The Liquid Land

by Raphaela Edelbauer

  ‘These seventy-one plots were bought exactly where branches of the hole are located. And I can’t allow the filling to begin until it’s clear why exactly that is. It’s not a fantasy.’

  ‘And why now?’

  ‘What do you mean why now?’

  ‘You digging up these old stories. What do you expect to come of it? You want the attention, is that it? Why didn’t you say anything at the time?’ she spoke so forcefully that a piece of loganberry sprayed from her lips over the table onto my jumper.

  ‘Because it was thirty-five years before I was born,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s easy for you to say. You know what? I think you were right earlier. Nature can’t help it. Just as little as the people here can, your neighbours and friends.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes exactly,’ she concluded incongruously.

  I took a deep breath, shoved the rest of the greasy schnitzel in my mouth, and carried on talking. ‘Have you been listening to me at all? The point is that bodies were highly likely thrown into the hole. On private land,’ I whispered, because I assumed that she simply hadn’t understood. ‘By everyone.’

  ‘By everyone! Right, so my grandfather, for instance, who was in the resistance.’ She wiggled a bone that had strangely been in the schnitzel out of her mouth. ‘And even if that were true. What is that supposed to change? In all the talk about the dead, don’t we often forget about the living?’ Anita had suddenly become a stranger to me.

  ‘Murder doesn’t come under the statute of limitations,’ I said defiantly. Anita took her mobile phone out of her pocket and looked at the display for minutes on end

  ‘Do you not understand me at all? My parents were researching this matter, too, and then they were suddenly dead. A mysterious car accident. Sound as a bell beforehand. What are the chances of that just happening?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Anita asked, startled. Now she had pushed herself back from the table.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. It’s obvious. They spoke with the Countess on the eve of their death. Maybe even about this.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Anita said, looking around the room almost hysterically. ‘I won’t go down with you. What you’re claiming is unspeakable. Your parents had an accident. If you weren’t so much of a coward, you would have looked at the pathological report a long time ago. Good night.’ And with that she left me sitting alone at the table.

  The next morning I woke up hungover, even though I’d only had two beers. I had no desire to go to work, and furthermore it now dawned on me that I had lost my best friend. But I had at least made a resolution overnight, and I stumbled over to the telephone before I’d had my first coffee. I telephoned the Vienna state police, had my call forwarded by overworked and unresponsive officers, and finally got through to the Scheibbs State Hospital, where someone checked my details, incredulous that it had taken me this long to get in touch. I was put through to pathology.

  ‘I requested a report from you two and a half years ago,’ I said, clearing my throat three times in this short sentence. ‘But then I never followed up.’

  ‘Your parents, is that correct?’ The doctor rummaged through paperwork for a few minutes. ‘Yes, here we go, almost three years ago. My colleagues came to their conclusion very quickly at the time: your parents died in the collision. Due to a blunt trauma that wasn’t seen at first, because their bruising wasn’t visible until much later. In both their cases their spleen was torn. They had very poor seatbelts, in the opinion of the expert. The report concluded that they had died in a car accident.’

  ‘How did the accident happen? Have you — I mean, were they examined for other causes of death?’

  ‘Came off wet motorway with summer tyres, says here.’

  ‘It definitely wasn’t — did you find poison? Damage to the vehicle? I mean, I’m sorry for asking.’

  ‘As far as damage was concerned, the car was pretty much intact. We naturally also checked for intoxication, so no, it was actually just a wet motorway. Well, not just — I didn’t mean it like that — I wanted to say: my condolences again.’

  In the middle of the preparations for the festival, a phenomenon of vanishings unfolded within the whole community, and, strangely enough, it was the Countess who drew my attention to it. Only a month before the festival, she wrote me a message that had got lost in all the chaos of the strange tasks she served up to me on a daily basis. I ought to take a look at a folder that she had put on my desk for me and tell her what I made of it. Floating right at the top of the pool of my unfinished business was the binder the Countess was referring to. On the first sheet was a post-it on which she had written in her playfully disciplined handwriting: ‘Please look into this, best wishes, Ursula.’ Momentarily stunned, as I always was whenever she was informal with me, I looked through the papers. They were gendarmerie documents that described incidents on different days, between which I initially found it difficult to make a connection. Almost all of them were regarding an officer having been placed in front of someone’s house, and spending the night in his vehicle without anything of note happening. The papers always ended with the police officers leaving at seven in the morning.

  It was only then that I saw that some of these otherwise uneventful reports had printouts stapled to them. They were, for the most part, anonymous emails, and always described the same thing. The first, for instance, went like this:

  I am a resident of Parkstrasse and would like to draw your attention to something I’ve noticed happening on my neighbour’s property over the last few weeks. Around two or three times a week, under cover of darkness, they transport a cart bursting full of objects to the entrance of the mines on the corner of Hauptstrasse. They unscrew the ten or so safety slats and then start throwing the objects they’ve brought into the shaft, which you can hear banging right up to my roof terrace.

  Incidents like this seemed to keep happening: with increasing frequency, complaints were being directed against strangers, whereby it was evident that the accused were almost always their own neighbours. The stories were about someone throwing all kinds of things in the hole, mostly at night, and taking every precaution to ensure that no one saw them. Generally speaking, this wasn’t a surprise. In a few weeks, so everyone thought, the cavity would be pumped with a filling agent that would forever make it impossible to access anything in the hole. Everyone had something to dispose of that in previous years they might not have known where to put. But as I flicked through the mountain of uniform accusations, I felt strange; in unbelievable synchrony, the population had begun throwing things into the hole.

  It amazed me that the Countess was interested in knowing more about it at all — these weren’t usually the incidents she sought to explore. I called her once I’d read through all of the documents, and she briefed me further: one can certainly overlook certain things, but with other things one certainly needed to know more. ‘It always depends on who it’s regarding,’ she said cryptically, and I understood that this was actually less about potential crimes, and a lot more about keeping the public calm so shortly before the festival. ‘Maybe just take a look if and when you have time, Frau Schwarz. Alongside your speech.’ The speech, it hit me. I had allowed myself to be talked into giving a speech at the opening of the festival; speak about the metaphysical aspect, the philosophical aspect, the Countess had instructed me. I had been wrestling with how to formulate it for weeks and had only got as far as the title: The Liquid Land.

  The speech can wait, I thought, and buried myself in the official documents, entering the listed persons in a spreadsheet. The most astounding thing was that almost everyone had something to discard. But at the same time, it was often the people who had themselves allegedly thrown something into the hole, who would send us condemning information about their neighbours the next day. I thought of it as a kind of redress for a guilty conscience
that plagued them, and which demanded that they implicate another perpetrator as compensation.

  No matter how explicable these things might seem, I had the feeling that in some cases there might be more to it, and I soon developed the fantasy of catching someone in the act. One account stuck in my mind: someone had accused three different families of throwing things into the hole together, of cooperating on their nightly excursions, which for some reason intrigued me. However, after one of these families befriended the Countess, she wanted me to not investigate this particular case any further, and instead choose a different incident to take a closer look at.

  Although I had to get up early the next morning, I decided to take a detour to a house that had been reported to the police the day before. It was a detached house on Korngasse — three children, a dog, was written in the file — and on my way there I imagined what such people could have thrown in the hole at night. So around 9pm I sat down in a blind spot, unable to be seen by the house in question, a few hundred metres down the street, on the still warm asphalt, and waited for something to happen. I had observed the family in their sheer harmlessness behind the illuminated terrace door: the pleasant married couple who gave one another faithful kisses, the baby, who had gone to sleep as if of its own accord in the arms of the mother, the little boy lifted up by the waist by his father and thrown into the air.

  The light finally went out, and I lit a cigarette. I could rely on smoking as an easy way to regulate my emotions. I stared in the persistence of the dark and thought in circles. Out of all these people who were undoubtedly involved in throwing things they wanted and needed to rid themselves of into the hole, in this groundless abyss, the bottom of which not even a sensor had been able to reach — out of all these people, it was practically impossible to catch even one committing the deed. More than that: the population of Greater Einland had probably always done this, for decades, if not centuries, and that I was lying in wait here was nothing more than a diversion.

  I startled as day once again broke. With a sore neck and full bladder, I noticed that there was a burn hole in my shirt, and I sat upright. I must have fallen into a deep, almost comatose sleep from which even the pain hadn’t jolted me awake, because on my stomach I could see a tiny burn. In the morning light I looked back one more time: the lights were out.

  Although I could have left it at that, I was occupied with this matter for the next week: there had to be a reason for this secrecy. On Saturday I went to the side entrance to the hole that was in the vicinity of my house and, while holding onto tree branches, examined the shallow part of the entryway. In fact there was a lot of junk here, too, and just about too deep in the shaft for it to be impossible to get to it. So I went home and made myself a fishing rod out of a stick and a paperclip: a box was wedged in right at the top that was almost completely eaten away by the damp, but after several attempts I managed to manoeuvre it out. A cloth bag had got caught on my miserable hook. First I opened the little bag and found two gold rings — wedding rings, there was no doubt about it, because engraved on the inside of one was ‘Oliver and Julia’ and on the other ‘Julia and Oliver’. Julia and Oliver Heidenreich, I thought, a young couple that had divorced a few months ago. Still moved by the intimacy of the first objects, I opened the box: the picture of a young man with Down’s Syndrome, laughing, holding up a drawing in his hand. I knew him, too: This was Fritz, the son of Lilly Rank, the head of the Grocery Shop Association. More photographs and finally the drawing that he had been holding in his hand in the first picture. This was a purely personal confession of guilt: I knew from Sister Elfriede that Lilly Rank had had her son put in a care home in the nineties and since then had barely spoken about him — he had died there a couple of years ago. I felt embarrassed: what was being thrown in the hole were things people felt guilty about. No wonder the Greater Einlanders had an almost mystical relationship to the underground, I thought to myself, and threw the box and the bag back into the hole in frustration. And so the trail was lost.

  20

  In his later years, Johann Kienagl’s notebook entries became increasingly fragmentary. My explanation for this was the following: the undiagnosed tuberculosis that had formed encapsulated cysts in his organs, and had left the healthy tissue more and more perforated, had had a similar effect on the continuity of his thoughts. He was often bedbound for days with fever; periods that swamped his impressions in a mess of bodily fluids, sweat-drenched delirium, and bursting abscesses, before returning with admirable optimism to remarks about the sighting of a rare bird. Knowing that his life would end in an early death, I read these accounts with the feeling that I was connected to the fate of someone who was unsaved.

  In 1944, during his penultimate stay in Greater Einland, Kienagl relayed an episode that gave me a serious headache. He had over the previous years reported several times about house searches by the SS, which was nothing unusual in the whole of the German Reich, and would have been observed every now and then by anyone looking out of their window. But the tone and detail of this particular entry were very different from what he had previously recounted.

  When I came home yesterday evening (Trude had asked me to be on time because she had got the meat fresh from Gloggnitz), I could already see from Johannesstrasse that around twenty SS men were standing outside the old Schwarz place shouting commands. Heinrich was standing with my uncle, and there was a wild commotion. A desk, like the ones used in school, was in the middle of the street, and I half-jokingly asked whether I had detention, but my uncle was very stern and immediately sent me to my room.

  The officer leading the searches was also a Viennese who spent the summer in Greater Einland, where a large number of villas had been built for SS functionaries in recent years. His name was Karl Heinrich. He was a friend of Kienagl’s uncle, and a frequent guest in their home. Johann had up to that point described him with the same combination of awe and aversion that he showed for anyone in uniform: whenever he sat with him at the dining table, he answered all questions duteously and comprehensively, but would go to his room as soon as possible to read a book.

  It was around seven in the evening when Kienagl was sent into the house by his uncle.

  From his bedroom window he continued to watch the happenings going on down below and composed his diary entry. He described how the Schwarzs’ house, which had been vacant for over a year and had even been boarded up, was now being searched by the SS. How furniture and books were thrown from windows that had been broken open with crow bars — that the men broke windows and wooden floor panels with the butts of their rifles, and emptied the contents of jewellery boxes. After a good hour it came to an end. Nothing noteworthy appeared to have been found; an SS man stroked the head of my one-year-old mother, who was standing on shaky legs beside the fence, in view of my grandmother, who was joking with the men. My grandfather led the officer into the living room — to the exact spot where I was sitting while reading these lines. Kienagl was called back down soon afterwards, and dinner was served as if nothing had happened. Only there were still rumbling and crashing sounds coming from outside, because all the neighbouring homes were combed through; things were thrown into the street and burst open on the asphalt. Above all, however, a legion of people was involved in throwing the resulting detritus, and everything that no longer seemed to be needed, into the hole, as Kienagl put it.

  Over the next few days he himself kept a special eye on my grandfather, who had been excessively harried since the night nothing really happened. Instead of going to work, he stayed at home the next day and the day after — and if he did leave the house, he came back immediately, as if he wanted to make sure no one had stepped foot on his property in the meantime. I didn’t attach much weight to these descriptions. A few days later, however, Kienagl described a nocturnal episode that caught my attention.

  Probably due to his frequent nocturnal hot flushes during this time, he hadn’t been able to sleep, and had rolled over
on his sweaty covers in order to cough up into a vessel, as he put it. At that moment he heard a noise and went to the window. Below, in the yard in front of the house, he saw my grandfather Joseph Schalla standing there, exuding a great tenseness. He was kitted out in his full woodcutter gear and smoking a pipe, as if waiting for something. This went on for over an hour — he refilled his pipe three or four times, and, because I was not able to sleep, I simply watched him. While reading, I had the feeling that Kienagl had been initially delighted to see my grandfather — that the sick boy’s loneliness had perhaps been alleviated by the wakefulness of another person.

  Soon afterwards, however, he described something that I read through dozens of times without having an explanation for it: how Schalla disappeared into the house, after having finished smoking his pipe several times, and reappeared after a few minutes, as if struggling, Kienagl wrote. He carried a heavy sack on his back, and now set off to carry it to the edge of the forest, where the asphalt ended in boggy morass back then. It was the side towards the mine, and Kienagl made a special point of mentioning this, as it was strictly forbidden to be closer than five hundred metres to the entrance. A fence had been erected, as I confirmed when looking it up on old maps — and on the other side of it were the barracks housing the concentration camp prisoners. Around an hour later, it says in the diary, Joseph Schalla returned without the sack. Johann Kienagl was convinced that a person had been inside it.

  For a long time I thought about whether this could have taken place. Had Schalla hidden someone in his house, beneath the parquet under the floor, and could this someone have been my other grandfather? More importantly: what exactly had happened after the raid? Had my grandfather been afraid and if so, had he actually made as grave a decision as Kienagl’s account suggested?