Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

As mentioned, the many yacht clubs on the shore initially found it immensely entertaining when the big yachts with their colorful sails approached the giant sailor-swift-swimming birds that weren’t afraid at all, but friendly, trusting, frolicsome, and as they awaited the company of the sailboats, they pulled their necks out of the sky and waved happily to the boats — not their crewmen — as though they were neighbors of a related species, whereupon the ships, as soon as they were level with the birds, always began a sailing race with them, and of course the birds were always faster than the ships that were racing them, no matter how hard the sailors on the boats tried, the giant swimming birds were always at least one length ahead of them, it must have hurt the sailors’ pride, of course, yes, several of them got really angry, felt so robbed of their honor that they designed and built faster and faster yachts so that they could finally win a sailing race against those birds, but the faster their yachts, the faster the giant swimming sailbirds were too, in every wind, every weather, yet even so the birds had still never actually gone full speed ahead, and even the newest models from the yacht clubs, yes, even the still-faster sailboats, their sails stretched defiantly in the wind and aided furtively and against the rules by out-board motors, even those still couldn’t go faster than the fleet of giant birds — and the sailors had trained as never before, had worked on their technique like the devil, but the birds were still easily lengths ahead of them, and were downright cheerful and brazen about it, until the yacht clubs, with time, felt the birds were getting just a little bit too presumptuous, the clubs were being made fools of, being led around by the nose, mocked, they believed the fatherland had been betrayed, and with a fanatical raging love for their native land, with their ambitious patriotism striving for the highest falsified goals, they finally joined forces for a hunting party in which game would be sent up by beaters, and they knew how to get the beaters really riled up against the animals by slandering them, among other things, by using the lies of the lowest sort of political campaigns to incite the people, by spreading malicious exaggerations, unfathomable horror stories like frightful old folktales, and attributing all kinds of things to those swarms of giant sailing birds (yes, those who until then were the most wretched of all petite bourgeoisie really did stir up hatred among the last Führer figures of the battue-hunt clubs, who specialized in beating up backwoodsmen and turning them against the most astonishing and marvelous zoological creatures known to Christian seafarers!), yes, yes, of course there were indeed some unexpected incidents from time to time, unfortunately it must be said that although those animals were really very kind and trusting, they were also very, very stupid — no, not a trace of intelligence — and so it happened, for example, with increasing frequency, that in the animals’ mating season, one or the other of the giant feathered male beasts confused one or the other of the sailboats with a female of his species: as soon as such a boat approached the giant swimmer-bird, without any shillyshallying, immediately and surprisingly, without hesitation, this boat was subjected to an extensive rutting by the bird, who didn’t even notice its error later on — and once the giant swift had gotten going, had hopped up on the hind end of the yacht to mount it in such a manner, its enormous sail-wings flapped like crazy, rocking the stern of the boat to such an extent that the gale traveling from the water toward the land created waves as high as if there’d been a seaquake — and so the ship was subjected to a devoted and extensive rutting, during which the animals weren’t disturbed in the least by the sailors beating them wildly with their oars, until the ship, completely shattered, almost always to the point of being unseaworthy, was scuttled, after the crew had long since swum to shore unhindered — yes, and it goes without saying that the yachts subjected to that kind of severe treatment were unfortunately neither able to return to their boathouses after this spirited, subversive, swift-sailing intercourse, nor to build themselves a yacht nest, nor even to lay a single yacht egg in it and hatch out a baby yacht — but I don’t think that was what so angered the petit-bourgeois members of the yacht club who, on the one hand, had had to swim to shore, or on the other hand, had followed this fascinating violent natural spectacle in disbelief from the shore, standing on the wharf or looking out the windows of their club house; rather, they had simply begrudged their yachts such unbelievable experiences, unless it was that they were ashamed that such an activity had been so avidly observed by the spectators on the shore with their opera glasses, who must have found their sailboats’ behavior rather cunningly dissolute; but in any case, at the very least, the honor of the nation had been seriously defiled, endangered, lowered to the level of a laughingstock, exposed by those innocently depraved birds, yes, and so, one day, in contravention of all nature conservancy laws, instigated by the feebleminded intrigues of those petit-bourgeois yacht club members with their pathological craving for respect, they went out with their shotguns and started beating the bushes for the birds, rounding up and shooting the giant sailor-swifts, no, I don’t want to think of that now, all the lakes, the ocean, the shores were deep red for days afterward, the air had dust-colored, crimson-flecked black edges for weeks on end, as if a sunset were going on forever; presumably, the birds were all wiped out at once back then, or have you ever run into one of those giant birds in recent times?

No, said Burgmüller, never again.

Those were good times, when the birds were still alive, she went on with her story, and maybe everything we now long for really did exist back then, and not just in descriptions; back then, no one could drown in the ocean or the lakes, because as soon as anyone had even hinted at beginning to call for help, one of the giant sailor-swifts came swimming over right away as fast as possible, grabbed the body of the endangered person gently with its beak, lifted him out of the water, and didn’t just carry him back to shore, but took him right in through the open window of a beach house and laid him on a bed, or if all the windows were shut, took him into the corridor through an open door, a giant swimming swift like that would if necessary have broken a window for you with its beak, or have pushed down a door for you, howsoever firmly bolted, and it would have undertaken many other things for you as well; or, as you told me yourself, didn’t they carry you out of that spinach-purée-colored swampy ground that day, past all the white huts you mentioned, hovering in the shadow of their giant linen sails for several hours — you said back then it seemed to you to be the longest of all trips you had ever undertaken, until ahead of you the broadly spreading fan of a glittering beach with sand dunes opened up and you were put down there on the eyebrow of a curving coastline of gleaming feldspar slate, and the waves breaking against it flushed out your eyes so that you could see clearly at last. So that was life, you thought to yourself, and looked out from the land after the giant swifts that were floating away from you, then along the arc of the beach with its decorative dunes gleaming in the sunlight, the flashes of light seeming to point you toward the end of the arc of shoreline, as far as your eyes could see, but in fact there was something lying there, something very dark, very far away, rather like a large sack, or something else that was piled up somehow, and your gaze was irresistibly drawn to it, then also your steps, and what was lying there on the seabed in the swell, like a frayed earlobe filled to overflowing, puffed up, pointing upward, wrinkled and bulging, washed to shore by the waves, was actually the massive carcass of an animal whose body size far surpassed yours, its swollen, bloated skin almost bursting from the gases formed by decomposition inside its dead body.