Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

Yes, Burgmüller thought he remembered that the animal which had run aground there was a dead pig, but he had never been entirely sure about it.

That’s about as far as your story goes about what happened back then, she said, that’s approximately how it’s remained in my memory from your own storytelling. Back then was when I first turned up with many others inside one of those white huts you mentioned, maybe it was a changing hut where we were supposed to put on our bathing suits, but that didn’t happen, I no longer know why, but when we walked out of the hut into the open air and went to the beach, I could already see the giant carcass from afar, the largest dead animal I’d ever seen, and very small beside it, for the first time in my life, you. At first you were standing there almost as if you wanted to have us believe, as we approached, that you had just shot this gigantic animal, but that was only how it happened to look, because in reality you had gotten rather unfortunately caught in it or on it, yes, you were hanging very unhappily in the air, because you had obviously overlooked the fact that the carcass was growing constantly and wasn’t about to stop: instead, seemingly from within, it blew itself out and up and billowed farther and farther up into the sky, so that the bristles of its red, swollen skin stood on end, and you were dangling from them so high up that we, who were finally assembled around you and the dead animal, couldn’t help you at all in that unbearably oppressive calm, but then the wind did blow after all, a very strong wind came out of all the holes in the carcass, really roaring, spraying outward through the tightly stretched animal skin, through its eyes, ears, mouth, and all the other openings as well, as if death personified had become visible to us out of the anal opening available to it on this crescent-shaped shore, not only before all our eyes, but also directly in our faces, without being even a little bit ashamed about it, you know what I mean — in any case, for me, since that time, death has lost all solemnity and dignity, which is admittedly of no consequence to it, to death, but since then I simply can’t show it any more respect, you know what I mean? The downdraft it let loose at us back then was of great help to you, however, because that gale from inside the carcass jolted you out of your uncomfortable position at last, shook you off, and along with the deathdowndraft on that shore, you were thrown right at our feet, and you got up slowly, and I thought you would soon start to talk to me, when the wind out of the animal’s body suddenly stopped, yes, the carcass had collapsed in on itself like an empty sack and lay there really listlessly, lay at our feet in the blazing sun, burst and limp like a giant jellyfish transparently evaporating.

Yes, Burgmüller remembered it more clearly now, but why, he asked her, was the dead pig washed up on the beach by the waves, how did a pig get into the ocean?

I don’t exactly know that either, she answered, I only fleetingly remember how it was explained to us on that day by the teacher in charge of our group, dumped off a ship into the waves, accidentally falling or deliberately being thrown overboard because it must have been a sick animal, is what the teacher told us, although he seemed rather uneasy about the whole thing, or, he speculated, it might have fallen into the water from an airship and then been washed up there, if it really was a pig, yes, at first he too spoke about a pig or, more precisely, a sow, but when this completely wilted, floppy, saclike carcass at our feet began to stand at attention again, which is to say as it started to inflate again, to really pump itself up, as if it were sucking the globe dry through a hole beneath it, then the teacher went on to talk about a wild boar, maybe just so that we wouldn’t get in the habit of using the word “sow,” but then he was suddenly talking about the aurochs carcass that was lying there before them, and while the dead framework kept pumping itself up, he of course changed what he was calling it yet again, spoke of a stranded bison that had been lying there since primeval or prehistoric times, preserved in excellent condition by strange circumstances that the teacher himself could not explain, but there it was, towering up before them, at least until he spoke of a primeval elephant sow, or a mammoth pig, then settled on a raging, charging rhinoceros, followed by a hippopotamus, left over from a circus ship that, as he explained it, had foundered far out in the ocean, yes, sometimes it almost seemed as though the carcass, which went on swelling up, was being spurred on in its expansion by the teacher’s explanations, or indeed that the explanations were causing the expansion, and, by the way, it should long since have needed to burst again, as it had done once before already, but no, unbelievably, this time the dead thing didn’t burst at all, far from it, it was astonishing what this animal skin, already bulging out so far, was able to withstand: it crept higher and higher up into the early evening sky, towered up into the darkness of night, stretched out along the firmament, swaying farther outwards, almost as if it were being pumped up by an industrial-sized bellows, and the teacher’s commentary was naturally dominated now by even larger sorts of animals, the names of which I have unfortunately forgotten, and now, and now it would soon have to burst at last, out of all its holes, one sensed that from the teacher’s talk — he seemed quite helpless and clueless to his class, faced with this phenomenon — and he must also have been hoping that the evening sky, which was already quite filled with the animal skin, would burst open at last, because he would soon be at a loss for words, so he also started to describe in advance this blowing out of the holes of the dead evening-sky-animal, which in his opinion would have to start soon, calling it the night wind, but as it turned out he was wrong about that, because nothing burst, not a single zeppelin or balloon was blown off its course by this death’s-carcass wind, nothing was blown down at us, nothing was stranded on the beach, no sinking boat tore the evening’s furry hide: all I can say with certainty — do you remember? — is that our dead animal used its fur to form a dome around the dawning darkness, its skin kept steadfastly expanding, and we could clearly hear it rustling and roaring as it kept swelling up, arching over the plain, as if we were suddenly inside it. .

Burgmüller remembered all that, but didn’t know how the story went from there and asked her, since she had stopped her recitation, what else happened on that evening, how everything had continued on from there, to what conclusion had it led, how did it end?

Unfortunately I don’t know, she answered, and you can’t know it either, because it had already gotten late, and dark, as you know, so we had to go home quickly, we weren’t allowed to stay there on the beach by the dead animal, or under it, or in it any longer, don’t you remember that. .?

No.

Of course our bell-like children’s voices, sad from disappointment, had flown pleadingly through the twilight, because all of us would much rather have kept watching the dead night-sky animal for a while longer, but then all of us together, including you, as if you had always been with us and hadn’t just turned up among us on that day, dove back into one of those white changing huts, I think, or were submerged in it, or something like that; in any case, the two of us surfaced again the next day, for the first time you and I were in the same classroom of the school where the teacher held flowers up in the air before our eyes and called out, see, a flower! — who knows, maybe even those flowers on that day back then were already made of paper, or were artistic, silky stars made of twisted cloth, I can barely remember them — but from then on, everything had to be written, described, taken down as notes; behind us there was someone watching to make sure we really did take notes properly, that we didn’t talk with each other unnecessarily while doing so, it was forbidden, even then; do you still remember that the person who was keeping us under surveillance had a completely bald head that mirrored the rows of windows in the classroom so brightly that it always seemed as if he had no head at all but just a goldfish bowl on his shoulders that was filled with cloudy streaks of algae. .?