Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

Please stop! she interrupted him, his report was causing her physical pain, maybe you’re entirely right, she said, or at least it’s a very good invention of yours, but what you’re maintaining has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with the menacing nature of our inexplicable situation, we aren’t Saxons, or are you perhaps a Saxon? no? you don’t know? oh dear, I’m not entirely sure if I am either, but I rather think I’m not, and so what you’re asserting has nothing to do with us, and it also doesn’t explain how and why we come to be here, what was supposed to be communicated to us by that, by having us somehow brought here while we were unconscious after that journey back then, which would presumably have gone on forever if we hadn’t collapsed from exhaustion, but how did we get here? presumably, as I’ve already said before, we were thrown in through this window, do you understand, without our having the slightest idea what we’re supposed to do or to look for here, yes, I think we were simply thrown in through this window, without our noticing it, or did you perhaps notice something?

No, answered Burgmüller, he hadn’t been able to notice a thing about being recently thrown in through the window there, no, and he hadn’t been thrown out through it either, very definitely not, he knew that for sure, never in his life had he entered this room through this window, he knew that with the greatest certainty; haven’t you seen, my dear, with your own eyes, that I never come to you through the window, that I always just go in and out through the door, or can you remember my coming in through the window there even a single time — no? — well, you see, the most that could happen would be that I might soon disappear from the room through the window here, if things keep on for much longer the way they have been (if something crucial doesn’t change soon, he thought), you understand, and anyway, even then, I wouldn’t be thrown out at all, or would you perhaps throw me out this window? you see, no, I don’t think so either, instead, it would happen that I, you understand, as now, would first take a look out the window, look down, and then suddenly climb up on the window, here, you see, on this window ledge here, and then go out the window and afterward jump, if things continue on like this much longer. .

While he was still standing at the window and looking out, she went over to him and looked out the window too.

So you think for sure we weren’t thrown in by way of this window, we didn’t turn up in this room through this window frame as through a picture frame? well, that’s no longer so important now, what’s much more important is to find out how we’re going to get out again, do you understand? no? but didn’t you yourself say just a while ago that you wanted to get away from here at last? and so do you think the way out might be through this window, would that perhaps be a good possibility? that’s what you mean, isn’t it? or?. .

She had crouched on the window ledge and was looking into the distance, far beyond the edge of the city, trembling like the shadow of a bird before it takes off.

Come, he heard her say, let’s go, you’ve convinced me that we have to get away from here, far away, you’re right, it’s our last chance, perhaps the very last, for the two of us, we won’t find such a handy escape route again any time soon, let’s finally begin our life together as we did once before, a long time ago, the moment is advantageous in a way that seldom occurs, no one can see us, no one can secretly observe us, let’s simply disappear, come along!

She had taken him by the hand, wanting to pull him up to her on the window ledge, but he didn’t want to do that, instead, he tried to bring her back down from the windowsill into the room, and he pulled her in quick as lightning, so that she almost plunged right down onto the floor — but fortunately not down into the city — she hadn’t expected that because, of course, she thought he would come up to her, would crouch beside her on the window ledge and go out the window with her, out and away, instead of suddenly holding her back, when he had otherwise always wanted to go away with her, except not now, but why not anymore? with the strength she was able to summon, once she made up her mind to do something, it was hardly possible to hold her back, instead, she would have dragged him out, down, and away with her, all it took was for her to imagine such a thing, and now she felt accordingly deceived by him, he’d made a fool of her, pulled the wool over her eyes, he’d thwarted the plan she had so carefully thought out for their future life together; at first she was speechless, quite flabbergasted, as he shut the window and placed himself in front of it.

She slowly got up and asked him despairingly to let her out, alone, if he suddenly no longer wanted to come with her, he would in future have to get along by himself here, without her, without her help; if it hadn’t been for her, he probably would never have gotten as far as this decisive point in his life; she tried to push him away from the window, but he stayed there as rigidly as an atlas who had to support the roof. She burst into a ragingly desperate fit of tears, beat her fists against the wall as if she might succeed in breaking a hole through the concrete, and when she couldn’t do it with her fists, she tried with her head, pounding it frighteningly against the wall in an accelerating rhythm.

I can’t stand it here anymore, she cried, I have to get away, right out of the room that will crush us, don’t you see the walls closing in on us, the ceiling sinking down, soon it will touch the floor; after her knuckles are beaten raw, her grazed forehead will start to bleed, thought Burgmüller, now she’s finally had it, it seems, what would be the best thing to do with her now, he deliberated, and tried to touch her gently on the shoulders, which she didn’t even notice in her frenzy, otherwise she would probably have pushed him back again right away; then he tried to guide all the force of his thoughts, the thoughts still dominating him and making him sympathetic toward her, tried to turn them in her direction now, drive them into her firmly with all the concentrated anger of his wounded longing for her and with the entire devotional force of his evaporating feelings; yes, astonishingly, he wouldn’t have thought it possible at all, considering this instead to be a deceptive, transitory intermission before the final failure of his raging love, but it actually had an effect: whether it had something to do with these efforts, or was just the result of her being overcome by exhaustion, in any case she calmed down, her shouting got quieter, became whispering, she suddenly started complaining about how he had let his apartment deteriorate into a pigsty, how that can only be tolerated for so long, when was he going to start cleaning it up, until she finally sank down onto the chair at her desk, almost speechless, and then with a strangely quite brightened, clear facial expression, as though she had just turned up from a forced march, she looked at him and whispered to him, asking him to please excuse her, to forgive her for having lost her self-control to the point of being almost unreachable, she had been so far away, and had just now found her way back, but from now on everything would be fine again, and entirely different. .

For the time being, your story has reached an ending, Burgmüller then explained to her, you can’t find the real conclusion of your narrative from here because you’ll be hindered by your own writing, which doesn’t let you step outside of it; you’ll just have to be clever, like a stage magician who escapes his magic trick just before its climax by using another trick designed for just that purpose; for one thing, that’s the only way the first trick can work, and for another thing, without the second trick, or if he negligently implements it too slowly, he’ll remain stuck in the first trick forever, caught, wrongly imprisoned in a spell of his own making. That’s exactly the way you have to get out of your story right now, otherwise something similar, or worse, will befall you. The best thing would be if we left on a trip tomorrow, without delay, a trip necessary for our own survival and the survival of your story: we should get away from here, you’ll be surprised, we’ll suddenly be able to really experience, see, and understand everything, real landscapes, cities, you’ll feel everything yourself, we’ll both experience it, we’ll both be able to experience ourselves at last, do you understand, we’ll understand each other as we understand everything else, we’ll be grasped in mutual contact, and sometimes our embraces will be so strong that we won’t be able to feel ourselves at all anymore, just our feelings, whose streams flow toward each other, as we travel on this trip for the first time through real landscapes, not through descriptions of landscapes: I won’t be taking any maps on this trip! I’ve had enough of them for all time, do you understand? Then the landscapes of the trip we’ll set out on tomorrow are also a possible end to your story, after surviving all the described adventures, the two main characters of your narrative, you understand, will presumably still find a way out to freedom at the last moment, and this way out will not be described; instead, they will simply, surprisingly, find themselves again in the landscape of the trip that will begin tomorrow, or is that too ordinary for you; if the two of them, like the two of us, together with the two of us, find this way out tomorrow through the apartment door there, do you understand, down the staircase, out the front gate, around the corners of a few buildings, into the main entrance of the train station, into a train gliding out of the city, away, out with us to the end of your story, then the definitive disappearance of the two of them with us in the landscape will be a landscape solution, a dissolution back into the landscape, where they had always wanted to go, on the evening of the narrative of that boundless region.