Читать книгу Awakening to the Great Sleep War - Gert Jonke - Страница 6

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In the morning, that city is usually enveloped by a low-lying cloud, from which it slowly and with great difficulty extricates itself, and depending on the varying requirements of the day, it ascends at least three or five meters, yes, even as high as seven or nine meters up the air-arena stairwell, into the sublime midmorning.

By noon, however, this dignified stance has already become too uncomfortable for it, so it drifts surreptitiously down to its customary altitude, so that, once there, it can lean back into the comfortable afternoon, over the course of which it will of course still have to put up with just about everything imaginable, till long into the evening, when it pulls the evening’s gray pelt up over its ears before sinking further down, several meters, crumbling away through the porous, moth-eaten skin of the plains, as if its houses were being suctioned away, so that only the pointed tops of a few chimney toques still peep out, only the wings of a few helplessly fluttering rooftops still sail swaying over the spring tides of twilight—it has fallen in on itself, leaving deep furrows, and there is a barely audible rustling sound as the city slips away from the eye of the beholder, glittering as it goes.

In the morning, the walls blow their noses, hanging their bleary-eyed bedding out the windows, the roof trusses cough through asthmatic chimneys, and some buildings sneeze through their opened skylights; now and then an entryway shoves its stairwell, bursting with stairs, out onto the street, and sometimes entire suites of rooms are pushed out through their walls into public places, while the cellars press down on their heaps of potatoes, preventing them from rising up in rebellion when the countless coal sacks, filled to bursting, blow gobs of smog into the public transit system through the bars on the window.

Some days the buildings pull in their protruding bay-window stomachs and bashfully fold back their elegantly pointed balcony breasts, as if obeying an order to stand at attention with their mortar smoothed flat and their walls erect, because the municipal authorities, that is, their superiors, the towers, have come to report on them, have donned their clockwork cupolas and are wearing the marshal’s baton tips of their weathercockscomb teeth up on their belfries.

Some days the streetcar tracks spring out of the asphalt, shake off all those annoying stops, and move their terminals several meters up into the air.

What were you looking for in that city, Burgmüller?!

In that city, some nights moor their black sailing fleets so firmly to the buoys of the church steeples that they’re still there the next day, far above the heads of the townspeople, the dust swarms of their thick night-bird shadows drawing curved lines in the air, passing through the walls of our airspace-vault, as well as its ceiling fresco.

What did you lose in that city, Burgmüller?!

Yes, the days in that city were sometimes invasions of sunbeams pushed out of the nights, their explosive fields of flowers shot up from the first light of dawn, the rain of their petals cascading down from the galleries of air, pulsating with streams of budding light, accompanied by the vapor-lined sultriness of dark, padded storm attics—their bolts bundled together into a rigidly frozen burning fountain of woven lightning; one was thoughtfully offered shelter beneath the fountain, and in order to stay for just a short time (no longer than necessary), people like Burgmüller hid from it on those islands that drifted through the river until, tired of being inhabited, they evaporated.

Burgmüller wasn’t the only person to pass through such days as though moving down an interminable tunnel of light that had been placed over everything, its woven sunbeam runnels brushing very slowly over the city, close enough to be felt, like a cloth made of air, like an extremely thin condom that might burst at any moment if the buildings continued to act up in this fashion: in the process of greeting each other by raising their roof-truss hats, they were hurling their brick-patterned caps so far above their firm, streamlined walls that they got lost in the wind.

It wasn’t just on days like this that Burgmüller had withdrawn, of late.

Because he had already made the acquaintance of those remarkably different beings who inhabited the city, had been involved in intensive discussions with them for a long time now, had become increasingly fascinated with them, hoping to fathom the various modes of their existence, which he tried, futilely, to comprehend in every detail, together with the world in which they lived, and definitely also moved, although at an apparent standstill.

But how had it all begun? Had he simply stood there and called out to them, You! hey, you there!? No, he would have considered that tactless, pushy; instead, one day, he felt something come up and touch him from behind, without warning, and he turned around, but saw nothing. The only glance cast at him came from the ossified face of a woman of stone, a caryatid, her hands propping the balcony of a building up against the sky in such a way that she could also have been thinking of throwing it. He knew for certain that only she could have attracted his attention in so threatening a manner; Burgmüller was about to answer in the same tone of voice, to forbid that sort of treatment and demand an apology, when he thought or felt that there was an entire congregation all around him, a crowd blocking his way and even laughing at him—from underneath archways, windows, oriels, and other parts of the façade of a long building, whose very marble began to tremble gently. When Burgmüller asked what the reason was for their mockery, which was obviously directed at him, they replied, no, it wasn’t mockery, it was joy, satisfaction, because with him, for the first time in several decades, they had at last found someone who was able to sense a little of their conversation, of how they occupied themselves, of what their days entailed, of their wallseasoncalendar plans, of their buildingfront epochs, etc., what a happy coincidence, and at that he and they decided to meet each other daily; yes, please come tomorrow, all of you, to my apartment, Burgmüller suggested happily to the caryatids and atlantes—which is what the male columns called themselves—and of course they would always be most warmly welcome at his place, in future he hoped as many of them as possible would swing by, any time was fine, he would always welcome a visit from the telamones—which is what all of them together called themselves—at any moment, because their friendship would brighten the twilit loneliness of his quiet rooms!

But unfortunately they didn’t give him a single opportunity to wine and dine them, if discreetly, with his meager hospitality, because of course they never went to his apartment; it would just have been too difficult, for a number of reasons, but above all it would have taken too long.

Instead, he went to visit them regularly, questioned them about the composition of their world, their worldviews, their ideas about existence, and about the course of their walled-up everyday life.

How did they manage to communicate?

On the one hand Burgmüller spoke as slowly as possible, with pauses between each word, between each syllable, if possible intervals of several seconds, so that they were able to hear or understand everything he said or asked, even if he spoke quietly, barely audibly, or often just thought; while on the other hand, their utterances took the form of a not-really describable nor closely definable trembling of the light in the airspace immediately around their figures: Burgmüller thought he heard it very quietly, at least he thought he understood the meaning of it, because “hearing” probably wasn’t the right word for it, although each of their sentences did seem to be infinitely slowly and carefully spelled and then spoken, if it could even be called “speaking,” no, “speaking” wasn’t a suitable word either, not for this type of communication—those veins of light that flashed through the thin, perhaps whispering, nearly invisible blurring of the air that very quietly surrounded their figures, that buzzing of their heads which expressed itself in a manner that was obviously just barely perceptible: when Burgmüller listened to the telamones, it often seemed to him as if he were hearing with his eyes.

The telamones lived, as he soon found out, in a version of the world that was at first neither understandable nor apparent to him: movements in that world flowed with infinite slowness, and indeed their understanding of existence seemed to involve hardly any motion at all. E.g., for one of the marble arms to make a fist so that its stone hand could punch some passerby in the head, or else if one of them wanted to give an inconsiderate loudmouth a pert slap with the back of its stucco hand, or else tear the seat from the pants of a disrespectful slob peeing at the feet of their lonely evenings and nights, they would need, depending on their position and location, at least two to three years, or even twenty to thirty, and in extreme cases two to three centuries.

The by no means crippling, infinitely slow pace of their days and years was the necessary precondition for their existence and protection. The same purpose that air served for Burgmüller—something to breathe, but which also held his biosphere together in and with the atmosphere—was served in the telamones’ case by the inestimable time at their disposal, time that they even conceived of in a material sense; yes, they needed whole piles of eternity around them in the form of time clouds that they also somehow “breathed,” but “breathe” is again of course an entirely wrong word, because time held their biosphere together by not only being consumed but also being gathered into millennia and epochs, which remained always present, circling around them like smoke, those densely steaming centuries, the number of which determined the density of their atmosphere, whose every wheezing season and vapor trail fluttered inexhaustibly for decades—and this very dense chronospheric shell could not be measured with the conventional concept of infinity, because its inhabitants would often inhale and exhale in a single minute the time-space network of more than a hundred or a thousand years, which for them had passed imperceptibly . . . yes indeed, how to spend the time was no problem for them at all.

They had no objection to Burgmüller’s spending his, in telamonic terms, ridiculously short time with them.

Soon afterward, he spent several uninterrupted days and nights with them, but once again, far into the evening, his eyes fell shut on him, and so he spent the following night too, until far into the next day or evening, maybe even longer, he didn’t know, lying in the protection of their fixed shadows, in the marble folds of their back courtyards.

When he woke up again, all of them were terribly upset about him, at a loss as to how to explain his presumed illness, from which he had just recovered—some of them had almost written him off already as having died some sort of motionlessly crumbling, timeless death, as having collapsed into a pile of rock debris at the foot of a cliff, as having died in a way clearly puzzling to them because it involved a loss of time.

In any case, they had been very worried about him, had feared he would just remain lying there, would dissolve into little scraps of air that would in turn evaporate and flow away into the evening, but he got up again at last.

It was only a little nap, said Burgmüller, he’d been very tired, more exhausted than he had been in a long time, and he’d slept better than he had in ages; was that really so unusual to them, why were they all suddenly so concerned about him, or had he done something to offend them?

Slept? Tired? But what did it mean?!

I fell into a deep sleep, he explained, and tried to define such concepts as rest and recuperation, and the degree to which they were needful.

Sleep?! But what was it, and what purpose did it have, and where did it all lead to?!

At first, Burgmüller wanted to tell them a little about his already forgotten dreams, but they didn’t understand—Dreams? What are those?—until Burgmüller finally grasped that the telamones up to that point in their existence had never heard anything about sleep, about sleepers, or about sleeping dreamers, because until then every sort of tiredness or exhaustion had remained completely unknown to them.

No, until then they hadn’t known what sleep is, what it’s good for, what and whom it serves; and why should they have known even the slightest thing about it, after all? Nothing even remotely like falling asleep had been included in their blueprints; even the faintest hint of telamonic tiredness would bring the buildings of half the city to their knees: one night of marble sleep would cause everything to cave right in, a single dream would bring catastrophe, desolation, mountains of rubble, collapsed walls, burned buildings, the remains of sunken cities from recklessly forgotten wars; yes, it would have been exactly like a war, a telamonic sleep war of the caryatids against the city.

Even the word “sleep” had been unknown to them, it didn’t occur in their language.

They had never been tired, never exhausted, but rather were trapped in petrified wakefulness, immured by the need for an eternally preserved insomnia. That’s why Burgmüller had to make a great effort at first to explain things in a way they could begin to understand; he began with the word “sleep,” and for weeks he explained again and again what was meant by it, what it designated, represented, in order to give them an understanding of it, along with all related phenomena, and he did so lovingly, and was precise down to the last detail, so that, at least on a hypothetical basis, sleep would be understandable—or more understandable—to them.

The phenomenon was completely new and puzzling to the telam-ones; they were soon so fascinated that they demanded he tell them more and more about it . . . slowly but surely, they were starting to see sleep as an expansive, hitherto unsuspected art form, now presented for their appreciation, and which they couldn’t help but regard with astonishment and great admiration.

Yes, that was a good time in his life, perhaps one of the best, all told; under his highly esteemed professional direction, almost all the caryatids and atlantes in the city undertook theoretically rigorous and pure sleep research, and as the chairman of their stony meetings, Burgmüller would give detailed lectures about sleep that proved immensely popular and were a great success, as were the follow-up dream seminars about all the phenomenologies associated with this area of the discipline: dozing, deep sleep, afternoon naps, daydreams, and the dream-night, which is to say the sleep period before and after midnight—in the coming days and nights, their zeal for any knowledge related to the subject became evident in their plasterwork: They were wide awake.

Soon afterward, the telamones approached Burgmüller with the particularly heartfelt request that he now proceed to the practical part of these exercises: they requested that he sleep, asked him to demonstrate sleeping as intensively as possible, from the dusk of falling asleep to the dawn of awakening, to demonstrate it in all its clarity, together with every possibility arising in the process, moving from theory to practice, just so, as often as possible.

Thus began the calmest, indeed most comatose period in Burgmüller’s life, because almost all he did was sleep: the telamones couldn’t get enough of watching his sleeping body along with the dance performances of his dreams; his sleep demonstrations in those days were considered a wonderfully exotic, peaceful Gesamtkunstwerk, which he launched into the atmosphere in all its vast incomprehensibility, along with his Gestalt, making magnificent the day-nights and the night-days.

For this reason, his body was passed from building to building, from caryatid to atlas, as comprehensively as possible, so as to give wider circulation to his sleep concerts, sleeper plays, dreamer serenades, tiredness tragedies, and exhaustion comedies . . . with increasing excitement, they marveled at his performances, thinking them the ultimate or penultimate secret that would at last explain and transfigure their inflexible existence, thus solving the mysterious equation of their petrified philosophy.

It goes almost without saying that many of them tried to get to the bottom of Burgmüller’s dreams, but, alas, found them hovering unfathomably high above them; their goal in making that attempt, which they at first kept secret, was to learn for themselves how to sleep.

In vain. Not one of them got even close to it; and how could they? Burgmüller might just as well have tried to breathe time instead of air; no, he wouldn’t have succeeded in getting a single day into his lungs.

Nevertheless, or just because of that, his performances—every snore dedicated to their breathlessness, which spanned centuries—became ever more popular; hardly had he awakened than he was immediately obliged to give a new sleep demonstration.

So he took stronger and stronger sleeping pills and potions, because in one’s natural state it’s impossible to be honestly asleep all the time, that is, without affectation, and especially not when giving public demonstrations of the art, as he was doing in his new function as, on the one hand, a creative sleep artist, now very well known and famous among them, and then, on the other hand, as the interpreter of his own sleep, following each performance. He could neither bring himself to deceive them by simply pretending to sleep during his performances, which is to say without actually sleeping, because they deserved better than such amateurism, nor could he possibly expect them to have the least patience with a sham performance, because they would have seen through any deception from the start: their theoretical knowledge had in the meantime become so thoroughly sound that no one could pull any tricks on them:

Once Burgmüller had started his presentation, the stone women first carefully pulled up his drooping eyelids to measure the strength of his sleep by the position of his pupils; then they proceeded to rock his limp, sacklike body slowly and gently back and forth as it lay there relaxed and exposed on all sides, swinging it up and down to double check if he was sleeping deeply enough, after which they began to give the sandbag of his body a good shaking, throwing it up to the cloudruins of the weather station and catching it again; yes, and in conclusion they hurled him carefully and slowly over every gable in the city, even those of the highest roofs, playing catch with the crumpled, crinkled bundle of his body.

As soon as he woke up again, they held him to his agreed-upon obligation to describe his dreams. But it was above all when he succeeded in speaking from the depths of his unconsciousness that his sleep performances exceeded all expectations—for when that happened, he spoke in the person of a character inhabiting one of the dreams that came over him in the course of his increasingly unavoidable passages through nightmares, so that his audience had a very clear sense of the haunting force of these images—and such successes were downright triumphant.

Which however made no difference to his body, upon which he was visiting such harm, mainly because he had to keep increasing his dose of sleeping pills in order to continue his work, to maintain as well as to improve on the unconscious qualities of the artistic embodiment of his subconscious in the service of sleep research, because the demands of his stony admirers set into their walls were also increasing, until one day or night he had reached his limit and could go no farther; no sleeping potion helped anymore, and it turned out that he had landed himself in a terrible state of torturous ossifying wakefulness, and was thus unfortunately forced to withdraw, due to illness, from the sleep-theater palaces of the telamones’ world, of which he had become very fond. He postponed all planned performances until further notice, so that he could discontinue his sleeping-pill regimen, and so time went on without him.

How had you gotten yourself to this city anyway, Burgmüller, it almost seems as if you never really arrived here, never really climbed up the crumbling ruins of those proud walls that once formed a quay on a river that has presumably been nameless for a long time now—or was it that you yourself were supposed to bestow upon that river one more word for its miserable trickle? But how to decide on one when your memory was made up of nothing more than prophecies flashing back at you from far ahead? And they didn’t do much to convince you of your plan to settle in the aforementioned place, even if, on a daily basis, in the center of its accumulation of buildings, you happened to see the yellowed, now illegible dial fall from the peak of the clock tower of the municipal authorities’ sky—torn apart, it either crumbled down like sunsnow onto the glowing main square of the Republic, or else, depending on the weather, rained down as hail from all the cobbled floors of the clouds onto the citizens who had run for cover—but what was that supposed to mean to you, since you weren’t reliant on the landscapes themselves, but rather on their maps, according to which the entire region had only recently been formed, and the names that were entered on the maps, were those the right words, or insidious disguises for incorrect, misleading topographies? Who then could have given you the correct, accurate names? You were almost always hidden away or submerged in your suite of rooms at the edge of the suburb, still much too far away from each point of your life and of the corresponding life there in that city: you never had nor would ever get a proper impression of it, because not even its improper—let alone its proper—rules would have meant anything to you: that’s why you often couldn’t even be sure if the designation for the city corresponded to the city itself; yes, to be sure, one word or the other was clearly legible on the maps available to you, but didn’t these maps often change their shape as you were trying to orient yourself according to them?

Yes, look at the map, at the crest of that hill there on the plans, that hill is starting to change before your eyes, it’s dissolving under the blue snakeskins of this torrential trickle that meanders from the foothill countries of the map through valleys and gorges into the lowlands, suddenly streaming along into the tableland, together with its waterfall chains, as if cut into the plains, stretching straight out over the edges of the map, perhaps to wind back again soon and seep into the city map you look at when you look at the city, you who roam around its frayed outskirts, at its canvas edges, aimlessly lost between the dilapidated shacks and the many machine-chassis gangs with their shovel loaders, digging trenches where they will bury meadows alive and toss entire rolled-up forests out of their path: they grin gloatingly, wielding their pliers, and mockingly threaten the hysterical swarms of birds of prey while sending clumps of old garbage whirling through the day . . . but they are also partially occupied with each other, with trying to unscrew, dismantle, and modify each other, whereby on the one hand they puff themselves up alarmingly with the steel-rib gears of their chromium- or nickel-plated thoraxes, spitting screws, almost bursting rivets, in order then on the other hand to shrivel up again into themselves, rumbling together, almost wizened, yes, sometimes they collapse in on themselves, clatter together in a huff, but more often they just attack one another with their grasping shovel tongs and mutually pluck each other’s headlight eyes out of their driverless cabs, yes, they usually can’t take a joke; but then again a lot of them wind up in an embrace after very clumsily pinching each other’s rear ends with the pincers on their clawed arms, sinking toward each other, getting wedged deeply into each other, gliding with their penis rods extended into holes the size of luggage lockers that are opening especially for them, and so in they sink, clutching each other, swinging over each other: they merge, and then, look, Burgmüller, how they all mutually roll each other through the air of this day, into the distance, or else they roll back into the municipal authorities’ fleet of vehicles, pushing each other out of the way . . .

It was on a previous day, yesterday, or like yesterday, yes, again and again, recently, like yesterday, a very foggy night, through which you had come here, back then, had driven through, had turned up at that stage of your solitary trip, which had begun so incredibly with someone else.

Your eyes are hurting from the edges of the forest that keep wandering away into the sunrise, and your back hurts too, as if grass-hoppers have taken your neck by storm. From the turnip fields, the crops hop toward you in swarms to heap themselves on your esteemed person.

But perhaps there might have been a secret way out, back then, much earlier, though not all that much earlier, just a wee bit earlier, when you hadn’t yet started to say back then, before that city, but it wasn’t just you, your lost love too would of course not have had a clue, would have found it utterly disconcerting that, quite contrary to what you’d both assumed, this trip you began together would remain your only common secret.

Back then, or somewhat earlier, before the silhouettes of that city’s walls had appeared with their exhibitionist, pseudo-prehistoric fortifications, much earlier than the two of you would ever be able to imagine again afterward, the beginning of the story of your lost love took place in a completely different city, and to be sure in a more distant foreign country, off the maps, and indeed in the train station there, no, maybe it wasn’t a train station, but rather a harbor,

yes, right, a harbor, no, it was a train station after all, you still remember that, vaguely, yes, this other city with that train station back then (or still today, one never knew what one could still say about it today), in a foreign country that had become invisible, off the maps, was located on the shore of one of the main continental rivers, or even at the edge of an ocean, one of those oceans that strayed and has been forgotten to this day, because how else would Burgmüller have hit upon the idea of talking about a harbor, or even have let its word-ships rise over the beach: not a single ocean-going rowboat subordinate clause, be it ever so ridiculous, would have slipped over his lips and out of his mouth if there hadn’t actually been something dissimilarly similar there, with ships along quay walls or steamboat-mooring points, anyway it wasn’t just he who was so certain, no, his lost loved one would also have agreed with him, maybe they would have argued about it briefly, just for an afternoon, whether it was a river or the beginning of a newly discovered ocean, but eventually the two of them would soon have agreed that it was both the ocean and the chameleon-skin rapids of a main continental artery, yes sir, back then it could well have been both at once, in the form of a swampy, branching, sultry, world-famous delta at the mouth of a river where it poured into a slotted gulf funnel at the entrance to the ocean—that much could also have been deduced from its cartographic representation, in those days, which also shows the exact location of the train station, easy to find with its slim tracks and the trains chained onto them, the station where the two of them first caught sight of one another, each in their respective lives back then, in the high-ceilinged waiting room of that train station, which had confoundingly similar facial features to each of its fraternal buildings, linked to it by iron rails, offering the same old things to eat from inside the cooking steam of their snack bars, they simply couldn’t be dissuaded from selling wieners that burst with laughter and exploded toward the traveler, spraying greetings at him, and there was the unmistakable smell of their exceptionally common types of mustard under the glittering hot downpours of the gleaming gold-toothed window-eyes of happily homecoming locomotives.

Yes, Burgmüller, remember how, back then, when you looked through the train station hall rising high above the tracks, you were suddenly touched by a gaze that understood you so immediately that you asked yourself what it must be like to see with such eyes; surely whatever they glanced at was immediately penetrated and assessed, and nothing or almost nothing could escape such eyes, you thought, but you didn’t feel at all as if you had been unpleasantly seen through, you would have let such eyes look through even bigger holes in you than there were in the segments of wire-mesh glass that made up the dome of the train station.

Back then, when he caught her looking at him, he felt a slight pressure at the center of his deepest and most intimate feelings, as if he had been forced to toss his thoughts to her across the waiting room, at first almost with a hint of reproach that she had kept him waiting so long, but she had finally turned up after all, though who knows how long she might have taken if he hadn’t happened to meet her here on the platform, whereupon he sensed that she was sending a transparent, silent answer-chain back to him, something to the effect that today was the first day that had been created for the two of them alone, for the two of them as for no one else, and that’s why they could only today begin their now inevitable simultaneity, because, in the future, they would be spending all their time together, yes, in our mundane futureland; and Burgmüller believed that he was receiving her answer loud and clear, without a word of it getting lost, they then thought toward each other with a perceptive clarity never previously experienced, without the slightest loss of meaning or interruption of a word, saying approximately this: that soon now everything would be cleared up, so much better than before, so much better than even a few minutes ago, when they had not yet sensed anything of each other, but everything had been steering them toward this point, as if all their past-regions, whose boundary lines had mutually stood in each other’s way, had just now touched each other, bringing with them the contrapuntal voices and moods of their future memories, the memories that belonged to both of them.

On the skin of his eyes, then, Burgmüller felt in every detail—as he looked farther back through the train station scaffolding, sewn with tracks—how the contours of his beloved’s face began to impress themselves upon him in its gaze-reply, how it had been planted in him, sliding up under his eyelids along with the light of the train station in the heat of this twilight; and a mirror image remained fixed over his pupils, as if, from the partly cloudy eyes of his beloved, a pleasant weather system had descended over the low-lying fields of his gaping eyes, a mirage extending from her dear face that then sank in behind his forehead.

The train the two of them were supposed to take later on had been waiting patiently alongside the platform since noon, ready for them and at their disposal; wasn’t it black, like the chimney sweep uniforms of its conductors, who were throwing motorcycles and bicycles into the dark recesses of the baggage car, and now also the story-cases that belonged to the two of them, nailed together with the boards of their fragmentary experiences to be sent off into another time zone, packed full of things they’d dealt with and not dealt with, their crossbar-titles black as the conductors and the waiting train that, as before, lay at their feet, as if waiting just for them and no one else, with cozy chatty cries of welcome flapping wide then slamming shut again from the wide-swinging wings of its waving train-car door-sails (and you know, back then, almost every rose came stamped with black digits that tallied up the exact number of its petals, which determined its worth).

Outside, in the square in front of the train station, it was a hot afternoon, but in spite of the silent sultriness of its breath, it managed to alleviate the boredom of the neglected pay phones by using its happily trembling, lustrous dust cloths of air, as well as its shimmering cleaning rags of light, to give their receivers a proper scrubbing and polishing, while, at the same time, the lower-ranking train station assistant personnel hit all the cars in the intestines with sledgehammers, to see whether their last trip had left them full of holes, or else whether the next trip was likely to leave them full of holes, and as if the train station church bells were cheering along with the chromatic runs of the rainbow-tinted rails, the activity of these personnel turned every individual train car into the strenuously played sound-box skin of a single huge train-station waiting-room xylophone-cathedral, into a majestic festival steaming through that summer afternoon heat, back then, along with the track-bundles whirring through the station and heading out into the country.

At the entrance hall wickets, officials tried one by one to sell all that remained in the way of trips and open seats and reserved seats on the trains that would still be leaving that day, back then: how selflessly they exerted themselves, how admirable was their zeal; they knew just how to draw in the many people who had arrived to swell the ranks of their train station audience, how to entice them over to their respective windows; at first they only used cautious beseeching, then imperiously demanding hand gestures, and then head shaking accompanied by facial expressions from within their glass train-ticket sales-center cubicles—for example, they often held a few of their tickets up high in the air for all to see, so that they could immediately explain to even the undecided customers at least the most obvious qualities of their offers, how one could travel without delay, thither, where one had always wanted to go, yes indeed; and some of these officials behind their glass wickets even went so far in their zeal as to wave from their windows to a particular gentleman or a lady, at first in a friendly fashion, but then stepping out and going toward the person to persuade her or him to please come back to his respective wicket, and sometimes, with a carefully pushing, helping hand, they even grabbed the lady or the gentleman good-naturedly by the arm, or best of all took her or him by the hand and led the way without delay to their respective wicket, employing by and large the subtle power of gentle benevolence, which seemed particularly appropriate and suited to those people who, even if with difficulty, had come precisely to be persuaded for the first time in their lives of the only happiness possible, and who, at the very last minute, were still able to ride away at last. Yes, and as soon as such a train-wicket official had properly flattered a lady or gentleman over to his ticket window, he immediately described the various persuasive advantages of one trip or the other from thither to hither or both together and back again, everything explained with absolute precision, with the utmost emphasis, by way of a vivid brochure that he wielded winningly and lovingly, using the dazzling seductive power of all the available colors found upon a competently equipped painter’s palette. Yes, and back then the urge to travel had already increased in the train station to the point where suddenly there was an invasion of endless lines of tightly-packed people in front of the wickets, fully convinced by the train station ticket-selling personnel, all of them suddenly wanting to go away, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough space left by this time for all the additional people who had now suddenly made up their minds to travel, so that a few of them were certainly forced to remain behind, back then, in this other city, it was just a question of who, and who else as well; after all, it wouldn’t have been good if, back then, everyone had suddenly gone away at the same time, without at least a few remaining behind. Yes, and the pushing and shoving this way and that and the other by all the people who had now been shoved partway into one another, trying more and more insistently to get to the wickets, almost gave rise to a mass fistfight in the wild rush for the last of the still-remaining tickets and trips that could be purchased; only prevented, at the last minute, by the ticket agents themselves, after they had really sold their very last ticket, because right after closing their wickets in the hall, back then, they rushed out from behind their glass booths and with calming words and carefully appeasing hand gestures put the remaining people off until new offerings were made the very next morning. Yes, and for the very last of those people who’d been hurt in their longing for the faraway, and for the most pitiful of those who were always waiting in vain in the waiting rooms and as before were left empty-handed, to reinforce what they had said in closing, the ticker sellers recited by heart the first-rate poetic litanies of the train schedule, which in their own way were perfectly beautiful and complete, and they said them several times more in farewell, sometimes continuing their litanies uninterrupted all through the following night, because more and more frequently there were several railway officials becoming more and more fond of the habit of never leaving their familiar, homey railway station halls even when they were off duty—why go back to the loud desolation of a sublet room in the suburbs, where they were plagued with loneliness and everything was strange to them, when, after their working days were over, they could spend their nights as well under the protection of the huge umbrella dome of the train-station-cathedral, in the waiting rooms and in the entertaining company of the passengers who often waited there through the darkness of the nights, often their whole lives long, for the infinitely postponed departure of their trains, and didn’t lose their patience at all, quite the contrary; first they felt somehow obliged to look for their trains and then if they eventually found them they didn’t need patience anymore because there was absolutely nothing else for them to expect, yes, and some of them had even gotten used to bringing their bedding along into the waiting room so that they could spread it over the benches before they disappeared under their fluffy down-filled duvets into one of their waiting-room dreams that the train-station ocean-going hall-steamer crossed on high seas on heavy seas.

From the light surf of the sun tide, the time that was yet to come pulled many colorfully shining schools of fish to shore with its nonce nets, while the blossoms on the bushes and trees in the parks began to sing, also to hum like birds or make a sound like swarms of insects, but it was really the plants themselves that were making music with their calyxes and flower bells—there wasn’t an animal in sight—and now the leaves along the avenue began to flutter more forcefully too, no, they weren’t moved by any wind, this day was completely calm; instead, the proud avenues were waving to each other with all their leaves from all their twigs right up to their highest branches, as if to give the two people strolling below them some really rather rustling applause, or to announce that the departure of the flowers could begin at any moment, lifting off together from all the stems: they would glide up like a huge swarm of leaves from the surface of the city, rustle away and possibly leave all the parks and gardens leafless on that hot afternoon, but then, back then, they weren’t yet ready to do that yet, the petal-swarms of dragonflies were still hanging in the light; only now and then individual hummingbird-leaves were whisked up into the sky and out through the harbor, glowing as they went, and only in a few small gardens did bare plant stems show that an early autumn interlude must have broken out over them, it had lain there under the wallflower-gray air, as if to hide itself from this summer’s heat.

Then the whistling of the locomotive called after the two of them, searching for them throughout the city, finally catching them, pulling them back through the streets into the hall and toward the platform; the conductor waved at them vigorously as they came in through the train station entrance, asking them to hurry, as if the entire train had just been waiting for the two of them, it would be the two of them or no one at all, yes, and didn’t the conductor also hold the door open for them, welcoming them with a friendly nod, almost as though to say that he would be back later on, after the departure, to greet them personally, and at greater length, shaking their hands of course, and he begged their pardon for the entirely unnecessary request that he be allowed the privilege of inspecting their tickets in advance, but unfortunately the urge to do so simply overwhelmed him, it came over him again and again, incessantly, and the courteous expression on his silent face revealed that he really had tried recently to shake off this bad habit once and for all, but without success, because the irresistible urge came over him again and again, almost like an addiction, he just had to look at other people’s tickets; every attempt to stop himself had been in vain, so they should please be lenient with him.

When the two had entered the dark hollow of their train car, he obligingly shut the door behind them with a terrific bang. And soon the red track manager’s cap swam quickly past through the air outside their window, and the green signaling disc was raised, at the exact angle of a military salute, a warning sign to the train that it should now leave the station immediately, right away, kindly clear off!

The waiters in the dining car were so quick in their white uniforms! And how skillfully the full bowls of soup hopped ringing and spraying through the swaying airspace of the traveling restaurant; without even spilling a drop, the wine glasses rang out a music box melody of welcome, and already the white-capped beer steins were fizzing from window to window, while, outside, chased by the whistling of the locomotive, the evening landscape retreated farther and farther until it had disappeared entirely, or else just collapsed from exhaustion in the middle of a tunnel they were passing through, or else gotten itself stuck intentionally on the inside of the hill they were passing under, in order to spend the night comfortably in the protection of an abandoned tunnel attendant’s house?

The attention of the people in the dining car was then drawn to a young man in a completely crumpled and soiled black uniform: he went through the dining car, joined the presumed chef at the bar, and began a long conversation with him; judging by the relaxed gestures they were exchanging, it seemed to be a very private, official discussion—there was something both pronouncedly businesslike and intimately private about their exchange.

Who’s that, one heard individual people ask excitedly, and what’s he looking for there, and hopefully he won’t stay all too long; he’s some filthy, lanky, ill-mannered thug, an escaped chimney-sweep-boor’s apprentice . . .

Yes, yes, that description isn’t all that far off the mark, because it’s definitely the stoker, yes sir, it’s the stoker himself, in person, very definitely—but look, I say, what are you talking about, where did you get such a crazy idea, don’t you know that our locomotives haven’t used coal now for decades, they don’t run on steam anymore, those days are gone, once and for all . . .

Where was she going, Burgmüller asked his new girlfriend, he had a burning interest to hear the exact name of her destination.

She was going THITHER, she answered.

THITHER, he responded, oh, THITHER? That’s a pity; does it have to be THITHER, of all places?

Why? Did he have something against THITHER? She certainly hoped not. Or might he be planning something against THITHER? A prank perhaps?

No, of course not, he has nothing against THITHER, especially not now that he knows she’s from there, but still, it’s a pity that she has to come from THITHER of all places . . .

But why?

Simply because I’m not going THITHER, unfortunately.

Well, well, and where was he heading, and she couldn’t imagine where else one could go except of course THITHER, nowhere else, that was one of her few but strict principles, always THITHER, nowhere else, probably it was only that he’d never gotten as far or near as THITHER and so wasn’t familiar with the many persuasive advantages offered by THITHER, otherwise he would certainly have learned from her example and gone THITHER, as she did.

He’d be traveling THITHER with her, and was very happy about that, but had to continue on past THITHER.

But to where then? Just tell me where.

HITHER, answered Burgmüller, exactly as far as HITHER.

Oh, HITHER, she said, HITHER, of all places, what a pity, couldn’t he do without HITHER?

So he’s the stoker, the conversation in the dining car continued, but what’s he stoking, if he no longer needs to stoke the locomotive? Presumably the other cars, but first of all, it’s summer and hot, and second, there aren’t any ovens in the compartments, not even a small, inconspicuous oven, hmm, or is he heating the entire train from a single, centrally located furnace? But, but, forget the furnace, Mr. Furnace over there must have furnaces on the brain, but the train doesn’t have a single one, because look, that so-called stoker there has probably never in his life had to deal with any kind of heating system, let alone had to put coal in one to get the necessary practice, just look at him, you can see right away that he wouldn’t know how to stoke coal, that cobblestone-softener, that sidewalk pest, afraid of the edge of the curb, oh yes, that miscreant at large, that drainpipe-hose windjammer wind-tunnel brigadier!

What do you have against HITHER? asked Burgmüller, you’ve probably never even been there, have you? No? Why don’t you come along with me now to HITHER?

THITHER is closer than HITHER, she replied, why don’t you come with me to THITHER first and stay with me THITHER without the long trip to HITHER, why not?

Later, Burgmüller answered, I’ll go THITHER a little later, but first I have urgent business in HITHER. But why couldn’t she go THITHER with him and then continue on to HITHER?

Later, she answered, just a little later she would naturally travel to meet him in HITHER, or they could meet somewhere between HITHER and THITHER.

The tracks that were laid out in front of the train on that dark night stretched ahead of it like an infinite hairclip, and they swung to the rhythm of the wheels bearing down on them like singing sawmills; a trip complaining of its own good fortune, confident mourning odes tossed away behind it into the sunken, unforgotten afternoon above all the wooded hillsides, its destination stretching ahead into the indeterminable dawn of the expected morning; they were full of fear and longing, a longing to be held once again and all at once in the tight embrace of an entirely new, familiarly unfamiliar wanderlust . . .

But if I plead with you, Burgmüller insisted now, to come with me right away to HITHER, if you can and want to, you would do that, wouldn’t you?

She didn’t rightly know, THITHER or HITHER, and whether hither thither HITHER or rather hither THITHER, but people had sent word from THITHER that she was expected and would be picked up, people were waiting for her at the THITHER train station, they would be sad if she didn’t arrive THITHER, sad to have waited in vain.

You could send a letter THITHER, he said.

She said: The letter wouldn’t arrive THITHER in time, he ought to know or suspect that himself.

Telegraph, he replied.

Even a telegram, she responded, containing the regretful, polite request that they postpone their expectation, would no longer reach the people THITHER who, as she had been assured, had already been awaiting her for the longest time at the train station.

The travelers in the dining car then spoke of a historic problem: A long time ago, when steam-driven locomotives were discontinued, everything indicated that all the stokers would be let go; for some time then, they had no firm footing, and had stood, sat, or lain on the streets, which is why they then undertook certain acts of sabotage, for example always sneaking sugar into the tanks of diesel locomotives, necessitating the unexpected, temporary re-implementation of the steam engines, which had been put to sleep in the sheds, only used as replacement machines, until the entire population finally became aware of the stokers’ fate, whereupon many then, out of mistaken pity, joined the stoker party, which organization, as a result, was soon strong enough to force through a plebiscite on the stokers’ future, whether they should lose their jobs or not; and as you can of course vividly imagine, the people let themselves be bought, and they voted almost one hundred percent in favor of the stokers, yes, yes, as you well know, no one likes to be cold, and the stoker party had threatened that the entire country would be iced over right away by a terrible freeze if the people decided against the stokers, the doomed Republic had only one hope, and that was salvation at the hands of the stokers, who knew how to take effective action against such an ice age, but they would only do so if they didn’t lose their jobs; yes, had everyone already forgotten the stoker battle songs that had sounded from almost every throat back then, ever more heatedly, ever more threateningly, and which soon, because of their increasing popularity, had entered the canon of great old folksongs, even ancient folksongs, such that to this very day, as you know, the so-called “Old Stokers’ March from the Shed” and other such ditties almost always turn up on the concert programs of every railway band in the world . . . ?

Burgmüller asked his girlfriend yet again, saying he really wanted her to travel on with him and so get HITHER at last.

Sorry. She really couldn’t, but why didn’t he travel with her THITHER and stay on there with her, and so on.

He didn’t have enough money with him, he answered, or something to that effect.

You don’t say, she said, please let’s not even mention such things, she would give him some right away, it’s no excuse.

But he really couldn’t accept, not at all, no, no.

Well then. I’ll lend you some.

No. He didn’t want to have anything to do with money; he was sensitive about it.

But what was the problem then, she replied, and why was he making such a fuss, and it wasn’t necessary, and was it possible he just didn’t want to go THITHER and spend some time with her there because he had some good opaque hither reasons for doing so and was keeping them to himself, thus making quite clear despite his efforts all that he was presumably keeping from her.

No, no, not that, he replied, and he wasn’t keeping anything secret from her on that score, and how could she think that of him, and he wasn’t that kind of person.

And the stokers have gone on asserting themselves right up to the present day, and to date they have successfully averted the ever-looming ice age, the conversation in the dining car continued, and this was recognizable above all in the fact that the trains were almost always terribly overheated; it was clear that one couldn’t treat the old stokers the way they’d been treated previously, but that one there, yes, that’s the one, please take a look, that one there is a young man, isn’t he? yes, probably the son of an old stoker, possibly his successor, well couldn’t these damned stoker children have found their calling in the district heating plants that had been built in the meantime?! unfortunately not, more’s the pity,

because the railway stokers have very little, actually nothing at all in common with the resident city and state stokers, there’s no comparison, although: things get heated in both workplaces, but over the course of the centuries, the traveling stokers have become so accustomed to being almost continually underway—this trait passed down through the generations—that every longer stay begets a dangerous illness; they can no longer stand still, sit still, lie still, let alone sleep, but the worst thing is that they’re struck down by a puzzling, life-threatening loss of appetite that forces itself on them almost like a hunger strike, and the only thing that can help them is running, yes, yes, to run away from it, to run uninterruptedly for days through the cities, villages, and forests, the traveling stokers then run around everywhere; and after such a running cure, two days of which was usually enough at first, they felt somewhat better for a short time, but even then they couldn’t stay anywhere very long, they just took short rest periods and then continued on like that for the rest of their lives! yes, yes, they just needed to be moving, being on a train was enough, then they didn’t need to run and they still stayed healthy, because then their appetite wasn’t just satisfactory, it often increased almost alarmingly with the speed of the train, yes, yes, in recent times some of the trains have gotten so fast that the stokers riding in them have fallen victim to a shameful gluttony, just look at that one there, his bloated face, unshaven, that sadly sagging stomach pouring out unrestrainedly over his belt, from which one can nevertheless draw the sure conclusion that one is riding in an extraordinarily fast train; yes, yes, over the course of the centuries these traveling stokers have really gotten increasingly peculiar, and if the planet weren’t always being obviously pulled away from under the soles of their feet, like a carpet rolling itself up, then they would have to urge it on and make it hurry with the kicks of their jogging feet, and they would have to hop around on the earth until the world deflated and turned into a pair of bellows in outer space, where we could no longer get an overview of it, the stokers were always very afraid of getting their feet caught in the mooring ropes of the meridians, which in their opinion were hidden everywhere, and when the ground under their feet didn’t swim away of its own accord, then they would have to make it get a move on and try to take the continents for a ride . . .

I’m not keeping anything secret from you, Burgmüller explained to his new girlfriend. The reason he was urgently needed right away in HITHER was because he was an acoustic interior designer by profession, and he spoke of threateningly lined-up concert dates beckoning him ever closer, but she, on the other hand, why didn’t she come along with him HITHER, and what sort of good opaque thither reasons was she perhaps keeping secret from him?

Wait, she replied, until we have arrived THITHER; then maybe we’ll be able to see farther hither.

But just look, and we’re only noticing it now, and isn’t that the absolute limit, that really takes the cake, look at that man over there, you know, him, he’s completely covered with dirt,

he’s got soot on him, yes sir, soot, quite right,

and he’s dressed as if he’s still sincerely going about his work as a stoker, just like in the old days, he looks the very thing, although that can’t be right at all,

how someone could lie so boldly just by wearing certain clothes, oh yes, or maybe the clothes aren’t deceiving us after all, maybe it’s his actual uniform that he’s wearing while on duty, as he is right now, according to regulations!

But that’s ridiculous, don’t you think? There’s nothing for him to heat, but he’s still dressed as if he’s continually exposed to thick smoke, that’s really too much!

Or maybe he’s tending a secret, private little fire hidden away somewhere, unsuspected?

Up front at the bar, as if to signify the end of their conversation, while both of the men were nodding their heads at each other, the head cook had stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Just as he realized he had neglected to offer the stoker a smoke from the package that was almost back in his pocket already, a conspicuously sparkling-clean and lit cigarette lighter glittered at him from the stoker’s hand.

May I give you a LIGHT? people now heard the stoker say, quick as a flash, loud and clear.

I knew it right from the start, you could almost hear people sigh with relief through the dining car.

Then the stoker walked back through the dining car and disappeared somewhere to the rear, whence he had arrived a short time before.

He actually wasn’t a stoker at all.

No, back then it had already been a long, long time since stokers had ridden along in the trains.

But the night outside had gotten as black as the nostril holes of a ship’s stoker.

That one night in the sleeping car. That only real night in his life, basically, Burgmüller thought again and again, that darkness decorated by cracks of light, corridors of hot air, in the rhythm of their shared trip, regulating their pulses, subordinating them both to an identical beat during the deep exchange of their embrace, mutually deeply united in each other, as if they were busy mutually battering down each other’s doors, again and again, and more and more intensively, or as if they were alternately banging their back doors open and shut, with such force that each one’s individual presence was forgotten in their mutual transformation, as if they were saving each other’s lives, because each was respectively getting lost in the other, and he could only still find himself where she pointed the way along the route to the center of her happy dream-sorrow, and she could only still find herself where he pointed the way to the innermost room of his dreamy sorrow-happiness.

Their bodies had become far distant foreign lands to each other, familiar but exotic, vast areas quite near to each other, neighboring, but diametrically opposed: they brushed their provinces around each other’s faces while they sank into the enchantments they had constructed around each other, him feeling the impression of her feelings bursting on his skin cage, penetrating inward, while the wings of his feelings soared up until all his imaginable senses could melt into her, as if painted on, could surface on the ocean of the mirror-walls of her disguise; finally the two of them were as wrapped up by their train compartment as a landscape is by its sinking ceiling of air, until the waves of their bodily surf slapping together had completely closed around him, like a homecoming back through the vast rooms where he had strayed, returning to himself, as if, by giving himself away entirely to her, until her devotion too was entrusted to his ecstasy, he had finally found the way back to himself after a long time away; what was new was a space that was completely diffuse, but that he could comprehend as a place he could grasp playfully, yes, a region that distributed itself around her with hopeless bliss, while he, certainly strengthened, had entirely dissolved in her.

He didn’t think of their union as a penetration on his part into a female body, which is how he had thought of similar intimate acts until then; instead, he suddenly felt certain that he was going across a bridge with her, slowly and safely, a bridge over the entire Pacific Ocean, and which they crossed relatively quickly, as if it were only a somewhat wider river, its midpoint decorated by the equator, while the highest point of the steel girder bridge frame arched over the international date line, behind which a completely new epoch spread out: in the most hidden reaches of his mind, it was rising up from the pools of her eyes and coming toward his field of vision, until the shores of the continents touched one another, simply pushing aside the ocean’s towering spring tide, while the merging coastlines piled up, folded upward to form a mountain range, sank together, and fell back onto the seabed of the night-darkness that was flooding past.

Yes, indeed, the ocean, swept aside, has towered up like a spring tide to form a waterspout tube spewing out toward the cosmos, and after its heated collapse, with its hot clouds of steam hissing, its continental laundry tub boils over, shrouding the vast land below.

When he woke up again, he saw that the train was already rolling through a homey region that seemed very familiar to him in the first light of dawn, the last scraps of the darkness’s nightshade-flower garments still stuck to the outer skin of the window, dragged along like little cleaning-cloth flags in the airstream through the dried up sultriness of a landscape completely exhausted by the disappearing gloom.

Of course the life that was wrapped around the trip the two of them were taking had not come to an end, as he had momentarily but prematurely assumed when he first opened his eyes; though, to tell the truth, he had almost hoped it had, because the intensity of their being together had been almost violently happy, as if this happiness might with corresponding violence push away everything else around them, so that only the two of them would be left over to turn up in this homeland that seemed alien to them in the first light of dawn.

But it sank in soon enough that they weren’t alone: after coping with the plugged toilet, he wanted to wash away last night’s darkness-pollen, which had stuck to his entire body, mixed with train sweat, but he couldn’t do so, because it would have meant waiting too long outside the occupied washroom and he wanted to go back to their compartment—but just then he heard the washroom door snap open with a deliberate bang, as if to make certain that he, the person waiting outside, knew that he could now get into the washroom right away; and when he turned around to see who had found it necessary to be so kind as to hurry on his account, he saw the stark-naked body of the stoker from yesterday evening, who had painted his face freshly black for going on duty today, although or because he was not a stoker, and who flung a radiant, resounding, howling good morning at Burgmüller like a knife in the back.

The clothing of the landscape they passed through got lighter and lighter: the simple monks’ habits of a seemingly endless assembly of hills behaving reservedly at first toward the passing train, but then gradually greeting it more and more congenially, waving to and after it, and then at first some of them, then more and more, started singing, yes, the gigantic hill-church choir along the edge of their route wasn’t going to let anyone stop it from singing a really excellent song for the train gliding past them, probably “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” or something similar? but no, no, it wasn’t that, it really sounded very different.

In any case, high above these countless hilltops, entire cloud stairwells succeeded in sneaking furtively away, in making a misty escape behind the back of this first light of dawn, moving fleetingly in the direction of the noontime boundary.

In the morning, a few hours before the expected arrival of their train in THITHER, it had become clear to the two of them that they would only separate for a short time, they had agreed that he wouldn’t get out with her right away in THITHER and she wouldn’t continue on with him right away to HITHER, so they’d be apart, but only for a very short time, they had sworn that they would meet again immediately afterward, regardless of what might intervene, no matter where they were, they would continually seek each other out, when suddenly, in spite of the fact that it was already late morning, a few hours before the arrival of the train in THITHER, the dawn-fragment in the restless window of their almost-flying bedroom somehow staggered backward, tipping sideways, in any case turned right around into an interleaved intermezzo night that must have been hiding away in some corner of this day that had dawned, maybe inside a crevice in a cliff that was a member of the hill society still singing, still dominating the region, though now its choir had suddenly made the transition to a very sad song of departure, and either he and she had again assisted one another in freeing themselves from the bonds of their clothing because they wanted to experience the adventurous security of their confusingly unalike figures merging into each other one more time before their temporary separation, or else the backward-pointing dawn of their bedroom rolling through the country had sent them back to their first night of love, to an hour that didn’t belong in any way to this day that had now dawned: an hour that had grown out of an unsuspected corner of the morning like a pitch-black flower of darkness that could no longer be driven away.

They were back again in their only night—or was it perhaps a somewhat different, quite indefinable night after all, a night belonging to some unfamiliar in-between region of time whose hours had been lost somewhere by the day before, left lying here only to turn up for them again in that dark overcast nightmorning, completely lost in this morningnight mist that appeared briefly on the fields, in the darkness swirled through with night mist—although it couldn’t have been a “real” night, that curtain of morning mist pulled shut in front of the landscape’s performance, keeping the public out, pulled shut for the approaching noonday eclipse of the sun in an interposed nature reserve of time set aside just for him and for her, that’s how it was, Burgmüller, wasn’t it, at the point of parting from your sleeping-car rendezvous with your beloved who has been lost to you ever since, a few minutes before the scheduled arrival of the train THITHER.

And after that?

Don’t you know anymore?

No? Or not exactly?

In your opinion, the train never arrived THITHER back then, Burgmüller, or at least you weren’t able to notice if it did. Could this arrival possibly have escaped you? And your beloved, who has been lost to you since then, is it possible she perhaps has a better grasp of events? No?

But if it didn’t arrive, the train, then what went on with it afterward?

Maybe it had an accident, you think? everyone rescued, of course, just that the two of you were so deeply caught up in one another that you lost your way in your sleeping-car compartment and wound up buried in the landscape?

Don’t you think so?

Or was this mutual inclination of yours so destructive that it perhaps somehow managed—melting apart, floating away—to dissolve your life into a different, communal, transparent form of existence?

Or is that not at all how everything happened, as one is still able to surmise, but entirely differently, yes, everything happening just as stated but only as reflections of a sort, flashes, you’ve only been signaling at one another from afar, the two of you did meet at the train station and then did see each other on the train, whereupon you simultaneously thought all the above things in each other’s directions, but, due to unfavorable external circumstances, it had not been possible to put these thoughts into action, even to openly imply them, before she quite normally got out THITHER and he rode on HITHER, without their having exchanged even a single word.

No, something very significant must have happened between them after all, must have been set in motion, otherwise they wouldn’t have searched for each other endlessly like they have.

Burgmüller had looked for her first of all throughout the entire region around THITHER, and his lost love had looked for him hither and thither in HITHER and then thither and hither around about HITHER, but he no more found so much as a trace of her in or around THITHER than she’d been able to find even the hint of a shadow of him in or around HITHER; nevertheless, they looked for each other their entire lives, all through their memories of the future, and maybe she had long since been together with another man, and he with another woman, but notwithstanding all that they had remained for each other an untarnishable image to be sought.

Maybe he had always been THITHER just when she came HITHER, or she hadn’t had anything to do with THITHER in a long time, and he hadn’t had anything to do with HITHER in ages, because all their searching here and there was so much in vain that it seemed as if neither of them had ever really lived, or that she had only looked for him in the time of his absence, while he on the other hand had looked only behind her back—or had the wind just let its opaque curtains fall in front of the windows of this neglected landscape-salon in such a way that the two of them had their visions mutually blocked whenever their searches happened to be underway?

But somehow a solution had to be found, you must have been able to hold onto something reasonably securely that only you, Burgmüller, and your lost love had in common, that no one could take away from the two of you, because it had only concerned the two of you, a city, a stretch of land, and for that the two of you naturally chose neither THITHER nor HITHER, after having had such bad experiences with those places, no, the two of you wanted to have absolutely nothing more to do with HITHER or THITHER, and so the two of you then chose that city there, didn’t you, with which neither of you was familiar, and the two of you made your separate ways to that city, until you arrived here, you, Burgmüller, from HITHER, and she, your lost love, from THITHER or from somewhere else, because perhaps the two of you had long since been somewhere else entirely and each of you thought, purely by chance, that you would meet each other again upon this plain outside the city here, or, each on your own, were jointly underway next to each other on opposite streets far apart from one another, but you never reached that city there, because you had lost your way in the enchanted ruins of the suburbs that spread out around you as if airdropped by a cargo squadron, or else you’d bogged down in one of the squares of steppe grass laid out like allotment gardens, bogged down in a fleet of camels and their scarecrows with parasols and hats to protect against the sun, traveling under the personal protection and with the efficient camouflage of a developing darkness caused by a swarm of locusts.

Or couldn’t it have been like this: for her, your lost love, THITHER was this plain spread around outside the city here; just as for you, Burgmüller, HITHER was also this suburban lowland, so that to a certain extent both of you have actually always been together here somehow, without knowing or suspecting it, since yesterday, yes, or anyway it was like yesterday, it was yesterday or like yesterday.

From then on, every morning began as if it weren’t today’s respective morning, but rather your stale day yesterday that had snuck through its day and its night, between the seconds and minutes, into the following day, so that finally, gradually, with a lot of effort, it had managed to rise up as its own continuation, and tomorrow too the day before would turn up in the morning again instead of tomorrow’s day, yes, tomorrow morning will still have been yesterday morning or last night, which never gave you cause to assume it had passed.

In the plain outside the city, where Burgmüller was standing, he saw a train coming toward him from the edges of the suburbs, and as he walked along a narrow path through the fields along the railway embankment, the train now arrived there farther out in the country and glided past him, and the skin of its cars was almost transparent, or the sun had covered it with a reflective coating whose blinding light started to melt in Burgmüller’s eyes without causing him any pain, but soon the train cars seemed to have become even more transparent than the air, and he saw the travelers sitting inside them, yes, indeed, not just faces in the windows, but the individual people sitting there from head to toe, they greeted him with friendly smiles, waving at him from the windows, but one of them caught his attention, a passenger was looking out at him from the pounding train particularly lovingly, with careful concern, and kept looking back at him for a long time even from a distance, indeed in such a way that it seemed as if this fellow were an acquaintance who was particularly fond of Burgmüller, but then it became increasingly clear that a woman had been sitting or standing beside that passenger, and her gaze explained everything to him, it seemed to him with great certainty that he himself had been sitting in the train with his girlfriend and had ridden past, yes sir, as if he had been waving at himself from the train car as he had stood on that path through the fields by the train tracks, while you, Burgmüller, yes, indeed, stood on the path by the train tracks and waved at and after the travelers in the train that was slowly gliding past, as if, having been waved at in a lively fashion by yourself from the passing train, you were standing there as it drove past and also waving back at yourself again at the same time, waving from the path along the railway to the train that was slowly moving off, and from the train that was now gradually disappearing behind the hazy wing-beats of a hill on the steppe, the you that waved back at yourself as you were continuing to wave while standing near the train tracks rode away together with your lost love.

So, back then, you got to that city here, Burgmüller, and it was almost as if you had never arrived here, never been in the city here, no, and you’d also never climbed the rage of its museum-wall copings, never noticed the pride of the ornamental plasterwork on its decorated buildings, which are well worth a visit; instead, at most, you often hid on the islands that wandered downstream in that river whose name you didn’t even know, or did it even still have a name then, that water-snake rivulet that was proving ever more inadequate? But people felt it necessary to prevent its water system from spreading out in too many branches, and to stop its snakeskin back, scaly with wave-mirrors, from rising all too high against the chains of the adjacent quay walls along its banks—no sooner had it entered the city, letting its wave-dances surface and tear through the municipal area, than it had been tied as tightly as possible to the ground, which was done by strapping it down with several bridge-girdles along its path, keeping it to prescribed areas; and perhaps this also made it easier for the islands floating downstream to cross safely through the city, escaping the threateningly looming tongs of cellar windows and sewer gratings that were always reaching out for them; and how many of these delicate chains of islands had probably already been swallowed by the sewers of the gigantic rows of city wine cellars built along the edge of this primary river of our continent? They had thrown their window-bar nets out from the walls and pulled them to land, those islands; and how sad it was for a chain of such river-islands to be sucked down the throat of an underground vault, instead of wandering farther and evaporating back into the high mountains between the tropics of the sunrise and the sunset, where, uprooted by the river as it sprang from its source, they had set out with it on its trip to the lowland; yes, overcome by weariness, they would evaporate in the midnight floodlights of the twilight theater, at the point of intersection of all the light-year seasons, at the Southern Cross polestar in the loneliness of Greenland, glowing, frozen, as flickering flaming mirrors in the icebergs of Tierra del Fuego.

Besides, you had to rely on maps. But they were unreliable aids to orientation, because aside from the fact that their names and signs were in a constant state of flux, you could often see with the naked eye how the landscape depicted on them was in the process of changing, how this or that group of foothills would crinkle up from the paper like an island rising from the ocean, or sinking away; or else how the paper dunes of the suburban steppe approached the edge of the map and glided off in waves behind it!

And your position too, Burgmüller, clearly marked there at the edge of the city, didn’t it also swing into motion, carried along by the bushy thicket-whirls belonging to the flood of trees streaming past out of the dying, emigrating forest? And if, before your very eyes, the soil of the map, where you now thought to define yourself as a barely visible location that had nonetheless settled just there, if it floated away—because the land immediately imitates everything shown to it by its superiors, the maps—would you not then fall off the plain on which you’re standing, and would you not be washed away from these steppe-grass flatland-folds of a forgotten desert-harbor navigational zone at the bottom of a sea that was driven away from here just yesterday, an unimaginably long time ago?

When he had recovered from the strain of his sleep demonstrations for the telamones, the first thing he wanted to do was go right back to the caryatids again. But when he went to those walls where he had gotten to know the stone women, he was at first bitterly disappointed: during his absence, the building in question had either been torn down because it was threatening to collapse, as was maintained on the one hand with a certain resoluteness, or else the building had caved in and collapsed on its own, as one heard on the other hand somewhat more hesitantly—he was unable to find out anything more specific.

Shouldn’t he have taken into consideration the possibility that his best friends from back then might well have been capable themselves of intentionally causing the building to collapse by making a surprise movement, by stepping out from their wall some night and into the square in front of the building? Hadn’t he heard them several times saying something to the effect that they found that building and everything housed between its walls to be an increasingly unreasonable burden? And wasn’t their objection made even clearer to Burgmüller when he found out a little later that the building which had stood where now there was nothing but the rubble of collapsing ruins had previously housed the public investigation units of the secret police?

Or had they, in his absence, learned how to sleep after all—had they gotten tired at last, as sleepy as petrified darkness pulled in toward the center of the earth when the trap doors to the planet’s cellar began to open?

But wasn’t it better for Burgmüller to avoid another meeting with the stone women again? Otherwise he might not have been able to resist the temptation, might have gone back to spending all his time with them, and everything would inevitably have started over again and would have gone on approximately as already described and had a similar ending once more, and if that happened then he would have gone through everything up until then for nothing, because he would have had to go through it or something similar a second time, without being able to leave anything out, just to get back to his current state, this stage that he’d reached only with great effort, but he had reached it. Or might he have been unable to reach this point a second time? The likely catastrophe always lurking so successfully around the next corner might take on alarming proportions en route, proportions that don’t need to be described in any additional detail here.

For a long time, those calcified memories were still vividly present for him—particularly evident in the fact that, albeit with decreasing frequency, he was overcome, characteristically, by a peculiar feeling, namely that he was playing the role of a very mobile caryatid, no, a very mobile atlas who, to be sure, had no building, no gateway, no oriel to support or to carry on his shoulders, but in its place, and certainly comparable in terms of weight, he had a column of air, its dimensions unimaginably overwhelming for him, and it accompanied him loyally everywhere he went, stretching from his shoulders up to the farthest outermost roof-truss skin of the atmosphere, and he had been growing increasingly weary of carrying its load of late. I’m not going to do this much longer, he often thought to himself when he had collapsed from one of the sudden attacks of weakness that overcame him, accompanied by nausea, gasping for breath, no, he thought to himself, not me, no, not like this, and so he often tried to shake off that column of air, but it didn’t let itself be shaken off so easily, it stuck to him stubbornly as if it had grown onto him; but then he was at last able to manage it, at least sometimes, it had taken him a long time to find out how to do it: having assumed a position of repose, for example, sitting outside on a park bench, he needed first of all a period of concentrated relaxation, and then a simple rest, closing his eyes, with his body, and particularly his head, very peacefully balanced: then he noticed how his inner feeling of relaxation streamed out of him and transferred itself to his column of air, of course only gradually, things like that take time, until he could feel quite distinctly that the cylinder of atmosphere on his shoulders had gotten quite light and downy or fleecy, it rolled itself in or up and off his shoulders with something like elegance, often swaying iridescently as it did so, like immensely huge, wide wings that were made of a thickly woven mesh of various crystal threads; then he just had to wait until the column of air had finally quieted down and itself gone to sleep; then it was easy to remove it, if you were gentle, but that usually resulted in its waking up again and hopping right back onto his shoulders—which is why Burgmüller, once he’d removed the column of air, had to run away immediately, as fast as he could, to get away from there, go somewhere else. But even that didn’t help him for long, because shortly afterward, when he had stopped in order to catch his breath and enjoy his new freedom, the column of air again positioned itself on his shoulders or his head; was it the old one, having run after him, pursued him, which would always pursue him, that had sought and found him again, or was it another one, a new one, that had finally found a shoulder with a vacancy, yes, that seemed more logical to him, and sometimes he saw the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere as a pushing and shoving of assorted columns of air, aimlessly straying here and there, always fighting with each other, all of them looking for an empty shoulder on which they could settle, come crashing down. But those often only very brief moments of release made Burgmüller very happy, so his escape attempts remained rewarding for him, and he undertook the described measures more and more frequently. The only really stupid thing about the situation was that those people who observed him in the process of running away from his column, full tilt, not only immediately considered him suspect, but were in fact quite certain that he had stolen something from them or done something terrible, something criminal, because he immediately heard their frantic, hysterical voices calling after him, “Stop him! Thief! Stop the murderer!” etc. And once, when the forces of law and order really did detain and question him as to the reason for his extreme haste, when he told them about the business with the column of air they naturally didn’t believe him. But since they found no stolen goods on him, they let him go again.

Often, when he came across caryatids or atlantes, he did stay with them for a little while, of course without initiating contact, but very often with the intention of suggesting that perhaps now the time had come for them to go out for once, to go read newspapers in a café, or to go to the movies, he could recommend that, it would relax them a little, and in their absence, he, Burgmüller, would make himself temporarily available to prop up their archway, to hold their balcony up against the sky, and if they replied that he would probably be too weak to do that, he had his counterargument ready: given that he had been able until now to cope with his column of air, he would certainly be capable of lifting such miniscule things as buildings and doorways, at least for a while, and so on. But every time he was about to address them on this subject, it occurred to him that he unfortunately wouldn’t have enough time. Because the centuries required for them to have a quick cup of coffee, or the millennia it would take for them to watch even the news, no, he unfortunately didn’t have that kind of time.

But it was important and long past due that not only he but all the other people in that city should begin to treat the telamones with more respect than they had previously been shown. If they didn’t, there would always be the fear that the telamones might some day grow weary of supporting their buildings. Yes, what if they fell asleep someday after all, and indeed did so intentionally? Then half the city would cave in, and it would be as if an undeclared war had broken out. Hadn’t the telamones already begun to shout at passersby in a way that was becoming more and more comprehensible, to hurl curses of stone at them? Of course the people were surprised to be yelled at so impertinently by their own buildings, but while at first they simply shook their heads over this lapse of good manners, they soon became accustomed to it, as to so many other things. But it happened more and more frequently that these scoldings from the walls became associated with certain unpleasant bodily pains. The people walking past the rows of houses were often struck still, as if rooted to the spot, stopped in their tracks, as if they felt they had been hit on the backs of their heads, or in their backs, by projectiles whizzing through the air. But there was nothing to be seen, neither shots fired nor stones thrown nor any of the other projectiles that people had thought to find. These were words of stone. Yes, yes, the telamones had clearly begun to defend themselves more and more, in ways that could not be ignored, against the people in the city. And they were quite within their right to do so.

Judging by appearances, though, it was to be feared that they might not put up with things as they were for very much longer; yes, the walls were often roaring incessantly and indiscriminately now at everything that passed by below them, their whitewash seething, their mortar forming a dusty mist! And even if they weren’t capable of learning how to sleep, thought Burgmüller, at some point they would indeed step away from their buildings—even if they did so very slowly, it would still be a shock—and they would leave the city behind them, letting it sink into rubble and ash as they made their way out onto the plain and to the shore of the sea, taking a trip to the cliffs by the ocean, to the stone quarries of their birth.