At some point, the two mysteries need to be discussed.
In the mornings and evenings, I would sit for two hours cultivating my private investigations like a clandestine civil servant, which the Countess’s workload couldn’t keep me from. Only my thesis suffered even more than it already was. The thing was: from the very beginning I’d had the feeling that something wasn’t right about the history of the hole, and that the filling, in addition to the obvious structural need, also had the purpose of transforming this vagueness into a solid mantle, an ossification that could never again be broken. The Countess’s wish for a binding agent to be developed had increasingly faded into the background for me. Instead, the hole and its causalities, its condition and its preservation, but above all the processes that had led to its formation, had in the last year become my hobby.
If I came across information, it was mostly a byproduct of the work that I carried out for the Countess. I photocopied the more interesting papers at the castle and took them home. If you put them together and, where applicable, added missing pieces, it resulted in a picture. As if I had accidentally tipped out boxes of matches, and the matchsticks had merged into a clearly discernible motif. Or I should say, two motifs arose: a general one and a special one.
The first mystery was the tunnel system and those incidents that lay within them beneath the surface. It took months for me to realise that something was missing in these stories, because the gaps had been dutifully plugged up. It foremost required a trained eye on the local environment, a practically native eye, to see that the threads that converged over the hole were different from those of the original fabric. Only the subtle shade of the stories disclosed them.
The object of the mystery was this story of the missing forced labourers that I had first learned of a year ago. Generally speaking, this wasn’t anything remarkable in Austria — i.e., the fact that the crimes under National Socialism had been carefully covered up and then came out in the end after all.
It turned out that not only had around seven hundred and fifty bodies been lost in the collective memory, but that even the grave itself had started to move in people’s various stories. Its location was constantly changing in the documents from various decades: at one time, it was supposed to be on a hill behind the protected forest; another time, it was described as being on the main road, or directly on the land of the former concentration camp, where the memorial had been erected in 1988. That alone was remarkable: that a mass grave had been forgotten. Far stranger, however, was the disappearance of the seven hundred and fifty people: a mountain of corpses that the earth had swallowed without a trace.
A final partial mystery — perhaps it was simply incomprehensible to me because of a lack of imagination — was the question of how ten guards had managed to kill eight hundred people. I had long suspected that the guards must have had help, yet even this was a formulaic, picturesque, deplorably banal version of things: the Wehrmacht had done it, the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht had sequestered everything. That is to say, it really wasn’t that easy, because in three or four places in the history that someone had tried to smooth out again after its unfolding like an unruly table cloth at Sunday lunch, the obstinate earth’s crust was surprisingly torn. A real estate agent had bought some land near the South Town in the eighties, and when he started the excavator, there appeared, to the honest surprise of everyone in the community, bones, tumbling from the earth by the hundreds. The ground was pounded down, an unmarked cross was stuck in it for the sake of decency, and the matter was once more collectively forgotten.
Then I found something else: I had to write a report on test drillings and their geological results from the year 1989, when I found a reference in a note in the margin of some old plans. Apparently, during these tests first one body, then a second and a third had been found on someone’s land, far from the first two graves. When they looked in the outflow, a vertical bore pipe behind a villa, they found a further ten people. These weren’t isolated cases; I dug deeper into the files, and soon found out that there had even been a hearing in the fifties at which a family stood trial, because someone had come across three bodies in their yard. I was surprised when I read the names of those involved. In the absence of evidence, the matter had ended in an acquittal, and people went back to creating a so-called good impression. Every time there is a spillage, a runner is thrown over the tablecloth before the guests arrive — a white-washed piece of fabric, with small animals or skiers or other patterns printed on it that distract from the stain. It soon became clear where the expensive, water-resistant waxcloth was coming from: the Countess had bought all of the relevant land in these unpleasant cases, and consequently things had been quiet ever since.
When two issues are interlinked and their moving parts fit together perfectly, both of them start to move. It seems like a lucky coincidence, because you think you can measure one by the turning gear of the other. For me, it was the personal and the societal. Yet this motion is deceptive: in order to grasp the mystery, I would, in fact, have to separate these gears from each other to a greater degree. Had I not been so absorbed by their synchronisation, I might have understood that collective forgetting is different from individual forgetting.
Because then there was the second mystery I was constantly working on. It was the mystery of my parents and all of the things connected to it. It was much more precise than the first and had a clearer goal. It was as follows: why had my parents visited Greater Einland every week and why had they never told me? What had led to such a radical break between them and the community — and what had led to their putting it into perspective?
I gathered material on this mystery at every opportunity — details about my family history, which in turn raised further questions. One in particular drove its way to the top: Leopold Schwarz. My search for him in the land registers and indexes had been in vain. I found neither his notice of indenture (because I suspected he might have been drafted) nor any indications of what had happened to him after the war. Leopold Schwarz was the gap in my family: I had found three grandparents, but one’s existence remained dependent on me.
He was the first explanation I found for what my parents might have been looking for here. The problem was that I hadn’t found the slightest proof: I clung to this parallel between me and them, and yet knew nothing of their motives. I just always remembered that on the first day in the town archives, Anita had said that my mother had come by almost every week to excavate documents, just as I was doing now, and with a discretion that I now assumed was calculated.
I lay in wait for the unspeakable thing I was after: had my parents also noticed that people had disappeared? Had their research gone deep into the hole, or had they begun with my grandparents — with the sudden disappearance of Leopold Schwarz? Or maybe it had absolutely nothing to do with it at all, I thought on some days, when I lay alone on the couch in the living room they had both played in as children, and then I was ambushed by the strange feeling that I didn’t know anything about them at all.
For the work I was performing for the Countess, I had burrowed my way into lithology at an alarming rate, and after three or four months I began to read the physical properties of the sediment like the morning newspaper. Because we were working with borehole geophysical data analysis — that is, drawing out our information through narrow eyelets that we had to first chisel out — we only had data from imprecise measurements at our disposal. We couldn’t enter the hole — it was a hostile, permanently collapsing terrain that we were researching. This method was called remote sensing. I had mandated the Schlumberger method: an alternating current for exploring the subterranean nature of the soil, and then itemising the cavity using sonographic methods. This was in the spring of 2011. After realising right at the start that the data on the size of the caves did not match our plans, a further inconsistency was soon revealed. I had the radargram in front of me, which should have produced a uniform, linear diagra
m in tune with my expectations, but instead I saw wild, jagged clusters of fragments. Where some parts of the underground had been tidied up, and fine stone chambers had been cut out for the miners, in other places someone had, without it ever having been recorded, indiscriminately detonated explosives. And in some places, there was no stone at all, and that’s what most caught my eye: there were non-mineral materials in the tunnels, perhaps tonnes of wood. I sat perplexed in front of the sonographs’ densely sprawling tangles of lines. There was no way of pursuing it any further, because all I could draw my conclusions from were mere return signals from sound waves.
Once again, something prevented me from drawing anyone’s attention to these finds: the way the papers appeared to have been falsified made me suspect that it couldn’t have been an accident. Or was I just paranoid? Was I bored? When I dared to include the deviating results in a weekly report to the Countess, and even wanted to add something further, I saw that Philipp had marked them for deletion.
The mystery itself lay in layers that kept needing to be drilled: there were hundreds of tiny inconsistencies. For instance, that the hydrological reports clearly showed water ingress that was never included in the data. Or that a child had allegedly fallen into an abyss four years ago, in a place where in reality there was no such opening at all. That a concession had been in place for the mining of iron ore for fifty years, even though there was no iron in the mountain. I collected these documents on my desk and later in my living room. There were small shifts, yet the deeper one drilled, the more fluid whatever I was holding onto became. I suspected that it must be a deception coordinated with the authorities. When I later decided to go to the town archives to note down the details of the mining and all the explosions, the system told me that I was unable to: the volume in question had been loaned out to Elisabeth Schwarz two years ago.
I put the facts to myself every evening and annotated them with footnotes, so that I knew exactly where they came from. I drew question marks wherever there was an ambiguity, and collected ideas on how to fix it.
Seven hundred and fifty disappeared people, and a community in which a monarchy had been reinstated practically overnight.
Explosions underground, see footnote 1. Here: a geological report that shows that activities took place in the mountain post-1945. Question mark: my parents took out the volume. I shook my head, no, at least seven hundred and fifty disappeared people, fact, and one of them was Leopold Schwarz. The miners who left the mountain after 1945; my parents left on 21 September, the documents on the backseat, then a collision: an exit, a demolition ten years ago, recorded nowhere, see no footnote. And one thing had bled into the other: the sinking land and its inhabitants, some of whom had irrevocably liquified others into the mountain because they thought that, unlike them, they didn’t belong to it. This humus prepares the ground for rapid growth. It is easier to put down roots where much of what is in the soil is rotten.
From the beginning, I knew that my chances of solving both mysteries were extremely slim. All the materials that reached me were disordered, anecdotal, and obfuscated by the mudslides of memory. To be buried and carried off also means that the layers get mixed up. When I wanted to look at the hole, I found my parents. When I wondered what they had been doing here, I found nothing but the hole and what I thought I had lost in it. No matter where I went, I was constantly being told about my parents, with anecdotes and pieces of information. I could be eating my supper and someone would slip me a photo (in it: my father, maybe fourteen, tanned and astride a chopped log) or tell me a story about my mother’s parents’ house, in whose kitchen poppy-seed cakes had been baked in an assembly-line-like fashion. It was the disconcerting touch of a past I had nothing to do with, when someone approached me while I was having breakfast in the café in town and said: Your parents were always here too! What I could believe of it remained to be seen: I only had information from indirect conclusions at my disposal. It was biographical remote sensing.
Whenever I switched to the mystery of the hole, because I thought I would be able to deal with the factual there, I noticed that the main source of my knowledge was likewise only hearsay: no different from the case of my parents, everything was conveyed via old stories, bon mots, and the dispatches of my own grandparents. What had actually happened and what had been embellished or even only surmised was difficult to determine. In the nineteenth century, it was said, seventeen men supposedly on the search for gold disappeared. In the eighteenth, they were looking for copper — at the beginning of the twentieth century, a desire for uranium drove people into the hole. You would be told these things in the inn over a beer or someone would find it in an anthology of fairy tales, but the same thing would be later invoked in an historical work. At first glance, none of these stories had a causal relationship to the other — indeed, I didn’t even know whether their role went beyond the purely metaphorical, that is, beyond what was already laid out in the myth of Pergerhannes, for instance.
The problem resided in the fact that the camp-prisoner story was handled in a very similar way. Everyone was used to telling the history of the mountain a little differently, and because everything came from word-of-mouth accounts, inaccurate formulations kept cropping up that made clear knowledge impossible. One would turn, full of relish, to the horror stories, and with love to the mountain transfigured by mystery, which in turn seemed to form a tight-knit community between its inhabitants.
I couldn’t see anything underground.
I had to give my eyes a few minutes to get used to the darkness, before I could turn off the light in the darkened chamber. I was standing in a kind of recess in the foundations — a gap that had been placed in the middle of the wooden gables. The chamber had an uneven, tamped-clay floor, and the bricks were exposed — I felt the coolness of the earth emitting from them. By my estimates, the whole compartment couldn’t have been more than three metres square, and it was completely empty except for a table, on which lay a book. The surfaces were covered in a finger-thick layer of dust — it was a place with an oppressive atmosphere. Its emptiness in particular was oppressive, and precisely because it was so empty, I looked for details that I hoped to see: I found two sturdy hinges protruding from the left wall, and a hanging cord at the entrance that made it possible to slide the doors open from the inside. I had spent only a few minutes in this strange cellar when the claustrophobia hit me. Before I went upstairs, I wiped the book on the table with the back of my hand and saw its title: The Iliad. Breathing heavily, I went back into the living room and dialled the number for the care home. The night nurse picked up.
‘This is Ruth Schwarz; would I be able to come by now?’ I asked. ‘It’s urgent, I need to speak to my grandmother.’ Silence on the other end: Of course, I thought, it’s half past one in the morning, what an absurd question.
‘I’m sorry,’ the nurse said. ‘I thought you’d been notified. Your grandmother passed away three days after your visit.’
13
The first incident I personally witnessed was the one at the swimming pool. In early summer, just as the swim-ringed children were jumping from the diving towers on the first day of the season, the water level rapidly dropped at around 1pm, and around ninety seconds after the first person had noticed the suction, the water had completely drained. No one even had time to shout for help or to fetch a lifeguard who could have thrown the buoys into the pool. Between the children sitting on the blue bottom you could see a crack as thick as a leg in the concrete. As time passed, an awkward silence took hold; no one dared to call the fire brigade, because, after all, no one had been hurt. The mothers lay on their stomachs and dragged their children out of the pool by hanging towels. The very same day, after the lifeguards had provisionally repaired the pool, they filled it with water again — but the invisible cracks continued to pervade the whole structure like fine capillaries, and so they had to pump thousands of litres into the slowly leaking basin every day for the whole of July,
just to deal with the situation.
It was true that what was going on was part of a natural event, but it fostered a charged atmosphere, generated by the infinitely slow cracking of the stone foundations on which we continued our everyday life without a care. A month later, still in the hazy heat of the summer, one could gather from softly worded newspaper articles and whispered conversations that reports of burglaries had skyrocketed. Initially, these were individual cases that were unrelated to one another: burglars are said to have climbed behind the bourgeois house facades that had given way to the earth’s erosion and subsided. Then it gradually became clear that the unsightly sides of the houses, the long-standing cracks in their facades, had been obscured by swings and tarpaulins that had hastily been thrown over them, and that cunning criminals had realised all this before the rest of the population did. The private erupted into the public, even if one sought to cover it up.
The streets slowly, and without anyone being able to determine the precise transition, took on the character of the provisional, a never-ending sequence of transient states. After the school became in acute danger of collapsing because of its roof, the children were temporarily hosted in containers. Everyone got used to them so quickly that within a few weeks the blue metal boxes, which could be stacked and adjusted, were considered buildings in the real sense. The whole townscape slipped a small, but disturbing bit further towards ugliness. The same thing began to happen to the private houses, too: where there had previously been flat concrete garage roofs, there were suddenly ones made from corrugated iron, which tolerated the tectonic activity better. Fine wrought-iron fences were replaced, little by little, with wire mesh equivalents. Surprisingly, what shocked me the most was the fate of the beautiful, willowy statue of Lady Justice in front of the district court (blindfolded and holding scales in her hand), which not only broke down the middle, but also both halves — that is, the left and right — had drifted apart from one another. Instead of dismantling the bust however, the gap in the middle was constantly being filled in, so that Justice’s physical size visibly increased. Ultimately the community considered, since the figure looked more like a caricature, remodelling her into the founding father of the town, Karl Stiefel, for whom this potbelly would have at least been authentic. But this was dismissed as too ridiculous. In other words, a second coating of glaze was overlaid on the baroque cityscape: a layer of fillings, substitutions, and imposed eyesores.
The Liquid Land Page 15