Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

And then something that only gradually occurred to him: the kitchen, which had been locked for so long, looked astonishingly clean, how was that possible?

Only in its farthest corner did he find several little piles of salami skins intertwined like a labyrinth, skins that someone had forgotten to sweep into the garbage. He collected these remains, which seemed to him the only remaining proof of the story, and thus proof that Elvira had really been there. It calmed him to at least be able to assume that much with a degree of certainty.

Outside, countless drops of snow came tumbling out of the clouds, forming a hazy gray network over the roofs of the city, bundling up the sunlight until the whole day was so firmly caught in it that it tore open the surrounding cloud curtain, and it was as if all the sunbeam dams had burst, for a light-generator flood tide began to rush into the narrow streets and rolled on through all the avenues that ran off at right angles, bringing traffic to a stop and making the day stand still for a while, until late into the evening. It had become a matter of indifference to Burgmüller whether he kept on waiting or forgot to wait while he was waiting, because forgetting had become a form of waiting, and even his memory became a waiting room, where he imagined returning endlessly to the time coming toward him tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, as if he had put it so far behind him that it had hurried to get ahead of him again and had passed him by miles.

Once, when he was going for a walk around the city and so likewise wandered through the sky — that was how low the ceiling of our mantle of air lay back then — he discovered that he could deal quite easily with the flocks of birds that were getting in his way by making certain sounds, calls, yells, which the birds, masses of them, obeyed simultaneously. If he made a high, steady, shrill call, the whole flock moved simultaneously several meters diagonally upward to the side, as if it had been pushed in that direction by the sound wave streaming from his lips; but if he aimed a high, two-note call at the fluttering birds, the whole flock, several thousand birds, first moved simultaneously diagonally upward to the side, and then immediately afterward in a big loop back to him again — this, that is, when the second of the two tones he called out was lower than the first, but if it was higher, then they did the opposite, and kept heading upward, away from him. Now if the call consisted of three notes, the flock of birds was no less obedient, with all the animals simultaneously executing triangular figures, which, depending on the pitch of the sequence of notes, either moved them farther away from him or brought them hopping back.

Yes, the birds danced to his tune, followed his calls to the letter, he could place the animals wherever he wanted.

Once he saw a huge flock near the chimney of a factory that had been shut down, and he started mimicking its whistle. Even before he had finished making his voice go up and back down again like a siren, the thousands of birds in that flock started swarming all together in a huge arc, crosshatching the sky, away over the factory to the other side of the city and back again, according to the sequence of notes in his siren, so that the sky was temporarily almost blacked out by the fluttering dome that the whirring flight of the birds drew through the air. When he tried it a second time, the flock of birds nearest him formed a similar arc over the edge of the city, though the hatching marks made by its wings were somewhat lower, with a more modest radius, because his call wasn’t as loud, so that the end of the arc fell approximately in the middle of the city, and soon the bird-flock curve sprang back once more, flying from the rooftops like a thousand closely sketched lines. Thus, the length and width of the flock’s movements corresponded to the volume of his call, which could either spread them out farther, or contract them more closely.

If his call was a curved glissando of notes rising and falling — comparable, for example, to a sine or a cosine curve — the birds rustled against the sky like the crests and troughs of waves, swung up and down through the air, away or back again; he could swing all the birds behind him at the same time, have them plunge over the rooftops of the city, and drift far away into the landscape.

In his head, he immediately began to outline a new concept of what an acoustic interior designer could accomplish, a concept that no one before him could have been in the position to develop.

He thought of setting up fog horns at varying heights and depths around the city, locomotive whistles, car horns, acoustic alarm systems, and all possible mechanically operable instrument-machines, and to preset them for a certain rhythm, which could cause the masses of birds in the sky to behave according to design: when it was very hot, for example, it should be possible, by sounding an even note at a certain pitch, to collect the birds at a certain height, and by filling in the chord, to have them collect in a corresponding density over the city, so that the city itself could be protected from receiving too large a dose of thermal radiation; and then it would also be possible to wallpaper the dome of the sky, as it were, with feathers, and so control the quality of light, from slightly darkened to deep twilight, according to the respective requirements.

Or if there was a threat of hail, to whistle in the flocks of birds over the farmers’ fields in such force that the millionfold beating of their wings would not only form a protective cover, a roof over the fields and gardens that no hail could break through, but would also drive the hail clouds apart and pulverize every individual hail stone into ice dust.

Or if there was an intolerable calm, to cause the flocks to sweep through the streets, with curved trajectories, through the attic skylights, in order to drive air through the alleyways, to gather together the streams of air stacked up above the houses to form great wind-rivers that would produce whichever type of breeze from whichever respectively required direction.

Or to shape the movements of flocks of migrating birds into a manmade, natural, acoustical, and pictorial Gesamtkunstwerk: the course of their dance movements in the atmosphere comparable to stunning daytime fireworks.

You were at the unsurpassable high point of your work as an acoustic interior designer, Burgmüller, and you would have continued on single-mindedly, as described, wouldn’t you?

But why did you have to run into Theater Director Comelli on that evening, of all times, although you had seen him coming, but he hadn’t seen you, and you could certainly have avoided him by ducking into a side street; or were you so happy about your experience that you wanted to tell him everything right away? You had hardly greeted him, and he you, and you had already started to describe the new epoch of art that was dawning, intending to invite him and his entire ensemble to work with you, but by then you couldn’t help but notice that he had no interest whatsoever in your plans or in working with you in the natural theater you had discovered outside the city; instead, he invited you to the premiere, the first performance of a play by your recently deceased friend, the playwright Kalkbrenner.

And it is perhaps understandable that you did indeed attend the premiere of this work by Kalkbrenner; a play, by the way, entitled The Poet’s Death , which tells the story of how a young artist, together with his wife and many friends and acquaintances, male and female, goes on a pub crawl through the most important pubs of a city, is out the whole night, and ends up in a pub that just happens to be in the same building where the main character lives, the hero of the play, and as the culmination of the night, the artist invites the whole group up to his apartment, and the whole group gladly accepts, right away. So he then goes to his room ahead of them to spend just a moment preparing a few things, as he says, and asks the group to follow him upstairs in a few minutes, and the main character, who by the way is a young poet, decides to give the group coming up right after him a nasty shock, so he kneels down in the kitchen in front of the gas stove, opens the oven, sticks his head in, and turns on the gas, fully expecting that his friends will be arriving shortly, that they’ll find him and get into a panic about his presumed suicide — but they would rescue him right away, of course, since only a few minutes would elapse before the first of them turned up — and meanwhile the gas is already starting to flow and to anesthetize the poet, and not one of the people he intended to frighten to death turns up to find him in the described state, instead they have round after round of drinks downstairs and get so tanked up that they don’t know whether they’re coming or going, and not one of them can stand anymore, let alone walk upstairs, while above them, the poet who wanted to frighten them to death, but by whom they could no longer be frightened, still has his head stuck in the gas oven as before, is stuck there for good in fact, and loses consciousness because of the gas streaming out, and dies.