She spent the following days and nights as well crouching outside the locked door, refusing Burgmüller entrance on a daily basis, using the same arguments, which she presented ever more logically, and which were now making sense to him too, and she sent him to the butcher several times a day.
Sometimes he suspected that Elvira, whom he still had not set eyes on, must have grown in the meantime, and indeed to the same extent that his girlfriend seemed more and more shriveled, because she herself hadn’t eaten a thing, but was sticking everything through the door for the housefly — or was he entirely misinterpreting the situation? Did his girlfriend take her meals secretly with the housefly when he went out? Did she go into the kitchen without telling him, so that he would have no reason to go into the kitchen as well? Sometimes he even suspected that she had made a pact with Elvira to drive him out of his apartment, but he soon dismissed that as nonsense. Then again he imagined that Elvira, alone in the kitchen, was flapping her wings clear across the horizon of the ceiling, that she had grown as large as a bat and wasn’t humming quietly anymore but singing more and more loudly in a bright baritone, with a voice that made the water pipes and the refrigerator rattle.
All attempts to reestablish his relationship with his girlfriend through tender attentiveness were in vain, so he continued to spend the nights alone, and he spent most of his time during the days away from the apartment, at friends’ apartments or in bars; the only kind words that still fell on his ears were threats about everything that would happen to him if he caused Elvira so much as the slightest discomfort.
One of the things he hoped for was that the housefly might soon go into hibernation for the winter, and then everything would return to normal. But Elvira didn’t seem to hibernate, which is why things stayed as they were throughout the entire winter and into the spring.
Sometimes he didn’t just stay away during the day, but also during the night. When he returned, it was always the same sight that met his eyes: there she was still crouching outside the closed door, oblivious to all else, gazing through her holes as if into an inexpressible expanse or distance that remained hidden to him: only she could understand it, and by not letting him look into the kitchen, she was also not letting him look at her or into her; she was so deeply torn inside herself that she was puzzled by the sight of her own hidden secrets, the bases for which had until then remained unknown even to herself, and now they were causing her the greatest difficulties, but she categorically refused to confide in him. She glanced briefly and reproachfully at him and asked what he was thinking to have left Elvira so long without food; but soon she didn’t talk at all anymore, just looked at him questioningly and said nothing, whereupon he limited himself to responding to her reproachful stares by going to the butcher.
Sometimes he was concerned about the sanitary and hygienic conditions behind the kitchen door. Certainly Elvira was hardly in a position to completely devour those mountains of salami, so he feared the room was being crammed increasingly full of piles of meat and would soon have to burst; the only thing he found strange was that not even a hint of a smell wafted out through the door.
Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep at night, he sat in the farthest corner of the room, looked into the darkness that was wrapped around the roofs like rolled-out bolts of dark blue cloth, and heard or thought he heard a fluttering in the gable — was it the birds that sailed through the attic? Or did it come from the kitchen, where Elvira was fluttering from the refrigerator across the table to the window, where her wings beat wildly against the glass and set all the walls vibrating in an all-pervading roomquake?
His girlfriend always had her ear pressed firmly to the kitchen door, listening intently to what was going on inside, and always thinking she’d heard something, he could see that from her face, she strained to listen to the interior, as if it were also the forbidden room of her own innermost being, forbidden even to herself; but he heard less and less, soon nothing more, even when he pressed his ear with great determination against the door, which she tried desperately to prevent him from doing, he simply heard nothing. By way of contrast, she seemed to hear something that moved her more and more deeply; it gave him the impression that secret messages were being passed to her through the locked door, messages that were explicable only to her, and were intended only for her, as if the locked door were the insuperable boundary to an entirely different, invisible, unimaginably new type of existence that had known how best to set itself up, to settle into his apartment behind his back, without asking his permission, and strictly speaking also against his will, yes, as if for her another space was beginning behind the door, a space she didn’t entirely understand yet, but which she sometimes longed to enter as she longed for nothing else, but this was impossible for her for whatever reasons, with which situation she nevertheless seemed satisfied.
What did it have to do with Elvira? Had Elvira, by turning up at the kitchen window on that November day, brought all of this about — had it all begun with Elvira, and hadn’t his girlfriend greeted the housefly that day as if she’d been waiting for it for the longest time?
Only Elvira would be in a position to understand everything completely, thought Burgmüller. . would he therefore soon consider the housefly more important than his beloved?
At first, though, he wondered if he was in some way to blame; why had she turned away to such an extent, not only from him, but also from herself? But the more he questioned her about it, in his distress, the more determined she was not to give him the slightest clue; her refusal to speak took on an increasing clarity, until her silence became an even louder form of scolding than if she had screamed at him — thus her refusal to talk about how he had hurt her feelings, which he was trying in vain to determine, became the main component of her punishment of him.
Yes, maybe he hadn’t spoken with her often enough about everything imaginable; for example, he had never spoken about his work as an interior acoustic designer, and he had always refused to do so. Why, actually? Did he think she was too unmusical, and had that cut her to the core, that he suspected she didn’t know enough about music? So he tried to make amends right away, he started giving her whole lectures about the proper setup of the acoustic spaces of the musical architecture he had conceived of over the years, he spoke of rooms as the interiors of huge instruments, of houses that sounded, buildings that, as he now explained very simply, almost as if to a child, sucked in air to produce sound, street air, city air, but along with the air they also sucked in the waves of street sounds, city sounds, that were swimming along in it, how it was then possible to take this intolerably noise-filled air from the environment and convert it in the hollow spaces of his room instruments and the chamber-music valves of his sounding buildings so that a happily moaning or excitingly calming vibration of notes would come forth from the roofs, the windows, the walls; because the occupants of the buildings, within their private musical-instrument walls, not only happened to live in their particular homes and in their part of the city, but were also, at the same time, by means of this living, in those rooms, responsible for forming the sound atmosphere of the entire city, through all of its streets, without any effort on their part, and so even the smallest street had its own assigned sound atmosphere: for example, on the narrow streets, there would be a pulsating, resounding circulatory system to accompany life at the different times of day and night in a beguiling and generally systematically supportive manner, all of this taking place thanks to and within an uninterrupted family music performance. . and Burgmüller showed his girlfriend, who was crouching silently before the kitchen door, his corresponding blueprints, but she didn’t so much as glance at them, and then he likewise showed her his rejoicing model buildings that whistled or moaned, and she ignored them too, whereupon she hurt his feelings even more insultingly with her silence, almost pelted him with it, as if she were roaring at him, she turned completely away from him, so that only her arched back was turned toward him; only in the shiny surface of the varnished kitchen door could he see the dully reflected shadows of her face.