I had, in the meantime, shivering from the cold, lost all feeling in my body; it could have been ten hours or five minutes between my attempts to descend the steps. It was as if there was a physical obstacle preventing me. When I had taken three steps down, a strange combination of nausea and exhaustion forced me to sit down again, because I suddenly wondered what I was going to do with the information I was seeking here. What a hardship it would be to dig and understand more deeply — because I indeed only saw a mine looming ahead. But it was late, maybe I was just tired. I hadn’t climbed down deep enough to be able to see more precisely what lay before me. On the other hand, however, I was already too deep: too deep to hear what had taken place so sonorously outside that half the town had peeled out of their houses; too deep to be able to imagine that whatever I would find might matter in the outside world. So I hovered in indecision.
By 20.01, the fire brigade had pulled all the injured men out of the rubble on the Church Square. One would die on the way to the hospital. Ferdinand, whose presence in this tumult with his oxygen bottle and his trailing foot I can’t make sense of to this day, told me that he had seen rescuers grab the foreman and drag him into an ambulance, and that two or three more had jumped onto the loading bed after him.
It was unspeakable chaos. Later accounts came from three to four hundred people present, as more and more people were driven into the street by the noise and gathered, enraged by a sudden sense of collective injustice. Groups came together to rebel against the sinking hole: a few of them began throwing bricks through the windows of nearby houses in a total frenzy. Other bystanders pulled the rioters — who were local doctors and lawyers — away. (It’s important to put into perspective that the investigation determined that it was a single brick that had been thrown. In reference to the prompt that at least six shop windows had been smashed, the assertion stood: all six were destroyed with a single brick). An outright mass hysteria descended — the demolished church tower acted like a drug on the population.
But perhaps this wasn’t the complete truth: for one thing, there were isolated records that gave the impression of a collective rage. Perhaps ten people who were causing havoc, and five who had allowed themselves to be carried away into violent excesses. The majority were, so to speak, peacefully aggressive: they pulsated with suppressed hatred for the hole, which couldn’t be hit because there was nothing there. At 8.30, around twenty fathers and young men had gathered in front of the demolished clock face. You could see them shaking with excitement — a quivering, standoffish group who had to bury their fists in their pockets because their hands didn’t know what else to do. But nothing happened. It would later be summarised thus: as soon as the fire brigade and ambulance had driven off, and the town office began to transport away the rubble with four trucks, the crowd suddenly calmed. As suddenly as the uproar had spread, it now seemed rather absurd not to go home and discuss it further in private.
It was 21.00 when I left the entryway again, closed the door behind me, replaced the chain, admittedly without locking it — surplus to requirements. No one had ever touched it. No one would attempt to in the future. It was only now, as I was walking up the Schulgasse, that I noticed a certain disquiet, and was surprised for a moment that the whole town seemed to be up and about. Families were heading for their homes with purpose. I noticed their silence and that everyone was avoiding the gaze of others. Taking the eastern route out of the town, I arrived at the Brunnen Arch, and had to pause a moment to gather my impressions: a sea of glass shards and terrible desertedness. What had happened? The inns had turned out their lights, the pavements were empty, and there was a centimetre-thick film of dust and rubble over everything, so that I had to be careful not to fall over. Only two street sweepers, working alone, braced themselves against the mountains of rubble. In the midst of these impressions, I became aware of tinnitus wandering into my own ears, as if a sound that had been accompanying me for the longest time had been turned down. I finally pulled my hood from my head. The weeks of rain had stopped.
16
The festival would take place on a Sunday, as Sundays are the raw material for a contented look back on an accomplished work of godly scope. There will be a spring-like mood for the tourists (even if it is autumn), as if you can already feel the crocuses breaking through from beneath the lawn. In the event that the weather and/or landscape conditions do not comply with this maxim, help must be given to find another way to make it happen (as yet unspecified).
Generally, the festivities will take place in three phases, which will be carried out as follows:
1.) The arrival — the tourists will be brought from Vienna in chartered buses to the town entrance at nine in the morning. Hundreds of people from home and abroad, with a strong focus on China, Japan, and the United States. An arrival area will be set up in advance for this initial stop-off for the groups, which, in addition to four thousand carpark spaces, will also include a refreshment station for those waiting, where all kinds of typical Austrian fare will be offered, including Sachertorte, cheese-stuffed smoked sausage, crepes, and punch cake. Everything will be served as take-away.
Then the first highlight: a procession towards the town centre. The tourists will be escorted from the town gate by a four hundred–strong marching band. Eight drum majors and their battalions will each be responsible for one tourist section, and will lead them into the centre, playing ‘Radetzky March’ as they do. The first part comes to an end here with a spectacular beer brunch, where, in addition to the usual speeches and honours, the Greater Einland craftwork will be presented on stage in the manner of a circus performance: our machine embroidery and cutlery fabrication ought to be as monumental as Cirque de Soleil, a brewer’s drayman should shoulder-carry his ten barrels of wine, and a master bronze-castor shall make a baptismal font in which the priest would immediately baptise the most recently born child.
2.) Station-hopping — the second part follows on from the first around midday. The whole event is intended to be a combination of art action and natural spectacle: in other words, an encounter between performance and natural purity, which must be closely interrelated. The crowd will be dispersed and, as is done at Dokumenta Festival in Kassel, visitors will be invited to roam around the town, which has itself been declared a sculpture. For the next few hours, events will be held at smaller sideshows — secured appendices and side branches of the hole. A depression (up at Auf den Haiden) will be consecrated as a chapel, a larger hall opened underground for weddings (‘Weddings in the Hole’, check availability). The afternoon will be shaped by a specialist in passion plays from Oberammergau: geological art and subsidence installations will lead to a massive re-evaluation of the population and public’s mental conditioning. The hole ought to be presented as a mythical force of nature, with which people live in harmony. An underground wine trail is still being evaluated.
3.) Injection — the third part will begin in the evening hours, when there will be a romantic sunset. Brought back by stewards lurking for this very moment, the crowd will gather on the football pitch for the final act. This, of course, comprises the insertion of the filling agent into the mountain, bringing the subsidence to a standstill. The filling process, which will take the whole night, will be accompanied by a specially commissioned composition created solely for this purpose by a Greater Einland secondary school teacher. The aim is to create an oratorio that tells the story of the local legend Pergerhannes and will, ideally, be composed in the style of Hayden, but contain elements that will allow people to dance the cross polka. An incomparable spectacle produced from the power of Austrian industry, mechanical engineering as well as down-to-earth folklore and high art is to be offered to the tourists, before they are loaded back in the buses in the late hours of the night and transported back.
With a feeling of barely suppressed shame, I signed this agenda of lunacy drawn up in the salon, and sent it to the councillors. We had been working under inhumane pre
ssure for the last few months, and my thesis had been out of the picture for a very long time. It was only during this period — when the festival program was being re-sublimated and there was more and more talk of its earning potential — that it become apparent that the town wasn’t as well positioned financially as it appeared from the outside. No wonder — the stopings and support brackets that we had to regularly attach went into the hundreds of thousands. The ceremonial acts had long since turned from a prestige project into a stopgap in order to be able to carry out the planned fillings. Perhaps that had been its true purpose all along. Twenty-nine September of next year. An unreal date. I could have sworn that we had only just made the decision to have the festival, but when I looked at the calendar it confirmed that it had already been a year ago.
After lunch I packed up my things and headed for the secondary school. Scattered groups of students stood around on the schoolyard, talking with each other and laughing — it must have been their lunch break. I stood on the street in front of the premises and waited for the bell to ring. When the youths still didn’t disperse, I had to walk past them. A deeply inscribed fear, which came from my own schooldays, briefly made me worry that they would turn to me, mock me, comment on my clothes — but nothing happened. I was an adult, I no longer existed for them. I walked to the upper floor and knocked on the door to the music room. A man with tousled hair and a shirt collar, an unknotted tie hanging pointlessly around it like a ragged ribbon, opened the door and gave me a damp handshake.
‘Prof. Hausbrecht,’ he said. ‘Please, take a seat.’ He sat down at his teaching desk, and I lowered myself into the chair offered to me. The man seemed nervous, under pressure, and what’s more was badly shaven.
‘Finally, a free period,’ he said, sighing ostentatiously like a man convalescing. ‘At moments like this I can devote myself a bit to my actual task — art.’ He pointed at the piano, and then stood, as if I hadn’t understood his gesture, and laid his fingers on the keys.
‘Would you like to hear a bit of my new composition?’ he asked, the end of his sentence already being drowned out by the first chord. ‘I’ll take the liberty of playing one of my works. I actually want the commissioned composition to be similar in form. It’s an Austrian piece, but very different to what people already know. Much more contemporary.’ I could have sworn that what he was playing on the piano was Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Walzer. ‘I’ve developed my very own sound language, which is shaped by our current problems with the hole,’ he said. A couple of small secondary motifs might have been altered, but it sprang right back to the repartee between the Marschallin and Octavian.
‘Lovely,’ I said. No sooner had he finished his performance than he reknotted his tie and sat back down to continue sighing.
‘Well, it’s difficult to compose when one has to deal with the children all day, but one simply shifts one’s creativity to other times of the day,’ he said and then elaborated, as if he speaking to a complete ignoramus: ‘Nights.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to rush in any case — I wanted to talk to you about something else. It’s about the festivities, about the brass band.’ While I said this, I blushed. While working on this event, I always thought that others would notice its ridiculousness as much I did and laugh at me for the pipedreams I was involved with. But to my surprise, no one did.
‘We’re actually planning’ — I laughed a small, half-hearted laugh — ‘four hundred marching musicians. And we need a layout from you as soon as possible.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ Hausbrecht replied archly. ‘We’re bringing together everyone from the region. It’s no problem at all. But under no circumstances will we be going downtown. That would be a death trap in view of the circumstances, with so many people. And the farmers have to stop their cultivation two months beforehand.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, not understanding the relation.
‘The farmers,’ he said, and then more sharply: ‘The peasantry.’
‘What about the farmers?’
‘Everyone knows what’s going on with the farmers.’ He began to polish his glasses with his sleeve, but pulled so hard on it that the bottom of his shirt pulled out of his trousers. ‘You’re trying to fix the subsidence. There,’ and he pointed at the ceiling. A crack as thick as a fist that ran from the middle of the room to under the piano into the corner. ‘It always upsets my piano in these temperatures, you understand? The taproots’ — he formed a funnel with both hands — ‘dig up the ground and loosen the soil. Carrots and radishes, for instance. It’s called subsoiling. Why do you think the fire station over there keeps collapsing?’
‘Because of the hole, I think.’
‘Yes, yes, but the question is, how did the hole come about in the first place? Taproots,’ he said again. ‘The farmers earn themselves a pretty penny from these kinds of crops and think that a person of science won’t see through it. It all comes from South America, from the pharmaceutical companies. This means that after poisoning the intellectual climate we now have to bear considerable costs for the town because of the farmers. Yes, yes, I’ll sign it now.’ He waved his hand when he saw the form I had to get everyone contributing to the festival to sign.
‘It’s completely irrelevant what the exact cause is. But we’re certainly not walking four hundred people’s worth of live weight over a hillside filled with root vegetables,’ he concluded, thrusting a leaflet at me. It read: ‘Secondary school teachers against taproots — a reckoning.’ Below this, a stop sign was stamped over a weeping black salsify. I hoped that he was the only member of this group.
‘Thank you,’ I said, confused.
‘Ah, you’re not interested in ecological issues. Here’s my signature, for my part,’ he said, taking the form from my hand. ‘We’ll have to bring in a few less gifted people, of course, if we really need four hundred people. So I wouldn’t get on the bad side of the farmers and their saplings, I mean offspring, too much. There we are — my free period is almost over. All the best. You don’t have an easy job,’ he said as he gave me his hand, but it sounded more like he was referring to himself.
Although the cold wind whistled through the streets, I sat on a park bench bathed in sweat, as if I had just climbed a difficult summit. What he had told me about the farmers didn’t surprise me, because during the last few months new alliances, associations, and initiatives had been developing, merging, and once more dissolving, like a heat mirage on a hot day. What they all had in common was this: they refused to understand that we were dealing with an organic, natural phenomenon, albeit accelerated by the former mining.
For a few days we had been occupied with hundreds of phone calls all talking about the conviction that Slovenes were crossing the border at night and carrying off the bricks from the middle school. It was actually falling bit by bit into the hole, while the popular belief spread that the good imperial and royal Austrian bricks had long been transported to Maribor. In some respects, this was due to the fact that we within the castle were instructed not to tell anyone about the real dimensions of the hole — on the Countess’s advice, so as not to cause unnecessary panic or even an outright exodus. However, our silence had laid the groundwork for this void to be filled with imaginary matter. Real problems were adamantly suppressed: the church remained bare and unrenovated, without it having been discussed, because no one wanted to touch the building and with it the events of November. I was amazed at how much the building itself was redefined as a result of the destruction — a church without a steeple could not be recognised as such.
The way back to the castle led me down Langegasse, which was one of the most desolate areas in the town, and which I had to climb through. Like when you start to cut pieces from a carefully iced cake, and the middle emerges from underneath it, the jagged edges on both sides of the pavement led craggily into bare earth. On some of the properties bordering it, you could see funnel-shap
ed pits, in which the water that had been forced upwards, already frozen solid on the surface, was now a metre high. One might have thought that the town council was trying to dig a small dredging pond in front of each house in preparation for the next summer, and had withdrawn after only finishing half the job.
That I took this route in spite of this was like a walk of penance: with my head bowed, I passed Sister Elfriede’s property and stood for a moment in front of the fence, where I always saw with horror, as if for the first time, the progress of her house’s collapse. Two months ago it had been, though riddled with cracks, at least level. Then an incredible metamorphosis had unfolded, and now one could watch the right side of her beautiful half-timbered house sinking into the mud. This corner, hanging at a fifty-degree angle in one of the ponds, had long since begun to suck up the moisture, and now the mould was feasting higher with every passing day. It was a hazard — especially for its resident, but in the meantime also for passers-by, because the wooden beams that held the roof were dangling out of the facade.
I had stood in this exact spot three months ago, with Philipp, who was once more trying to urge me to visit him again.
‘I’ve got a tiramisu in the fridge,’ he had said with a wink, while I said nothing. ‘You can come over to mine, I won’t be able to eat it all by myself.’ I shook my head and said I had to finish an article. He insisted. ‘That’s alright, we could watch DVDs instead if you’re watching your figure.’ He was still laughing at this, his non-joke, when we rang Sister Elfriede’s doorbell.
‘The beams won’t be able to carry the traversal loads for much longer,’ Philipp said, looking at the house. That a person could be socially uncouth to such an extent and yet so assured in his expertise amazed me time and time again. Sister Elfriede opened the door to us, and it was uncomfortable to see how difficult it was for her to climb over the shattered threshold with her stiff legs. She herself seemed to have come to terms with things, however, because she asked us to come into the house without the slightest word of explanation — an invitation we declined.
The Liquid Land Page 20