Yes, Burgmüller remembered it more clearly now, but why, he asked her, was the dead pig washed up on the beach by the waves, how did a pig get into the ocean?
I don’t exactly know that either, she answered, I only fleetingly remember how it was explained to us on that day by the teacher in charge of our group, dumped off a ship into the waves, accidentally falling or deliberately being thrown overboard because it must have been a sick animal, is what the teacher told us, although he seemed rather uneasy about the whole thing, or, he speculated, it might have fallen into the water from an airship and then been washed up there, if it really was a pig, yes, at first he too spoke about a pig or, more precisely, a sow, but when this completely wilted, floppy, saclike carcass at our feet began to stand at attention again, which is to say as it started to inflate again, to really pump itself up, as if it were sucking the globe dry through a hole beneath it, then the teacher went on to talk about a wild boar, maybe just so that we wouldn’t get in the habit of using the word “sow,” but then he was suddenly talking about the aurochs carcass that was lying there before them, and while the dead framework kept pumping itself up, he of course changed what he was calling it yet again, spoke of a stranded bison that had been lying there since primeval or prehistoric times, preserved in excellent condition by strange circumstances that the teacher himself could not explain, but there it was, towering up before them, at least until he spoke of a primeval elephant sow, or a mammoth pig, then settled on a raging, charging rhinoceros, followed by a hippopotamus, left over from a circus ship that, as he explained it, had foundered far out in the ocean, yes, sometimes it almost seemed as though the carcass, which went on swelling up, was being spurred on in its expansion by the teacher’s explanations, or indeed that the explanations were causing the expansion, and, by the way, it should long since have needed to burst again, as it had done once before already, but no, unbelievably, this time the dead thing didn’t burst at all, far from it, it was astonishing what this animal skin, already bulging out so far, was able to withstand: it crept higher and higher up into the early evening sky, towered up into the darkness of night, stretched out along the firmament, swaying farther outwards, almost as if it were being pumped up by an industrial-sized bellows, and the teacher’s commentary was naturally dominated now by even larger sorts of animals, the names of which I have unfortunately forgotten, and now, and now it would soon have to burst at last, out of all its holes, one sensed that from the teacher’s talk — he seemed quite helpless and clueless to his class, faced with this phenomenon — and he must also have been hoping that the evening sky, which was already quite filled with the animal skin, would burst open at last, because he would soon be at a loss for words, so he also started to describe in advance this blowing out of the holes of the dead evening-sky-animal, which in his opinion would have to start soon, calling it the night wind, but as it turned out he was wrong about that, because nothing burst, not a single zeppelin or balloon was blown off its course by this death’s-carcass wind, nothing was blown down at us, nothing was stranded on the beach, no sinking boat tore the evening’s furry hide: all I can say with certainty — do you remember? — is that our dead animal used its fur to form a dome around the dawning darkness, its skin kept steadfastly expanding, and we could clearly hear it rustling and roaring as it kept swelling up, arching over the plain, as if we were suddenly inside it. .
Burgmüller remembered all that, but didn’t know how the story went from there and asked her, since she had stopped her recitation, what else happened on that evening, how everything had continued on from there, to what conclusion had it led, how did it end?
Unfortunately I don’t know, she answered, and you can’t know it either, because it had already gotten late, and dark, as you know, so we had to go home quickly, we weren’t allowed to stay there on the beach by the dead animal, or under it, or in it any longer, don’t you remember that. .?
No.
Of course our bell-like children’s voices, sad from disappointment, had flown pleadingly through the twilight, because all of us would much rather have kept watching the dead night-sky animal for a while longer, but then all of us together, including you, as if you had always been with us and hadn’t just turned up among us on that day, dove back into one of those white changing huts, I think, or were submerged in it, or something like that; in any case, the two of us surfaced again the next day, for the first time you and I were in the same classroom of the school where the teacher held flowers up in the air before our eyes and called out, see, a flower! — who knows, maybe even those flowers on that day back then were already made of paper, or were artistic, silky stars made of twisted cloth, I can barely remember them — but from then on, everything had to be written, described, taken down as notes; behind us there was someone watching to make sure we really did take notes properly, that we didn’t talk with each other unnecessarily while doing so, it was forbidden, even then; do you still remember that the person who was keeping us under surveillance had a completely bald head that mirrored the rows of windows in the classroom so brightly that it always seemed as if he had no head at all but just a goldfish bowl on his shoulders that was filled with cloudy streaks of algae. .?
Even at that time we sometimes looked at each other in secret, do you remember, she went on, we exchanged the clothing of our glances.
Did we, he asked, already try to describe each other back then, to compare our faces?
Yes, she answered, mainly because we didn’t know anything about our own appearance, because we didn’t have a mirror, I don’t know why, that’s the reason we looked into each other’s eyes, very deeply, because we thought we could recognize the indistinct outlines of our own faces, until people caught us at it and threatened to take our eyes away.
Were mirrors so dangerous then, that glances were forbidden? he asked.
I don’t know exactly, she said, we were just supposed to learn to write first, to describe everything correctly, to practice noting things down, without being tempted to save our words by copying from a mirror; because mirrors simply repeat everything, exactly the other way around, blind trust in a mirror prevents you from describing things without losing your balance, and anyway, have you never noticed that a mirror repeats everything really stupidly, it repeats like a parrot whatever happens to fall toward it, but not even you could possibly maintain that a parrot with all its parroting can explain or delimit its environment; only after we learned to mistrust even the mirrors of our own eyes could we begin to describe our faces accurately to each other and to compare them with each other, do you understand?