After the final performance of The Poet’s Death, she told him of her plan to take a leave of absence from the theater to dedicate herself to her other, heretofore secondary means of depicting life, which was increasingly becoming her primary occupation, she was writing a book, a literary Portrayal of the World; she had kept it secret from the people around her, including him, until then, but her preparatory studies and all her research had progressed so well that she had now definitely decided to write her story at last. Since, while on leave, she would lose the apartment the theater had provided for her, she needed a place to stay, and did he perhaps know of one that was reasonably priced.
Up until then she had repulsed his desperate hope for the most intimate fulfillment of their rapprochement, and so when he offered her a room in his apartment, he feared she would once again feel burdened by the persistence of his presumably presumptuous hints and that there would be some threat of her rejecting him outright, but she could move in whenever she wanted and stay for a while, or longer, as long as she wanted, he said, and didn’t forget to assure her that she would have the utmost peace and quiet for the work she was beginning.
What a surprise for him to hear how happy she was about his offer, how pleased she was that they had finally reached the point, yes, they were finally at the point when the time had come for the two of them to be together decisively, once and for all, to live together, in the same apartment, yes, and she had always wanted that most fervently from the very beginning, for how long now, yes, for a very long time, and finally he, Burgmüller, had at last become reasonable about it and had really decided on her and no one else. .
He asked her when exactly she would be coming, and she named the approximate day the following week; he gave her a key, prepared everything at home, had some workmen come in to fix up a few things, had a cleaner give the apartment a thorough going over, and he put flowers in every room on the day he expected her, especially in the room intended for her, and he eagerly awaited her, filled with emotion; but then, just as he had thought might happen, she didn’t show up, and in the following days he continued to wait in vain.
Maybe she’d changed her mind, had regretted her all-too-hasty decision and been frightened by it, had found another option that suddenly seemed even more convenient, or maybe she had moved away, even to a different city or country, where he would lose touch with her, because she didn’t want to be with him now after all, and in any case, everything pointed to her obviously having invisibly reached a different decision.
She had once told him incidentally that the story she wanted to write at his place was to be an exact description of the world and also proof of the fact that the whole so-called world is an invention, our life doesn’t take place in it at all, it only represents a description undertaken with such sincerity that it makes us believe we are living it;
. . after all, everything that one experiences has long since lost all credibility, all value as evidence, as has what was perhaps formerly called reality, and we now have no more clear idea of it than of the images thrown at us in a hall of mirrors, in which we annul the representations of our ideas, those that were forced upon us, and everything connected with them in space and time, and simultaneously in time and space, that’s the gist of what she said, isn’t it?
. . was this illusion in keeping with her existence, is that why she had disappeared for a while inside the world of mirrors of her own thoughts, or was Burgmüller in her opinion a figment of her imagination who could thus be very easily deleted at any time from said hall-of-mirror thoughts. .?
When he got home that afternoon, however, his fears proved to have been unfounded, because she had come after all. She was sitting in the room he had intended for her, so absorbed in her work that it seemed she had already spent weeks or months at the desk that was now hers, and the desk, for its part, was already so intensively and naturally in her service and her possession that it seemed it had always belonged to her, and she was sitting at the typewriter she had brought along with her and didn’t even stop typing after he had politely knocked at the door and walked in to welcome her, to express his pleasure at her finally turning up, to embrace her — whereupon she warded him off, rejected him, let him feel right away that his walking into this room bothered her, indeed it bothered her a great deal, his arrival was inconvenient for her, could he please try next time to come at a more convenient time than he had now; she acted as if she had always been present in these rooms of his apartment, for years in fact, and he, having turned up as her guest, really ought to kindly show more consideration, more restraint in future, without getting pushy or being a nuisance, yes, given that she was allowing him to be at her place, she asked that he be a little less presumptuous, and the first thing she threw at him then in a commanding tone of voice, proceeding to the day’s agenda without a word of greeting, was a word chunk that sounded something like attention, or even pay attention.
Burgmüller didn’t understand what she meant, wasn’t fazed by her unfriendly behavior, and asked what it was he was supposed to pay attention to, he didn’t know, yes, what is it?
What is it likely to be, she asked, well, what did he think it was, what?
Yes, what, he asked.
Then she spoke about certain people who were on their trail, anyway somewhere nearby, in the neighborhood, dangerously close, yes, they had certainly been after them for a long time now, regardless of where they happened to be, or hadn’t he noticed that?
Once again, he didn’t know what she was talking about, what was nearby or behind them, there was someone downstairs, yes, as far as he knew, below them, far below, the janitor, but even he wasn’t there, actually, his post had been abandoned, and Burgmüller didn’t know if the position had been advertised again or not, but he didn’t say anything yet about the vacant janitorial position, instead he just asked her, who, whom do you mean?
The people who are spying on us, our spies, of course, she replied in a tone of voice designed to make him feel she found his negligence very stupid, because who else would it be but those people, the ones she kept talking about so secretively, presumably their spies still didn’t suspect that the two of them were talking with each other again so freely, instead of just writing to each other, even if they were doing so in secret, and keeping it hidden, but even he knew that people like that had extraordinarily good hearing.
He still didn’t know what she was talking about, was she just going out of her way to avoid being more specific, that’s certainly what he began to suspect, she’s afraid of an eavesdropper, he thought, that much is clear, of someone eavesdropping on their conversation, a so-called voyeur who might possibly be in attendance when they began exchanging loving gestures, yes, he could understand to some extent that she wouldn’t want anyone listening when she made her first intimate gestures toward him, that’s why she wanted to make very sure right from the start that no unauthorized person might be listening to them in secret; but he could put her mind at rest in that regard, since his neighbors had all moved out, both the ones on the left and the ones on the right, as well as all the people on the floor below, quite some time ago now, and in the basement, as mentioned, there could at most have been the janitor, but in Burgmüller’s opinion this man too was absent, and therefore unable to eavesdrop on anything, not even unintentionally.