Mess

by Veronika Groke

It was there when Traudl got up on Sunday. She was sitting on the enclosed veranda her late husband had built largely by himself as an extension to the kitchen some twenty years back, sleepily cradling her coffee in her hands and listening to the comfortable gaaaaw, gaaaaw of the chickens. That was when she saw it: next to the road, behind the row of dried sunflowers that reminded her of a painting she liked, someone had put up a wooden sign.

Traudl craned her neck, but with the sign facing away from her, it was impossible to see what was written on it. Perhaps another announcement of the summer solstice celebration, Traudl thought, though it was a bit of a strange place to put one, out of the way like that. Plus, they could really have asked before ramming a stake into what was, after all, still part of her land.

She sat for a while longer, sipping her coffee, trying to retrieve the feeling of early-morning peacefulness she was so fond of, but in the end it was no use: the sign kept jumping into her field of vision, demanding scrutiny.

Sighing, she got up, unlocked the veranda door and slipped into the old wooden clogs she kept next to it for just this kind of quick outdoor excursion. She trudged through dewy grass and dandelions, wincing once as something crunched underfoot, until she had rounded the perplexing object and was looking at it face-on. Indignation, spiked with the slightest pinch of shame, rose inside her as she read the message that had been painted on the sign’s front in clear, red capitals:

THIS MESS IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FRAU ECKER.

***

Monday at the Felddorf council office is always fairly busy. It’s when people try to get everything sorted out that they didn’t get round to the previous week, on top of whatever else they thought of over the weekend. And sure enough, the moment Waltraud Ecker audibly voiced her complaint to me, there were about five other people still waiting to be seen. So even with the office door closed, it wasn’t all that surprising that Frau Ecker’s little anecdote made it out into the wider world.

“What am I hearing?” said Franz, grinning as he flounced in to take over for me during my lunch break. “Someone’s put up a sign in the Eckers’ field, complaining about the mess?”

“I see you’re already well informed,” I said with an eyeroll I couldn’t suppress. “She was in here bitching about it for at least ten minutes.”

“Haha! So what did you tell her?”

“To email me a photo, but that there’s probably not much we can do about it. So either she takes it to the police – but I doubt they’ll be interested – or otherwise she can just take the sign down, and maybe cut those sunflowers down too,” I added in an undertone.

Franz laughed. “That’s what you said? I’m sure she didn’t like that. No wonder she was in here so long!”

“No, she didn’t like it at all. Said she’d left the sunflowers on purpose, for the birds, and people should damn well mind their own business.”

“For the birds! That fits. She’s always been cuckoo, that one!”

I rolled my eyes again, leaving it open to Franz to interpret whether the gesture was aimed at Frau Ecker or at him. He just chuckled. Franz is technically my line manager, but he’s easy-going, always happy to have a bit of banter. (Besides, according to my mother, he is also her stepbrother’s wife’s second cousin, so basically family.)

A photo from Frau Ecker was waiting in my inbox when I got back from lunch, attached to a shouty email: ENCLOSED THE PHOTO OF THE SIGN! ONE CAN SEE CLEARLY THAT IT IS ON MY LAND! THE SUNFLOWERS ARE FOR THE BIRDS! PLEASE DEAL WITH THIS PROMPTLY!! WALTRAUD ECKER

I showed Franz, and he just shook his head. “The problems people have… But I have to give it to her, for an old woman, it’s impressive how she’s managing these new technologies.”

Between requests for recycling bags, birth registrations and applications for land use reclassification, I’d quite forgotten about the sign affair by the time I locked up the office just after 3:00 pm. It was a beautiful day, and after the relative sterility of the council building I luxuriated in the sunshine, happily squinting at flowers and butterflies in gardens and meadows as I walked past them on my way home.

As I was admiring the house with the wonderful 60s panorama window a couple before ours, I noticed a row of little signs that had been put up along the strip of grass just next to the road. A PIG HAS LET THEIR DOG SHIT HERE, read one; NOT A DOG POTTY, another. Some had little pictures of crossed-out pooping dogs on them. Like Franz earlier, I shook my head: Clearly, the Felddorfers had a liking for DIY signs. But at least these had been put up by people on their own land, so fair play.

The next couple of days passed quietly. Frau Ecker posted a complaint, as shouty as her email, in the “Felddorf Network” Facebook group (WILL WHOEVER PUT UP THE SIGN, KINDLY REMOVE IT!!! IT MAKES HOLES IN THE GROUND, WHICH IS WILFULLY DAMAGING MY PROPERTY!!!), but there were only some three gently mocking replies that basically echoed what I’d told her at the office, so I kind of expected that that would be the end of it.

Then, on Thursday, I was on my way to the hairdresser after work when a piece of paper caught my eye. It had been neatly stuck to one of the ground floor windows with Sellotape. It was a handwritten notice suggesting that it wouldn’t hurt if whoever lived in the house gave the (admittedly uncommonly grubby) windows a good clean. (Capital letters, needless to say: much harder to identify the handwriting.)

On a whim, I got my phone out and took a picture – it was beginning to look like I might be able to put together a nice little collection of handcrafted signage projects from around the village. And I didn’t have to wait long for the next instalment, either: vigorously massaging conditioner into my scalp, Nikki, the hair salon’s owner, vented her outrage at someone having nailed a cardboard sign to her front door in the middle of the night to complain about her cat.

“It’s un-be-lievable,” she fumed. “Someone actually comes with a hammer and puts a nail in my door. Woke the entire house up, but of course, by the time my partner got to the door, there was nothing to be seen. Except the stupid sign! And because of a cat – my goodness, so maybe it shat in someone’s garden – like other people’s cats don’t shit in my garden sometimes? No, really!”

“Boah, really… Do you think I could see it?”

“What, the sign? Yeah, sure, if you want…”

Nikki disappeared into the back and a moment later returned with a piece of brown cardboard, the kind boxes tend to be made out of. Ripped at the top where it had been pulled off the nail, it brandished the words LITTER TRAY / KEEPS THE CAT HAPPAY, referencing a song by a German comedian that had – against all odds – been absorbed into the public consciousness. Underneath, it said in much smaller letters, AND THE NEIGHBOUR, TOO.

I caught myself before I let out a chuckle – granted, the execution was humorous, but the act itself was really a bit menacing.

“Can I take a picture of this?” I asked.

Nikki nodded emphatically. “Absolutely, yes, please. And if the council finds out who did it, give them my best regards, and the next time they’ll be paying for the door!”

I showed Franz my pictures when I saw him in the office the next day. Shaking his head, he pulled his own phone out of his back pocket.

“Looks like this is becoming a new fashion. Here, have a look, I’ve got some of my own.”

I scrolled through Franz’s photo collection. There were five photos of signs, one of which featured the same note on the dirty window I also had on my phone. While all of them were petty, one stood out as being rather more alarming. It was another cardboard job, but rather than painted or drawn, its message had been constructed from letters cut out of newspapers in the classic blackmailer style. It read:

NO LoUd mUSic afteR 9:00 pm, sluT

I zoomed in further. The word “slut” had been put below the rest of the text and underlined with a black marker.

“Boah,” I mumbled. “Where did you find that?”

Franz gave a humorless cackle. “Ha. You won’t believe it. This was taped to my neighbors’ door – Josef and Christel are away visiting Christel’s sister Hilde and her niece in Vienna for a few days, and their sixteen-year-old daughter is home alone and has been having noisy parties the past couple of nights. Nothing extravagant, just a few other young people. I mean, they were loud, and they were up quite late, but this…” he tutted.

“Calling her a slut?” I said. “That seems a bit much.”

“Yeah…” Franz exhaled. “That’s what I think. Any normal person would have just banged on the door and told them to keep it down. That just seems… malicious.”

I was beginning to feel a touch queasy. “It all seems a bit threatening to me. Maybe we should tell the police. What did you do with the sign?”

“Uh… Nothing.” Franz took his phone back and pocketed it.

“What? You mean, you just left it there? For the sixteen-year-old to find?”

“Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, it was stuck to their front door. Behind the garden fence – I couldn’t very well…” A look of mild panic was spreading across Franz’s face. “But maybe I should have taken it down – just wait a moment, will you, let me quickly go get it.”

“I think it’s better. But put on some gloves maybe, in case the police want to take fingerprints or something.”

While Franz rushed off to get the sign, I decided to make up a folder to collect all the sign-related pictures and reports, just in case this turned out to be a bigger thing. I was almost finished when there was a knock at the office door.

“Come in!”

The door opened to reveal Herbert Hütterer, who laboriously lowered his bulk onto one of the chairs in front of my desk.

“How can I help?”

“Well now.” He rocked back and forth a couple of times, puffing until he seemed to find a comfortable position. “I’d like to file a complaint.”

I took a pen out of the desk tidy. “Yes?”

“Yes. It’s about my car. In particular, someone’s stuck a sign on the windshield.”

I waited. When nothing else was forthcoming, I asked, “What kind of a sign? And what does it say?”

“It’s a big sign, like this—” he indicated about an A3 size with his hands “—and it’s made out of baking paper or something like that. And what it says is, DRIVE SLOWLY, SAVE LIVES.”

Again, he fell silent, looking at me expectantly.

“And… what would you suggest I do about it?” I was getting a bit irritated by this whole sign business, so it might have come out a touch less diplomatic than it should have. (Besides, if I’m honest, with Hütterer being a well-known speeding offender in Felddorf, I was feeling a certain sympathy with the message writer.)

He opened his mouth to protest, but at that moment Franz entered, clutching the sign from his neighbors’ house, with two young people following right behind.

“Ah, you’re back,” I said, relieved. “Is this your neighbors’ daughter..?”

Franz turned. “What? No, but if I understand it correctly, these two have another one for the collection.”

I sighed.

As it turned out, the two newcomers were a local girl and her boyfriend from one of the locally settled migrant families, who had come in to report a sign someone had fastened to the boy’s family’s kitchen window.

“It’s complaining about the littering,” the girl said. “In Arabic.”

“We don’t do littering,” the boy added. “And we don’t even know any Arabic. We’re from Romania.”

“So how do you know what it says?” Franz asked.

The girl brandished her phone. “Same as how they wrote it in the first place, I’m guessing: Google translate.”

By the following Monday, it was clear that something needed to be done. There were now so many signs all over the village that some tourists were starting to complain they were spoiling Felddorf’s rural charm. The Facebook group, which had dissolved into a spate of protests and accusations, had been suspended. When an irate driver came into the council office after a rogue sign had been blown onto her windshield, causing her to slam on the brakes and almost mow down a dogwalker, the mayor, Roland Ackermann, decided to call an emergency village assembly.

Much to the Felddorfers’ credit, the assembly attracted so many attendees the community hall was crammed full to the last corner. Though it took some three hours of heated (and, if we’re honest, not always exactly civil) debate, the outcome was altogether positive: in the end, it was decided that all the signs would be collected and burned on this year’s summer solstice bonfire, which had been scheduled for the coming Saturday.

With their usual hands-on spirit and love of orderliness, the Felddorfers had removed all the signs by late Friday afternoon. Since the vast majority were made of either wood or cardboard and could therefore be easily added to the bonfire, the result was a stack of truly colossal proportions. Though some of the older people swore there had been even bigger fires in the past, most of those present agreed that they had never seen anything like it. Mayor Ackermann gave a short speech on the importance of community and communication; then, gathered in the field just below the fire station, hundreds of locals, migrants, tourists and visitors from other villages watched as, lit by the local children with torches, the troublesome signs went up in flames.

The whole event had been meticulously organized. There were stalls selling grilled chickens and bratwurst, beer and wines from the region. A brass band played traditional tunes; some couples danced. A spontaneous ring formed around the bonfire, by now a tower of flames reaching far up into the night sky, with people just grabbing whoever was standing next to them by the hand. The church choir started to sing “We Shall Overcome,” which would have been cheesy, except the general feeling of joy and togetherness made it all feel very solemn.

Sweaty from the fire and out of breath from dancing with several people in a row, I eventually plopped down next to Franz on one of the wooden benches that had been set up for the occasion. A glass of white wine materialized in front of me.

“Prost!” Frau Ecker called from the other side of the table, holding her own wine glass out to me.

I clinked glasses with her. “Prost!”

“Prost!” Franz said, adding his glass to the toast.

Hot as I was feeling, I downed my wine in one go.

Franz topped up my glass.

“My sign is already burning,” Frau Ecker said with something almost like pride. “I saw it was one of the biggest.”

“Haha, yeah,” Franz said, “Traudl Ecker doesn’t do things by halves.”

I smiled. “It’s so great that this has all been resolved in such a constructive way.”

The evening got blurrier and blurrier as it went on. At midnight, most of the celebrants were still there, and the fire, though somewhat lower, was still going strong. After that, I lost track of time – and, I’m embarrassed to say, everything else as well.

I spent most of Sunday shuffling back and forth between my bed and the sofa groaning, with occasional trips to the bathroom thrown in. Around lunchtime, Franz called to entertain me with his account of how he’d more or less carried me home around 2:00 in the morning, as I loudly sang “We Shall Overcome,” making up half of the words. I would have laughed, had my head not throbbed with every tiny movement, as well as the visceral feeling of existential dread that seemed to have taken up residence in my body.

“Thanks for taking me home, and sorry for being so drunk,” I mumbled. “Did you stay any longer afterwards?”

“Nah,” he said. “The ones who were left were all pretty plastered by then, and getting quite stupid. They said they had to keep the fire going, so a bunch of them—”

But at that point, I had to interrupt him because I urgently needed to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll call you back,” I spluttered. (Which, of course, I didn’t.)

Over the course of the day, fragmented memories started coming back to me: Waltraud Ecker trying to persuade the mayor to jump over the (by then merely smoldering) fire with her, in the tradition of the young couples of old; the Romanian boy improvising a solo on a trumpet borrowed from one of the musicians; people bringing broken pieces of furniture, pieces of wood that were really still too green, old newspapers and so on to add fuel to the fire.

Then weirder things, too.

I had a flashback of a bin bag being tossed onto the pile that opened to release a shower of NO DOG POTTY signs, mixed with others sporting slogans like NO DOGS ALLOWED, PUT DOGS ON LEASH and other dog-related restrictions.

Someone coming with a wheelbarrow full of big, shiny letters that looked a lot like those above Nikki’s hair salon.

Someone hurling a sign into the fire like a frisbee that had – but surely not! – Welcome to Felddorf written on it.

And had I really seen Herbert Hütterer shove a 30km/h speed limit sign into the embers..?

Cursing Franz and his refills, I shook my head (which I instantly regretted doing). I wasn’t used to drinking so much; clearly, I’d been delirious. I spent the rest of the day trying to distract myself from my self-loathing by binge-streaming old episodes of Kommissar Rex.

I was still feeling a touch rough when I made my way to the office on Monday morning. Everything felt a bit off, disconcerting, almost; even the traffic seemed more unpleasant than usual. I walked past the supermarket, my eyes agitatedly roving over the familiar building like they were unable to settle on it; like there was something missing. At intervals, some weird, random metal poles were standing by the side of the road, like the kind that normally held… And then it hit me: my drunken hallucinations from Saturday night had been nothing of the kind.

I got to the entrance of the council building at the same time as Franz came strolling over from the parking lot. For a few moments, we stood wordlessly, taking in the clean, white patches where the Felddorf coat of arms and the office sign with the business hours had been removed from the wall.

I unlocked the door, and we silently trudged up the stairs to the office together.

“I think this mess is gonna take some time to sort out,” Franz said at last.

“Mhm.”

We looked at each other, nodding.

With a deep sigh, I switched on my computer, made some coffee and braced myself for the arrival of the first complainant.