But usually the only important thing to them was that they were talking, it didn’t matter about whom or what; to such people, their own talk was a means of rehearsing the mechanics of imbuing storytelling with slanderous powers of destruction, of keeping the ball rolling. Unfortunately, thought Burgmüller, most of the so-called normal human conversations and discussions that allow people to better understand one another have almost never been anything but diligent practice for the spreading of lies — which intentionally and predictably result in human destruction.
His memory of those first days with Elvira was rather sketchy, but as far as he could remember, he had noticed her “love of animals” early on, especially her almost intimate familiarity with certain species that did not exceed a certain size; he had noticed it on their almost daily walks on those paths along the edge of the forest. She heard the mandibles of stag beetles clattering with all the conviction of a new type of can opener, saw their backsides shining as if with fresh black shoe polish. Foliage suddenly fluttered down from some trees, but before the leaves had fallen to the ground, some of them had turned into rare butterflies whose wings were as discreetly multicolored as oriental prayer rugs. Ladybugs frequently flew to her, and she counted the number of white dots on their two red wing cases and entered them in her notebook, because she was keeping statistics on the dots. When she talked to herself, he couldn’t understand what she was saying, because she used fragments of words from the untranslatable language of natural sounds that are used to transmit news of a catastrophe; through the waves of shining, swaying, putrefying twilight in a forest that was slowly dying and evaporating, the dense veil of gently threatening swarms of spruce web-spinning sawflies swung over the unstoppable invasion of migrating silver-fir wooly adelgids that had soon spread through all the undergrowth, reinforced by the merry drilling sounds of well armored pine weevils and elm bark beetles.
The woodlice that had settled in the underground coal cellars of the building were doing well since she moved in with him; she reported on such things promptly, and told Burgmüller that at the same time every day, and perhaps also during the night, the walls of the building were shaken, barely perceptibly, but undeniably, as if by a gentle earthquake that was passing through, tenderly stroking the walls and rocking the roofs, and went on to explain to him in detail that in her opinion a small colony of termites or some such thing had settled in the building walls. Anything larger than, say, a dragonfly or a praying mantis no longer attracted her attention, which was not so much scientific as deeply sensual in nature.
Sometimes, when he looked at her, the answer she sent back to him, light as a feather, was melancholy sheet lightning from her eyes.
The autumn air was filled with fog-fairytales of bereavement and quivering cotton-batting clouds; embedded in the foehn, they trailed through the bushes and hedges in the park, tearing the last petal sails from their twigs; passing out of the city and through the suburbs into the lowlands, they flooded the banks of the streams and ravines formed by the streets, washing premonitions of an early winter ashore, and the landscape picked up on those feelings and rehearsed them carefully as études to accompany a silent movie.
Burgmüller was sitting with his girlfriend at the breakfast table by the window and looking out into the bleak half-light of the season, which, coming from the surrounding countryside, started then to arch up over the edge of the city like a deliberately threatening wave of putrefaction slowly rolling in, and soon it had playfully covered over all the roofs, and then it remained glued across all the windowpanes and entranceways to the buildings like a greasy piece of tinfoil that had been wrapped around butter, but that someone had carelessly allowed to get dirty.
The leaves sailed heavily from the twigs of the trees, like Kleenex tissues full of snot, and wobbled through the clouds until they ran aground on the edges of the rain gutters polished shiny by storms, or they whirled up and away into another region of the sky that was bending in and out, whizzing along the tops of the telegraph poles.
Then Burgmüller heard a very quiet, barely audible hint of buzzing coming through the window from outside, or was it rather a pompous sort of stuttering, somehow rustling, drawn out, carefully whispered, slightly indignant, a grouching rasping in the pervasive, rustling sleep of the apparently dead storm of leaves? Then he thought it was a sigh that had fallen out of one of the neighboring windows, a window nearby, not far away, a sigh that had happened to swing over here on the wave of an air current and get stranded, but as Burgmüller made a greater effort to concentrate on whatever was outside his window, he saw something that was clearly black, and, on the one hand, at first, very small, but on the other hand soon quivering and growing into something fatter, it was also astonishingly covered with hair, almost like fur, yes, a spot of fur had come staggering up and was smacking against the outer window glass, bouncing back and diagonally upward into the faded canvas of the autumn sky, then swooping down again at an angle, falling down, and surfacing insistently, as if perhaps to knock on the glass in desperation, knocking harder and harder, almost determined to break down the glass or otherwise bash its own head in. It was astonishing, so late in the year, a fly in this unusually cold, damp November, when all the other flies had long since died a wretched death or were hidden away in secluded corners where they could grow stiff and sink down into their winter hibernation: here, by contrast, was the fly outside the window, who had obviously gotten lost in the bitingly cold mist and yet had managed to survive until now.
What’s so interesting over there, that you won’t look me in the face? and she asked that he cast a friendlier glance in her direction.
Something surprising, he answered, and since her back was to the window, he asked her to turn around.