How Burgmüller had longed for this night, desperately, as if it were a matter of life or death for him.
Her affection for him had been carefully built up over the course of months, and, as she in the end assured him, with much persistence on her part — how could it have suddenly turned against him now, with the force of an erupting volcano?
If she was in this state, why had she still come to his place, inflicting on him, of all people, and apparently him alone, her almost childishly impudent, so seemingly hard-hearted, stubborn way of seeing herself; was it perhaps that this was merely the most robust of her few, still-remaining faculties of thought and feeling as she underwent a transitory loss of personality, which had broken out paradoxically as a merciless frenzy of the subconscious that soon buried the ruins of her remaining feelings beneath it?
Maybe she had come to him because she knew very well that he would accept her as an equal, even in this state. . yes, he thought, the way she was now, any other man would either throw her out or take measures behind her back to have her institutionalized. .
For a short while he really did think she had gone mad, at least temporarily; this was indisputably evident. . but no, he didn’t think she had become feeble-minded, it seemed rather that she had become strong-minded, in a way that had nothing to do with megalomania: instead, her mind seemed subordinated to some sort of violent power plant that tirelessly animated her thoughts and feelings, making the sharpened circular saws of her thoughts cut right into her own head. .
She needs my help, thought Burgmüller, otherwise she wouldn’t have come like this. . or has she come to me without noticing that she has done so, just as she hardly notices me, doesn’t seem to have recognized me at all, but in the farthest corner of her being, even as her memory is seeping away, she has the irresistible feeling that she belongs to me, especially now, as never before, he thought, and so she had simply come to him without much ado, without even finding it strange. . wasn’t it good that she had done so, or at least good enough, for a while, better than if she weren’t there at all? (He couldn’t yet begin to think of the possibility that she might never be there again without getting the shivers, and feeling as he trembled that he was being scorched to the point of burning up, until there seemed to be nothing left of him but a smoking clump of ice. .)
Did he really think it was so much better that she had come to him in that state rather than staying away, when her coming to him showed that she was so terribly distanced from him, there in the adjoining room, where behind her door now, within her four walls, a private little dried out, steppe-like autumn had broken out in her room (perhaps because he had neglected to remove the wilted, weathered flowers from the room he had prepared for her on that day long ago, the day of her initially announced arrival, when she of course did not arrive, but he had gotten ready for her just the same, and he hadn’t gone into the room since that day, and it might be that in the meantime it had been all too abandoned, so that something had grown over or gone wild there) — and surrounded by the abovementioned very privately-occurring autumn in her room, she sat at her typewriter, very focused on her work, already having described her way far into her own story, and as she wrote, all the banging and hammering of the typewriter was often subordinated to a considerable murmuring or suddenly-arising rustling of the erratic autumn air being pushed back and forth and chased up and down through her room, air produced by this passionately intense work on her narrative, blown steadily and strongly out of her typewriter, so that soon even the dried yellow leaves painted close together on the wallpaper were also affected by the unexpected arrival of the season in the room, and they likewise started murmuring and began rustling, until the painted leaves fell from all four walls, swirled up to the pale ceiling with a rustling sound, and soon fluttered and hovered down to the abandoned, overgrown autumn garden on the floor of the room; and did the softly whispering drizzle, the crackling sound that then began, represent a change in the narrative weather of her story — was all this really spraying out of her typewriter? — or was this only advance notice of the typical autumn rainstorm that would soon perhaps burst from one of the corners of the ceiling, sprinkling stucco from the walls, cracking the plaster, causing the sky of the room to flake off and pour down, so that this autumn room would finally get a thorough soaking? — but no, the storm was spent much too soon, and had rolled back past the agitated attic it had blown through, under whose protection she sat unchanged at her typewriter, behind the autumnal room door that locked her in, as far away from her neighbor Burgmüller as she would be on a different continent, as if the narrow hallway that divided his apartment had expanded into a very dark ocean that was almost invincibly separating them and keeping them apart; would it not have been better if she hadn’t come at all, or hadn’t come yet; or would she then never have come? And yet, the fact that she was in his apartment meant that there was certainly something that could still be salvaged; besides, he thought, albeit almost surreptitiously, it’s much more important for me to love you initially in vain than to have nearly lost touch with you forever, to hold you in contempt as I curse my luck. .
Still. . was that supposed to be their first night together? He didn’t want to think it, so he wondered for a long time if he should go to her in her room again and ask her lovingly if she didn’t want to come out to him. . no, first of all, she would hardly understand what he meant, or wouldn’t want to understand it, and besides, he could still hear her typing, and whispering as she did so, and she would hardly let herself be distracted from the work in her head. . unless she suddenly surprised him, appearing in his room here quick as lightning, because, as she had proven before, he could expect many surprises from her? But the longer he waited, the less likely that seemed to him.
The disappointment of wounded longing covered him with a blanket of light sleep, with a dream of snow flurries that enveloped his room to the music of her typing; it was coming through now like drumbeats from frozen tropical forests that had ice rain hissing through their leaves — was it possible that it had meanwhile become winter in her room, had a new year just begun there, already snowing down from the attic onto her white paper, the sooty snow of the letters of the alphabet that comprised her story? Then, from the twilight of his thoughts, it became clear to him that she was having a much harder time of it than he was: of course it hadn’t escaped him that she had already begun her story, but it was likely, and this was something he hadn’t recognized right away, that she wasn’t just writing her story, not just putting it down on paper, but was also living it, going through it, experiencing it for herself, while writing her story of the invented world she had gotten trapped in the invented world of her story, a prisoner and at the same time an actor in her story, she couldn’t behave in any other way, that was it, nothing else existed for her apart from the story she was living and simultaneously writing by putting the plot down on paper, and at the same time she was bodily a part of the story she was depicting, without any distance from it, without hovering above it like other inventors of traditional stories, but almost in danger of being crushed by her storytelling, oh dear, how was she going to get through it all without going crazy, or even crazier than she already was, or had she, on account of her story, been crazy right from the start, had the invention of her own narrative world moved her into the one story, her own, that could not offer her safe haven, instead offering a lot of approximate paths toward — at best — the most dangerous adventures, so that she wouldn’t entirely founder in the hopeless depths of her thoughts, but would rise up again onto the snow-white paper surface of an ocean initially without a shore, on whose waves — frozen, as in slow motion — she could only travel from the horizon of one empty piece of paper to the next when she had covered the surface of the sea with her writing, so one could only hope that the life of her story would not turn out to be too long. .