‘On the one hand it was, of course, about a very dark period in Austria,’ he said, again being vague, raising his right hand to wave.
‘Which period?’
‘The darkest,’ he answered. ‘They had questions about, shall we say, ambiguities, regarding a certain course of action that happened from the top. And, as a certain kind of politician, my interest was purely in maintaining a tradition that is, on the one hand, human, and on the other hand, subject to reason.’
It occurred to me that after a year and a half in this town, I didn’t know what party he actually belonged to. It could have been any of them.
The vagueness of his statement made me increasingly aggressive.
‘Were my parents researching something about the National Socialists?’ I asked in a provocative tone — though there wasn’t actually anything provocative about my question. The mayor took off his hat, as if he were hot. An oily tuft of hair appeared from under it.
‘One has certain … provenances,’ he forced out. ‘And it’s not always clear how these relate. Your parents maybe went too deep from time to time, and not everyone liked that.’ The log was heaved into the air with a roar, and the brass band struck up again.
‘Who didn’t like it?’ I asked, but the mayor had become engrossed with unusual fervour in shaking hands with a passer-by wearing a sash. When he turned back to me, the question had become obsolete.
‘You work for the Countess?’ he now asked, as if to change the subject. ‘Very hardworking.’
‘Yes, I do. Why? You get on with the Countess, don’t you?’ I said.
‘You get along with those you have to get along with. Whereby the getting along is also always a question of letting things go.’ This answer also confused me.
‘So there are points of friction? Is it difficult to be involved in political activities when you have the nobility next to you in a parallel system?’ I was in full flow, suddenly daring enough to ask everything. But he had his nose deep in his glass again.
‘The nobility, well,’ he finally began, slurring. ‘I wouldn’t say we were talking about nobility in the classical sense.’ With these words he looked around like a persecuted man. ‘Your parents knew that. I’ll only say this much: you shouldn’t believe everything that the Countess tells you. Fifty years ago,’ then he corrected himself, ‘maybe eighty years ago, the castle belonged to someone else. Then there were certain changes that everyone in Greater Einland agreed not to talk about, because a lot of good came out of them.’
‘The Countess’s family were originally the owners of the mines, right?’
‘Some say a direct descendent of Pergerhannes. But that can’t be true of course, because Pergerhannes is a mythical figure,’ babbled the mayor. ‘But what isn’t a myth is this: someone wanted to, so to speak, rise up to the nobility. The Countess belonged to the first generation in which social change had been implemented with violence. Out with everything to do with mining, in with having more land. She grew up in great hardship, that has to be said. My father told me that the Weidenheims sometimes didn’t heat the children’s bedroom for the whole of the winter. To encourage self-discipline. Had her taught by a French general, only the best education. Never went to school with other children, all private. I’m saying nothing. I’m just saying you have to respect that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, when old Weidenheim died, the nobility was already fully developed. From then on, the mines were no longer a decisive factor for the family’s prosperity, but the daughter has administrated the town excellently. Of course, some estates only came about by dubious means, if you know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
He took another breath, put his hat back on, sighed three times into the Rákóczi March currently being played and then leaned over towards me. ‘It has to do with what your parents were interested in. There were omissions, I’ll say that much, the house, the one you’re living in,’ he cleared his throat, then started up again in a different place, ‘because the mine was controlled by forces from the town which were not unrelated to the Countess. And quite a bit had been accumulated through the predicaments that arose at the time.’ I needed a few moments to process the chaotic mess he had created.
‘Have I understood correctly that the Countess isn’t a noblewoman at all?’
‘Listen, that I’m telling you this is, to be honest, no accident. Everyone in the town knows that you’re sniffing around. I advise you not to draw attention to yourself.’
This directness appealed to me; for the first time, I had the feeling that someone was really talking to me.
‘Mayor,’ I said, leaning towards him, ‘I know only too well that I am in a grey zone. But it’s like this: I believe that my parents were onto something, and maybe …’ — I considered for a final time, whether I should touch on it, and decided to give it a try — ‘You see, the night before my parents’ accident, they were at the castle. Isn’t that a strange coincidence?’ Now the mayor looked as if he had suddenly sobered up; he sat up and was breathing heavily.
‘What unspeakable things are you suggesting about our Countess?’ he whispered, even though he had just been talking in the same vein. ‘You’ve got a nerve saying that while I’m sitting next to you in public? You must have misunderstood me.’
Then he straightened the cord tie inside his jacket, as if he had said too much. The conversation was over. In fact, he got up and we shook hands, as if saying farewell; neither of us would leave the party, though. Instead, he stepped towards the steeply towering May Pole.
In 1801, Thomas Young carried out the double-slit experiment for the very first time: an electron emitter was placed in front of a barrier with two slits and was used to shoot particles at it. The surprising thing was that not only were impact points able to be seen behind the two slits, but also next to them — in the form of a fringed interference pattern. This was a strong indication of wave-particle duality: electrons behave both like individual particles and like periodic oscillations. Furthermore, even a single particle could apparently take both paths at once — bilocation, the breaking of time, was a reality on the micro level. A modification of the detectors revealed even more astonishing things. If one affixes an apparatus that records the gap through which a particle flies, the particles only take one path and the interference pattern disappears. It was only when the electrons were given the freedom to break the laws of nature without being seen that they would do it.
15
At the beginning of September, an area of low pressure drew in over the Hochwechsel and brought with it the longest-lasting drizzle that had been recorded in the last sixty years. After an unbearably hot summer, where one had fevered with the earth and the panting plants, it was a relief for us all. For about two weeks, a besprinkling set in over the landscape, which was further eroded by blasting wind against the stone ridges. Which is why the people in the community hardly noticed anything of it: only that on seemingly clear days, one still had to turn on the windscreen wipers, and walk a little more carefully on the asphalt in their patent-leather shoes because the puddles no longer evaporated. The fact that one could barely see the Hochkarner ridge only unsettled a few people. The scattered light got lost in the oversaturated air and never emerged from the haze. This was the autumn weather longed for during the long, hot summer — local weather conditions, they said, normality.
But the surface of the ground, the meadows, the forests, the machine-tamped soil beneath the buildings — all of them, meanwhile, sucked the moisture out of the air in thirsty gulps, faster than had ever happened in such a short period of time. Eighty kilometres away, the Schwarza had already powerfully broken its banks and had flooded the cellars in the surrounding area, from which people hurriedly carried their preserves and table-tennis tables. But Greater Einland didn’t know anything about it.
By the middle of the month, the ground beneath the town had drunk in e
xcess of its capacity, so that when the onset of October showered the first plants, the herbaceous, tender ones began to drown under our feet.
The pressure of the water had to therefore escape downwards, a layer deeper, and it was, as was later reported, around 2 November, when, deep beneath the main square, south-east of the large shaft, one of the stone walls, which had been excavated too far during the era of mining, broke. It couldn’t withstand the water any longer. The crack, which reached semi-diagonally from the cemetery to the main square, did not immediately lead to the collapse of the area, as the edges of the layers of rock still overlapped one another. This meant that the water could now finally run into this crack, and the rock itself was disturbed by an increase in pressure. The fibre connections, formed over the course of millennia, broke apart — the base of the mountain, which had been stabile since the Mesozoic Era, swelled up like an edema. This meant that, far below the surface, where we carelessly went about our daily work, shaking the inconvenient droplets from our raincoats, everything was swimming.
The events of 14 November began for me when I was awoken by a sharp banging sound around four in the morning. I sat upright and was for a moment in panic mode, before realising that the noise was coming from the window. The outer shutters had come loose in the stormy gusts of wind and were now knocking with a jumpy flightiness on their hinges, as if they were trying to gain entry to my house. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and opened the window in order to reattach the shutters once more. Outside there were hurricane-like conditions: for a moment I had the feeling that the wind, which drove sprays of droplets into my hair, would grab me, too, and tear me into the open. This moment of fear then sank in the fog, because I went back to bed and fell into such a deep sleep that when I woke up again, around eight, I wondered if I had only dreamt it. I hadn’t: even now a strong storm was blowing down from the cloud-shrouded Brunnenkogel Mountain. I rushed to get dressed, as I was already running a little late.
At the exact same time I was climbing into my trousers, 8.30 to be precise, work began on the nearby construction site next to the church, as it did every day. I had been annoyed by their racket for the whole of August, yet in this cloud of ire, I had never looked at the renovations — so my entire knowledge about these works only consisted of stories from third parties. Every child knew that the church tower had been tilting bit by bit over the years. A wretched sight, as if forsaken by God, the people said, and there was no question that of all the buildings with this fate, the tower had to be the first to be straightened, if one wanted to obtain a blessing for the salvation of the rest of the town. It was to be unveiled again at the Easter Mass this coming year with a solemn procession, and would be therefore encased for its straightening out for the whole year.
A foreman from the local construction company went to work there every morning with fourteen temporary workers, who were always hired on a project basis. On site were four men from Kosovo, six from Slovenia, and another four from Bosnia. Even though they had worked together for the past nine weeks, they were still struggling to find a common language. They called to one another, from down below up to the tower and back again, in four different idioms, with German ultimately dominating. Around 9.45, six of the men were on the scaffolding, beginning to render the crumbling facade. The din of the building work masked the swelling sounds of the town, in which people in every part of the place began to leave for work. As was so often the case, today the doors slammed twice. Though the day looked sunny and clear from inside, almost cloudless, when people stepped outside they noticed the cold, damp weather that seemed to rise from the ground, and the drops hanging in the air, against which they were now pointlessly arming themselves with an umbrella or rubber boots.
I had started making my way to work around nine, the documents I was carrying with me encased in an additional plastic slip. In the last week the papers were constantly arriving in a terrible condition: damp, as if they had been steamed — and in some places a word had run into the one adjacent to it. I clearly remember that day — the feel of the plastic in my hand, my fingertips, which already felt waterlogged. Then I saw something unusual in my path: I could see, from a distance, that in the large square in East Town a group of people had gathered, which I now joined. The statue of Pergerhannes that was erected at this location, which had been in a conqueror pose, pointing at the ground with an outstretched hand, had fallen over in the night. Its base had pressed into the cobblestones, and the downward thrust had brought to the surface what was underneath: sludge. The sight of this clay, which was white with lime, particularly worried me. My worry was eclipsed only by the position of the statue: the arm that had pointed at the mountain for the last two hundred years, was now, due to the incline, pointing at the primary school. I walked on, as did the rest of the small crowd, who were just in the process of dispersing. We were used to daily collapses. This was also the reason, it can be said in retrospect, no storm warning was issued: because we had all become resilient to the incessant demolitions. As we would later learn from the newspaper, the wind had swelled so violently since the early hours of the morning, that by midday, fourteen windows had been broken. The homeowners secretly swept up the shards and attached the frames that had twisted in the rage to the hinges with tape, each in the belief that they were an isolated case and ignorant vis-à-vis the widespread destruction. A two-hundred-year-old oak came down on Beethovenstrasse and only just missed a parked sports car, which the owner perceived as cosmic luck.
The castle remained, as always, completely untouched. No storm could carry away the two-and-a-half-metre thick stone walls. Only the bushes were forcibly sloping, and an uprooted yucca tree from the garden blew past as I arrived for work. I worked undisturbed until around two o’clock, only temporarily interrupted by my own agenda. The remarkable thing was this: it was precisely this day, but probably already beforehand, on which I had resolved that I could no longer keep my suspicions to myself. While I was once again poring over papers for hours on end, I decided today was the day. For this I would have to stay longer for once. At five o’clock, when the Countess arrived at her work salon, I would go to her and ask her about it. From then on, I couldn’t keep still; I got up and drank five cups of coffee over the next few hours to pass the time.
Nothing remarkable happened between one and four, apart from a meeting that took place on the building site. The output target for the day had almost been achieved, but only with great adversity: all day long the wind had torn away the tarpaulin under which they had been trowelling and chiselling, and the relentless rain had soon run under the shirts of the workmen. One or two had wanted to finish work early, but, as the commission would later establish, it had turned out quite the opposite.
Early that afternoon, sometime around three-thirty, the foreman of the church tower renovations, Karl Leitgeb, had called a break and had the four men in the scaffolding at that time fetched down. They had taken shelter in the crypt and discussed their next steps in whispered tones: the subject of the brief discussion was the fact that they were clearly behind schedule, due to various factors. Leitgeb therefore asked whether the men would be willing to work twelve instead of the usual eight hours for the next fourteen days in exchange for an advance payment. All the workers except one, who was commuting from Slovenia and could not spare the extra hours, accepted the offer, and went back to work after a short break. But this time they wore chest harnesses; the wind on the wooden platform sixteen metres up in the air made it too dangerous to stay unsecured.
When overtime began for the temporary workers, the bell rang, signalling the end of the day for the upper years at the nearby grammar school, whose students unburdened themselves with ease from their afternoon lessons. By now, a whirlwind had torn nine satellite dishes from the prefabricated building on Genossenschaftsstrasse, uprooted around twenty fir trees, and pushed a cat into a drainage shaft, which was subsequently rescued by ten volunteers from the fire brigade. When the same cat, which
, according to the regional newspaper, was called Samira, was wrapped in a towel and handed over to its happy owners, the children gathered at the primary school meeting point to set off for the lantern procession.
What an exceptionally large number of the participants would remember was how, beforehand, they’d had to step into shoes that were already wet: it had rained for so many days now that no one owned a dry pair. Around forty middle-school students and their parents had gathered in front of the church at 5.15pm. The children nervously rocked back and forth; carrying their lanterns felt like an important, almost earth-shattering task, while their parents were clearly in significantly worse moods. Many of them had found damage to their houses only a few hours before, and no one yet knew that almost everyone had been affected the same way. So they kept furiously silent, and fretted about when to repair. A bright light shone on the street from the Pumpkin, where the usual suspects had taken refuge after work. The priest had had the rochet put over his cassock, which had become dewy from the fine water, and was shaking hands with the children in turn. The parade would last around an hour, and go from the parish church through the Brunnengasse, and, once past the old West Gate, through the entire town centre. It would be followed by a performance of the story of St Martin on the Perger Platz. For the first time in over one hundred and fifty years, the Market Square was in too bad a shape to display the saint’s exploits. Everyone had to struggle to light their home-made lanterns in the windy conditions — if the wind didn’t instantly blow out the lighters, it swung the lanterns away wildly. The children tensely held their sticks, which the gusts tried to wrench from their hands.
I appeared in the Countess’s study at five-thirty sharp and found her, as expected, sitting at her desk in front of the wall of books. In contrast to my own office, which looked down onto the courtyard, the wind couldn’t be heard in hers.
The Liquid Land Page 18