Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

How surprising, thought Burgmüller, that she is listening to me for so long without interrupting, without contradicting, but no, quite the opposite, she was agreeing with him, she told him he was right, he could hardly believe it, she was happy, that was evident, happy for the first time, she breathed a sigh of relief, not only as though she’d been rescued but really freed from her story , there was an expression in her eyes that he had never seen before, both melancholy and charming: heavy with happiness, from the depths of her face, wild lily-of-the-valley had surfaced in her gaze, and he would be hopelessly at the mercy of her gaze again and again, illuminated by the flaring up of a feeling of happiness that arose in her and flowed through him; he was more devoted than ever to the sight of her, transfigured as never before by a feeling of belonging, and quite relieved, as though she had been able to put indescribably more than what she had written behind her — and as though the fact that she had found her way out of it again was not a miracle, but a natural phenomenon.

She suggested that she should help him clean up his apartment, the state of which alarmed her, she thought they should provisionally try to remove at least the most conspicuous things before leaving on their trip together tomorrow, so that they wouldn’t be mercilessly subjected to the present circumstances right away again after their return, but Burgmüller didn’t want to, no, he said, he had no intention of dealing with that anymore, never again in his life, before departing he would hire experienced cleaners, in writing or by telephone, to put everything back in order while the two of them were away, they’d be able to manage for this one night as they had before, wouldn’t they? though if she couldn’t stand this situation for even one more night, then they’d leave immediately and go to a hotel, yes? No, she said.

The best thing would be to start packing, so that we can get away as early as possible tomorrow morning, right after we wake up, through the apartment door, down to the train station, and then out of the country on the next convenient express train, to the high mountains by the sea, as though crossing the ocean toward each other from opposite ends of the world. For a long time he described the landscape-acquaintanceships they would soon make, as if speaking of old friends, and she began to reply to him with landscape stories, as if they were descriptions of her affection. .

. . so he tried to describe how the Hungarian lowland plain of his body-landscape sank down over the hot celestial skin of her Amazon delta estuary, and she told him about the opening of her gulf shore there, about her impatient waiting for him to cross the Atlantic, so that they could finally glide inland together. .

. . and soon after that he told her how long he had already been wanting to heat up the subterranean cave system of her Siberian tundra for her, whereupon she answered him in a few sentences with all the concentrated bustling of the artesian-well installations of the Atlas Mountains, saying very dryly, like the Sahara, that she would grant him entrance into the boundlessness of her northern forests. .

. . whereupon he, with his icily boiling Titicaca, let her La Paz bowl be filled up to the top, hissing, bursting, boiling, and overflowing. .

etc., until with these descriptions of their love they had finished a rather complete, universal geography of love as it corresponded to them. Maybe, he thought, everything that is still Utopian today would be able to revolve around them tomorrow with infinities that were already cosmically comprehensible. .

But unexpectedly, something exploded, yes, something crashed into the midst of this narrative, as though tearing it.

Burgmüller asked right away what he had quite typically done wrong again, what had crashed, exploded.

Nothing crashed, nothing exploded, she replied, he hadn’t made the noise, that “tearing sound” to be precise, as she explained; but hadn’t he noticed anything? no? but hadn’t he gotten cooler? no? not that either? he should take a closer look around him.

Then he saw that in the continuation of her love story she had just taken his shirt off him with a single sentence, with a few words she had torn his buttons off with quick dexterity, almost like an assault: he thought he heard his distraught shirtsleeves, pulled to pieces, like fluttering scarecrow wings that had learned to fly, now lamenting as they ran aground in the farthest corner of the room.

He wasn’t as quick as she was, and didn’t want to be, but he didn’t keep her waiting long for a very sensitive, extensive description of the exceptionally complicated pattern of the material of her blouse, with his very special preference for certain parts of the awesome sight of its material, which she understood in no uncertain terms because of the exceptional care he took to be so precise.

Was that all right with her, he asked by the way, yes, that was all right with her, she wanted him to tell her very exactly and completely all the further measures he wished to take regarding her, everything that occurred to him to want to do with her, though of course she rather suspected what other things he would still want both from her and with her, yes, but he shouldn’t leave out a single word, she was exceptionally interested in what he thought he wanted from her; (then she would add to that by telling him exactly what could still be wanted so very much from her, so that he would soon want that too. .)

Suddenly he felt himself penetrated by her heart, and embraced by it, although, as before, it was only his words that were learning to advance ever farther toward her with the continuing seductive beauty of his sentences, by which she thought she felt entirely fulfilled, because the plots of the love stories they dedicated to each other, piled high, broke up into almost feverishly flowing sentences that sprayed into the atmosphere around them like the lost parts of a legendary myth that remained unknown and not even imaginable, so that they held their breath, or was it mainly the sunshine of the daylight leaning into the room toward them, which was ground into wood shavings and shaken out of the bulbous sacks of this region that were filled to bursting?

As if “myth-sick” Burgmüller was able, in distinguished depravity, to have sentences of ornate sparseness glide through his head, which sounded something like this: Tomorrow, the unbound Prometheus will go on a great holiday with the woman who has suddenly surfaced, the liberator of his love. Accompanied by the satiric pathos of a comedy full of self-mockery, he suddenly seemed a little witty even to himself during this thunderstorm in the heat of the night that was blinking around so vainly with its cobalt shimmer, though its weatherproof cape was riddled with holes.

After they got back, Burgmüller thought, the two of them would start their public performances of nature-music concerts by directing flocks of birds through the air, sky concerts above the city, and he thought of people he would consider involving as collaborators, such as Schleifer and Schläfer, the two indestructibly dissolute virtuosi, not Pfeifer, no, not Pfeifer, Comelli of course, maybe Jagusch too, and Jacksch, no, not Jacksch, but then it would also be better to do without Jagusch too, and instead of them, he’d involve Hellberger, Keldorfer, Schwarzkopf, and Diabelli. Pfeifer could write whatever he wanted about it in the newspaper, and maybe Jagusch wouldn’t be all that bad after all, and he could certainly do more with Jacksch than people had previously thought possible. .

When he woke up the next morning, she was already gone.

They hadn’t intended to leave until midday, because a few days before this she had received a letter, an official or semi-official document containing the inviting request that she show up without fail on this day for a fixed appointment to discuss something of an urgency that wasn’t clearly defined, but was to take place in an exactly designated room of a very particular public building.