The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘It’s actually too dangerous to even get close to the house,’ Philipp said, when we finally sat down on a bench in the garden. ‘To be frank, we’re here on the instructions of the Countess to request that you move out.’

  ‘Oh come, it’s just a passing phase, the subsidence will be over at some point,’ Sister Elfriede replied. ‘Excuse the way the place looks, children. I can’t afford to have it pushed back up at the moment, but I’m saving for it. It’s annoying, of course, that it rains in my bedroom, but I’m sleeping on the sofa for the time being.’ Even though she tried to give a positive front, I could tell that she knew exactly what was happening to her house.

  ‘We have a resettlement program,’ I ventured. ‘Lovely new apartments down on the Koloniestrasse. It’s paid for by the town — you could move in right away.’

  ‘Come off it, the Koloniestrasse,’ she said. ‘Ruth, save your breath, I already know. I know, but I’m not going. I’ve lived here since I was four years old. In the town centre and nowhere else. I still have the soup kitchen after all. Back there, next to the house, that’s where I used to play with my brothers. It’s survived through two world wars.’ She patted herself on the breastbone, as if she were accomplishing a part of this survival herself. ‘And my father repaired every bit of damage himself. I still remember when we concreted the garage together. My goodness, what a mess.’

  I saw that far back in the garden, almost against the neighbour’s wall, a section of decking had been put down — a common sight in Greater Einland where a branch of the tunnels broke through onto someone’s plot. So that’s where, I thought to myself. That’s where Sister Elfriede’s parents had thrown the bodies underground. That’s where someone’s dog had gone berserk, and the police had pulled two half-decomposed corpses out of the ground. They were portrayed as victims of an accident in a speedily conducted trial: ‘Maybe burglars, climbed over the wall at dusk, fell into the shaft,’ it said in the court record, which I had only recently found in an old file. Had Sister Elfriede known? She must have known about it, she had to have been at least school-age by then. And although it was clear to me that precisely because of cases such as these the filler should never be developed, I could feel nothing but sympathy for Sister Elfriede and her childhood home.

  ‘You should get yourself to safety until the subsidence is under control,’ I tried again. ‘Do you remember Stokke’s equation? We talked about it at the Pumpkin that time. The sedimentation speed of the mud isn’t that fast yet, but three or four downpours could be enough to reduce the viscosity significantly.’

  ‘There are always good and bad times. One minute things are down, then they’re back up again.’ I was irritated by this cliché — until I saw that the hand in which she was holding her glass of water was trembling.

  ‘The house won’t remain standing, there’s no way of saving it,’ Philipp said with an admirably realistic coolness. I felt queasy.

  ‘There’s always a way.’

  ‘Not in this case, unfortunately.’

  ‘I can’t leave my parents’ house,’ Sister Elfriede said. Or maybe she said something else, but I knew that was exactly what she meant. I could understand how she was feeling, and stared blankly at a red bucket standing next to the bare plaster. She wouldn’t leave until the very end, even though she knew exactly what was going on. So Philipp discussed with her the same measures one would with someone who lived in an earthquake zone — that she had to crawl under the table if she felt vibrations, and the windows should be open at all times of the day and night.

  I was glad that he’d brought the conversation to an end. I couldn’t do it anymore. During this get-together I was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt the like of which I’d never felt before. I could save the foundations of this house that meant so much to her, but I didn’t, and the longer I remained in this situation, the more I lost my reasons for neglecting to do so. As I lay in bed that evening, eyes closed, the situation compelled me out of the dark into a waking state. Time and again I had to sit up for a few minutes and explain to myself that I was not responsible for the others, and that dozens of people shared the same fate. There was no reason to focus on Sister Elfriede as a victim, I kept telling myself until I sank back in exhaustion. After only a few hours, I awoke in the morning in sweated-through bedsheets, and felt like I was walking on clouds. The following evening I resorted to Valium.

  At the end of 2012, while attempting to once more take up the strange history of my house, I had discovered the history of Johann Kienagl in the town archive. It was a chance find, and yet I soon became obsessed.

  Johann Kienagl was a boy from Vienna who, between the years 1942 and 1946, travelled to his uncle’s place in Greater Einland for summer retreats on account of his health. He was a high-school student, had a passionate desire to become a biologist, and every day would undertake extensive excursions in the surrounding countryside, where he gathered objects for his microscoping. That he was suffering from a lung disease almost seemed to suit him, because he was excused from his Hitler Youth duties during the holiday months. (I also researched what kind of illness he might have had — although the descriptions were at times imprecise, it had to have been tuberculosis.)

  Three full diaries, which were later brought to the town archive, reported on his stays on the land that were available to him because of it. Kienagl unfortunately succumbed to his infection in 1950 at the age of only twenty, and the matured forest belonging to his childless uncle was auctioned off after the war. I read the notebooks, which he had written like adventure novels, only occasionally getting up from my armchair to verify details of his descriptions in other works.

  The writings of Kienagl, who did not sympathise with the regime, but did not especially oppose it either, testified from their first moment of his extraordinary sensibility and sensitivity for nature, which he feared might fall victim to a cruel slaughter for the war. In contrast to the Viennese woods he lived near during the year, widespread logging was conducted in Greater Einland. The quick transportation of wood was needed for trenches and ramparts, but also for local aircraft production, which was carried out underground. Five times in these five years he spent July and August in Greater Einland and depicted snapshots of local life in his diaries.

  He was always alone. From the first to the last summer that he recorded, it was very difficult for Johann to establish relationships with other young people, whom he described as distant and hateful towards him. He was teased for his accent, for his, as he put it, effeminate demeanour, for his interest in taxonomy and his weak constitution. Apart from his sister, who unfortunately died even earlier than he did, in her adolescence, he never had friends. The most heart-wrenching thing for me as the reader of his diaries was that although he was able to occupy himself very well and for long periods of time, he still seemed to feel a strong longing for human company.

  For many hours of the day, Kienagl roamed the slopes of the town, and sat with a book about wild plants in the branches of any tree his constitution would allow him to climb. But he would also always observe the residents on their nearby properties, describing scenes with a hard-to-ignore focus on what he saw, which under normal circumstances would be regarded as everyday occurrences: what time a farmer’s wife started milking the cows or pulling the weeds; how families gathered in the garden in the evenings and picked berries for dessert together; how the newspaper seller, after a night of excessive drinking, fell off his bike on Saturdays when he threw the weekend edition of Der Stürmer over the fences. On every page I had a renewed hope that he would meet a kindred spirit, but it never happened.

  As far as I could infer from his descriptions, Greater Einland had barely changed topographically — I recognised each of the places he mentioned. As he sat in a treetop and wrote alternately about songbirds and people, whose behaviour he examined with the same scrutinising thoroughness, he became aware of the property that was right next to his uncle’
s house, the Villa Helene.

  This was where my grandparents had lived — it was the building in which I was now sitting. As I recognised it in his writings for the first time, I was surprised and suspicious simultaneously, because throughout the diaries there appeared to be a certain attentiveness on Joseph and Petra Schalla, the parents of my as-yet-unborn mother. Their daily routines were described in meticulous detail. Based on the descriptions it seemed Johann Kienagl, whom I pictured standing on a tree stump in knickerbockers and lace-up shoes, seemed to have felt a particularly tender fondness for my grandfather. In none of the years did he miss describing how he set off early in the morning, and how he wore his tight woodcutter boots and a plaid shirt. Kienagl also described how he came home in the evenings and chopped branches, shirtless and with his hair shaved high up his neck. The most moving thing for me was what followed this. His wife often called over the fence to the neighbouring house, where my second grandmother, Gerda Schwarz, responded.

  What an extraordinary account: that all four grandparents sat together and talked, drank wine and made music with one another until late into the night. Once, and probably only a single time, something happened that Johann Kienagl described as one of the happiest moments of his stays: while he was sitting in the long grass observing one of these tableaus, he rustled too loudly while getting up, and he was noticed. Joseph, whom he so admired, turned, smiled, and invited him to his table. A piece of cake was placed in front of him. Only the Schwarzs weren’t eating yet, and as it got dark, they began, as Kienagl described it, to sing in another language. Very quietly, Kienagl wrote, who couldn’t explain this behaviour and reported of it as if a little perturbed. Then they also ate.

  I learned, through the eyes and ears of a thirteen-year-old boy, something I had never heard talked about: that my father’s parents, or at least one of them, must have been Jewish.

  (With this entry in particular, however, I asked myself whether it could have been just a fantasy — food was strictly rationed back then; fat in particular, which would have been necessary to bake a cake, was practically unattainable.)

  In the third year of his visit, the Schwarzs were no longer there, but the handsome, sinewy woodcutter was. The little girl of the family had been born a few months earlier. It was only when the second child appeared at the Schallas’, the child who had to have been my father, did my introspection start again, because the boy was about two years old when he first appeared. But that in itself wasn’t necessarily unusual; a young family with a second child who, perhaps like Kienagl himself, had had to spend their first few years inside. Kienagl’s resolution for next year, when he hoped he would feel old enough, was to finally speak to Joseph Schalla and invite him for a beer. But this would never come to pass.

  17

  As spring drew to a close, there was no longer any doubt that my house had been badly affected by the subsidence. The crack that had started beneath my threshold, a delicate serration through the flawless wall, was now wildly overgrown. Filling in the cracks was a lot more work that I had imagined: I often sweated through a clean shirt when I decided to renovate the walls that had cracked overnight before going to work. I also had to spend more and more time on repair work, the curing time of which was longer than it took for the water particles to reach the edges again.

  We had experienced a winter full of collapses, the menacing fluctuations of which hovered over us: one midday at the start of December, a rumbling sound could be heard in the distance, and people looked up at the sky in amazement — it took a few seconds to process that it was a cloudless blue before then realising that it was a thunderstorm from the depths that was threatening us. Like many others, I had slipped on my shoes and intuitively found the exact place from where the rumble had unfurled: terrace houses whose steel posts had been forced sideways, starting with the one furthest to the right, had knocked over all the others in a domino effect. No one had been injured, because the residents, surprised by the force that had gripped their houses, had left just in time. Suddenly everyone standing in front of the carcasses of these buildings was overcome by a certain embarrassment. These days one encountered a strange kind of savoir faire: just as when a jaw tumour appears on someone, we look at the face neither particularly conspicuously, nor too little, and after a while one simply looks away. I subsequently came to cherish this form of tactfulness when it concerned my affairs, and the fact that no one spoke to me about my own ailments gave me a certain kind of reassurance. Until the day my flagstones cracked, of course.

  Months had passed since the first crack had appeared in my walls, and I had almost come to terms with these circumstances, when a heatwave rolled over us at the beginning of July, which particularly tormented us because the swimming pool was completely unusable for the season. Above my cellar, at the back entrance to the house, there was a place where white marble tiles were laid, and where a kind of cooling pad would form on hot days. Last year, I had developed the habit of putting the heavy armchair, in which I so liked to read, on the tiles and spending the harshest hours of the day there. When, on the first day of this heatwave, I wanted to carry down my chair to align it in the right position, my legs locked: right where it had always stood, the tiles had fractured. I fetched the stone adhesive and tried to put the shards back together, but it was always either too few or too many — either a piece was missing or there was inexplicably a surplus. That was the moment I lost my composure.

  I fell to my knees and cried like I’d rarely cried before. A feeling of injustice, of defilement, held me down; at the same time, it was just a house. But all the frustration that had built up over the past few months broke out of me, until I ended up crying on the stairs. As suddenly as my crying fit came, it passed again, and then I felt a restlessness that drove me out the door. No, at least no one could see it from the outside, that was a calming thought. I ran to the cellar, to the spot exactly underneath the cracked tiles, and my head spun: as I stepped down onto the dirt floor, I was in ankle-high water. And that wasn’t the worst of it: the whole room, which I hadn’t entered for a week at most, had in this time collapsed downwards. Skewed corners wedged up against one another; from the ceiling, a single wooden post protruded from the brickwork. Trembling with horror, I went back up to the ground floor.

  A crying fit shook me once more — I dragged myself into the empty living room and huddled on the couch. A hideous thought that I kept fighting to suppress just couldn’t be shaken off: the house was the last thing that remained of my parents. It had been entrusted to me and I had failed. I cried torrents. In the blink of an eye, it was evening. No one could be allowed to see anything, indeed — as long as no one saw anything, I could do what I wanted. It was all there. I rubbed the incoming sleep from my eyes, then went into the garage. From this moment onwards, my memories are porous.

  In any case, I soon found myself on the cold bathroom floor, the formula for the filling agent spread out in front of me for the second time. My inheritance was not going to sink, I thought defiantly, this was why I had become a physicist, a physicist of time: to lend things eternity. I began giddily repeating this nonsense to myself while I put all the materials I had left in my bathtub and stirred the mixture with a wooden plank from the toolshed. Sixteen times in total I filled and emptied this volume. This meant that I had to go once or even several more times to the hardware store to buy myriad further materials. With a dreamlike certainty — and the decades-long practice of tablet-taking — I grounded myself every time I became aware of an impending episode: when I saw something moving in the corners, I looked away; when I itched, I refrained from scratching; when I poured substances in the bathtub I managed, despite my intoxication, to review the formula. Then, bathed in sweat, I carried mixture into the garden, two buckets in each hand, where I began to pour it into the small hole that led underneath the house. Naturally, half of it sloshed either side of it.

  Again more stirring. The ground tipped away beneath my fe
et and I fell on top of the earth, fetched more mixture, kept plugging. As the height of the filler got closer to ground level, I improvised injection tubes for hard to reach places. I used a garden hose and water pipes, an electric ball pump, and a plastic tank designed for rain water. I was able to test out the pump in the cellar, relieved that I could flounder to and fro between my attempts in there, out of reach of possible glances. I inserted the hose into the deepest of the cracks, which was exactly under the broken tiles, then activated the motor for the pump and heard liquid flowing in the direction of the hollow room. (I marvelled in retrospect that I had possessed so much care and technical skill in my haziness — before I later found, on my desk, a plan for the apparatus, with precise instructions, that I’d been given by Philipp.)

  My construction was not perfect, not in the slightest, and when I tried it for the first time in the cellar, half of the filling agent was forced back up. But enough of it stayed down, which — given the small volume of the cavity under my house in comparison to the mountain — gave cause for hope. I undertook a second and a third round, lost all sense of time, pulled the hose out of the cavity, stuck it in another crack, and at this point it had become another ten, maybe twenty, no, more like thirty bucketsful that I had pumped in without knowing whether it would be enough. The cellar had become boundless to me; it took me an hour to climb the stairs and fall into a deep sleep in my bed. It wouldn’t be until the following day that I would comprehend the fatal consequences of my weakness.