What was he blathering on about, she cut him short, what nonsense, to talk about something some time ago now, what a waste of words, some time ago now—didn’t he know that the past had gotten lost in the river beyond the city limits; didn’t he know that some time ago now, as she went on to explain, was nothing but a fumigated wasps’ nest, know what I mean?
What was he supposed to know, he was alienated by the way this charming person had changed for the worse, she seemed to be in the grip of an unfounded and uncontrollable aggression toward him, and he racked his brains as to what might have sent her into such a rage, what might have caused such ill will right at the beginning of their cohabitation, what had he done wrong? He hoped they would get along better as time went on, but she interrupted him right away, soon as he dared say that, what did he mean, talking about a sort of time that presumably “went on,” did he even know what time was? No? Time is at most the smell of an autumn landscape burning at the beginning of springtime.
But it does pass, he replied.
Only in a virtual sense, she said, nothing more, reality has been reduced to an ancillary act, strictly speaking there are only the words and sentences being written right now, by her, as he can see, as he has known for a long time, written numbers and letters of the alphabet, what seems to be happening right now is nothing more than a sort of symbol for what is being written at the moment; there is, no, actually nothing more, nothing more to say about it, no landscapes, no grass, life is a substitute for words; it was supposed to help explain their meaning by the simple fact of its turning up, but it can’t even begin to do that, no, maybe it could at one time, some time ago now, but there wasn’t even a some time ago now some time ago, the words some time ago are just an abandoned beehive whose dusty wax was put together to make an understandable explanation of the words some time ago!
But we, the two of us, Burgmüller tried to object, because the two of them still seemed as if they were really there. .
Only as letters of the alphabet, nothing more.
Now he was at his wits’ end, it was becoming clear to him that she was disagreeing with him on everything, and not being able to agree with what she said in turn, he tried to defend his point of view, he described to her the walks they had gone on together out in the countryside, and how the two of them had controlled the flocks of birds available to them in the sky, directing them through the air, and he asked if she remembered how the atmosphere had become a huge television screen for them, on which they had playfully let the birdfolk line up by each other like fleets of ships on paper maps of the ocean, or had swept them across the windowpanes of the horizon’s display cases like swarms of butterflies; she certainly couldn’t have the heart to deny that all of that had happened, but if she did, the two of them could go out again right away for a refresher course, she would see. .
What do you want, how are you going to prove anything? she asked; you’re much too feeble to get even a millimeter out of this room with me, no, you won’t get me a millimeter away from here, just try it!
There was no point: caught in the framework of her assertions, he couldn’t even have taken her out of her room by physical force, and he could see she wouldn’t be ready to leave it under her own power anytime soon, for reasons that he didn’t entirely understand; but there was certainly nothing more to be done today, he resolved to agree with her now about everything on this first day, to give in to her, no matter how unreasonable her demands.
She went on, saying it’s as if we were just made up of a few letters of the alphabet, a cipher, don’t you sense that too, think about it, feel it, we might even have already lost exact designations, names, I for one no longer know what my name is or is said to be or was once said to have been, and I know nothing more about you, nothing more about you than I know about myself, no name; or do you perhaps remember what my name is said to be, or what your name is?
Given her present confusion, which was probably the result of finding herself in new surroundings on this first day the two of them were properly together, this first day of a future they would share, he of course didn’t dare to tell her either what her name was or to divulge his own, for he felt that now, in her presence, he wasn’t allowed to know those things, so if he now revealed her and his names to her, she might possibly misunderstand it, see it as an indication of her vulnerability in her transitory state, indeed, as mockery, yes, the naming of her name right now would plunge her into the deepest despair, and now that he was keeping her name secret from her, his name had no business there either, not at all, he thought, and he said that he didn’t know anything about any names, what names could she mean, why was she suddenly talking about names — until now they’d gotten along famously for the longest time without names, so why were they suddenly supposed to have names? Yes, maybe at some other time they should have thought to ask each other what the names were that they would still have had back then, but. .
That time has long since passed, she replied, it’s barely perceptible anymore, it lay far behind them, do you understand, it’s not anywhere up there, over there, or down there, she seemed to be pointing out the window, out beyond the city.
Where, he asked.
There, where all the other people were or had to have been, the people they had known some time ago, she replied, when all of us were together, and she spoke of a room, tried to describe it, and at first just found the word “immense,” and indeed this room must have spread out so far in all directions that it was like a landscape without horizons, a landscape that rolled in toward them from the open places of a slightly hilly coastal plain, right up to the very steep walls that closed off the shore, and the ocean, too, as she remembered, had also been carefully sealed off back then, didn’t he remember anything about it at all anymore, had he retained nothing of it in his thoughts?
Probably not, Burgmüller replied, because it seemed best to him to be somewhat doubtful about any current view of how things had looked, or at least to let it appear doubtful.
Nevertheless, she stuck to her room landscape, together with the walls along the shore at the beginning of the ocean, it’s still fleetingly in my memory, just hints of it, do you understand?
Yes, yes, he replied, but hadn’t she herself just asked what memory meant, if there was no proof for it?
It was unbelievable, but now she was suddenly agreeing with him, Burgmüller seemed to have found the right words, the appropriate way of speaking, the correct tone of voice for this difficult situation; the day had almost seemed lost, but now he had come out ahead, even if he still didn’t know why she had gotten so strange, why she was still rejecting him even though they had decided to live together for an indeterminate span of time; or had he misunderstood her yet again, she was entirely immersed once more in a sentence that seemed particularly decisive as she typed it, she had turned away from him, as if for her everything had been brought to a close satisfactorily; as she continued typing her important new sentence, attending to its message, her writing was accompanied by whispering, by sentence fragments rustling outward from her lips, fragments that were at first unintelligible to him, but then he thought they formed the kernel of some secret bulletin, as if by operating her typewriter she was simultaneously operating radio equipment, and as she tapped in her written sentences she was also transmitting encoded messages of entirely different content, sending them out of the room, through the open window, into the early evening, into the darkness of the coming night, and sending them inward too, directly to the focal point of their first night together, at the start of a journey that might possibly get even more difficult than it had been up to now.