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 able to resist the temptation, might have gone back to spending all his time with them, and everything would inevitably have started over again and would have gone on approximately as already described and had a similar ending once more, and if that happened then he would have gone through everything up until then for nothing, because he would have had to go through it or something similar a second time, without being able to leave anything out, just to get back to his current state, this stage that he’d reached only with great effort, but he had reached it. Or might he have been unable to reach this point a second time? The likely catastrophe always lurking so successfully around the next corner might take on alarming proportions en route, proportions that don’t need to be described in any additional detail here.
For a long time, those calcified memories were still vividly present for him — particularly evident in the fact that, albeit with decreasing frequency, he was overcome, characteristically, by a peculiar feeling, namely that he was playing the role of a very mobile caryatid, no, a very mobile atlas who, to be sure, had no building, no gateway, no oriel to support or to carry on his shoulders, but in its place, and certainly comparable in terms of weight, he had a column of air, its dimensions unimaginably overwhelming for him, and it accompanied him loyally everywhere he went, stretching from his shoulders up to the farthest outermost roof-truss skin of the atmosphere, and he had been growing increasingly weary of carrying its load of late. I’m not going to do this much longer, he often thought to himself when he had collapsed from one of the sudden attacks of weakness that overcame him, accompanied by nausea, gasping for breath, no, he thought to himself, not me, no, not like this, and so he often tried to shake off that column of air, but it didn’t let itself be shaken off so easily, it stuck to him stubbornly as if it had grown onto him; but then he was at last able to manage it, at least sometimes, it had taken him a long time to find out how to do it: having assumed a position of repose, for example, sitting outside on a park bench, he needed first of all a period of concentrated relaxation, and then a simple rest, closing his eyes, with his body, and particularly his head, very peacefully balanced: then he noticed how his inner feeling of relaxation streamed out of him and transferred itself to his column of air, of course only gradually, things like that take time, until he could feel quite distinctly that the cylinder of atmosphere on his shoulders had gotten quite light and downy or fleecy, it rolled itself in or up and off his shoulders with something like elegance, often swaying iridescently as it did so, like immensely huge, wide wings that were made of a thickly woven mesh of various crystal threads; then he just had to wait until the column of air had finally quieted down and itself gone to sleep; then it was easy to remove it, if you were gentle, but that usually resulted in its waking up again and hopping right back onto his shoulders — which is why Burgmüller, once he’d removed the column of air, had to run away immediately, as fast as he could, to get away from there, go somewhere else. But even that didn’t help him for long, because shortly afterward, when he had stopped in order to catch his breath and enjoy his new freedom, the column of air again positioned itself on his shoulders or his head; was it the old one, having run after him, pursued him, which would always pursue him, that had sought and found him again, or was it another one, a new one, that had finally found a shoulder with a vacancy, yes, that seemed more logical to him, and sometimes he saw the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere as a pushing and shoving of assorted columns of air, aimlessly straying here and there, always fighting with each other, all of them looking for an empty shoulder on which they could settle, come crashing down. But those often only very brief moments of release made Burgmüller very happy, so his escape attempts remained rewarding for him, and he undertook the described measures more and more frequently. The only really stupid thing about the situation was that those people who observed him in the process of running away from his column, full tilt, not only immediately considered him suspect, but were in fact quite certain that he had stolen something from them or done something terrible, something criminal, because he immediately heard their frantic, hysterical voices calling after him, “Stop him! Thief! Stop the murderer!” etc. And once, when the forces of law and order really did detain and question him as to the reason for his extreme haste, when he told them about the business with the column of air they naturally didn’t believe him. But since they found no stolen goods on him, they let him go again.