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The town did not wake early that fifteenth of September. It didn’t wake up at all, for it had never slept. By the time the brass band started marching at five in the morning to announce the start of the festivities, everyone was already awake: filter coffee accelerated the processes, which from above would have looked like a chaotic, fragmentary flickering — caffeine kept everything on track before cognition could keep up. Everyone was punctual, everyone outwardly full of enthusiasm, but that couldn’t belie the real state of things.
The town had bags under its eyes and the inertia of the bleary-eyed, a delay in reactions that made one’s walk drag. If one had looked down with a bird’s perspective between the treetops, one would have seen the band’s hats, the way they swayed restlessly on their heads, because everyone was impatiently stepping from one foot to the other. At seven o’clock, the town had double vision from exhaustion, as buses packed with tourists drove in on the freshly levelled roads from the north and the west. People were freed from the aluminium pods, and by eight o’clock, thousands had gathered on the specially excavated forecourt outside of the town walls. Diverted by small delicacies and much good will, they were kept under control by a troop of stewards. Meanwhile, in the town, hundreds of heads, filled with hundreds of tasks, were inside keen to tackle that very thing, and get a motor going that had been oiled for such a long time — and hundreds of watch faces, on hundreds of wrists, became illegible with nervousness. In the sky there was that strange hum, familiar from marathon events, as if there were a helicopter in the air that was nowhere to be seen. The conversations from a thousand mouths and the tension of zillions of tiny muscle fibres made everything oscillate. Then, on the stroke of nine, a shot was fired from a starting pistol, and everything erupted.
The four-hundred-strong marching choir, led by choirmaster Hausbrecht, climbed out of the forest, and the crowd, who didn’t seem to have been expecting it, broke into loud cries of oh and ah. Now they marched from the Mühlgasse towards the town centre, dutifully drawing in the more than four thousand tourists behind the brass band. On the way through the rows of houses, sweets and little doughnuts wrapped in cellophane were thrown out of the upper floors by families. Everyone, including the children, had something to do.
Little by little, the human particles dispersed urgently into the town and fitted into every nook, every street, every recess, until everything was filled, just as the hole soon would be. The crowd split along the aisle of main attractions as if on hydrophobic surfaces. Blocks of hundreds washed up because the vortices pulled them in their direction: they streamed to the underground bumper cars, where they could collide with one another in complete darkness, while the muddy earth dripped on their heads. Or they ended up at the demolition station to the south, where you could hire a sledgehammer to smash a building destroyed in the subsidence with your own hands, and spend five minutes hammering the furniture, the windows, the splintering bricks.
In the north was what ultimately attracted most people in the sloshing human basin: a healing spring in a small St Mary’s grotto, in which three priests blessed endless streams of tourists with the assistance of about twenty acolytes. The blessing time per person was around five seconds, and the people were led back out of the underground tube in a loop.
On the other hand, if you were to peer out of the lookout hole of the old fire station at midday, you could observe how individual families moved in this multi-layered social quake. Mothers wanted to go to the naming office: an institution where one could have small side branches of the tunnels named after oneself or one’s family, in order to proudly carry home a certificate showing the fresh nomenclature of the tunnel. Fathers, who hitched their sons over their shoulders, strove to join the machinery display together with their appendages, where hoses, complete with masculine purr, were shown detonating into the ground at a pressure of fifty tonnes a second and two hundred and fifty-nine kilometres an hour. The children steered their parents to prospect for gold, where they feverishly looked forward to the exciting prospect of a tremendous find. Everyone bowed to the movements of others and held each other’s hands, so as not to, as they say, lose one another.
But if you stood at eye height, or on a gallery raised about a metre off the ground, like I was at that very moment, you finally saw how the individual person fared in this swilling about. Let’s say: a woman from the not too distant surrounding area, maybe fifty, who was sceptically swaying between the options, even though none of them really suited her; perhaps she was already exhausted by the far too dense impressions, just as I was, for that matter. For a moment she seemed to reject each of them, but then looked around and could only see people screeching enthusiastically. A jolt went through her body: she spun in circles for a moment, and the first thing her eyes found were the signposts pointing in the direction of the artisan village.
‘Excuse me, can you make things there yourself?’ she asked me, while I was waiting on the small platform from where I was to conduct the approaching parade. I had to briefly concentrate until my eyes had refocused on what was near to me.
‘Yes, you can,’ I answered. ‘You have to sign up on site, thirty-minute waiting time.’ I had been expecting all morning for the sheer mass of people to lead to the collapse of the long-overused ground. But nothing had happened.
Then the so-called ‘small parade’ was approaching: a procession of children’s brass music, and supposed artists who were dressed up as folklore figures (Danube maidens, Rumpelstiltskin, a dragon). Some of them tried, as they had been instructed, to ride unicycles in their costumes, but kept falling off them and making others coming up behind them fall off, too. What’s more, the children were playing badly. It was a miserable sight, out of which now suddenly fell Ferdinand, dripping with sweat and with his face painted white. In spite of his oxygen mask, which today he had tied to his back, he jumped up to me and threw his arms around my neck, and the curve of his belly almost knocked me off the platform.
‘Ruth, isn’t it all great? I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve never experienced anything so amazing,’ he said, panting and looking at me with wide eyes, as if he had been holding off crying for a long time. I nodded and tried to encourage him with a movement of my head to get back in formation. I just wanted to wait for the parade and then, when I was allowed to take a lunchbreak, steal home unnoticed. But Ferdinand hung off me like an embedded thistle.
‘I’m so looking forward to your speech this evening. Are you excited?’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, wiping his hands from my shoulders. I had a guilty conscience: it was childish, and I knew that I had to wrest myself from this feeling.
‘We’ll have a beer after, okay? And for the first time we won’t have to be afraid that something will collapse while doing so, under our bellies,’ Ferdinand said, laughing.
‘Yeah, I’ll see you later. I think I might still be nervous about the speech.’ I really was an appalling liar, I thought to myself, and jumped from the platform to signal my departure.
‘Ruth, wait!’ I heard Ferdinand shouting after me, as I began to dig my way through the crowd, my face turned away and my hand raised for nothing more than an abandoned farewell.
I arrived home sweating from the exertion. The car, hidden from view in the backyard, now seemed to me to be a vehicle like the hot air balloons used to flee East Germany: an incredibly illegal mode of transport that no one was allowed to see. Only here and now the escape part wasn’t the most problematic thing. I went through the house a final time, but I had long since said goodbye. All the melancholy, leaving the only place that had ever felt like home, lay far behind me.
The printouts for the journalists drilled painfully into the flesh underneath my ribcage, and at that moment, still in the doorway, my heart suddenly burst. The last Xanax, but it didn’t soothe me, so two Valium, then I left the house, for the last time, locked the door, and threw the key through the letterbox. T
his was the final farewell.
I sat on the steps and took a deep breath. Up to this point everything had been so easy, and what was to come hardly seemed more complex: I would wait until the evening event began, and, shortly before, I’d go along the rows of journalists to give each of them a file. From these, as incomplete as the data was without my parents’ books, they would learn about the facts that I had gathered: about the seven hundred and fifty vanished people and the ownership of the mine, about the thwarted searches and complicity of the town, of the nobility, the Countess and Glottersaat. When it was eight, I would take the stage, ask the journalists to look at the top page in their pack, and then begin to give my real speech. It seemed so simple.
I walked up the steep Johannesstrasse — the only direction from which no tourists came towards me — and now I actually hoped to be able to rest in nature for one or two hours; to disappear before my greatest task approached. Now it began to pursue me after all: I winced at the thought of how my acquaintances would look at me, surprised at first, then disgusted, then horrified as I ruined the celebration that everyone had been toiling over for years. The celebration that everyone viewed as a new beginning after half a decade marred by personal catastrophes, and, ultimately, the celebration that should have adjusted the image of the town to the public. As if something were gripping my neck with cold hands, I quickly shook myself, and finally dropped, exhausted, into a meadow at the topmost point of the hill. The sun on my face, the buzzing down in the valley felt like white noise. Insignificant — soporific, almost consoling.
I had just closed my eyes a few moments when someone sat down next to me. A nuisance — robbed of the last moment of happy loneliness I would have for an unforeseeably long time. I turned my head to the side and jumped in fright. It was the mask dealer, sitting in the meadow with knees raised and looking down at the town below.
‘I was thinking of you today,’ he said, and waited until I’d sat up before continuing. ‘Do you remember how we met back then? In the Thousand-Year-Old Oak Tavern?’
‘I remember,’ I said heavily, sitting up. ‘It has to be around here, but I never went back there again.’
‘No, it’s over a hundred kilometres away.’
‘That can’t be,’ I said, and pulled a tuft of grass out of the ground. The damp, interwoven stems dangled before my eyes. ‘My father always told me that when he was a child he spent the summers there, and that it was walking distance from his house.’
‘You must have misunderstood,’ the mask dealer said, leaning back. We were silent for a while, looking down at the town, which was covered by a multitude of whirring heads and scraps of colourful disguises that spread a pointillistic sea over the broken surface.
‘I hear you’re the saviour of the town,’ the mask dealer said, pointing into the valley. ‘Soon we’ll be all in one piece again.’
‘Yes, maybe. You know, sometimes I wonder whether I should have refused the Countess’s offer of work.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? You did a great job.’
‘The good for the one side comes from the exploitation of the other,’ I said, noting inwardly that it sounded like a cheap aphorism.
‘Correct,’ agreed the mask dealer. ‘But tell me: you’re a theoretical physicist, if I remember rightly. It must have taken some effort to develop a filling material.’
‘Yeah, you know what,’ I laughed, ‘at first, I had no intention of taking this seriously. It was more of a fluke really.’ I blushed, looking at the ground, and for a few minutes we listened to the brass band. ‘I thought of our conversation often,’ I said at some point. ‘Do you remember telling me about your excursions in Arnhem Land? About the ancestors and their movements in the Dreaming? Sometimes I have the impression that in the last five years I haven’t spoken to a single real person made of flesh and blood.’
I tore the greenery from the ground with a slow regularity and threw it, lost in thought, while I wondered what I was saying. ‘But only with ancestors. Always with ancestors. And when I could not bear this losing myself in time, I had to think of you. Of your stories from Australia. Spiritual and physical world combining in an eternally created present, the Dreaming, to a place where we can come into contact with our forefathers, isn’t that what you said?’ Now that my departure was imminent, I was beset by sadness. I struggled to hold back the tears.
‘All these years I had the feeling that the landscape wanted to convey something to me, this allegedly unconscious nature, that it could tell me about my own rootlessness. I wrestled with it — my God, that sounds crazy — and felt that this place was my fate. And then I just stayed here.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Isn’t it ironic that I so quickly found a home right where it’s threatening to sink into the ground?’
‘The best place to put down roots is where much of what is in the soil is rotten,’ the mask dealer said, and chuckled. The children screamed in enjoyment on the Kirtag machines that were closest to us, a sort of whisk to which they and their parents were strapped, and that now buffeted in a rapid circular motion.
‘Or time, do you still remember what you said back then? That for Aboriginal Australians everything becomes a metaphor, and chronologies taper to a single point? I have long believed that I was acting as an individual in the present and that I could be completely independent of everyone else. But you’re right: we can’t take a single step without colliding with our past.’
The mask dealer burst out laughing. ‘Did I tell you that? You caught me on an extremely wretched day. I don’t know, I see it more as philosophical folklore that I tell to persuade people to buy my masks. Authenticity, that’s the buzzword that interests customers. I’ll let you in on something. I’ve never been to Arnhem Land. I have a mask shop in Mistelbach and make them myself there. But don’t tell anyone.’
I dropped a buttercup stalk mid-throw, and now it dangled from my knee. ‘The masks aren’t real?’ I whispered, pointing at the rucksack lying behind us in the meadow.
‘What’s real?’ he said and laughed again, and now I saw that he wasn’t in the least bit mythical or mysterious, just elderly and provincial. His face was bashful and pudgy, with crow’s feet and a double chin in spite of his wiry stature: all over his face, I now saw in the glaring sunlight, was a layer of cheap make-up. I was overcome by an unfathomable dismay at how banal he and everything else around him suddenly seemed. I saw the wooden faces dangling in the wind — the African masks and the Black Forest carnival larvae — the artificially aged witch carvings that I had thought dated back a hundred years, while a fraudster had manufactured them in Mistelbach. Just in Mistelbach. This got me on my feet, as if I had finally seen through an optical illusion.
‘Going already? Do you still have to prepare your speech for this evening?’
I ran down the hill without answering, re-joined the street and entered the Market Square, was carried by the euphoric crowd, who couldn’t see why they were cheering, onto Margaretenstrasse, and stumbled around between the streams of people. I could hardly free myself from one group, a huge maelstrom-like delegation, and was dragged to the corner of the Church Square, where I backed into the May Pole. I pulled myself away from the crowd, using all my strength, and escaped to the Schulstrasse. My whole body shaking, I saw how people were breaking away from the fixation on the town centre and were being driven, as individual particles, in the direction of the sports field. This signified that the evening event would begin soon. I asked someone for the time: six-thirty. I felt the tablets were slowly starting to wear off in my warming bloodstream, and I reached in my trouser pocket — but I’d left my medication in my car.
Then I heard the mixer trucks rolling in in the distance, and ran off in the direction of the school as if they were chasing me, as if they wanted to fill me up instead of the hole. I caught my breath behind the school building, but then it gripped me anew: in front of me I saw the tunnel, sealed off with red an
d white tape, into which the little girl had fallen a year ago. She was never found — in a few hours her body would be enveloped by the filler. The thought caused me unspeakable claustrophobia, but in this confinement a decision finally grew. I pried away one of the slats, which had been spread over this duct like a pot lid, and looked down into the depths. Even after I’d wiped away my tears, I couldn’t discern anything. I took the cloth bag that was hanging over my shoulder, and once more checked its contents: the original documents, the copies, my speech. Then I tossed it, and with it everything that had been my nightwork for the last three years, into the hole. The folders that I’d prepared for the public opened and their white contents disappeared into the darkness. All the folders that I’d filled with evidence of all the uncoiled corpse findings — that is, the last thing that could have made the uncoiling possible — was gone in a matter of seconds. I thought I heard a crash, and was shocked at myself for a moment, but this sensation disappeared as soon as it came. I felt freed from an oppressive nightmare and stood back up.
The people marching to the sports field no longer bothered me as I went back to the town centre. Someone shouted my name; I couldn’t tell who, but managed to turn while walking and reply: ‘Yeah, I’ll be right there, let the others know I have to get changed quickly.’ I pierced the cushions of noise from the various instrumental groups, and before they could stop me, I was already home and had jumped into my car. I started the engine and rolled along the streets in first gear, just as I’d learned off by heart: Johannesstrasse — Auf der Haiden — Gmeingrubenweg — Schlossstrasse. The impassability of the terrain knocked off my bumper as I turned onto the first forest road, just like years ago when I arrived. And like then, I still managed to make the crossover back to the forest road and drive infinitely slowly back up it.
The Liquid Land Page 26