No, said Burgmüller, never again.
Those were good times, when the birds were still alive, she went on with her story, and maybe everything we now long for really did exist back then, and not just in descriptions; back then, no one could drown in the ocean or the lakes, because as soon as anyone had even hinted at beginning to call for help, one of the giant sailor-swifts came swimming over right away as fast as possible, grabbed the body of the endangered person gently with its beak, lifted him out of the water, and didn’t just carry him back to shore, but took him right in through the open window of a beach house and laid him on a bed, or if all the windows were shut, took him into the corridor through an open door, a giant swimming swift like that would if necessary have broken a window for you with its beak, or have pushed down a door for you, howsoever firmly bolted, and it would have undertaken many other things for you as well; or, as you told me yourself, didn’t they carry you out of that spinach-purée-colored swampy ground that day, past all the white huts you mentioned, hovering in the shadow of their giant linen sails for several hours — you said back then it seemed to you to be the longest of all trips you had ever undertaken, until ahead of you the broadly spreading fan of a glittering beach with sand dunes opened up and you were put down there on the eyebrow of a curving coastline of gleaming feldspar slate, and the waves breaking against it flushed out your eyes so that you could see clearly at last. So that was life, you thought to yourself, and looked out from the land after the giant swifts that were floating away from you, then along the arc of the beach with its decorative dunes gleaming in the sunlight, the flashes of light seeming to point you toward the end of the arc of shoreline, as far as your eyes could see, but in fact there was something lying there, something very dark, very far away, rather like a large sack, or something else that was piled up somehow, and your gaze was irresistibly drawn to it, then also your steps, and what was lying there on the seabed in the swell, like a frayed earlobe filled to overflowing, puffed up, pointing upward, wrinkled and bulging, washed to shore by the waves, was actually the massive carcass of an animal whose body size far surpassed yours, its swollen, bloated skin almost bursting from the gases formed by decomposition inside its dead body.
Yes, Burgmüller thought he remembered that the animal which had run aground there was a dead pig, but he had never been entirely sure about it.
That’s about as far as your story goes about what happened back then, she said, that’s approximately how it’s remained in my memory from your own storytelling. Back then was when I first turned up with many others inside one of those white huts you mentioned, maybe it was a changing hut where we were supposed to put on our bathing suits, but that didn’t happen, I no longer know why, but when we walked out of the hut into the open air and went to the beach, I could already see the giant carcass from afar, the largest dead animal I’d ever seen, and very small beside it, for the first time in my life, you. At first you were standing there almost as if you wanted to have us believe, as we approached, that you had just shot this gigantic animal, but that was only how it happened to look, because in reality you had gotten rather unfortunately caught in it or on it, yes, you were hanging very unhappily in the air, because you had obviously overlooked the fact that the carcass was growing constantly and wasn’t about to stop: instead, seemingly from within, it blew itself out and up and billowed farther and farther up into the sky, so that the bristles of its red, swollen skin stood on end, and you were dangling from them so high up that we, who were finally assembled around you and the dead animal, couldn’t help you at all in that unbearably oppressive calm, but then the wind did blow after all, a very strong wind came out of all the holes in the carcass, really roaring, spraying outward through the tightly stretched animal skin, through its eyes, ears, mouth, and all the other openings as well, as if death personified had become visible to us out of the anal opening available to it on this crescent-shaped shore, not only before all our eyes, but also directly in our faces, without being even a little bit ashamed about it, you know what I mean — in any case, for me, since that time, death has lost all solemnity and dignity, which is admittedly of no consequence to it, to death, but since then I simply can’t show it any more respect, you know what I mean? The downdraft it let loose at us back then was of great help to you, however, because that gale from inside the carcass jolted you out of your uncomfortable position at last, shook you off, and along with the deathdowndraft on that shore, you were thrown right at our feet, and you got up slowly, and I thought you would soon start to talk to me, when the wind out of the animal’s body suddenly stopped, yes, the carcass had collapsed in on itself like an empty sack and lay there really listlessly, lay at our feet in the blazing sun, burst and limp like a giant jellyfish transparently evaporating.