into the abyss for weeks on end, work twelve hours, sleep eight, pray for two, and eat the remaining time. They no longer feel the dust that lies on their skin like a second mantle within the first. To keep them alive there are rusks, soup, jerky on Sundays, and litres of watered-down wine at all times that keep fear at bay.

  Even though workers disappear or perish time and time again under these conditions, more and more fearless young men climb down into the depths. A sacrificial will is rife in the village: it is understood as a pious surrender to the land and its gifts to penetrate the mountain — to deliver oneself to the will of the damp earth.

  Pergerhanns, unlike the other mine owners of his time, makes himself comfortable in this eternal twilight. He wants to be the first in every newly developed section and nestles his body with ardency against the stone, even though it has still not brought him any significant silver deposits in a year. Fifteen water scoopers have to keep the shaft dry, but Hans Perger is always the first to stand in the damp with soaked trouser legs and bloated leather shoes. He is notorious as the cruel captain of this odyssey: Pergerhannes has crews dig at opposite ends of the tunnels, then breaks off their work whenever he pleases and tells them, contrary to any statics, to rebuild a shaft in the middle of an intermediate corridor.

  It is during this time that things begin to get out of hand: in the by now completely confusing network of paths, he, the leather tanner, is suddenly overcome by a distrust of his men. This is why he creates new rules. He divides the ramification system, a kilometre in size, into four quadrants, a north, south, east, and west quadrant, and assigns a foreman to each. Fifteen men are made available to the crew. The key requirement of Perger, however, is that the foremen only see a plan of the quadrant where their pit is located. Exchanges between them are severely punished. Due to the lack of coordination, another tunnel collapses due to moisture in October 1631 — only this time twelve people died, because they did not know about the nearby western exit from the sole.

  Over the course of decades, the figure of Pergerhann became a kind of motley figure into which melted several historical people, but especially those who disappeared into the pit in the period from 1632 onwards. At one point Perger is also referred to as the owner of a dairy, and later even as mayor and town administrator, which can be considered out of the question for the historical figure. The events of the narrative that have been sketched up to this point are also referred to as the so-called ‘Little Story’. Not only was it added later, but it also mainly originates from oral sources. In contrast, there is the ‘Great Story’, the passages of which can be repeated in unison by every child in the region:

  In March 1632, people in the village were very suddenly saying that Hans Perger had disappeared, that is to say: not disappeared in the true sense, because it is a generally recognised certainty that Pergerhanns met the devil in the deepest ravine of his pit. It is impossible to say from which source this knowledge first arises, but it is known that it happened on the third of the month: It is early morning when Pergerhanns learns that the southern crew has encountered a large underground cave; a kind of grotto, oppressively humid and spread out like a lake through a dripping stone cave system — devouring everything right up to the last flood basalt vein. He immediately stops all work — Pergerhanns gets into the branch and orders that a boat be made ready. He urges his men to leave the cave so that he can be alone, and climbs into the tunnel with nothing but his miner’s lamp. He pushes the sk
iff along with a willow stick and disappears into the cusp of the lake.

  That is the last the men see of Pergerhannes.

  When he does not come back after a few hours, they gather at the western tunnel exit and wait for their master to return — many are in the sun for the first time in weeks and have to spread their palms over their eyes for hours before they can identify the nature of Greater Einland again and return home to their families. The hoar frost lays on the stalks that discreetly intertwine over the northern entrance hole, over which a child steps at this very moment, sliding silently into the tunnel. Falling fifty metres into the ground like a projectile, the child becomes one with the land. The child will not be missed because it belongs to the travelling people and cannot be assigned to any name. A gypsy woman complains that her son has disappeared; people laugh at her, and the day comes to an end without anything of note happening. And yet everything holds its breath.

  That was the beginning. While the master went missing underground for six weeks that spring, another eight children disappear without a trace and nobody wants to get anywhere near where it happened. Whoever is embraced by the mountain is simply lost to it. Now nobody has the courage to dig: it’s believed the mine is already lost, and they pick up their plough and pickaxe again to do the righteous work up on the surface. But no one dares set foot on the meadows and farmland plains anymore, because everyone dreads the hollow space that opens up below. People huddle together in the inns, wet with sweat and fearful. It only affects the spawn at least; not a child of a full citizen and certainly not a full citizen himself. Nobody sees any of the children, thirteen in all, that disappear, as if the mountain wanted to draw them in at the most intimate moment.

  In some sources, it is stated that this period only lasted two months, but that people felt it stretch like a decade. Many a villager saw Pergerhannes climb into the hole as a young man and come out as an old man. In other documents it is even said that time stood still, and that the moon did not move a metre in those weeks before the inconceivable happened.

  Finally, on May 31 1632, Whit Sunday, Pergerhannes, the Loden Hannes, the Mine Perger, rose into the light once more, and although he was underground for weeks and weeks, he climbed out of the pit that day in time for the church service, in perfect short lederhosen and as if he’d freshly got out of the bath. In a wool sack he carries a multitude of shiny, precious stones, which he begins to hand out in the church: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, until every child who walks through the village behind the Whitsun Quack shouts with joy.

  In the coming weeks and months, Greater Einland sees an increase in wealth, indeed even the awarding of a town charter. In particular, the aristocratic Korb-Weidenheim family, who were respected but impoverished until then, managed to rehabilitate their circumstances through owning the land on which the western entrance was located. The sum for this is grotesque:

  The house fronts straighten up tautly, as if they had been treated with bellows — the wrinkles smoothed out through the stream of air from a sudden inflation. The cracks in the facades are filled without anyone ever seeing who did it — the potholes in the steep road are paved over, and people are dressed in beautiful robes.

  It restores the stricken hunchbacks of the workers of Greater Einland: a wealthy Jew invests in the town for no apparent reason, and everyone now has well-paid jobs. Although nobody knows exactly how or where the revival of their so-called circumstances comes from (seeing as nobody ever sees a piece of silver coming out of the pit), they are gratefully received. Except for in the evenings, nobody really dares to leave their own house. The taverns are as if swept empty; the shining oil wicks in the lanterns never need to be lit, because nobody wants to go outside anymore.

  In March 1635, after the church service, Pergerhannes descends the ladder at the north entrance for the last time, and stays underground forever.

  In the first year after this last descent, twenty-two people disappear into the labyrinthine tunnels of the mine — adults, too, this time — the first being a knife grinder by the name of Jajo. He’s witnessed in the twilight of dusk, not long after the disappearance of Pergerhannes, definitely going to the south entrance and climbing down the ladder. In the village a firm belief continues to spread in a whisper: that a time will come when Pergerhannes will return, and that this very return should bring time to a standstill.

  Over the centuries it has been called into doubt over and over again as to whether Pergerhannes even existed, or whether he was rather a founding myth that allowed people to understand certain movements in nature that would otherwise have been unfathomable to them.

  A second possibility that was discussed is the person of Pergerhannes as a kind of amalgam figure; a basin for all those memories that in reality were not undertaken by an individual, but rather by the collective. In this respect, it is also plausible that the whole of Greater Einland succumbed to the silver rush, or that the fateful quadrant system that cost so many lives was in fact decided collectively. Be that as it may, at the end of 1640, the Perger Pit came to an abrupt end:

  In the early morning hours of 28 December, an earthquake shook the town, catapulting people out of their deep sleep; when the first of them lean out of the window, the Market Square is already a good three metres lower: above the main basin of the lake, the honeycomb-like and, from lack of coordination, completely arbitrary soles collapse. The water that has accumulated in the various drainage shafts frothily unites, the water gauges hiss upwards, and now the last entrance is also impassable.

  10

  The care home was still holding together on the lower floors, as if someone had split the building in half with an axe, but the blow had been struck with hesitation. It was an arduous walk up to the rooms, because the lifts had long been out of service, and the steps had unfolded like the bellows of an accordion. The tiles in the dining room, the floor of which having fallen away on both sides of the space under the pull of gravity, stuck up splintering from the concrete base, and they had to hang the seniors’ wheelchairs on the doorframe with straps to prevent them from rolling away. If you looked in briefly, you might have thought you had come across a roped party on Mount Everest, but then you would notice the heads sunk to their chests and the infusions dangling over them.

  The higher the buildings were in Greater Einland, the worse the repercussions of the subsidence — since the torque of the lever arm in the depths could cause the greatest devastation. In the patients’ rooms that the nurse led me past, tufts of cables protruded from the walls like roots. Breathing tubes and catheter leads, which had to at one point have run through sheaths, were exposed: the hidden aspect of human decay was now coming to light at the same time as the architectural breakdown. It shook me. Juices and saliva and gases: all of this was only quasi-covered with cotton wool, as if for the sake of appearances. I was led along a corridor that was already secured with wooden platforms just below the ceiling, like the ones found in mines, and I admired a carer who was clambering over the expanse of rubble cordoned off with caution tape despite carrying a tea tray in his hand. Everything about the people’s bearing maintained the appearance of utter normality. This indicated that the situation had changed so slowly that the adaptation processes had happened almost imperceptibly. The quick glimpses in the rooms, the smell of disinfectant for floor and bodies lying over everything, the electric light that had intensified to a glare for tube extraction: death was at its most tangible in sterile places. I was shown into a room, and the nurse left me.

  So that’s it, I thought to myself nervously. I’d had to spend a whole year here to find out about this place, and even that had been by accident in the end.

  ‘The retirement home is about to fall apart,’ Sister Elfriede had said, who was supplying some of the patients there with her soup kitchen. ‘Maybe we ought to get together and give them a hand?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said a woman I knew as Resi, and who delivered the ma
il twice a week. ‘How do you do it, Ruth?’

  ‘How do I do what?’ I asked, looking up from my newspaper.

  ‘You know, with your grandmother. Are you paying extra for her to be in a better room, or did the Countess put a good word in?’ I was stunned, while the others began debating about their loved ones in the home, and I needed some minutes before I could muster the courage to enquire further.

  ‘My grandmother’s alive? Gerda Schwarz?’

  ‘But of course,’ Schlaf said, slurping a piece of spaghetti into his mouth. ‘Of course she’s alive.’ A phone call confirmed what had at first sounded inconceivable to me.

  In the room I’d been led to, there was a single bed, a sofa, along with a television mounted in the upper corner of the room, which was currently showing ski racing. Voices penetrated through the closed doors — lowered, as if not to disturb those who no longer participated fully in life during their process of drifting away. For a moment I sat in an armchair in the care-home room and didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for. It was only when I walked past the bed to open the window to let out the stuffy air that I saw a thin figure was lying on it, clad and covered in the same white of its skin. I blinked a few times before I could say with any surety where the body ended and the mattress began. It was a woman; on her chest lay a white bunny, a horrible thing that was almost greasy from manhandling. So this was my grandmother. I stared at her for several minutes without knowing what to do with myself, then I moved closer.

  There was a strange ambiguity in the way she held her body. It was unclear whether she was asleep or unconscious, and it was just as unclear whether she had noticed me or not — I sat down as gently as was possible. Those familiar phrases came to mind: skin like tissue paper or utterly fragile, and yet the body lying before me seemed so much more fragile than I had imagined. The entire frame of bones hung together with the last bit of its strength. From the look of the tendons, everything had wanted to let go a long time ago. Ninety-six, I thought, and in the same moment she opened her eyes.