into the distance, or else they roll back into the municipal authorities’ fleet of vehicles, pushing each other out of the way . . .
It was on a previous day, yesterday, or like yesterday, yes, again and again, recently, like yesterday, a very foggy night, through which you had come here, back then, had driven through, had turned up at that stage of your solitary trip, which had begun so incredibly with someone else.
Your eyes are hurting from the edges of the forest that keep wandering away into the sunrise, and your back hurts too, as if grass-hoppers have taken your neck by storm. From the turnip fields, the crops hop toward you in swarms to heap themselves on your esteemed person.
But perhaps there might have been a secret way out, back then, much earlier, though not all that much earlier, just a wee bit earlier, when you hadn’t yet started to say back then, before that city, but it wasn’t just you, your lost love too would of course not have had a clue, would have found it utterly disconcerting that, quite contrary to what you’d both assumed, this trip you began together would remain your only common secret.
Back then, or somewhat earlier, before the silhouettes of that city’s walls had appeared with their exhibitionist, pseudo-prehistoric fortifications, much earlier than the two of you would ever be able to imagine again afterward, the beginning of the story of your lost love took place in a completely different city, and to be sure in a more distant foreign country, off the maps, and indeed in the train station there, no, maybe it wasn’t a train station, but rather a harbor,
yes, right, a harbor, no, it was a train station after all, you still remember that, vaguely, yes, this other city with that train station back then (or still today, one never knew what one could still say about it today), in a foreign country that had become invisible, off the maps, was located on the shore of one of the main continental rivers, or even at the edge of an ocean, one of those oceans that strayed and has been forgotten to this day, because how else would Burgmüller have hit upon the idea of talking about a harbor, or even have let its word-ships rise over the beach: not a single ocean-going rowboat subordinate clause, be it ever so ridiculous, would have slipped over his lips and out of his mouth if there hadn’t actually been something dissimilarly similar there, with ships along quay walls or steamboat-mooring points, anyway it wasn’t just he who was so certain, no, his lost loved one would also have agreed with him, maybe they would have argued about it briefly, just for an afternoon, whether it was a river or the beginning of a newly discovered ocean, but eventually the two of them would soon have agreed that it was both the ocean and the chameleon-skin rapids of a main continental artery, yes sir, back then it could well have been both at once, in the form of a swampy, branching, sultry, world-famous delta at the mouth of a river where it poured into a slotted gulf funnel at the entrance to the ocean—that much could also have been deduced from its cartographic representation, in those days, which also shows the exact location of the train station, easy to find with its slim tracks and the trains chained onto them, the station where the two of them first caught sight of one another, each in their respective lives back then, in the high-ceilinged waiting room of that train station, which had confoundingly similar facial features to each of its fraternal buildings, linked to it by iron rails, offering the same old things to eat from inside the cooking steam of their snack bars, they simply couldn’t be dissuaded from selling wieners that burst with laughter and exploded toward the traveler, spraying greetings at him, and there was the unmistakable smell of their exceptionally common types of mustard under the glittering hot downpours of the gleaming gold-toothed window-eyes of happily homecoming locomotives.
Yes, Burgmüller, remember how, back then, when you looked through the train station hall rising high above the tracks, you were suddenly touched by a gaze that understood you so immediately that you asked yourself what it must be like to see with such eyes; surely whatever they glanced at was immediately penetrated and assessed, and nothing or almost nothing could escape such eyes, you thought, but you didn’t feel at all as if you had been unpleasantly seen through, you would have let such eyes look through even bigger holes in you than there were in the segments of wire-mesh glass that made up the dome of the train station.
Back then, when he caught her looking at him, he felt a slight pressure at the center of his deepest and most intimate feelings, as if he had been forced to toss his thoughts to her across the waiting room, at first almost with a hint of reproach that she had kept him waiting so long, but she had finally turned up after all, though who knows how long she might have taken if he hadn’t happened to meet her here on the platform, whereupon he sensed that she was sending a transparent, silent answer-chain back to him, something to the effect that today was the first day that had been created for the two of them alone, for the two of them as for no one else, and that’s why they could only today begin their now inevitable simultaneity, because, in the future, they would be spending all their time together, yes, in our mundane futureland; and Burgmüller believed that he was receiving her answer loud and clear, without a word of it getting lost, they then thought toward each other with a perceptive clarity never previously experienced, without the slightest loss of meaning or interruption of a word, saying approximately this: that soon now everything would be cleared up, so much better than before, so much better than even a few minutes ago, when they had not yet sensed anything of each other, but everything had been steering them toward this point, as if all their past-regions, whose boundary lines had mutually stood in each other’s way, had just now touched each other, bringing with them the contrapuntal voices and moods of their future memories, the memories that belonged to both of them.
On the skin of his eyes, then, Burgmüller felt in every detail—as he looked farther back through the train station scaffolding, sewn with tracks—how the contours of his beloved’s face began to impress themselves upon him in its gaze-reply, how it had been planted in him, sliding up under his eyelids along with the light of the train station in the heat of this twilight; and a mirror image remained fixed over his pupils, as if, from the partly cloudy eyes of his beloved, a pleasant weather system had descended over the low-lying fields of his gaping eyes, a mirage extending from her dear face that then sank in behind his forehead.
The train the two of them were supposed to take later on had been waiting patiently alongside the platform since noon, ready for them and at their disposal; wasn’t it black, like the chimney sweep uniforms of its conductors, who were throwing motorcycles and bicycles into the dark recesses of the baggage car, and now also the story-cases that belonged to the two of them, nailed together with the boards of their fragmentary experiences to be sent off into another time zone, packed full of things they’d dealt with and not dealt with, their crossbar-titles black as the conductors and the waiting train that, as before, lay at their feet, as if waiting just for them and no one else, with cozy chatty cries of welcome flapping wide then slamming shut again from the wide-swinging wings of its waving train-car door-sails (and you know, back then, almost every rose came stamped with black digits that tallied up the exact number of its petals, which determined its worth).
Outside, in the square in front of the train station, it was a hot afternoon, but in spite of the silent sultriness of its breath, it managed to alleviate the boredom of the neglected pay phones by using its happily trembling, lustrous dust cloths of air, as well as its shimmering cleaning rags of light, to give their receivers a proper scrubbing and polishing, while, at the same time, the lower-ranking train station assistant personnel hit all the cars in the intestines with sledgehammers, to see whether their last trip had left them full of holes, or else whether the next trip was likely to leave them full of holes, and as if the train station church bells were cheering along with the chromatic runs of the rainbow-tinted rails, the activity of these personnel turned every individual train car into the strenuously played sound-box skin of a single huge train-station waiting-room xylophone-cathedral, into a majestic festival steaming through that summer afternoon heat, back then, along with the track-bundles whirring through the station and heading out into the country.
At the entrance hall wickets, officials tried one by one to sell all that remained in the way of trips and open seats and reserved seats on the trains that would still be leaving that day, back then: how selflessly they exerted themselves, how admirable was their zeal; they knew just how to draw in the many people who had arrived to swell the ranks of their train station audience, how to entice them over to their respective windows; at first they only