Kalkbrenner had just barely been able to finish the play several years earlier, with tremendous effort, before he succumbed completely to his alcoholism and didn’t write anything more. He had considered the work one of his best, if not his very best, and so had offered it to almost all the theaters in the country, but they all turned it down, saying it was naïve and out of touch with reality, until Kalkbrenner wound up, at the end of a night spent drinking with a large group of friends in the pub under his apartment, inviting the crowd to his flat one floor up and then went on up ahead of them; the group intended to follow him shortly, but he, in a state of total inebriation, and in the deepest despair, opened his gas oven right away, stuck his head in, and turned the gas on, because he had long since forgotten about the people who were supposed to follow him upstairs, because if he had remembered that someone might soon follow him and find him, he wouldn’t have done anything of the sort, Burgmüller was sure of that — Kalkbrenner didn’t want to frighten anyone, he really wanted to kill himself, because he didn’t see any other way out — but before Kalkbrenner’s friends had passed out dead drunk in the pub on the ground floor, Kalkbrenner had passed out dead on the second floor, his head deep inside his oven with the gas turned on: his life had flowed out the window with the gas he had breathed in and out, for he had considerately thought to open the window beforehand to forestall an explosion in the building, which would then also have collapsed, have fallen in on itself, and fallen down onto the collapsed people on the ground floor.
Immediately afterward, the play was slated for performance in almost every theater in the country.
It’s understandable, that is, Burgmüller, that you went to see the play, but you could have skipped the opening night party, to which you were also invited — that would have spared you a lot, don’t you think?
Or do you think that meeting her was inevitable, no matter what, the actress who played the poet’s wife, which was almost the same as playing Kalkbrenner’s wife, whom you had never met, personally, and who in the play contributed greatly to the unintended suicide of the young poet that was intended to frighten his friends to death, and then later in reality contributed greatly to Kalkbrenner’s actual suicide, at least it’s said to have been portrayed that way in the play, because in the play she’s always leaving the poet, and in reality she was always leaving Kalkbrenner, in order to be able to blame him for having left her, and so on. . So do you really think it was inevitable that you’d meet this woman, who, strangely, even during the performance, seemed to be gravitating toward you unavoidably, to the extent that you once thought you were up on the stage very close to her in the midst of the drunken party, and another time you thought she was almost coming down from the stage to you — and then she did come to sit beside you at the opening night party, and right away the two of you struck up a long, intense conversation about the play and your dead friend Kalkbrenner, but at the same time, silently, it became a conversation about the two of you; as the two of you looked at each other, you clearly felt that from that point on you had almost entirely forgotten both your lost love and Elvira too, because you saw how, as you were looking at the actress, the images preserved within your innermost imagination sank into the eyes of the woman sitting beside you like waterlogged autumn leaves sinking into a pond, and you thought your own body had crumbled into gray and brown colored autumn leaves that were falling onto the surface of the ponds of her eyes and breaking up there to form entirely new images out of the inestimably dark depths of those pond-eyes in the face-landscape of the woman sitting beside you, images that bored upward and outward from her gaze into your eyes, Burgmüller, images that might have been of dense forests and extensive fields around stony deserts and salt flats and similar areas of land that would always remain obscure to you, but that you nevertheless knew so well that you could have found your way around in them blindfolded, because you found that you had strayed so hopefully into them, and you felt so secure there. .
At the same time, while she kept on looking at him, he felt the transparent desert plain of the skin of his eyes starting to mirror the contours of her face, he clearly felt the discrete boundaries of the provinces of her face, as they emerged from the light between their two figures and glided inward under his eyelids, as they were laid on top of the glowing, shiny ice surface of the plains of his eyes, stuck there like mirror images over his pupils, as if, from her deep, dark, heavily overcast, cloudy gaze a pleasant thunderstorm of glances had rained down over the thirsty savannahs of his ravaged fields of vision, had sunk in unforgettably behind his forehead, had planted itself in his head.
Soon their wordless conversation was continued only by their eyes, thrown back and forth between them as in not-altogether-safe competitive ball games, small planets, whose continents they began to roam through; while their verbal conversation, as to whether Kalkbrenner had been an invention of the play or the play an invention of Kalkbrenner, had already subsided, remarkably, before he or she was in a position to summon the intellectual attentiveness necessary to even take note of it.
He met her again the very next day, and almost daily throughout the rest of the spring and on into the summer. Of course he told her right away about his new acoustic discoveries in the formation of natural architecture, and he wanted to show her the bird-flock ballet produced by him on the stage of the sky outside the city limits, but he didn’t have very good luck in that regard on the first day they went, or the following days, because the flocks of birds he had seen the previous day weren’t there anymore, they had disappeared, what a pity, regrettable, but they would turn up again some day, wouldn’t they, unless they had just been passing through on their way to another continent, hopefully that wasn’t the case, but his insistent enquiries would probably still enable him to find out at what times, whether often or seldom or barely at all, he could count on the absolutely essential presence of the flocks of birds in the sky in as great a density as possible for his future work, or else how one could promote their appearance in large numbers, perhaps by taking measures to attract them; but on the day in question, during his first walk with the actress, there was unfortunately not a single bird that he could have directed through what seemed to him to be the most expansive dome over the day that he had seen in his entire life, not a single bird that he could have directed upward, or out to the edges of infinity and back again.
So he couldn’t as yet offer her a performance of the acoustic space project he had begun; instead, he unfortunately had to resort to making it all understandable to her with the most suitable words and phrases available, to try to give her at least an indication of it.
To make music we can live in, he began his explanation, you know, to construct music we can live in, by joining together as many of the most durable acoustic spaces as possible, spaces that aren’t scattered right away by every moist scrap of foehn wind that comes running by, having tumbled out of the mountains, and that don’t lose themselves in the noise of the neighborhood, torn into ridiculous splashes of notes, you know, to construct individual rooms of sound by the sturdiest chains of chamber-music space, more carefully than has heretofore been possible, but not just within normally inhabitable music buildings, but also under the open sky, like here, now, you know, and you see now, for example, how the plain here around us and that city behind us often seem to be almost rolling up to us from their outermost edges, as if this country were a shabby, dog-eared cleaning rag of a map, and how sometimes, not today, which is an exception, the sky hangs far down, very tired and limp, like window glass that’s become too stiff to make a proper curve and has gone opaque in spots, but those places, those sail-scraps of air I mentioned, which I think have gone opaque in spots, are actually, no, not clouds, you know, instead, they’re the different flocks of birds that you now have to imagine to yourself, how they’ve built their closely linked nests into the cogs of the sunbeam carousel up there, as high as a sky that sags so low allows, you see, and in places they hang down along with the flabby sky, way down into the thicket of the steppes in this part of town, sometimes they even touch the chimneys of the outer villas, just imagine!