The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  In the autumn of 2009, a certain anxiety began to mingle into my thoughts, too. I checked the doorframes, and began using a spirit level — at first only occasionally, then several times a day — to check the shelves. I studied the plans I had in my office, which were updated with every fissure, until I was sure that the groove of the subsidence didn’t go through my house. It had become a running joke in the office — when I got to my desk in the morning, Anita or Philipp would often throw me a geological profile on which the distances between the damp places to my house were drawn up in marker pen. I didn’t find it funny — the idea that it would get hold of my property tormented me day and night.

  The house: sometimes I felt its foundations within me, as if I had deep, root-like wreaths of nerves in its floor slab. I lay in my bed and felt the beams creak, as if it were my own joints making this sound. I felt a liveliness in the walls that I had never perceived in something inanimate before — the way the wood stretched in the sun and the shingles twitched under the sleet that fell regularly. When it rained I felt the top of my head become wet. On other days I laughed at myself for this pathos, and yet it was undoubtedly the reason that those processes, which would later come to a head, kept running unnoticed in the back of my mind. On the surface, I was completely satisfied with my conviction that I would not work on a filler until my fears about the hole had been proven groundless. Yet when I was first affected by the thought that my own house could sink, automatisms were set in motion within me. It was 15 September when these hidden thoughts found their way to the surface.

  I’d lain awake half the night before I got up. Cold air whistled into the study and pushed aside the heavy curtains, against which the glowing end of my cigarette almost brushed as I stretched in the darkness. I’d been smoking again for the past two months. At first ashamed and under the self-appeasement of only doing so when drinking with others, then while working if the task was especially demanding, and finally on waking, or even, in fact, while trying to stay awake. I stared into the darkness when I heard a simmering from the kitchen, and remembered that on my way to the study I’d put the espresso maker on the hob while on autopilot as usual. The heaviness of the bed was still in my bones, even though I hadn’t slept at all. It was pitch dark as I fetched a cup of coffee from the kitchen, went back to the window, and, with the boiling hot coffee in my mouth, grasped the decision to work.

  I sat at my desk and my head ached — but I held the pen firmly. Perhaps it was due to the late hour: I had a magical peace of mind at my command, of a kind one often feels in dreams. On the right-hand side of the table were the specialist journals on replenishment I’d ordered countless copies of and had never opened — in the centre were the graphical representations of the slumps, which I usually only stared at for a distraction. At that moment I had an idea. Without any effort and without my involvement, the answer revealed itself: the binding agent had to be of the same composition as the hole.

  Within moments, I had started covering sheets of paper with formulas. One would need, I determined, small canals through which the water could drain. My ludicrous idea, which, I assumed, also contradicted all technical rules, was to mix a fungus in the still damp amalgam — a mycelium that grows quickly and in the dark. The filling agent would have to be prepared in such a way that it would require many days to harden. During this timeframe, the massively multiplying mushrooms would embed small tubes of the desired quality into the filled space — and simply die off after the amalgam had hardened. By the time the sun had started to rise, I had gone in the kitchen countless times for more coffee, and within a few hours I had got down a formula. It didn’t take long for me to identify two main problems: first, I would have to produce a petrol-based mixture that would render the land barren a few hours after the injection; dead, flora-murdering castrato soil. The water and thus the nutrients would not be completely transported through the extremely thin tubes, at least that’s what my biological lay knowledge told me. It was a moral problem, I thought, and wiped viscous fluid out from the corner of my eye. Second, and most important, due to my lack of experience it was not clear whether the binding mixture would hold at all. This was, however, a technical question that could be solved through trial and error.

  An innocent, enthusiastic impulse was now keeping me awake: the urge to research — the question of whether what I had written down on the paper would also prove itself in reality. I sat impatiently in the winged chair in front of the wall of books to calculate the unfamiliar quantities. It was six in the morning, which meant that the shops wouldn’t open for two hours, and I would only have a short window of time to get everything before I had to go to work. I began to write down a list of substances out of which I could fabricate an at least roughly similar mixture. The things I needed for the trial run were common products from any hardware store. I made more coffee, keeping the grounds and those from the last brew in a bowl, and left it to cool, before I got dressed and ran to the hardware store. It wasn’t too difficult to find the things I required.

  Back at my house I used the kitchen scales to combine the chemicals in a cleaning bucket. A lot more coffee grounds would be needed to give the fungus enough contact surface. I had seen a documentary about an Australian inventor who had developed a building material from coffee grounds, it now occurred to me, but I didn’t know what to make of this idea. The rest, that is, the hardening element, had to consist of slag, but, of course, it was not possible to mix slag — which had to be concocted in a blast furnace — oneself. So I switched to bitumen and coarse-grained sand, pressed the nets of fungus in small coffee balls and mixed the rest of the grounds with the pseudo-asphalt that I’d made. I immediately carried two buckets as heavy as lead into my garden. A tiny canal had developed around the back of my house — this unauthorised fabricated filling wouldn’t suffice for anything more. The hardest part was getting the artificial material deep enough into the little hole: I pushed the viscous tar into the ground with a broomstick until the last part I could reach was filled with it. As I left the house, still worked up by what had just happened, I vowed never to tell anyone about my discovery.

  I had already been waiting for two hours in the still-empty Pumpkin, and had spread out my papers on the regulars table, when Hat-Maker Schlaf finally entered the bar, pulling his cashmere scarf over his mouth against the drizzly weather. He greeted me fleetingly, settled down in his usual place, and drew out the commercial gazette from his pocket — the same way he did every day — to fill his repertoire with anecdotes and complaints about the goings-on of the rest of the world in the half hour before the others arrived. Over dessert, he would once more assert that it would be best for the company to stay in Greater Einland.

  I made sure that Erna wasn’t in the room before I sat with him.

  ‘Herr Schlaf, how’s business?’ I asked.

  ‘May I help you, Frau Schwarz?’

  He was taken aback, indeed unnerved, by my appearance at the wrong table, at an hour when no one had ever disturbed him before. In order not to let my nervousness get the better of me, I wanted to get to the point as directly as possible, before someone had the opportunity to interrupt us.

  ‘Actually you can. You see, I haven’t lived here very long, and I’ve been hearing a lot of things for the first time that are common knowledge to others.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said absently, sticking his finger in the newspaper like a bookmark.

  ‘And recently I read something at the castle … it was in the legal department, I work with all kinds of documents.’

  Within a second all movement had been wiped from Schlaf’s face. ‘I’m listening?’

  ‘You see, I read about what happened in ’62 and would rather ask you directly than anyone else.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I read something wrong. Yes, it was probably some wrong information. Because it said that you were in police custody fo
r a week back then.’

  ‘On false accusations,’ Schlaf said, so quietly that I could barely hear him. ‘And I was released and rehabilitated post haste. Kindly stop talking.’ He leaned away as if the whole matter had been closed, but immediately added: ‘Those bunglers. How do I know who buried them there? And now I’d like to finish reading my newspaper, if that’s alright with you.’

  ‘Were your parents still alive at the time? Why didn’t someone interview them? You were only seventeen. At least, that’s what it said in the newspaper.’ Why were my hands shaking?

  ‘They — my parents weren’t involved at all. What do you want? This episode cost me enough. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I’m asking you for geological reasons,’ I said, and knew myself how unbelievable it sounded. ‘That four bodies were found in your garden is not irrelevant if we soon start digging up everything.’

  ‘If you don’t retract your accusation this instant, I will report it to the Countess,’ hissed Schlaf, who had recovered himself. ‘Someone placed subjects on my parents’ property — that’s done and dusted. There was a brief commotion at the time, fine, but you know how the media can be. It has passed.’ Now that he had mentioned the Countess, I suddenly felt in a tight spot.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something: it could have just as easily been someone else’s garden. Don’t dig up all this stuff about my parents through your bumbling curiosity. These were old, frail people who were hard-hit by the trial. My father walked into the courtroom with the use of a stick after his son had been in custody for a week.’ I didn’t say anything, but by now Schlaf was in full swing. ‘Things like this are distorted, they’re bad for business. Back then they only fixated on us, never on Sister Elfriede or the others. Because we,’ he pointed his rolled-up newspaper at me, ‘had money.’ With these words he thwacked the journal on the stable, and Frau Erna came into the bar, startled. He lowered his voice again. ‘Only the devil knows why there were a few corpses lying there. It was the war. How many people do you think fell, here, from the town? If the Count hadn’t saved us — it was a smear campaign. And you’re dragging it back up, your generation especially. Because you never had to build anything. And now, get out of my sight.’

  Without saying another word, I walked out of the inn, sat down, momentarily outside of my body, on the kerb and took a deep breath. Sister Elfriede and the others, Sister Elfriede and the others, I thought, and then hurried on again. I would take the way to the Kastelburg to calm down. It was a steep path that took around thirty minutes through thick coniferous trees, followed by a ridge over three or four hills, and ended in the spot-lit castle ruins, high above the forest, which were like a lighthouse towering up from the sea of treetops. While the others were partaking of their dinner at the Pumpkin, I tried to calm my heart on my way into the forest. I moved over these surfaces as confidently as I could find the way from my throat over my chest to my stomach with my eyes closed. As I climbed the ridge that gently led to the plateau above the town, my uneasiness subsided. Nature brought me into equilibrium, and I allowed it to seize me: agriculturally cultivated scraps of land, which the road had woven like a shuttle into a single piece of fabric. No sooner had I arrived at the Kastelburg than I sat on one of the walls left ruined by the Huns, and stayed for hours, never bored: I watched the wind sweeping the earth and smelled the moss behind me, until I wanted to infiltrate the soil myself.

  I turned towards the familiar slope, but something seemed different to me this time: as if a plate of glass was lying over the panorama, as if I were sitting in front of a shop window with a model railway inside it, and all the people were only little men cast in plastic. On top of this, I was sitting uncomfortably, as I now realised, and had to move back and forth as if to be freed of something heavy on my back. When I stood up in frustration to get to the bottom of it, I saw that the back of my seat — this small wall on which I always wiled away my time — had sunk a good thirty centimetres. It had to have happened suddenly, because I had been sitting here just a week earlier. Evidently everything was following this sinkage in a viscous domino effect — some stone or other had shifted barely noticeably. But it shocked me no less than if someone had removed a bone from a face I knew.

  All of a sudden when looking down into the valley, which lay before me like a picture puzzle, the scale of the subsidence was revealed. The surfaces were hacked into pieces — small, useless fields forced into shape. A crack went around the centre of town, as disfiguring as a deep scar. This panorama disgusted me — and at the same time, the more I backed away from it, the more it moved in, like an indiscreet person who doesn’t want to let you go.

  For the first time the landscape aggrieved me. More than that: I was overcome with loathing, so I decided to start making my way back. The moisture that had previously been evaporated by the sun I could now feel in my ankles. Then a gap in my memory, without my knowing how it had happened. I had been walking for about ten minutes, first turning left and then right, when I realised I was lost. The way had only been one road and yet I was standing on a bridge that I hadn’t crossed on my way here. So I went back a hundred, then two hundred metres, but soon realised that I hadn’t gone back but had actually taken a third, even more wrong, direction. It was getting dark, only the treetops stood out, pointed against the sky.

  When I began to hit obstacles with my feet in the dark and could only progress very slowly, I experienced a moment of panic. Every direction looked the same as the other; there were no distinguishing features in the seamless black that surrounded me. I regretted not having brought a torch with me, cursed my lack of mobile phone, and continued to shimmy from tree to tree. I lost all sense of time. I felt that I hadn’t been on my quest for even an hour, yet my feet hurt as badly as they did after twenty or thirty kilometres. I came to a decline, was relieved to be back in the valley, as I assumed, then a wall jumped up in front of me and I once more didn’t know where I should go.

  I gradually realised that I would no longer be able to find my way back home today, and attempted to turn this into something positive: it was still warm, I wouldn’t freeze. There’s no real danger, I said to myself two or three times, out loud, and lay down on the ground. I stacked some branches so that my body wouldn’t roll down the slope, and lay my head on a rock, like I was pretending to be someone sleeping. Now that I was lying in absolute optical deprivation, what I had previously taken to be a wonderfully quiet forest was suddenly full of sounds. A hoarse owl screeched, and all around I heard rustling and hissing, so that time and time again, I sat up with a start. I now understood the wretchedness of my situation. When the miserable wind pressed the damp leaves in my face, I gave up. The sun was coming up, and I hoped I would be able to see soon enough and get home. For the last hour I sat and waited for my eyes to get used to the slowly returning light, then I finally comprehended where I was: I had spent the night in a ditch in the forest, less than five hundred metres from the path I’d walked in on, and had mistaken a forester’s lodge for a rock wall.

  I got home at dawn and brushed the leaves out of my hair.

  14

  I leaned my cheek against the soft, warm muzzle of the animal, from whose nostrils flowed a slow, calming breath that kept my own in check. Its chin was covered with bristles and yet was so soft that I could stroke its lower jaw. No resistance from the horse’s docile flesh that let me go wherever I pleased: a feeling that I had always liked.

  ‘How long?’ asked a servant who was clearly underage, and who had just tied the saddle in place, but I couldn’t immediately think what he meant by the question.

  ‘I haven’t actually ridden in a long time,’ I said. Regardless of my non-answer, the lad lashed the stirrups deep into the brown mare’s ribs. At this moment the Countess came around the corner, leading a mighty white horse, whose mane was woven into a baroque braid.

  ‘Let
’s hurry,’ she said, and I led the horse, the way I’d learned during my teenage years, following her out of the stables. ‘I can’t take too long because I have to meet someone at 3pm who will be making all the costumes for the festival. A master of disguise and deception. I’ve worked with him for years.’

  ‘Are we really going hunting?’ I asked, but the groom was already helping me mount.

  I longed to be somewhere else, but there had been no escape that day. The Countess had besieged me for months about doing something with her outside of work, but I had always managed to wriggle out of it. The insistence she showed was inexplicable on the surface, and yet had a system: she criticised me incessantly and didn’t even seem to like me very much, but at times she displayed a strange, almost excessive attachment to me. As if in some moments it occurred to her that she urgently needed a female companion. Then suddenly there would be a pack of lime-blossom tea on my desk, the kind she was constantly drinking herself; or she’d remember that I’d once complained of back pain, and draw exercises on a piece of paper that she said she herself did every morning in front of the open window.