Often, when he came across caryatids or atlantes, he did stay with them for a little while, of course without initiating contact, but very often with the intention of suggesting that perhaps now the time had come for them to go out for once, to go read newspapers in a café, or to go to the movies, he could recommend that, it would relax them a little, and in their absence, he, Burgmüller, would make himself temporarily available to prop up their archway, to hold their balcony up against the sky, and if they replied that he would probably be too weak to do that, he had his counterargument ready: given that he had been able until now to cope with his column of air, he would certainly be capable of lifting such miniscule things as buildings and doorways, at least for a while, and so on. But every time he was about to address them on this subject, it occurred to him that he unfortunately wouldn’t have enough time. Because the centuries required for them to have a quick cup of coffee, or the millennia it would take for them to watch even the news, no, he unfortunately didn’t have that kind of time.
But it was important and long past due that not only he but all the other people in that city should begin to treat the telamones with more respect than they had previously been shown. If they didn’t, there would always be the fear that the telamones might some day grow weary of supporting their buildings. Yes, what if they fell asleep someday after all, and indeed did so intentionally? Then half the city would cave in, and it would be as if an undeclared war had broken out. Hadn’t the telamones already begun to shout at passersby in a way that was becoming more and more comprehensible, to hurl curses of stone at them? Of course the people were surprised to be yelled at so impertinently by their own buildings, but while at first they simply shook their heads over this lapse of good manners, they soon became accustomed to it, as to so many other things. But it happened more and more frequently that these scoldings from the walls became associated with certain unpleasant bodily pains. The people walking past the rows of houses were often struck still, as if rooted to the spot, stopped in their tracks, as if they felt they had been hit on the backs of their heads, or in their backs, by projectiles whizzing through the air. But there was nothing to be seen, neither shots fired nor stones thrown nor any of the other projectiles that people had thought to find. These were words of stone. Yes, yes, the telamones had clearly begun to defend themselves more and more, in ways that could not be ignored, against the people in the city. And they were quite within their right to do so.
Judging by appearances, though, it was to be feared that they might not put up with things as they were for very much longer; yes, the walls were often roaring incessantly and indiscriminately now at everything that passed by below them, their whitewash seething, their mortar forming a dusty mist! And even if they weren’t capable of learning how to sleep, thought Burgmüller, at some point they would indeed step away from their buildings — even if they did so very slowly, it would still be a shock — and they would leave the city behind them, letting it sink into rubble and ash as they made their way out onto the plain and to the shore of the sea, taking a trip to the cliffs by the ocean, to the stone quarries of their birth.
~ ~ ~
As previously described, Burgmüller had lost track of his beloved, but while searching for her in the shooting galleries of that city’s amusement park, he found Elvira.
Elvira wasn’t actually called Elvira, no, the real Elvira didn’t turn up until later.
This Elvira was only called Elvira when Burgmüller confused her with the real Elvira, which happened now and then later on too.
Her real name is of no consequence; people should avoid this unnecessary naming of proper names in public, thought Burgmüller, he hated those people who were always fooling around with names called through the telephone wires; since he had withdrawn some time ago, they had nothing new at all to report about him, but they nevertheless knew more about him than he knew about himself.
Whenever he wanted to find out something new about himself, he met with people like that and asked them: So, what’s the news about me? or: What’s the news about Burgmüller? Then he got to hear things that were really entirely new to him, that he would otherwise never have been aware of having done. They were confusing him with someone else, he often suspected, or else it was just that the different names and their respective stories, together with whatever documentation, were recorded and evaluated by these people according to the strangest criteria for determining what constituted a curiosity, criteria whose peculiarities exceeded even those of the civil service, the results then subject to an exchanging or mingling mechanism by which the news you heard about yourself could conceivably and in the very next moment be attributed to someone else, to someone recently added to the system, and soon, perhaps tomorrow, or in a few hours or minutes, it could be surprisingly attributed to yet another someone else, who until then had been completely unknown — so then in order to find out something really new about himself, Burgmüller would have had to ask after news of some entirely different people, unknown to him, people to whom just then the newest stories were being ascribed, things that would only be supposed to happen to Burgmüller in the near future. But how could he possibly have known about whom he should ask if he wanted to find out at least the most important things about himself? Or should he simply have asked: Tell me, about whom would it be most advantageous for me to ask in order to hear things about myself that would otherwise remain unknown to me? Of course people would have been confused if they were suddenly asked questions like that, but he might have succeeded in finding the key to their secret system — when, where, in what direction, and how often the names were to be exchanged as far as their respective stories, and with what downright artistically masterful nastiness their intrigues were adding storied ruins to whose past, and indeed in such a way that catastrophes were sure to follow. Or was it possible that Burgmüller, in those people’s descriptions, really had managed to do things he’d not yet thought himself capable of?