The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘Did I wake you?’ I asked, embarrassed, and immediately regretted being so familiar with her — we were basically complete strangers. But there also wasn’t any time to take it back: the woman sat up and drew her legs up to her chest. She without a doubt looked like my father: the same deep-set eyes, the same small forehead — but that was, of course, a banal insight. As I reached for her hand, I began to tremble and drew it back.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Ruth, your granddaughter. I live here in Greater Einland now. Did Mum and Dad tell you about me? Erich, your son, I mean. I’m a physicist and I’m researching Eternalism, did you know that? I live down there in a house that I bought.’ I pointed preposterously at the white wall, while this torrent of randomness broke out of me.

  ‘It’s hot,’ I said as if to myself, and finally threw open the window. Now that I could finally breathe again, I remembered all the questions I wanted to ask her. But I got stuck before I had even started.

  ‘I have to tell you something. Erich and Elisabeth — my parents’ — I turned back to her again, but looked at the floor — ‘they died. About a year ago. I’m so sorry. They were buried in Vienna, and I wasn’t even there.’

  My grandmother was still quiet, but for a moment it was as if this confession had at least rolled a weight from my chest. Then suddenly a response came from the bed.

  ‘I know, the nurse told me, I remember. Of course I remember,’ the woman said, and I recognised from her voice that she was my grandmother. Strange, I had never heard it before.

  ‘But I don’t know — what did they die of? Can you help me, Sarah? I want to sit over there.’ I watched in amazement as she moved to the edge of the bed on her own. I had intended to gently hold her under her arm to support her on the way to the seating area, but had underestimated her feathery lightness and practically took her off her feet, so that for a moment I had the feeling I was carrying her to the other side of the room. We sat down, and I poured water into the glasses provided. ‘My name’s Ruth, not Sarah,’ I said after a long delay. It was incredible how clearly she could formulate her words when she answered.

  ‘We haven’t spoken in a long time. I’ve been travelling and just settling back in again. No one wanted me here at first, and now you come here after all these years. You’re trying to poison me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No one wants to poison you. I’m visiting you,’ I said.

  She had put her hands over her head in a kind of pleading gesture, with which she now begged for forgiveness between her knees.

  ‘Your parents poisoned me for years, everyone poisoned me.’

  I had heard that this kind of paranoia was very typical for people with dementia, and that one should try and dispel it with the greatest care.

  ‘How are you getting on here? I’m your granddaughter, and I wanted to introduce myself.’

  ‘Yes, yes, now I see it. You’re Ruth, my Erich told me about you. You are so beautiful’ — now she had tears in her eyes — ‘such a beautiful girl. Look at you.’

  ‘So, what do you do here all day?’ I asked her, slowly, as if I’d just learned to talk.

  ‘Who are you again?’

  ‘There are some lovely things on offer outside, leisure activities, do you take advantage of them?’ I said hollowly, and immediately dropped the hand I had raised for emphasis.

  ‘What was my husband’s name? Leopold, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I was about to ask you a few things about him. Do you maybe remember what happened to him after the war? Did he go to war?’

  ‘The war?’ she asked, once more shocked. ‘Is there a war on?’

  ‘No, not for a long time. I mean the Second World War.’

  ‘Oh that,’ she said, relieved that it was nothing more. ‘We had to be frugal —’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I interrupted. ‘And while you were being frugal, what happened to Granddad? Look.’ I pulled out a piece of paper from my bag. ‘Granddad didn’t appear in the register after 1945. But you do, here. And here. Did he not return from the war?’

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I nodded. ‘That’s a shame.’ She gripped the battery-operated bunny still lying on her chest, whereupon it activated and rattled out the song ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’. Irritated, I tried to turn off the animal, but she held on to it tightly.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked again.

  ‘It’s nice that the nurses come and pick up you for dinner every day. You must know a lot of the other residents, right?’

  ‘He never came back,’ my grandmother said, so quietly that I could barely understand her over the blaring bunny. ‘When the hollow space under the parquet was cleared out.’ Suddenly the song was over, and there was silence.

  ‘What hollow space?’ I asked, but was relieved when she didn’t answer. ‘Listen, I wanted to ask you something,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Did my parents visit you very often?’

  ‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Erich and Elisabeth. Your son and his wife. I’m Ruth.’

  ‘Yes, they came,’ she said with surprising clarity. ‘We talked about you.’

  ‘And what else did you talk about?’ I asked. ‘Maybe something about what happened during the war? Or about your life during that time?’

  ‘They asked me a lot of questions. Always a lot of questions. And then we ate lunch together.’

  ‘What did you all talk about?’ I tried again.

  ‘They always waited for the food,’ she murmured, lost in thought, ‘so they could poison me.’

  This was the moment I gave up. I pressed the emergency button that summoned the staff, and the nurse that had led me there entered the room almost immediately. ‘Finished already?’ she asked, inappropriately cheerful as we stepped back into the hallway. The whole rural-town atmosphere had tightened around me, and I was breathing hard.

  ‘She has severe dementia,’ I said, even though the nurse would have known that. ‘Could I perhaps help her financially?’

  ‘How do you mean, financially?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, ashamed that I had considered never entering this place again and easing my guilty conscience by other means. It was out of the question. I had to see her again — she was the key to my parents’ visits.

  ‘Your grandmother’s confusion, to our amazement, has improved over the past year. She was a wreck before that, hardly spoke coherently at all. It’s got a lot better, which is a miracle because normally things only go downhill at this stage.’

  ‘I had the feeling that she’s not all there. Is that the way out?’

  ‘You should just stop by more often, maybe she’s just not used to you yet? We notice that the patients gain astonishing amounts of mental strength if a relative visits them every week. Your grandmother is in good shape for her age and her medical history. Did you know that she’s been with us since she was forty?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. Can I get through the doors without a pass?’

  ‘Yes, if I’m not mistaken, she was brought in by your parents’ father. That is, by your maternal grandfather. And he also visited her regularly until his death.’

  ‘What were her symptoms when she was admitted?’

  ‘Oh, your parents asked that, too. Hardly anyone understood the clinical picture. If you like, I could take a look at the files? Your parents had the symptoms recorded in detail.’

  ‘No, that’s alright,’ I said quickly, relieved that we were finally at the exit.

  I took the way back into the valley through the forest, where the birds had already struck up their courtship songs. In the past two months I hadn’t interrupted my walks for even a day, and had watched in fascination the way the landscape slid into winter. Back in town, I did my grocery shopping for the weekend, and felt the way the turmoil created by the visit to the care home slowly subsided a
s I walked up Johannesstrasse. Even though my house was less than a hundred metres from there, I took the detour via Quergasse so as not to have to walk by a certain building, which I avoided passing whenever I could: the Glottersaat house.

  I can’t remember when exactly it was that I first heard the story of Herberg Glottersaat, but I do know how shocked I was that no one had told me before I’d bought my house, as his was located only a stone’s throw from mine. It wasn’t until some months after I’d moved in that someone told me about his so-called case.

  Nobody could understand my horror — the matter was told to me without any additional explanation and, oddly enough, without any concealment, one evening at the Pumpkin: it concerned a man with the unusual name Herberg Glottersaat, who lived at 31 Römerstrasse and who would sit, just like we did, at one of the tavern tables to take his evening meal. I had noticed him many times in the morning when I left my house for work due to his sheer size. He was well over two metres tall, probably in his early sixties, but still had dark hair, and every single day he wore, along with a plaid shirt, a classic flat cap that one could attribute to a farmer, a truck driver, or a common drinker. The story of which he was the protagonist, however, was abnormal, even downright despicable. Which is why everyone in the town knew it.

  ‘Do you see that man over there?’ Sister Elfriede had asked, nodding her head in his direction. ‘Everyone knows him here.’

  ‘Everyone knows everyone in Greater Einland,’ Ferdinand interrupted.

  ‘Yes, alright. But they know him even more. Something happened in 1984. They were completely normal folk at the time, the Glottersaats. In construction, nice family, wife stayed at home. Everything normal.’ At this point she fell conspiratorially quiet, and the others went silent as if responding to a cue. ‘I’ll tell it like this. One day, it was in September, his children disappeared. Four of them — three boys, one girl — all between seven and twelve. Apparently on the way to school, maybe they were just playing truant, it’s not that uncommon at that age. Until people noticed that his wife couldn’t be found either.’ All heads turned once more towards his table, but Glottersaat calmly ate his soup. ‘On the fourth day after they had been reported missing, the police finally searched his house. And you wouldn’t believe it. All five bodies were in the basement, he’d killed them with strychnine. Still to this day, no one knows why.’

  ‘Then why’s he free?’ I asked, not yet entirely convinced about the credibility of this story.

  ‘Miscarriage of justice. A technicality? No one knows for sure.’

  ‘What does that mean, no one knows for sure?’ I wondered how someone could be so interested in the details of a murder, but not in the apprehension of the murderer.

  ‘He works for the administrative office now, never did anything peculiar again,’ said Sister Elfriede.

  The fact that he planted flowers in front of the elementary school was apparently enough for the Greater Einlanders to believe in his complete rehabilitation. It was talked about openly, as if it were just an anecdote about an eccentric — not something you might want to keep secret from anyone, but also not something you wouldn’t want to lower your voice for in order to make the most of a good story. I often pondered that Glottersaat himself, sitting there, had to sense that someone was being initiated in his abysses and tragedies, indeed, that he might even have been primed and was silently participating in this dramatic depiction of his life.

  11

  My daily route to work began with the sight of the lush green forest behind my house — an image that invigorated me time and time again. The difficulties began, however, as soon as I entered the town centre. The subsidence had progressed much more quickly than we had all expected in the last few months. The end of the winter and the melting of the snow a few months ago had, in a short amount of time, made the town sink more than a metre, and the roads were in such a desolate state that when crossing them you felt like you were wading through a quagmire. All of the cobblestones that made up the historical surfacing of the town had been forced up and dislodged by the subsidence, and now lay loose on the squares and streets. There had been attempts in the meantime to cement them back in, but they broke free as soon as the hole sagged by even a millimetre due to a damp night. All year round, there was an acute risk of slipping; we had all become masters at getting around. Even the elderly, normally barely able to keep their balance on solid ground, skilfully stretched out their walking sticks, as if they were walking on high ropes. The church tower had developed a new menacing dimension: some claimed that it was at a 45-degree angle, and even if the official measurements confirmed the exaggeration of this statement, its tendency to tip could not be completely dismissed.

  When, like every morning, I went to the bakery next to the primary school to pick up my obligatory coffee, I had to climb over a wall that shielded a cracked hydrant. Then I turned into West Town. I looked around carefully before entering the pharmacy, making sure that there were no other customers inside. Pharmacist Stuhl was expecting me, and he brought out a bag of my medication from under the counter, the cost of which I paid for with an enormous sum of cash. If I hadn’t been earning double from the Countess what I used to make in my old job, my funds would have dried up within a matter of days.

  ‘It wasn’t easy getting this amount of codeine. I had to stretch it a bit with one for children,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Codeine is codeine,’ I replied, taking care not to loosen the cobblestones in front of the door by kicking them too hard. Then I continued in the direction of the castle.

  Apart from the church, the main square was the core of the collapse: its centre hung a full three metres lower than it had a year ago. The stones weren’t just loose on it, but had slid right into a heap in the middle — it funnelled downwards to the image of the former archangel. Down there, that is, at the low point of the parabola, the first breach into the mine had occurred last month. As thin as the needle of an eye at first, then soon as thick as a fist and then a leg. I saw this black void, which I knew from my calculations to be over the deepest depression of the hole, every day on my way to work, and imagined how a stone, thrown into this hole, would fall a hundred and fifty metres into the mountain.

  You could only move around the funnel-shaped main square on its stony pizza crust. The others and I, who had to pass it nevertheless, edged along the narrow ridge next to the house fronts, politely, as if passing on a driveway, giving priority to one another — waving to acquaintances when they clambered up the street lamps on the opposite side of the square. We were standing on the same structure, and were still unreachable to one another. With my back against the wall, I shuffled past the east side of the square, more slowly than usual, because at the same time a group of primary school children, joined to their teachers by ropes in front and behind, were on their way to school. In spite of the desolate condition of the town, the Greater Einlanders had had the good cheer to plant flower bulbs in the planters, the bursting shoots of which were now rubbing against my neck. It felt like we were occupied for hours with crossing this square, but it only took a few minutes.

  Perhaps the strangest thing of all was how much the rhythm of the collapses carried over to the sense of time of all the Greater Einlanders: in the weeks in which the collapses happened rapidly, time seemed to race, and one barely had the chance to notice the many changes in the townscape, so that it seemed as though the weathering of years had taken place in a few moments. But if everything remained constant, the flow of things took on a certain viscosity, and the months rolled over me in insignificant indolence. I would hardly notice how a whole autumn had passed. Just as nature usually influenced the perception of time through the rhythm of its four seasons, things stood still and flowed here very much with the subsidence. Leaving the main square was a blessing. The rest of the town was also devastated to a certain extent, but one didn’t have to deal with such extreme inclines. Quite the opposite: I was pleasant
ly surprised how intact everything seemed today in North Town, even if this impression was nothing more than an optical illusion. Only a few weeks ago, we noticed that the landmarks, all of which were clustered together, were tilting more and more, so we decided to simply incline the pavement at exactly the same angle. It was only by ten degrees, which we had mastered with hydraulic mortising and supported with injections of concrete, yet the impeccably straight impression preserved the mind through this farce.

  To leave the town centre, I had to overcome one further hurdle: a single step, which had grown from twenty centimetres to half a metre. Only the castle, since it had been built on bare rock, stood in the same position it had for the last four hundred years.

  ‘Good morning, Frau Doktor,’ said Karl the butler as I entered the castle. ‘Tissues,’ he warned, pulling a packet out my pocket, which he replaced with a new one, before he — always the most unpleasant part of this procedure — poked his stiff fingers through my bun, to check that there wasn’t a listening device or something similar inside it. His bony, cold fingers gripped my temples, until the paranoia of the Countess, who constantly feared that her employees were spying on her, had been satisfied.

  ‘Good, you may go in, you have a lot of catching up to do,’ said Karl, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t even a minute late. I felt uncomfortable, as I always did when I was reprimanded by him. Even though I did my work to the best of my knowledge and belief, actually even performed better than what was expected of me, I felt permanently guilty. After all, I not only owed the Countess for my income, but also for my house. It was an infinite minus hanging over my head, not immediately urgent, yet subconsciously always present. In this respect, I soon discovered, I was not alone in the town — everyone owed the Countess in one way or another. I walked up the two flights of stairs to my office and pretended to immediately immerse myself in my calculations.