The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  Before long, respiratory depression of the soil caused by the artificial material would set in: the plants would suffocate over a matter of weeks, and simultaneously the microorganisms, trapped in the top layer of soil, could no longer submerge. Once the balance of my soil had been disturbed, the animals living there — squirrels, birds, rodents — would no longer have the chance to find nourishment. My garden would die, and the only way I could hide it would be to cover it inadequately with potted plants. It had been murder, or at least involuntary manslaughter, that I had committed. I looked fearfully out of the window: everything was still green.

  Mathematicians interpret the structure of a Reissner–Nordström-type black hole as follows: at the outer limit of one is the so-called Cauchy horizon — a boundary beyond which gravity becomes so strong that the general theory of relativity and thus determinism no longer apply. After crossing this barrier, all physical causality is abolished; the past no longer dominates the future. While time slows down more and more as you approach the black hole, this changes when the border is crossed into the exact opposite. An infinite time lapse forms, and the entire history of the universe collapses into a single instant. If a person should ever enter this sphere, he would be unable to tell anyone about his observations, because at the same moment he passed the Cauchy horizon, he would be destroyed by a powerful beam of energy.

  On 13 June, a Thursday, we were in the middle of a meeting when we received a call. Anita picked up the phone, and her expression deteriorated as she nodded repeatedly. Without knowing the content of the call, we had all automatically put down our documents and surrendered ourselves to its ominous momentum. There were four of us in the room: myself; Manfred, the head of the building yard; Karin, who was responsible for financing; and Anita, who put down the receiver and told us that a child had gone missing.

  It was an eight-year-old girl, Valerie Spitz, who hadn’t shown up for class that morning after having walked the mere eight hundred metres from her house to school. The family lived on the Burggraben, said Anita, and we all suspected, without anyone having to say it, what hideous thing had happened. Out from the Burggraben, behind the middle-school building, there was a short piece of dirt road, no more than fifty metres long. But on the left side of this path, which the girl must have taken, there was a hole. Not an official entry, but rather a shaft that was first created by the collapses, which we had incidentally, and without any special urgency, been trying to get under control for weeks. ‘We should go take a look,’ Manfred said.

  A commotion could be seen from afar, and the fact that it was so quiet made it all the more disconcerting. Behind the school building was a fire engine from the volunteer fire brigade, who had fortified the small hollow with steel cranks. I pushed my way through the crowd to the firefighters, as if I had something to contribute. They were standing, looking into the hole, with climbing harnesses attached to ropes. Now I saw the entry for the first time in an unsecured condition: the canal was narrow at the top — an adult could barely fit through it — but became wider and wider towards the bottom. The fire chief, a lawyer who had pulled rubber boots on over his suit trousers, explained to me that it would take hours, if not days, to reach the bottom of the hole. A machine, which first needed to be procured from a neighbouring town, would broaden then mill the hole until an adult rescuer could pass through it. And even if they did manage to do this — he said in a whisper, and for a moment I wondered why he was telling me, of all people — the girl would have hurtled uninhibited a hundred and twenty metres into the depths. Indeed, the railings had been pushed to one side, probably by the storms of the past few weeks, and yes, there had been traces of slipping, but they didn’t want to plunge the parents into total despair just yet. Fear that the town had been at fault wavered in his voice: The hole had not been adequately secured. Behind us, near the middle-school building, I heard the girl’s name being called. The heat of the cloudless summer’s day, which had been growing more and more merciless during the course of our conversation, shimmered over the dirt roads.

  The rest of the children were being picked up by their parents, someone explained. Within the last hour, a group of volunteers had come together to look for the girl in the forest. We all knew that this measure would only delay the pain, and yet we were determined to help.

  I walked like a sleepwalker, confused and seized by a sudden sense of guilt, to the place where the noise signalled a group. We walked in silence along the road to the protected forest, where we rolled ourselves out into a long line. I was integrated into the chain and went along the forest paths, shouting the girl’s name over and over again. The light broke through the treetops; there was no sound apart from the cracking of the twigs and the repeated calling of the name, which lost all meaning. Valerie — Valerie — Valerie — Val-erie — Va-lerie — Valer-ie. There was an aggressiveness in the voices of the others, as if they wanted to direct it at somebody. The forest wasn’t so much asked about the child’s whereabouts but rather what had caused her disappearance. Someone pressed a flyer into my hand that depicted the girl’s face. It was a portrait, like a school photo — those ones where the child’s head remains frozen for all eternity, the word cheese or spaghetti still in their mouth. Valerie had a ponytail and there, where her front teeth should be, a gaping hole.

  Frozen, I thought, and imagined how in a few weeks the filling agent might be led down all channels and lie thickly over Valerie’s body. Not only Valerie’s body, but also the bodies of those who were otherwise stuck there. Hundreds of bodies taken by the mine, bodies that time had washed up there, and all those who had been murdered and forcibly driven into the mud. And on top of all these now the child, set to remain forever petrified in the violent grip of the filler. A shiver came over me despite the stifling heat.

  I sidled out of the formation, stumbled through the undergrowth towards a hiking trail, and ran out of the forest to my house. I wanted to go to bed as quickly as possible, darken the room and revive myself. But as I came down Johannesstrasse, something was different: a surprising number of people were standing in groups on the street and smoking. There was something unsettling about it — all huddled together in groups of four and four, seven and nine, although none of them said a word. I looked around furtively, expecting one of them to ask me something. As I turned right into Mondweg, I passed a couple of young men in blue overalls and wondered about it, seeing as the garage was so far away. Then I heard the name of my neighbour Glottersaat fall from someone’s lips for the first time.

  In my house the numbness of the street fell from me abruptly. I drank a beer, which I never did in the middle of the day, to cool myself down, and while I watched a mindless tabloid talk show on TV with the blinds closed, and a chubby-cheeked teenage delinquent found out the results of his paternity test, I dozed off.

  I woke up when the sun was already going down behind the house. After the few seconds needed to wipe the sleep from my eyes, I opened the window. From a few streets away, a noise carried over to me as if from afar. Louder and louder calls, which seemed to be coming from the Römerstrasse, were soon ringing against my still-closed blinds. I pried apart the leaves of the blinds with my fingers, and peered out my living-room window. Coming from the left, less than a hundred metres from my house, I saw a person turning the corner, then two, then four, then ten people. Some were dragging a heavy burlap sack on four ropes behind them. Instinctively, I got down on my knees and ducked under the windowsill. But I had to know what was going on. Just before they reached my house, I emerged from cover and watched them go by. I remember how pure dread had overwhelmed me, because in those few seconds it took for the procession to pass by my house, I had seen pure, undisguised hatred in their body language. No one tried to disguise it; a few of them had wooden staffs in their hands, which they dragged along the asphalt behind them. One of them held a flat cap away from him, as if he had accidently besmirched it.

  I felt dizzy. What I had taken to be
a sack from a distance, left a mark on the concrete. Blood, I thought, and felt sick, blood that must have flowed from a body. I was trying so desperately to catch my breath that I wasn’t sure how much time passed. But I thought I had seen a checked shirt and a heavy, large body. On the other hand, I was slightly drunk, and could no longer clearly recall the image. When I later went out into the street, because I could no longer bear wallowing in my own thoughts, there was nothing to see on the asphalt.

  18

  When we worked out that we had seventy days before the date of the festival, we were all, as we sat around the table, without hope that the town would survive this brief three months. And even if it did, nothing would be gained: since I had made everyone believe that I had made no progress, we still didn’t have a filler. There was, however, one exception: the Countess seemed to be in a good mood. There were chocolates on the table — expensive ones that I knew the Countess bought in half-kilo portions and always ate alone. The rest of us drank filter coffee.

  ‘I’ve spoken with an engineer who will construct this for us,’ she said, rolling out a plan. ‘A rollercoaster train for this omission.’ The Countess would describe the hole euphemistically as an omission, as if someone had deliberately left out the earth so it could be supplemented with her inventions.

  ‘He would be able to build this for around three million euros. Is that still within the budget, Philipp?’

  The Countess had already put this question to me, as she often did, at three in the morning, briefly tearing me from my sleep before I dozed off again, annoyed at not having pulled the landline out of the wall as usual.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Philipp carefully. Everyone else was silent.

  ‘I think it’s possible,’ the Countess insisted, and pointed at the plan as if it were proof of what she had said. According to this, a vertical track with steel girders was to be bolted into the ground. The diagram showed people shrieking with delight while corkscrewing through the damp tunnels. We could make out their hands sticking exuberantly in the air only a few metres away from the shaft wall.

  ‘We can make savings elsewhere. I’m not very knowledgeable about power lines, but it looks like we need to put one in — can you arrange that as soon as possible, Herr Loreth? We should start everything immediately.’

  Again there was an embarrassed silence.

  ‘Lady Countess, that’s impossible,’ Manfred Loreth said finally. ‘We would neither receive the safety certification, nor do we have the financial means, and here and here’ — he pointed at the positioning of the steel girders — ‘the subsidence is particularly extreme. The rollercoaster would sink within a matter of days.’

  ‘Fine, then we’ll have to come up with a solution,’ the Countess concluded, as if what had been said had simply been a reinforcement of her plans.

  The town, in the meantime, had become a single field of rubble. A regular road network could no longer be maintained: the ridges caused by the road rising and splitting were so high and insurmountable that no one could make it to the supermarket without four-wheel drive. Some drivers were taken unawares by the transformation in the town centre especially, so that they would drive into a dip that they could no longer get out of — and would leave behind their cars, which remained, as if frozen in time, in the middle of the road. The community’s ability to suppress was remarkable: if from one day to the next a pavement was missing or one was still there but hanging a metre below street level, the next day you would find a rope running parallel to it tied between two lampposts, which everyone held onto on their daily journeys, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to lead your life as if at the base camp of Mount Everest.

  The taverns, which were all grouped around the main square, were considered to be in danger of collapse, which did not put off anyone from continuing to frequent them. In the back rooms, the plasterboard was supported with billiard cues, and every establishment had suddenly acquired an increasing number of poker machines to lucratively cover up the cracks in the walls. In the mornings, a police officer went around the wretched buildings and drove people out for safety reasons — by noon they were once more full to bursting. When large piles of rubble formed, which was inevitable, the town council poured a huge amount of earth on these mounds and formed pyramidal flower beds, on which dahlias would later be planted.

  Parallel to these collapses I can especially remember the little things: the time I spat my toothpaste into my wash basin one evening, and the vortex, which, according to the laws of nature, should form in the middle, was broken like a torn circle. And as the liquid disappeared down the drain, at some point I felt my socks become wet, because a crack had appeared in my sink overnight.

  On another occasion, I was walking through the town one evening, and suddenly heard a grinding sound, as if someone were crowbarring the world. I stopped and stood in the dark, convinced I’d only imagined it, then, as if touched by an invisible hand, the iron garden gates were forced from their latches and swung open. First one, then fifty metres down a second, then three or four down the street, until the air was filled with the clanking of metal.

  The greatest horror, however, was the only thing not affected by the subsidence: my own garden. No one had noticed yet, but starting from the entry point on the house facade, into which I’d injected the filling agent, the grass had become an ever paler green; the blossoms I had planted over it in despair were already drooping, and the large fir was in the process of dying. I prayed that no one would notice it, and watered everything four times a day.

  ‘Good,’ said the Countess. ‘Then there’s only one thing we’re waiting for,’ and she pulled back the elasticated band of her calfskin-bound notebook, as if to fire a starting pistol. The elastic snapped; I flinched. Of course she was looking to me; every day she looked to me, and so did everyone else, when they nervously crept by my desk with suppressed rage while I carried out my covert work.

  ‘Yes, Frau Schwarz, how is it looking?’ asked Site Manager Stocker, striking his palm several times with a rolled-up plan. ‘It would indeed be prudent to make progress in the matter of the filling agent.’

  ‘I’m nearly at a breakthrough,’ I said, perturbed.

  ‘That’s all very well, Frau Schwarz, but could you hurry up and get there. Perhaps you’re not fully aware of the cost of this delay,’ Stocker replied with undisguised anger.

  ‘I’ll have a prototype a week from today.’

  ‘We have to,’ he began again, ‘order the filling vehicles, train the workers, which will most likely take half a year —’

  ‘Yes, yes, Frau Schwarz will do it,’ interrupted the Countess — she would defend me in the most peculiar situations. ‘The money will pour back in through tourism. The hotels are getting ready. Is it not true, Frau Raich, that if we reach full capacity we could earn a profit?’

  ‘Well yes, if,’ said Frau Raich, who represented the tourist office in our group.

  The meeting was over, and we were panting like we had run a marathon. There was no longer any doubt that all of us, with the exception of the Countess, had reached our limit. We had installed a potent administration for the disintegration, and led the regiment with our eyes respectfully closed.

  As I did every day after work, I loaded up a shoulder bag I’d brought with me with documents, which I intended to work through in front of the TV, and which I’d lug back up the steep path to the castle again in the morning. Although I had been transporting everything that seemed crucial for my own research out of the castle in this manner for months, I was still nervous when I passed the butler, and as a precaution I had hidden every piece of paper in a folder of work-relevant papers.

  It was a blissfully wonderful early summer’s evening; the shouts of the teenagers, spending their whole day on the football field, overwhelmed with happiness about their holidays, were carried up the mountain. It was at these moments that I was most often over
come by an excruciating feeling of isolation, as if the mild weather were trying to persuade me of a level of contentedness that I was incapable of reaching. But what did that change? I would be gone soon anyway, I thought, unlocking my front door. Once inside I had to push my way past stacks of boxes, like a hoarder dwelling in an ever-narrowing system of aisles. In the living room, on the other hand, everything had been cleared out a long time ago. As of around three months ago, it had been like living in a compartment of a warehouse. I had crammed packed bags along the walls of the entrance hall, as if I would at any moment have to jump into a waiting getaway vehicle that would stop with a screech in front of my house. But there was no chance of that happening: this perpetual state of readiness for an imaginary move was, in reality, as I know now, a kind of substitute for the fact that I hadn’t done anything for far too long.

  I had tried in vain the last weeks to get back my car, which had been in the workshop for two and a half years, waiting to be repaired. This had never struck me as strange. But when I had gone into the garage the previous week and found my car in the exact same condition I’d left it in, I knew that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. I had to call out three times before Mario marched in, a pockmarked man whom I also knew as a petrol station attendant. For a moment, I was at a loss for the words to even ask for my car, after I’d let the matter slide for almost three whole years. As I turned around while Mario was still mining awkwardly at the computer, I noticed that my car was the only one in the whole garage — and that it was still positioned on the lifting ramp, just as I had left it. An air pressure gauge was stuck in the tire — nothing had happened. The moment I touched the fender a spanner fell to the floor. I spun around and looked at Mario, whose fingers were pretending to be typing on the keyboard — it was like a photo shoot for a pianist. In order not to break the farce, Mario finally said: ‘Maybe in two weeks.’ I nodded.