The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  The ocean, the sea…

  I spent nine thousand years travelling on the bottom of the Pacific, far below sharks and shoals of herring and sardines, in that black, almost unmoving zone where there is neither day nor night nor seasons. I made my way across the long deep-sea plains to the west of the Andes and the Rocky Mountains. Emerging from the Antarctic basin deep in the south, it was decades before I reached the equator, and further decades before I came to the Aleutian Trench in the north, and turned west.

  It was as if I had been completely released from gravity, so effortlessly did I drift along among luminescent prawns, hatchet fish and the dark sea butterflies, sank down slowly and then rose up again, often with just a sketchy movement of my arms wings fins. Sometimes I climbed the steepest cliff-faces of mountains with ease, taking months to reach the summits, which rose to a height of up to three thousand feet below the surface. And sometimes I dived for a long time – it seemed unending – dived in oppressive silence, farther and farther down, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where I was closer, apart from the time when I still lived in a womb, to the centre of the earth than I had ever been.

  Following the tropic of Cancer, I went to see the spawning grounds and graveyards of the eels in the Sargasso Sea in the western Atlantic, then felt my way along endless undersea cables encrusted with feathery corals and sessile crabs. I passed through forests of seaweed, eelgrass and algae, saw coral reefs, shoals of unbelievably colourful fish, saw – sometimes carried many miles off the course I had intended – the sea aglow with phosphorescence, individual lights, here and there the earnest eye of another solitary wanderer fixed on me. We always kept our distance, although I regarded him as a kind of brother, like every other angler fish, ray or giant pill bug who has crossed my path over the centuries.

  I will never forget the Indian-Antarctic Basin, the shallow Bering Sea, the Tonga Trench, the Kuril Trench. And once, just once, I even entered the Arctic Sea, following with fascination the trail of Jules Verne’s ‘Nautilus’ under the North Pole. When I turned over on my back I could see the lower hemispheres of icebergs, like menacing clouds above me.

  But everywhere, wherever I was, wherever I am, the shells of dead plankton float down to the bottom, like snowflakes on dark December nights. Sand too, the ashes from erupting volcanoes, the dust of burnt-out meteors. In the same rhythm as one new life after another is born, one corpse after the other sinks, and gradually disintegrates as it sinks

  When I started out on my expeditions, I was hurt by the distrust towards me and my claim that the undersea landscapes exceeded those of all the continents in extent, variety and beauty. But I have long since accustomed myself to the fact and calmly journey from one sea to another, obedient to the law of buoyancy eventually discovered by every scientist who once ran naked into the market place at night crying, ‘Eureka! Eureka! I’ve found it!’

  I often dream – and wonder, in my bewilderment, why I dream such dreams – of the immense wave from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mount Everest. It is an incontrovertible fact that the crest of a wave becomes the trough, the trough of a wave the crest. Thus it is possible that, as aeon succeeds aeon, the seabed will become a mountain, a mountain the seabed. Then the bottom of an ocean of water will become the bottom of an ocean of air. And just as now, thirty thousand feet above our darkness, the cabins, bridge and engine rooms of a sea-ship are crossing the ocean, in the future high above it, with a straight white trail, an airship will pass, carrying in its fuselage, stacked in four long rows, the beings who do not need gills.

  I can already feel the bottom lifting slowly, as if the pressure, the darkness were decreasing. Scarcely noticeable as yet. But the time will come when we will swim among sharks, among the shoals of herring and sardines in lighter, brighter waters with the surface just above, a never-still mirror of quicksilver.

  Until at last we will emerge, dripping wet, into the sunlight to build, in the bright, wind-blown dryness, a spacious house out of stones and dark beams that will house generations of our family.

  Cannibals

  Marlen Haushofer

  She could have been fifteen, thirteen, or perhaps no more than twelve. Nowadays you can never tell how old a girl really is. He was sitting opposite her in the compartment of the train and had been observing her for about twenty minutes. Actually, he had intended to read the newspaper, to read it properly and enjoy it which, as a slow reader, he hardly ever did. But then he had noticed the girl opposite and had hoped to spend an hour or two enjoying the agreeable sight. Now he was becoming uneasy.

  There were only the two of them in the compartment and it was much too warm for the time of year. The countryside was dipped in gold and slate-grey, and although it had not rained for a week there was a moist gleam over everything.

  He had felt the headache as soon as he woke, just behind his left eye. A gnawing, nagging pain that he had suppressed with coffee and pills. Throughout the morning he could still feel the gnawing and nagging, but without the pain. He knew that he actually had a violent headache, but as if with a local anaesthetic. After lunch he had taken another pill and since then his head had felt light and clear and as if it were made of cotton wool, as if it might come away from his shoulders at any moment and float up to the ceiling. The idea was irritating, he was sure it was the result of the pills he had taken and the atmosphere caused by the warm, dry wind, the Föhn. It was not normally his habit to indulge in thoughts other than the the usual ones, that is, in thoughts he assumed were usual.

  For twenty minutes, then, he had been observing the girl in the corner seat opposite. ‘The little girl’ was how he thought of her and she really was little, and in his opinion a pleasant contrast to the young girls you see everywhere nowadays. Even his own fourteen-year-old daughter was already as tall as he was. He was only medium height, true, but still it was too much for a girl. And there was no end in sight. He put away the thought of his daughter, which he found somehow disturbing, and turned back to the little girl. She looked exactly the way people used to imagine a pretty teenager when he was young, that is, thirty years ago. A very feminine creature with narrow, sloping shoulders, small, round breasts and the hips slightly rounded already. To the modern eye she probably had a poor figure, too narrow at the top, hips too broad and legs too short. But she was enchanting, so refreshing after all the beanpoles you saw stomping around like young giants everywhere. And she had the daintiest hands and feet. It was pleasant once in a while not to be reminded at the sight of a young woman that she too had a skeleton inside her.

  He felt a certain disquiet. It was surely not quite proper to observe this girl, still half a child, with the eyes of a man. On the other hand, there was nothing in that particular area that was proper, and he was doing nothing that might offend the little girl. He was only looking at her surreptitiously, and that only when she was not looking in his direction, which happened rarely enough, and then only as if he were a rather oddly shaped suitcase or umbrella stand. He was slightly hurt at this; on the other hand he was pleased, since he did not have the slightest desire to get into conversation with her.

  In fact, she did nothing at all but regard her rosy fingernails with unconcealed delight. Now and then she glanced at her reflection in the window and gave it a loving smile. It was funny and rather touching to see, at the same time he admitted to himself that he would have found this kind of narcissism irritating in his daughter. He immediately put that thought out of his mind and watched, enthralled, as the little girl moved her toes up and down in her sandals until she finally seemed happy with them.

  There was a book on the seat beside her. Natural History for Classes 1–3 of High Schools, that meant she was at most fourteen. At one point she made a worried frown, as if something very depressing had just occurred to her, picked up the book and started to leaf through it. Immediately she seemed overcome with a terrible tiredness, dropped the book back on the seat and gave a charming, if uninhibited yawn.

&n
bsp; His daughter had that book at school as well. He was getting a bit more annoyed now at the way his mind kept insisting on making this connection. His daughter and this little girl, they were as different as chalk and cheese, and anyway, it would never occur to a man to stare at his daughter in this way. Or would it? There was something slightly disagreeable about the situation, and to his astonishment he realised he was observing not only the little girl, but himself as well and, what was disquieting, found himself pretty revolting. He told himself it was due to the Föhn and all the pills he had taken, but the wind most of all. He had read an article in the newspaper about this wind only last week and felt he was an expert.

  He would get down to reading the sports pages in peace and ignore this little miss from now on. What was all this anyway? He wasn’t so old a slip of a girl like that could disturb him. And disturbed wasn’t the right word at all. What he felt was just pleasure in a beautiful creature, it was quite natural, it was entirely platonic. He peeped over the top of his newspaper again and looked at her face, a face that seemed oblivious of her perfect little figure. It was simply the face of a charming, superficial and not particularly intelligent child, and it glowed with health. The white of her eyes still had a bluish tinge, her lashes were childishly long and thick, and her hair, tumbling down in ringlets over her low forehead, was the soft, shining hair of a child. She really must be very young, her skin was still unblemished and healthy.

  Then the unease he had been unable to shake off all the time intensified, turning into a feeling of emptiness and hunger such as he had never known before. He felt slightly sick and wiped his face with his handkerchief. The little girl had not noticed anything, thank God, she was just smiling, enraptured, at her own reflection.

  His heartbeat was unnaturally loud and he was filled with fear. He tried to work out what was happening to him. One thing was certain: what he felt for this child was not sexual desire, it was something much deeper and more dangerous. And then he knew. This insane craving that was tormenting him was the desire to eat up the girl, to devour her entirely and fill the sad, empty hollowness inside him with her youth. It was an insane idea, especially for someone who only knew of such things from books. That must be what came over those despicable criminals before they carried out their incomprehensible, monstrous deeds. Now he understood and for a brief moment they were his brothers, and he hated the little girl for bringing him to this, and he hated her because nothing he could do with her could satisfy that terrible hunger.

  The train stopped at a station and four other passengers got in the compartment. He was glad he was no longer alone with the girl and forced himself to think of other things and look at the new arrivals. He very quickly established that they were not worth looking at: an ugly, red-haired man with protruding teeth, horn-rimmed spectacles and a horribly gnawed thumbnail (presumably an intellectual); an agricultural-looking man in a traditional folk-style suit with a watch chain across his belly; a bony, middle-aged lady covered in valuable jewellery and countless freckles; a good-looking young man who didn’t even so much as glance at him but sprawled in the corner seat by the door, stretched his long legs across half the compartment and immersed himself in a book about sailing boats.

  At least the interruption had calmed him down to the extent that he hoped he would now be able to read the sports section. He didn’t manage it this time either, of course, because his hands were trembling so much, a common Föhn phenomenon. Also he had probably drunk too much coffee with his lunch.

  Suddenly he noticed that it had gone quiet in the compartment, unnaturally quiet. Even when there is no one talking, there are lots of other noises in a railway compartment, shuffling, rubbing, rustling, wheezing, nose-blowing noises. It’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, he thought, and the idea went through his mind that he was thinking almost entirely in expressions he had heard or read somewhere. He stole a look over the top of his newspaper at the scrawny lady sitting next to him and saw to his astonishment that she was staring, oblivious of all around her, at the little girl’s knees.

  The knees, with their little dimples at the sides, were certainly worth looking at, but he didn’t like the way the lady was staring. There was envy there, admiration and desire. Suddenly he realised that she too was feeling that emptiness inside her, that terrible hunger that was forcing her to clench the handle of her bag so tightly that her knuckles stood out white. The expression in her eyes sent a hot flush over his face at the thought that he must have looked like that only a short while ago. He slid back down behind his newspaper again and carefully tore a little hole in it with his fingernail through which he could observe the girl opposite.

  The unnatural warmth seemed to have made her tired and she yawned, displaying white teeth and a portion of pink flesh on the roof of her mouth. It was the yawn of a little kitten and set his heart beating. Then she stretched her narrow shoulders, placed one arm across her thighs and examined with interest the delicate skin in the crook of her arm while gently stroking it with the tips of her fingers. A smile of rapture spread across her face.

  He forced himself to look away from her and saw that the whole of the compartment was holding its breath. Then the bony lady gave a painful, distressed sigh and he saw beads of sweat appear on her forehead. She had gone very pale, making her freckles look like a spattering of mud. A poor, spotted hyena. And the way she had drawn up her lower lip, as if she were crouching ready to pounce.

  They were all now quite openly watching the girl. With the sole exception of the young man by the door engrossed in his book on sailing boats. Sometimes he kicked the man sitting opposite on the shin with the tip of his shoe but didn’t notice, or refused to notice, he certainly did not say he was sorry. He seemed to be enclosed in an air bubble, in a world of the most marvellous sailing boats, the only desirable objects.

  Lost to the world, the child was still stroking the delicate skin on the inside of her arm. Then her knee caught her attention and she scrutinised it with the hint of a furrow between her gleaming brows. Then she inspected her fingernails once more, finally immersing herself in an earnest study of her pink palm with the delicate lines across it.

  He looked round, not at all surreptitiously this time. No one was paying any attention to him. The lady, the presumed intellectual and the man with the watch chain were all staring at the girl like beasts of prey eyeing a piece of meat the keeper had thrown into the cage. The man with the watch chain was sliding his tongue restlessly over his lower lip, which made him look like an idiot, the intellectual had white bubbles at the corner of his mouth and the lady was sweating, very pale and spotted.

  He felt ashamed, he felt wretched and humiliated. And yet he had not really done anything he need feel ashamed of. Anyway, what had actually happened? Nothing at all. None of them had even spoken to the little girl, let alone touched her. Still he felt thoroughly wretched. He knew now the inevitable conclusion of the affair. One day one of the beasts of prey would pounce and noisily devour the tasty piece of flesh. Later it would stop, a foolish look on its face, and realise that the hunger was still there, gnawing, tormenting and insatiable. He had to do something now.

  He cleared his throat with a loud and threatening noise. It had the effect of a bomb. They all seemed to freeze for a second. The lady put her hand over her mouth, as if to repress a scream, then leapt up, muttering something incomprehensible, and pulled the window even farther down. The man with the watch chain laboriously heaved himself up from the seat, went out into the corridor, stumbling over the young man’s feet, and lit a cigar. The intellectual remarked to the lady that he had never known an October when the Föhn was so bad. And so hot! Then he took a periodical out of his suitcase.

  The young man, who, when the man with the watch chain had stumbled over his feet, had looked up with a blank, uncomprehending expression on his face, stretched out his legs again and returned to the world of sailing boats.

  He and the girl were the only ones who had not noticed what had
happened in the compartment. She was still inspecting her palm, entranced by the shallow cup with the mysterious lines across, then she yawned for the third time on the journey, leant her head against her summer coat hanging in the corner and immediately went to sleep. With her innocent child’s profile facing the compartment, she suddenly smiled in her sleep, far away and beyond the reach of the spotted hyena and all other beasts of prey.

  At last he could read the sports section, but he did not enjoy it as much as usual. And the gnawing and nagging had started behind his left eye again. He knew it would soon turn into pain. He stared out at the moist blue landscape, wishing he were at home in bed, in the pleasant quiet and darkness, able to forget this and all the other days of his life.

  The Toad

  Florian Kalbeck

  I recently visited a friend of mine, an old doctor who had worked as a psychiatrist. We were discussing current affairs, and I confessed to my friend that there were certain recent events with which I could not come to terms. There was nothing in this world, the doctor replied, with which we could, or ought to come to terms, as I insisted on putting it. But then I was still young, of course. When I refused to accept this answer, he said, ‘Let me tell you about a case I came across many years ago. No, you’d better read the story yourself.’

  He took a slim volume bound in black cloth down from the shelf of medical books in his library and leafed through it. I noticed there was no title or author’s name on the cover. The doctor handed it to me.