Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

Yes, that had made a great impression on her, Burgmüller remembered, and he should have taken her to such concerts more often, but his time was so strictly limited because of the inevitable, hopelessly piled up work to do with his studies of silent space that he had hardly had the time anymore to exchange a word with her, yes, so they’d started being silent with one another a long time ago, perhaps simply too silent for too long, but couldn’t she have gone to a concert by herself, to let the silence brought about by the pieces of music being performed distract her from his and her silence, to let herself be entertained — he would have bought her the tickets — or was it that she’d have been afraid to go there alone, afraid that she wouldn’t find her way there by herself?

Would you perhaps like to go to a concert with me this evening? Burgmüller often asked now, naturally he didn’t receive any answer because she didn’t even notice him anymore, didn’t perceive anything more of his person, it was increasingly clear that she had turned away from her environment, nothing more of it was present for her, she had grown weary of her entire environment, not just of these rooms in his apartment and of that city, but of everything, until she had succeeded in forgetting herself, presumably with Elvira’s help, because it was the fly’s arrival that had facilitated Burgmüller’s girlfriend’s being lost to the world, the better to climb into an entirely other realm; although she still, as before, gave the appearance of remaining in his apartment, she was as good as gone, transported into a far distant, remote region that presumably began right behind the locked kitchen door and had only been installed into the rooms of his apartment by Elvira’s arrival.

When he went out, he often imagined her opening the kitchen door to advance farther into her new realm, with Elvira’s help, to settle in there, lost in singing or humming conversation with the housefly, or else silently caught in the nets of the insect’s compound eyes, it would have thrown the nets of its eyes over her as she watched it, wrapped her more and more deeply in them; he thought he had once heard somewhere that the compound eyes of flies could do the strangest things, yes, he imagined an enormous number of such eyes combining into a single immense eye cloud, into an artistically assembled, barely restrainable, extensively encircling compound eye-sail that then hovered rustling through this autumn, and on through the winter, and by spring it might accidentally have enclosed the entire continent, or at least this city, or even just this building here with its rooms that, once a day, like hollowed-out satellites, circled through the attic, revolving around the locked kitchen.

Of course — it was, after all, his apartment, not hers — he could have forced his way into the kitchen; no one, not even she, could have refused him entrance, and yet, apart from the hurtful resistance of his beloved, it was something else entirely that had held him back from breaking into the room like a thief: something that on the one hand was definite, but on the other hand could not be described, neither with normal words or signs, nor with new types of numbers; it was almost frightening, but he couldn’t manage to describe this fear or to understand it in any way that could be explained or complained about, it was both crystal clear and unfathomable.

He could also detect indefinable changes in her face, to the extent that she showed it to him. It seemed even paler, somewhat more wrinkled too, but by no means older, it was something else, perhaps as if her face were wound around her head, as if the image of her face was about to hibernate on her head.

Once he was out of town for almost a week. Of course he had laid out a whole roll of salami and a sharp knife for her. But when he got back, the salami hadn’t been cut, and the knife lay untouched. In greeting, she just threw a glance at him that either meant nothing or else could have had the very hidden meaning that if it were up to her, he could or should hightail it off into the cosmos, just like a huge roll of salami that’s so tall it pushes through the atmosphere of the planet. So from that point on he realized that she was helpless without him, and incapable of movement, reliant on him. After that, he only stayed away for an hour at a time, he owed that to both of them, and as always he bought two hundred grams of salami several times a day and brought it up to her.

That gave his life a strict routine that he gladly got used to, and he didn’t feel at all burdened by this new responsibility; in a way, it was pleasant to be on the one hand almost entirely alone, but on the other hand to still be there for others, because, after all, as he once accidentally thought to himself, in these exact words, I have two house pets to take care of .

Once he came back from the butcher’s and found the kitchen door wide open!

Elvira, he called, where are you, Elvira? She didn’t answer; now he saw that the window in the kitchen was open too, and a late snow coming in on the wind made sweat break out on his face, made his head hot.

Elvira had disappeared, yes, there wasn’t a trace of her in the other rooms either, he wanted to ask his girlfriend where she could be, and only then did he notice that his girlfriend was gone too.

Then he asked himself why he had first started to feel the absence of the housefly as a loss — even though he’d actually never properly set eyes on it since the time it had knocked on the window on that autumn morning in November — before he missed his girlfriend, who was also gone.

Perhaps because she had prevented him from meeting with the housefly and thus meeting with the last thing they still had in common, because she had hoped to be able to save the last thing linking them by transfiguring it, by turning it into a closed secret, and letting it remain that way to make it believable to him and to herself likewise, by always pretending that she could see Elvira, although maybe she couldn’t see anything at all, because the housefly had long since grown to the size of an eagle and flown back out the window?

But Elvira might come back again soon, maybe the two of them had just gone on a short outing, to have coffee in the café, to have something sweet for a change.

He waited longer than hours, entire days passed in the snow-covered shrubs that grew amid the bird droppings in the rain gutters, and he was already considering the possibility of putting an announcement in the pets section of the daily classifieds, asking to be notified if Elvira turned up anywhere, and he was already thinking of the wording of such an announcement, but as soon as he tried to describe Elvira down to the last detail, so that it would be impossible for anyone who saw her not to recognize Elvira on the spot if she flew in through another window, he no longer knew how to continue, because how could he have described the housefly, given that he had only seen her once, which is to say hardly ever?

He kept waiting, not just for days, but for weeks, but Elvira did not return, and there wasn’t a trace of his girlfriend either.

The longer this absence lasted, the stranger the whole thing seemed to him.

Was Elvira perhaps an invention of his girlfriend’s, or was it possible that the girlfriend was an invention, and there had only ever been Elvira, who had flown away through the window, was his girlfriend an invention of Elvira’s?

Had Elvira crouched before the kitchen door and prevented him from seeing his girlfriend locked in the kitchen?

Or had Elvira now finally departed for her long winter hibernation, and had his girlfriend joined her, had the two of them crept away together? Some day, the two of them would probably wake up, and he would suddenly see them standing in the kitchen again, his girlfriend throwing her arms up to the ceiling, toward the housefly that would flutter down from the clouds of the attic, humming just for her.