there, didn’t you, with which neither of you was familiar, and the two of you made your separate ways to that city, until you arrived here, you, Burgmüller, from HITHER, and she, your lost love, from THITHER or from somewhere else, because perhaps the two of you had long since been somewhere else entirely and each of you thought, purely by chance, that you would meet each other again upon this plain outside the city here, or, each on your own, were jointly underway next to each other on opposite streets far apart from one another, but you never reached that city there, because you had lost your way in the enchanted ruins of the suburbs that spread out around you as if airdropped by a cargo squadron, or else you’d bogged down in one of the squares of steppe grass laid out like allotment gardens, bogged down in a fleet of camels and their scarecrows with parasols and hats to protect against the sun, traveling under the personal protection and with the efficient camouflage of a developing darkness caused by a swarm of locusts.
Or couldn’t it have been like this: for her, your lost love, THITHER was this plain spread around outside the city here; just as for you, Burgmüller, HITHER was also this suburban lowland, so that to a certain extent both of you have actually always been together here somehow, without knowing or suspecting it, since yesterday, yes, or anyway it was like yesterday, it was yesterday or like yesterday.
From then on, every morning began as if it weren’t today’s respective morning, but rather your stale day yesterday that had snuck through its day and its night, between the seconds and minutes, into the following day, so that finally, gradually, with a lot of effort, it had managed to rise up as its own continuation, and tomorrow too the day before would turn up in the morning again instead of tomorrow’s day, yes, tomorrow morning will still have been yesterday morning or last night, which never gave you cause to assume it had passed.
In the plain outside the city, where Burgmüller was standing, he saw a train coming toward him from the edges of the suburbs, and as he walked along a narrow path through the fields along the railway embankment, the train now arrived there farther out in the country and glided past him, and the skin of its cars was almost transparent, or the sun had covered it with a reflective coating whose blinding light started to melt in Burgmüller’s eyes without causing him any pain, but soon the train cars seemed to have become even more transparent than the air, and he saw the travelers sitting inside them, yes, indeed, not just faces in the windows, but the individual people sitting there from head to toe, they greeted him with friendly smiles, waving at him from the windows, but one of them caught his attention, a passenger was looking out at him from the pounding train particularly lovingly, with careful concern, and kept looking back at him for a long time even from a distance, indeed in such a way that it seemed as if this fellow were an acquaintance who was particularly fond of Burgmüller, but then it became increasingly clear that a woman had been sitting or standing beside that passenger, and her gaze explained everything to him, it seemed to him with great certainty that he himself had been sitting in the train with his girlfriend and had ridden past, yes sir, as if he had been waving at himself from the train car as he had stood on that path through the fields by the train tracks, while you, Burgmüller, yes, indeed, stood on the path by the train tracks and waved at and after the travelers in the train that was slowly gliding past, as if, having been waved at in a lively fashion by yourself from the passing train, you were standing there as it drove past and also waving back at yourself again at the same time, waving from the path along the railway to the train that was slowly moving off, and from the train that was now gradually disappearing behind the hazy wing-beats of a hill on the steppe, the you that waved back at yourself as you were continuing to wave while standing near the train tracks rode away together with your lost love.
So, back then, you got to that city here, Burgmüller, and it was almost as if you had never arrived here, never been in the city here, no, and you’d also never climbed the rage of its museum-wall copings, never noticed the pride of the ornamental plasterwork on its decorated buildings, which are well worth a visit; instead, at most, you often hid on the islands that wandered downstream in that river whose name you didn’t even know, or did it even still have a name then, that water-snake rivulet that was proving ever more inadequate? But people felt it necessary to prevent its water system from spreading out in too many branches, and to stop its snakeskin back, scaly with wave-mirrors, from rising all too high against the chains of the adjacent quay walls along its banks—no sooner had it entered the city, letting its wave-dances surface and tear through the municipal area, than it had been tied as tightly as possible to the ground, which was done by strapping it down with several bridge-girdles along its path, keeping it to prescribed areas; and perhaps this also made it easier for the islands floating downstream to cross safely through the city, escaping the threateningly looming tongs of cellar windows and sewer gratings that were always reaching out for them; and how many of these delicate chains of islands had probably already been swallowed by the sewers of the gigantic rows of city wine cellars built along the edge of this primary river of our continent? They had thrown their window-bar nets out from the walls and pulled them to land, those islands; and how sad it was for a chain of such river-islands to be sucked down the throat of an underground vault, instead of wandering farther and evaporating back into the high mountains between the tropics of the sunrise and the sunset, where, uprooted by the river as it sprang from its source, they had set out with it on its trip to the lowland; yes, overcome by weariness, they would evaporate in the midnight floodlights of the twilight theater, at the point of intersection of all the light-year seasons, at the Southern Cross polestar in the loneliness of Greenland, glowing, frozen, as flickering flaming mirrors in the icebergs of Tierra del Fuego.
Besides, you had to rely on maps. But they were unreliable aids to orientation, because aside from the fact that their names and signs were in a constant state of flux, you could often see with the naked eye how the landscape depicted on them was in the process of changing, how this or that group of foothills would crinkle up from the paper like an island rising from the ocean, or sinking away; or else how the paper dunes of the suburban steppe approached the edge of the map and glided off in waves behind it!
And your position too, Burgmüller, clearly marked there at the edge of the city, didn’t it also swing into motion, carried along by the bushy thicket-whirls belonging to the flood of trees streaming past out of the dying, emigrating forest? And if, before your very eyes, the soil of the map, where you now thought to define yourself as a barely visible location that had nonetheless settled just there, if it floated away—because the land immediately imitates everything shown to it by its superiors, the maps—would you not then fall off the plain on which you’re standing, and would you not be washed away from these steppe-grass flatland-folds of a forgotten desert-harbor navigational zone at the bottom of a sea that was driven away from here just yesterday, an unimaginably long time ago?
When he had recovered from the strain of his sleep demonstrations for the telamones, the first thing he wanted to do was go right back to the caryatids again. But when he went to those walls where he had gotten to know the stone women, he was at first bitterly disappointed: during his absence, the building in question had either been torn down because it was threatening to collapse, as was maintained on the one hand with a certain resoluteness, or else the building had caved in and collapsed on its own, as one heard on the other hand somewhat more hesitantly—he was unable to find out anything more specific.
Shouldn’t he have taken into consideration the possibility that his best friends from back then might well have been capable themselves of intentionally causing the building to collapse by making a surprise movement, by stepping out from their wall some night and into the square in front of the building? Hadn’t he heard them several times saying something to the effect that they found that building and everything housed between its walls to be an increasingly unreasonable burden? And wasn’t their objection made even clearer to Burgmüller when he found out a little later that the building which had stood where now there was nothing but the rubble of collapsing ruins had previously housed the public investigation units of the secret police?
Or had they, in his absence, learned how to sleep after all—had they gotten tired at last, as sleepy as petrified darkness pulled in toward the center of the earth when the trap doors to the planet’s cellar began to open?
But wasn’t it better for Burgmüller to avoid another meeting with the stone women again? Otherwise he might not have been