He resolved, therefore, to do everything he could to help her get through her story, but how? Well, he thought then, only when I have succeeded in getting through this story with her and extracting her from it, only when I have accompanied her through her entire story, then. . yes, then. . he could be sure that his life together with her, the life he had been longing for, for such a long time, would finally begin. . because then she would have to feel more attached and obliged to him than to anyone else (in the whole world, he thought). .
The longer he thought about it, the more difficult, almost insoluble and unavoidably inevitable her situation became, for him as welclass="underline"
On the one hand, she was in search of self; on the other hand, she was in search of the world, or a world, or even a world in herself or around about her. At least she herself, as a person, seemed able to exist, to have a clear if uncertain sense of herself, and didn’t need to do all that much running around after the outlines of her own experience, but the world in her and her invented picture of her surroundings had to be assembled again and again as she did the work of writing and living her story: it was a ceaselessly laborious, unnerving piecing together of her surroundings, which she then destroyed again right away, setting out such destructively questioning answers that she repeatedly destroyed the invention of her imagination, which, in her opinion, didn’t and couldn’t “really” exist, because it had to be forever invented and inspected anew, and because the environment she lived in, that is, the environment of her story, as well as her story with herself in the middle of her story world, which she was gradually constructing in and around herself, was a copy of the so-called “real” world, which too had thereby come to seem like her own invention. .
He would have to hold her tight, he thought, so that she wouldn’t get lost forever in this story, because — since she no longer found anything right about herself, which is why she was always setting off again in search of self, trying to reinvent herself — she might possibly have become one of her own inventions, and have invented a self so distant from the original that she wouldn’t be able to find anything recognizable left over from herself. .
On tiptoe, he crossed the dark corridor again to her door, while behind it the wild singing of cicadas had broken out, like the roaring of an ocean now springing out of her typewriter, and he carefully opened the door a crack and looked at her, she had her back half turned to him, sitting under the reading lamp by the open window, where the turbulent waves of her far-flung, white-capped sentences were washed out into the night, the first they’d spend together, accompanied by the whispering of her lips, which, to him, sounded almost tender, he could make out several sentence fragments and connecting words, with which she might have been conjuring up fear, presumably her own fear of her story, fear of having gotten caught in its windsails, which she probably described in more detail, windsail-nets behind the eye-curtain of a coming typhoon, or something like that, bound by the colorfully striped ribbon of some coastline, somehow hanging down from a balcony in the air, or also, additionally, with her skin injured by prickly lightbush tendrils that then finally fluttered or sprayed away in the web of shadows of a dark brown dusk, or something like that, accompanied perhaps by the sound-box cabins of some carbide-lampboats or some other ocean-going steamer with a ship’s orchestra hauling beach songs, while he saw the late night hours come through the window behind her and spring into her face, half turned away from him, they were mirrored faintly in the darkened bays of her skin, and then, traveling farther up her face, they sank into the last hiding places of the sources of her field of vision, into the low-lying areas of her eyes, through the curtains of the cornea, filtered by the retina, all the way behind her forehead into her head, and she hadn’t noticed him through the crack of the door, and he silently closed it again so as not to disturb her as she prepared to invent the following night; he withdrew into the cold dream of light sleep in his lonely room, restless, until the description of her daybreak seemed to penetrate through to his stalled diving bell, in which Burgmüller had by then at last been lowered into a thicket of fog for a while, exhausted, at peace. .
He hadn’t been able to talk to her for days, she kept to herself and her narrative; did she intend to lock him out of her story. .?
Even on that morning, when he entered her room after politely knocking, asking her permission, she didn’t find it at all necessary to respond to his best wishes for the day that had dawned; instead, she just answered with a piece of advice, that he should watch out, be careful;
when he asked what or who he was supposed to watch out for, she spoke again of those people who could listen in on everything, whereupon he calmed her down once more by pointing out that their building was as good as empty, as were the surrounding buildings;
but she explained to him that those people were put there to keep an eye on them, or something like that, so that the two of them wouldn’t talk to each other without taking notes, because that was forbidden, as everyone knew, or something like that;
but instead of going on to ask the why and wherefore of it all, he again tried to convince her that, as he had already explained, there wasn’t the slightest possibility of anyone being nearby, because at this point in her story, which seemed to be unpleasant for her, he didn’t want to bother her; instead, obligingly, he tried to be unobtrusive in his approach to her life and her daily routine, accompanying her safely and kindly, to get as close to her as possible, which seemed to be fine with her on this particular day, because she returned to her previous topic of the watchers, drawing his attention to the building across the way that the two of them could see through the window, its crumbling walls supported by crutches of scaffolding whose framework of beams was shrouded by reed-mat curtains, and they kept seeing several suspicious figures behind the curtains, masons or other construction workers, he thought, but she warned him about these figures, why for instance did they come staggering out onto the scaffolding more often than necessary, surely he could see that this was suspicious, again and again they came out from the building there that was supported by scaffolding, from the individual levels of scaffolding leaned against the building walls, through the woven reed-mat curtains that enveloped them as well as the framework, in spite of the wind that was causing the woven reeds to billow out alarmingly against the mica-cellar surface of the sky above; but always, just as it seemed the figures would fall, they glided back onto the scaffold floors that in turn were leaning toward them, yes, those figures there, who sometimes waved down at them from the sky, boldly and impudently, or out from the gaps and cracks in the reed-mat curtains, yes, who were they, what did he think, she asked again, yes: they were the people she’d mentioned, that’s who they were, as she suspected with great certainty, the people she had been talking about before, yes, the watchers, who were observing them very closely from across the way, do you understand?! In the future, they would just have to be much more careful, and not talk to each other as freely as they were now; instead, at least pro forma, it would be better, in their present situation, to conduct their conversations in writing, so did he finally understand now?