Euphoria

by Heinz Helle

  45

  We are standing side by side at the edge of the road, urinating into the bushes. When this is all over I’m going to design women’s urinals for restaurants and get filthy rich, says Gruber.

  I say: Don’t they already have those?

  No idea. All I know is that there’s always a queue for the ladies’ whenever I go past one. At the cinema, after the movie, for example.

  I once saw a woman pissing in the men’s urinal, says Drygalski. She just went and stood facing away from the urinal, leant forward a bit and lifted up her skirt.

  And what did the men do?

  They just carried on pissing.

  We carry on pissing.

  Drygalski says: When this is all over, I’m going to make a TV show. It’ll be set up like a contest, but really it’ll be a sociological experiment.

  What?

  The question I’m interested in is: How important is a person’s address to them? Their postal address. Is it more important for most people to live in a nice house or to live on a street with a nice name?

  What?

  We’ll give away houses. Brand-new, nice houses. Just like that. All in a housing estate with the shittiest street names imaginable. Imbecile Drive, Arsehole Avenue, Paedophile Crescent. We’ll have to build the estate specially for the show.

  And then?

  And then there’ll be two contestants. The houses get better and better, the street names worse and worse. The first one to hit the buzzer on their podium gets a house.

  And the other contestant?

  Gets a different house.

  And where’s the contest in that?

  You’ve got to be quick on the buzzer, otherwise you’ll get the crappier name.

  But the nicer house.

  Exactly. The point is to establish the ratio between the need for luxury and the need for social prestige. Presumably everyone will have a different pain threshold. It would be interesting to watch.

  What a load of rubbish.

  No, I’m serious. If someone were to give you a flat at Haemorrhoid Street 2a, would you accept it?

  Absolutely. And then sell it.

  And who would want to buy it?

  Some Chinese pension fund. Golde always says they’ll buy anything. Used to say.

  Hmm. Maybe.

  Beside me, Gruber makes measured shaking movements, leans forward, buckles his belt and stands up straight. Maybe that’s the only good thing about our situation.

  What is?

  There won’t be another real estate bubble for decades.

  46

  A village on fire is really not such a complex phenomenon. Villages are composed of houses. Houses are composed, in part, of flammable materials. They contain wood, textiles, polyethylene, cotton, particle board, paper, leather, rubber, hemp, alcohol, protein, keratin, hair. And bones, sometimes. There were times when burning villages were a regular occurrence. Burning cities, too. But here and now what we were seeing in the valley below was so completely out of context for our usual perceptual experience that we were incapable of any reaction. Perhaps the sight of a single burning house would have been easier to comprehend, would have more quickly allowed us to make use of our faculty of speech, of our hands and feet. I’m pretty certain. A solitary house on fire would have been something else entirely. Two houses on fire? Sure, why not, so long as they were right next to each other.

  But there were more than two houses on fire here. The entire village was on fire, in its entirety, as it lay there, in the valley, by the railway line, eight hundred metres long by three hundred metres wide, fifty to eighty houses, former farmhouses, inns, offices, the post office, the train station, winter sports outfitters, florists’, holiday flats for the detested Dutch and German tourists. There seemed to be a plume of smoke rising from every single roof, all merging just above the village to form a gigantic cloud that gyrated around several crooked axes and was so thick that it seemed almost solid.

  Drygalski lit a cigarette. Must you? asked Golde, and I wasn’t sure whether he was bothered by the smoke – after all, we were out in the open – or whether he simply found it tactless in the face of the thick plumes of smoke in the valley below which were growing by the second and which were now beginning to bring home to us what it means for every house in an entire village to be on fire: people were dying.

  Once we were able to move again, we quickly poured out the cold coffee. We just poured it out over the railing, into the snow, and I could see that the stains were brown, but to me they looked like blood. Then we went inside and wiped the mugs clean with Drygalski’s paper tissues, put them back in the cupboard. Something was making us hurry, some unspoken, illogical urge, since why would we want to leave here in a hurry to go down there, when down there everything was on fire and not here? Golde stayed outside and looked at the village, which was burning away steadily, the smoke growing thicker and more amorphous and harder to ignore. Drygalski went and stood beside Golde. Golde said, Have you got one of those for me? Me too, me too, me too. Now we were all smoking. It was almost as unbelievable as what we were witnessing down in the valley, but somehow it also made sense. After all, right now what we had to do was stay put, watch and think. Wait until we were capable of deciding what to do. It’s nice to have something to do during such moments. Gruber and Fürst were coughing.

  Let’s go down to the car, then we’ll see.

  OK.

  Fog was descending on the trees, down from the clouds above the peaks. We first saw it on the cliff face above us, and as we began our descent it enveloped us. We moved slowly. Walking downhill is bad for the knees. And for morale. Whereas each step up the mountain represents a small victory over gravity, going down is a long series of defeats against solitude, the need for comfort, your work calendar. We walked in single file. Our pace was significantly slower than it had been three days earlier on the way up. The one in front was not in front because he wanted to lead the others, because he wanted to be the first, but because everyone else wanted to be behind him. The one in front was slowing down, steadily, secretly, in the hope that someone would overtake him, and because he didn’t want anyone to notice. The others slowed down too.

  We were walking down into the valley. The snow was melting. Every once in a while we would stop and listen to noises that were telling us, Don’t go down there, go back up, far up, hide. Gunshots, screams, looting, rape, murder. Then in our heads we would laugh at our over-active imaginations and carry on down into the valley through the slushy snow. A village was on fire. That was all. It could have been a series of unfortunate events. Two rival pyromaniacs, each setting fire to the other’s house at opposite ends of the village in the middle of the night, and then an unfavourable, erratic wind. It could have been a collapsed overhead railway wire, a high-voltage power line, telephone lines, ISDN, fibre optic cable, something with something else flowing through it, nodes, an explosion at a distribution substation, flames darting out of every wall socket in every house. It could have been an incendiary bomb dropped inadvertently by an American jet fighter from the Rammstein airbase, the pilot having lost his bearings over the snow-covered landscape. It could have been a troupe of marauding Tyrolean boy scouts, thirsty for the blood of Dutch and German winter tourists – Why don’t you come as often as you used to? It’s your fault we’re going broke. Take that. Die.

  The absurdity of your own fears is the greatest comfort. Painting a mental image of all the things that will never come to pass is the best means of ensuring that they never come to pass. The last turn before the mountain road. Remind me exactly why I believed that, again?

  The car: ashes and metal.

  Without a word we turned around. Without a word we went back to the cabin. Without a word we locked and bolted the door and closed the curtains. As we sat in a semicircle around the stove, Fürst was the only one brave enough to admit that he was scared by being the first to say what we were all thinking: And what are we going to do now?

  We’ll
go over the ridge, said Golde.

  What is there on the other side?

  Maybe a village that hasn’t burnt to the ground.

  47

  Leaving the forest behind we come into a wide valley. The mountains on either side disappear into the low clouds, in front of the mountains lies a foggy forest, in front of the forest, foggy fields, on the fields, ugly industrial buildings in black or green or grey. The windows are mostly broken, here and there signs of a fire. Through the middle of the valley runs a road. On the road: cars. Empty, stationary cars, as far as the eye can see. They are all facing in the direction of the valley mouth. Three columns across both lanes. No one seems to have been expecting any oncoming traffic. They stand there unmoving, silent, from left to right. We stop and look at the scene for a while. Then we fall in.

  We move past this abandoned outbound traffic jam. The road is slightly elevated and perfectly straight. The view would be nice if it weren’t so foggy. To our left there is a field, a barbed wire fence and the corrugated iron façade of a factory building. To our right, the stream, then the field, the forest. Behind us, the road and the cars. Ahead, more road and more cars. In the distance, at the head of this endless line of stationary vehicles, something emerges from the fog: something compact, thick, chaotic. A big pile. Or a small mountain. We draw nearer. A multicoloured mountain. We draw nearer still. A multicoloured mountain of metal. We draw even nearer.

  The line of cars beside which we are walking leads to a knot of cars that have come to a standstill next to, in and on top of each other. Crushed cars, overturned cars, cars that have been pressed together, wedged together, bumpers tangled in wheel wells, bumpers tangled in engine bonnets, in dented driver’s side doors, in severely dented passenger side doors, bumpers in bumpers in twisted boot lids upon torn-off car doors and on top of that rusty undercarriages, exhaust systems, wheels thrusting skyward and cracks, fissures and rifts in the crimson red, racing green, pearl white or obsidian black or in cheaper colours without trademarked names, dirty wounds that reveal that even the most dynamic SUV is really nothing more than a hunk of metal driven by fire. Pieces of broken safety glass everywhere, astonishingly evenly distributed, like sharp, bright-sounding snow.

  The mind’s childish hope that staring for longer will offer answers. We move closer.

  It looks like more and more cars had forced their way onto the roundabout. It looks like the drivers in the cars that were already on the roundabout were no longer willing, or able, to leave. At any rate they wouldn’t let any more cars in, and there were more and more cars that wanted to get onto the roundabout, from all four directions, and every once in a while one would manage to squeeze in, and they started going faster and faster around the roundabout, wondering as they passed each of the four exits whether it wouldn’t be possible to break out, but from all four directions there were hundreds of other cars, thousands, stretching from each of the four exits to the horizon, waiting, as cars do, in the unmoving traffic, fathers determined to keep their nerve, mothers determined to trust their husbands to keep their nerve, children acutely aware of their parents’ nervous tension and equally aware that this tension was unlike any other they had ever experienced, and who were therefore determined to believe the lies their parents told them: I’m sure we’ll be moving soon.

  They must have waited a long time. They must have waited until their fear was so great, their enforced inactivity so intolerable, and their rage at the ones who had made it onto the roundabout so strong that they could no longer care about anything. They must have waited until they realised that nothing mattered anyway, either because they were still able to think rationally and understood that the reason no one was exiting the roundabout was that no one knew where to go, because there was another car coming from every direction, lots of other cars, or else because they just couldn’t go on, because they had been accelerating and braking for so long now, accelerating and braking, accelerating and braking; because they had crept along inch by inch, always keeping their eye on the roundabout that must lead somewhere, they had been accelerating and braking, and when they had almost reached the roundabout they could see that the roads coming from the right and the left were packed with cars but they couldn’t see what the road on the far side of the roundabout looked like, the road leading straight ahead, and who knew, maybe that one was open, it was always possible; from each of the four roads leading onto the roundabout there was always one exit that was hidden from view, and, after all, there were always cars going round the roundabout; wouldn’t they be at a standstill if there were really nowhere to go? And now the people ahead of them are moving again, and so now they are moving too, and now they just have to get out of here, to somewhere else, anywhere where things are different, no matter where, no matter who else is there, we’ll figure something out, we just have to get out of here as fast as possible, there’s no future for us here, we know that, back there it’s all over. And then they all accelerated at once.

  Where did all the people go? Drygalski asks.

  48

  That evening we are sitting in the soft sand of a practice bunker on a golf course. We dig a small pit. We reach into the plastic bags hanging from our belts for little shreds of paper and thin birch twigs, and from our coat pockets we produce pieces of MDF shelving, thinly chopped wood salvaged from Scandinavian stoves in holiday rental flats, and the folded lid of a box of Trivial Pursuit Genius Edition. We place everything carefully in the pit, in the shape of a pyramid, first the paper, then the cardboard, then the twigs, then the MDF, then the wood. Gruber strikes a match and holds it to the shreds of paper. They catch quickly, the cardboard turning black until a blue glow begins to shine through before erupting in a tongue of yellow flame. Gruber blows gently on the pile, and small flames begin to form along the twigs, like Christmas tree lights on a necklace, the plywood burns quickly too, the wood more slowly. When we see that everything is in order, we lean back, rubbing our backs against the sand which will soon no longer be as cold.

  Drygalski says: It would be nice to get some answers, some time.

  That depends, I say.

  What do you mean?

  Not all answers are answers.

  What do you mean?

  Well, there’s this thought experiment. Imagine that an alien comes to Earth in the spring, just as the wildfires are raging in California. Towns are evacuated, helicopters fly back and forth with loads of water, lives are extinguished, people stand with their pets in their arms watching as their life’s work goes up in flames, their eyes full of tears and their lungs full of smoke. The fire brigade is out in force. Men are killed fighting the flames. Medals are awarded. Someone is caught smoking in the forest and summarily lynched. The governor in an olive green jacket gives a rousing speech. Experts on CNN expound computer models of wind, drought and climate change, and on Fox News just wind and drought. But nobody can really explain why these fires keep recurring.

  And the alien?

  He says: Excuse me, but it’s really quite simple. Of course there’s always a fire. Your atmosphere is full of oxygen.

  49

  The valley was on fire. So we went up into the mountains. It was hard to keep going on an empty stomach, and we had no water, that would have been too heavy. We drank melted snow. In primary school we had learnt that that was bad for you, but we couldn’t remember exactly why. Presumably because back then there was still acid rain and leaded petrol. Now there was no other option. It took three hours till we could see the ridge. One more till we reached the top. We stood on the arête. The snow was a fine powder up here, the wind was howling with discouraging brutality, and instead of the hoped-for reward of a panorama of pristine, unravaged countryside, we saw nothing but another valley full of low-hanging clouds. We began our descent right away, by default, since we were too tired to stand around up here, but carefully, because it was steep and the wind hurt our eyes and ears even though we were wearing hats. The wind hurt our hearts as well, and our lungs. They we
re on fire. We kept going, we stumbled, we fell, we got back on our feet. We were up to our waists in the fresh snow here on the north face of the mountain. We would not have lasted long. One of us pointed to the towers of the ski lift, farther down, it must have an end point somewhere, and then we caught sight of the mountain station about a third of a mile farther down. The lift was out of service even though the snow was good, but having seen the village on fire we were not surprised to find the station completely deserted. After a moment’s hesitation, Golde picked up a block of ice from the mound of cleared snow and smashed one of the windows in the door. We squeezed through the opening, watching out for the shards of broken glass. Golde never used to be in so much of a hurry. We were happy to feel the faint trace of warmth inside the station, and then we were annoyed that we had made such a big hole. Gruber rolled up the carpet by the entrance and with Golde’s help used it to stuff the hole; an ugly, makeshift solution which served only to make us even more acutely aware of how unprepared we were for our new circumstances. The wind whistled past the black plastic sausage and around our legs. A wide staircase led down into a restaurant area with a panoramic view. Thick rubber mats padded each step, which seemed excessive without ski boots on. It was as if it had been designed for people with a tendency to fall down stairs, but at the same time we were glad because it was an indication that people had given thought to other people here as they built the staircase. One by one we passed through the turnstile into the abandoned canteen. Instinctively, we each took a tray from the stack. There was still beer, some old sandwiches and pickled cucumber salad. The cucumber slices were so soft you could practically drink them. We didn’t mind; we were thirsty. The fat in the deep fryer was cold, but still looked inviting. We resisted the temptation. We sat down at a table by the window. The fog was so close that the glass looked soft. The food did us good. We could feel the nourishment descending into our stomachs, we could feel the warmth spreading there, even though we’d only had cold food. We could feel that our bodies now had some materials to work with, something to burn. And then we put down our forks and slurped the cucumber and the dressing straight out of the white porcelain bowls.