Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

The woodlice that had settled in the underground coal cellars of the building were doing well since she moved in with him; she reported on such things promptly, and told Burgmüller that at the same time every day, and perhaps also during the night, the walls of the building were shaken, barely perceptibly, but undeniably, as if by a gentle earthquake that was passing through, tenderly stroking the walls and rocking the roofs, and went on to explain to him in detail that in her opinion a small colony of termites or some such thing had settled in the building walls. Anything larger than, say, a dragonfly or a praying mantis no longer attracted her attention, which was not so much scientific as deeply sensual in nature.

Sometimes, when he looked at her, the answer she sent back to him, light as a feather, was melancholy sheet lightning from her eyes.

The autumn air was filled with fog-fairytales of bereavement and quivering cotton-batting clouds; embedded in the foehn, they trailed through the bushes and hedges in the park, tearing the last petal sails from their twigs; passing out of the city and through the suburbs into the lowlands, they flooded the banks of the streams and ravines formed by the streets, washing premonitions of an early winter ashore, and the landscape picked up on those feelings and rehearsed them carefully as études to accompany a silent movie.

Burgmüller was sitting with his girlfriend at the breakfast table by the window and looking out into the bleak half-light of the season, which, coming from the surrounding countryside, started then to arch up over the edge of the city like a deliberately threatening wave of putrefaction slowly rolling in, and soon it had playfully covered over all the roofs, and then it remained glued across all the windowpanes and entranceways to the buildings like a greasy piece of tinfoil that had been wrapped around butter, but that someone had carelessly allowed to get dirty.

The leaves sailed heavily from the twigs of the trees, like Kleenex tissues full of snot, and wobbled through the clouds until they ran aground on the edges of the rain gutters polished shiny by storms, or they whirled up and away into another region of the sky that was bending in and out, whizzing along the tops of the telegraph poles.

Then Burgmüller heard a very quiet, barely audible hint of buzzing coming through the window from outside, or was it rather a pompous sort of stuttering, somehow rustling, drawn out, carefully whispered, slightly indignant, a grouching rasping in the pervasive, rustling sleep of the apparently dead storm of leaves? Then he thought it was a sigh that had fallen out of one of the neighboring windows, a window nearby, not far away, a sigh that had happened to swing over here on the wave of an air current and get stranded, but as Burgmüller made a greater effort to concentrate on whatever was outside his window, he saw something that was clearly black, and, on the one hand, at first, very small, but on the other hand soon quivering and growing into something fatter, it was also astonishingly covered with hair, almost like fur, yes, a spot of fur had come staggering up and was smacking against the outer window glass, bouncing back and diagonally upward into the faded canvas of the autumn sky, then swooping down again at an angle, falling down, and surfacing insistently, as if perhaps to knock on the glass in desperation, knocking harder and harder, almost determined to break down the glass or otherwise bash its own head in. It was astonishing, so late in the year, a fly in this unusually cold, damp November, when all the other flies had long since died a wretched death or were hidden away in secluded corners where they could grow stiff and sink down into their winter hibernation: here, by contrast, was the fly outside the window, who had obviously gotten lost in the bitingly cold mist and yet had managed to survive until now.

What’s so interesting over there, that you won’t look me in the face? and she asked that he cast a friendlier glance in her direction.

Something surprising, he answered, and since her back was to the window, he asked her to turn around.

She turned around and looked, at first just fleetingly, then she asked in turn, yes, what’s that there, yes, what is it, it seemed familiar to her, it’s the window, isn’t it, and she knew this window very well, but what else was there?

Take a look, he explained to her, at that tiny, fat, furry, black, quivering, almost metallically gleaming spot outside there in the late autumn, presumably one of the last flies of the year, it wants very insistently to get in here of all places, obviously right through the closed window.

Hardly had he spoken the word “fly” than she had sprung up in alarm to open the window as fast as possible, then he heard a barely audible, gently drawn-out singing curve into the room, after which she shut the window again right away.

It had become unmistakably clear to Burgmüller that his girlfriend felt a deep, inner, indeed very personal responsibility for the fly, otherwise she wouldn’t have leaped to the window just now with such irritation in order to let the insect come in right away, and all the objections and misgivings he then expressed weren’t even deemed worthy of the epithet “ignorant.”

While she unenthusiastically continued chewing the piece of bread and butter she had begun, she looked up with concern at the cheerlessly darkened gray dawn of the dreary kitchen ceiling, as if it had already taken much too long for her expected guest to come down from there.

Cautiously and suspiciously, as if to scout out this new location, the housefly glided down and settled at first on the window ledge, as if it wanted in advance to investigate every possible route of retreat before hopping down onto the kitchen table, where it surprisingly began to clean its frayed, transparent wings by pulling them neatly between its hind legs several times. Or was it a ritual greeting of recognition — because, as if she had been waiting to make very sure that here she’d found a long lost or absent friend again, Burgmüller’s beloved began to greet the fly in an unmistakably affable manner, she seemed to tell it how welcome it was, whispering something Burgmüller couldn’t understand, like: oh, there you are, how nice, Elvira, you found your way here after all, just in the nick of time. Then she turned briefly away from the fly to explain clearly to Burgmüller: this housefly must have had some terrible experiences, couldn’t he see how exhausted the creature was from its long trip over the treacherous ice rinks of the fragile, frozen airspace plains; it had crossed the entire, soon completely sunken autumnal continent of the sky just in time to arrive here, she explained, and put the remaining piece of her buttered bread on the table for the housefly. Think of all the terrible things this fly must have experienced in the meantime, Burgmüller’s girlfriend continued, you couldn’t even begin to dream of it. As if to demonstrate her sympathy, she approached their new pet very slowly and carefully with her right index finger, stroking first just its wings with her fingertip, and then gradually the other parts of its body. The housefly seemed to like that, no, it didn’t seem at all threatened, but it soon swung back through the air to the window and hit its head helplessly on the glass several times before crashing down to the window ledge exhausted — it hadn’t hurt itself, because right away it had flipped off its back into an upright position again and was cleaning the net-patterned surface of its eyes with its front legs.

How frightened the poor winged creature is, the woman exclaimed to Burgmüller, its nerves are shot, it’s probably completely exhausted too. She took the rest of her buttered bread from the table and went calmly to the window, to spare the housefly the necessary trip back from the window to the table, all the while whispering calming words: Don’t be afraid, Elvira, don’t be afraid, here’s the bread and butter for you.