The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  For almost a year now, the mimicry that I’d nurtured here had become second nature to me. Five hours a day I busied myself in my towering paperwork, without moving a single step forwards with anything, while at the same time the Countess brought new, either unsolvable or senseless tasks to me. This meant: for a salary, which I received from the Countess monthly and in cash, I cultivated a fallow field of paper.

  Above my desk hung a blackboard listing the three catchphrases by which my work had to orientate itself: refining, broadening, filling. Refining — I had learned that this meant leaving the data as it was, but transferring it to a different, more tolerable aggregated state. I spent endless hours converting units into one another, and subtracting the margins of fluctuation from the results. The figures obtained in this way, which were visually soothing, but were by no means less apocalyptic in their prognoses regarding the subsidence, were presented at the weekly salons, where they acted like balm on a gaping wound. The second measure we called broadening. Certain factors were subjected to a so-called revaluation, which could be ecological, physical, but also moral, in some cases even spiritual. The aim was to put unchangeable data into a positive light through invented advantages: the dampness of the ground, which began to dissolve, squelching under the soles of our shoes, as a sign of fertility — or establish recent collapses as a good omen, since the entire town was approaching a common level at least. The term broadening related to the broadening of words: the subtle breaking of contexts of meaning. On a basic level, it was a matter of straightforward propaganda tactics. So for the moment all I did during the day was move numbers from one paper margin to another, and use them to create pleasant PowerPoint presentations once a week — and it suited me just fine.

  This was because these first two points, which ate up a large part of my energy, constantly kept me from tackling the task for which I had been hired: the development of a supportive substance that would accomplish what the Countess did not trust any and all professional service provided to do. I was not totally unhappy that this agenda was to a certain extent delayed by other activities. For one thing, in spite of my studying of the material, I still had serious doubts that such a miracle formula could be squeezed out of a theoretical physicist like me. What was much more important, however, was that whenever I had undertaken to do it in the last year, I had come up against peculiar irregularities. They were so obvious that I had wondered why no one had ever noticed them; not a single number matched reality. The first thing I noticed was that the volume of the hole was much greater than the figures stated in the official documents that had been made available to me. In my naivety I had simply corrected it, showed up in the office a week later, and, looking through the papers, had found the wrong figures again, without anyone having even mentioned the matter. I soon gave up informing anyone else about my findings, and more than that, from that point on, I showed a certain degree of caution while researching during the day.

  Even today I noticed one such discrepancy: a certificate from the year 1950 listed a side entrance to the mine that I did not recognise from our directories. I looked around hastily, then stuck the document in the machine to make a copy for my private research. I had decided, out of principle, not to work on a filler until I understood how so many errors could have got into the documents. After all, even if none of it signified anything, it would senselessly slow down my work. But maybe something revealing would be discovered this evening. I slipped the copy into my handbag and took a deep breath.

  At midday, only an hour after I’d started my work, I checked the clock. From the very first minute I had felt uncomfortable in my office: it was arranged like the interior of a Rococo egg and wallpapered with bizarre depictions of young boys and graceful deer on the heath. I had to regularly take a breather out in the corridor: the air in my office was as hot as an oven, especially in winter. All about the place, overzealous personnel lit fires in the fireplaces, the heat from which was retained by the thick carpets — and on top of that the four-metre-high windows could not be opened, but were rather flush with the wall. The boredom was unbearable; and the closer the hand moved toward the two, the closer came the time of day that I feared the most. At that moment, I could already hear the sharp tapping of steps approaching: at this time, and with monstrous assertiveness, the Countess entered my office, where I was still doing my so-called work.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said sternly, and had already entered the room with the full effect of her presence, laying her wide-brimmed hat on my documents. Most of the time she came from meetings with distinguished friends.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you regarding an urgent matter we have agreed to talk about,’ she said unnecessarily, as she sat on the edge of my desk. Of course, we hadn’t discussed anything of the sort. ‘Here, I have the plans from the old steelworks. I don’t know if you need them. If not, I mean, if you don’t, then I’ll just take them back. In any case we have to compare notes soon,’ she said nervously. ‘We urgently need to talk. You know that Sister Elfriede’s house is, some might say, subsiding. It’s causing quite the stir. It’s well known that Sister Elfriede is an important part of the community. Could you do a little research for me by next week?’ I moved closer to her in order to look at the plans, and felt her body stiffen.

  ‘They’re not just saying it’s subsiding, they’re saying it’s already started to break down the middle,’ I said carefully.

  ‘However that might look in reality — the key thing is that we don’t want to upset such a long-established citizen and then have to mediate by intervening. We should find a way for the problem not to be noticed.’

  ‘What do you mean? How are we supposed to hide that a house is breaking in half? I believe the electricity wiring is hanging free.’

  ‘I see, well, do I need to complete all of your tasks then?’ the Countess shouted, throwing a pile of papers onto the floor, but calmed down again immediately afterwards. ‘Oh, there’s no rush. I’m only talking about the ground work, provided you can be expected to do it.’

  On a daily basis the Countess came to me with these kinds of ideas, which bore no relation to basic physical laws or financial realities.

  ‘You’re spreading yourself too thin,’ the Countess said, as she saw that I’d turned back to the papers lying before me. ‘But let’s talk about something else. Yesterday I asked you to do the calculations for the proposal, you know what I’m talking about. Take care of it as soon as possible.’

  The Countess remained sitting in front of me.

  ‘As in … right now?’ I finally asked.

  ‘If you have nothing else to do, please.’

  I dutifully picked up my pen and, sweating, familiarised myself with the folios that the Countess had put on my desk for me yesterday. It was the most foolish nonsense that I’d ever read: an application for the construction of a kind of underground suspension railway that was intended to illuminate mining in the nineteenth century. It ought to be completed in time for the great art action, and be a draw for tourists despite its outrageously expensive tickets. I saw with an initial glance that not only was the cost–benefit calculation completely unsustainable, but also that the guests, moments after entering the mountain, would suffer an inevitable death from falling rocks. The Countess, however, sat stock-still and observed my obsolete arithmetic — the longer the situation lasted, the more I had the feeling of wrongdoing on my part. I was overcome with shuddering, time didn’t seem to pass, precisely because this situation was repeated almost daily. Dripping with sweat, I finally submitted the application with the calculations.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Countess said, pulling a piece of paper bearing her signature out of her pocket.

  ‘Your holiday request. I have approved it, of course, as I always do for my best employees,’ she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  She was already making her way back to her office when she stopped again.

  �
��I wanted to ask you something else.’ She looked sheepishly at the floor. ‘Would you like to come to the theatre with me this evening? My husband doesn’t have time. It’s Macbeth.’

  ‘I already have plans this evening, unfortunately, otherwise I would have liked to have gone,’ I replied.

  ‘Fine, if Macbeth doesn’t interest you, there’s nothing that can be done,’ the Countess said, as if I had rejected her personally. ‘Not in the mood for Shakespeare, very well,’ she added, ignoring my assertions to the contrary. She sat down again next to me, ruffling her hair, then, after lightly clearing her throat and mumbling a few words, returned to what she had been saying.

  ‘Well then, where are you off to this evening, if you don’t have any time? You don’t have to tell me,’ she added hastily but aggressively.

  ‘I’m meeting someone for dinner,’ I replied deliberately vaguely.

  ‘Oh. Yes. I understand then it’s not going to work. If you’re not interested in Macbeth,’ she repeated again. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ And her outfit slid across the floor out of the room.

  At exactly three o’clock, I was released with official precision from my daily duties, with the intention of giving me time for writing my thesis. I had an almost daily hangover from the conversations with the Countess and needed the way back home to regain a clear mind. Furthermore, my grandmother floated like a ghost in my head. The hollow space under the parquet was cleared out, I thought, and unlocked the door. However, as always happened when I entered my house, an immense calm fell over me.

  In the garden, the herbs I’d planted had already broken through. I picked a little basil for my lunch, sat in my armchair, and thought about what had to be done next in the garden. The feeling of having taken over the management of something that had been given to me from the previous generation grounded me — I had paved the driveway and repaired the facade myself, invested what I had left over in a new central heating system and a garage, even though I still didn’t have my car. But there was an uncanny feeling of happiness over all of it: in the end, my parents had been able to pass something on to me, even if it had been under unfavourable circumstances. I was not uprooted, but embedded in a continuum, even if it was only a material one.

  I heated up my food and began working on my scientific studies; time was already pressing. Week after week the workload for the Countess had increased, and the time I had for my thesis had decreased. Half a day, as I had understood for a long time already, was too short to really immerse myself in the theorems. Just as I was starting to get going, I had to leave the house again, and walked down Oberschenkelbacherstrasse.

  I found Ferdinand standing in front of the wine tavern, where he was having trouble typing something into his phone with his huge sausage fingers. He panted from the exertion, and didn’t notice me until I was already standing in front of him.

  ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘there you are. I was just trying to message you. Say, how come we’re not meeting at The Pumpkin? It’s difficult getting around at the moment, I’ve been stage 3 since last week.’ Only now did I see that a tube was sticking out of his nose — and that this was connected to an oxygen bottle in a little trolley via a transparent hose.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said and looked around, embarrassed. ‘I thought it might be nice, and, you know, the good air.’

  I gently urged him to go in, and we sat down in the corner of the garden. A wooden sign bobbed on the branch of an oak tree that read ‘Storm and Chestnut’.

  ‘How’s the swimming going? Good enough for the Olympics yet? You and Anita, you’re in the same group, right?’ asked Ferdinand, who had to break off after every three words to noisily draw air into his lungs. I became a little breathless myself from listening to him.

  ‘Good, but we’re short one person for the relay team. There’s only three of us in the club, so one of us always has to swim twice,’ I replied and hastily waved over the waitress. It was already darker than I’d expected it to be. Ferdinand ordered a litre of wine for himself, along with an oozing schnitzel. I winced when I saw a bite of potato salad fall out of his mouth and onto his football scarf. I wondered whether it was bothering me that I was ashamed, or whether I was already ashamed about being ashamed in his presence.

  ‘We meet far too seldomly, Ruth. I’ve wanted to show you my new apartment for ages. I live down on Genossenschaftsstrasse now. I have my own garage and a new kitchen with an ice cube machine.’ He smeared lingonberry sauce on a piece of lettuce.

  ‘It must have been hard leaving behind your house; you grew up there and everything. Has it completely broken apart?’

  ‘Completely,’ he said, and shook the final drops from the litre carafe. ‘Wasn’t hard. My dog fell into the crack in the cellar and died down there in the end. Didn’t notice for a whole three days, only when it started to stink. So I decided to move out, before the same thing happens to me.’ He laughed uproariously, but it took three or four intakes of breath before his oxygen supply normalised. ‘I mean it, you should come over to mine some time.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of stuff on at work. It’s going to be intense for the time being,’ I said quickly. I was agitated, and I looked at my watch. ‘What else is going on with you?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m doing fine, but I need a new car. For the football games.’

  Was he really that insensitive to his own physical state? Or did his rural upbringing forbid him to show his suffering too much? He seemed, in any case, in good spirits.

  ‘Ferdinand, I wanted to ask you something else.’ I tried to begin as innocently as possible. ‘You once said something about an entrance to the hole that someone could go down into.’ He answered in the affirmative with an inarticulate noise over his schnitzel.

  ‘Could we quickly go to it later? Is it even still open?’

  ‘What, today? It’s almost dark, and I can hardly climb steps.’

  ‘It’s important. Let’s go for a walk. I need fresh air,’ I said nonsensically, as we had been sitting outdoors the entire time anyway.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ferdinand said slowly. ‘Couldn’t we wait till after my treatment? Besides, it’s forbidden.’

  ‘Just for a second,’ I insisted, until he finally gave in, and I paid for everything that we’d consumed as if by way of apology. We made our way to Edelweissgasse.

  ‘It’s at the western entrance,’ he said, already completely out of breath from the short walk uphill.

  I fervently hoped to find an open entrance through Ferdinand — in truth, it was the only reason I had met him today. In the place where we were heading, there were particular discrepancies — the geological reports showed strange hill profiles, as if someone had attempted to fill in the soil there by force. Nothing had been found in the official documents.

  ‘Ruth, it’s not worth it. You can’t see anything.’

  I had to push Ferdinand forward every metre, and he was visibly in pain — yet he was the only person I trusted. After a terribly slow walk, we arrived at a steep section north of the Scheinbacherstrasse. Ferdinand, panting, clung on to a tree trunk, while I climbed into the thicket,

  ‘Shit, the entrance has been nailed shut!’ I shouted to him.

  ‘Told you, didn’t I?’

  I considered for a moment whether I could do anything about it, but the slats, which had been fixed into place with nails as thick as fingers, wouldn’t budge even a centimetre.

  Even within the general theory of relativity, there are points where time comes to a standstill: black holes. If a body has so large a mass that it not only holds itself together, but also binds more and more particles to itself in a noticeably stronger gravitation, a chain reaction is triggered. A greater mass means a greater attraction, which results in a denser centre, which in turn draws more mass into itself. If a particularly strong pulling force has developed, neither bodies nor light nor information can leave the hole again.r />
  The outer sphere of these singularities is called their event horizon: it is the boundary between the black hole and the universe that surrounds it, the crust where being and the nothingness that eats away at it meet. The name event horizon is, of course, deceptive because, by definition, no more events can be located there. All movement is suggestion; the gravitation emanating from the hole distorts space and the passage of time, everything is broken by the force of the infinitely compressed mass.

  12

  The hollow space underneath the parquet was cleared out. For many days, this sentence rotated in my mind. It distributed its composite parts before my inner eye, all of which I had to push away from myself, one by one, because they were far too opaque to be able to glean anything from. The hollow space underneath the parquet, I thought to myself in inattentive moments. Did this formulation perhaps indicate something repressed in her mind? That was a depressing thought: that she finally had an awareness of her decline.

  It went on like this for days, and as I was thinking about it for the hundredth time, a further idea popped up behind this sentence. One that was so improbable that I began to get annoyed about its persistence. I diverted myself with my work or agitatedly left the house to disappear into the forest. It was only after three gin and tonics during a visit to a bar with Anita that I finally succumbed. I lay on the sofa, the room spinning, while an impulse made its way through my disarmed mind. I crouched down on the floor and probed the cracks in the herringbone parquet, in which centuries’ worth of dust had settled. I couldn’t penetrate it with my hands; I fetched a coathanger and ran the wire through the crevices, to satisfy this suspicion once and for all. It got caught near the window. I pulled the hook in surprise, and the wooden floorboard popped up. It took some time before I understood what had just happened. A wooden staircase led into a recess in the floor, which I could only barely make out due to the shadow cast by my ceiling light. I climbed reluctantly into the hole, which smelled of heavy earth, and I stood on the clay floor of an old cellar compartment, which had a bare lightbulb on its far wall.