With what, asked Burgmüller, did I compare your face back then?
With a letter of the alphabet, she answered, I think with a capital or a lowercase O!
And then she whispered something to him very quietly in confidence: Listen, don’t tell anyone what I’m going to say to you now, because it’s one of my most intimate secrets that no one else will know now other than you, listen, my breasts, they look like, what do you think, yes, they look like a capital B from the German word LIEBE written in capital letters, which means LOVE. .!
At last she too was broaching this topic, thought Burgmüller, sure again of her still feeling affection for him.
He wanted to be able to lose himself in her with great certainty, without always being in search of himself while doing so, without being distracted or being caught off guard by a view of his own person being forced on him, which had nothing at all to do with him.
Because his love for her should be as strong as possible, he didn’t want to have anything more at all to do with himself, at least insofar as those painful thoughts that were bothering him and keeping him in their grip were concerned; instead, he wanted to be aware of himself only through contact with the woman he loved, as intensely as possible, to the point of wounding himself most gently, but also ardently, and this would equip him with an entirely new or newly acquired feeling for life, it would not only make his own presence more bearable but also make him capable, in an as-yet-undetermined state, of being at peace, if in a strangely agitated way, possessed of self-love that would make it possible for him to move beyond his present hopelessly deep loss of affection for her, and to fall in love with her again. .
This feeling of confidence let him forget almost everything that had happened until then, so he went to her, wanting to embrace her, joyful that the two of them together had overcome the dangers of their adventure till now, which had almost resulted in the annihilation of their love, but she turned him away.
When he was unexpectedly repulsed again, it pressed the contents of his skull out of his head, as if he and the room would just flow away out of the apartment down the stairwell, and then a blocked circulatory floodgate from the rainy sky outside pushed the mist through the window and up into his eyes, blurring his vision, yes, so he seemed to have been hurt at last, because he himself didn’t know exactly what he told her then about the lonely dawning of his dangerously threatened half-light of longing, but it went something like this: Who did she think he was, she, a woman he had loved and desired like no other before her, with such hopelessness that if he were allowed to spend one single night with her, and he was deadly serious about this, yes, he would be prepared to die for it, yes indeed, she’d heard him correctly, she had brought him to the point where he thought that such a death wasn’t actually very much to pay at all for the opportunity to sleep with her just once; he had never complained about the fact that he had to suffer an assortment of agonies when abetting the way she saw herself made self-denial a compulsory daily exercise for him, nor had he complained about any of the humiliations that had endearingly come his way, that he regarded as a valuable part of the time they had spent together, and so on.
You’re right, she tried to calm him down, what I have expected of you till now was too much to bear, but the fact that you have nevertheless made the attempt for me, and that you will continue to bear it, may save us both someday. But how stupid of you, how stupid you are, don’t you understand, we can’t even love each other properly yet — if we could just describe to each other how we would go about loving each other, then we would really love each other unconditionally forever; your nights, even the nights you spend together with me, must continue to remain lonely for you, because we can’t sleep with each other; at most we might someday describe sleeping with each other, if, in addition to our other and vitally necessary descriptions, we find we have a little time left over for that. .
She knew how to create a weather system throughout the apartment that was independent of the weather outside, an apartment weather of their own that prevailed only in their rooms.
For example, it could be a hot, dry summer day outside in the city, but if she wanted a humid climate in the apartment, all the rooms became overcast behind a hazy curtain of clouds.
If it was humid and tropical outside, she could make the air in the rooms so dry all day that it started to crackle.
Even if there was brilliant sunshine outside, clouds crossed the ceilings of their rooms, or vice versa.
Sometimes it even rained in the rooms.
That’s not to say that she always created apartment weather in opposition to the city weather, no, sometimes there were quite similar or even identical conditions outside and inside, but he was a little annoyed that she didn’t discuss the apartment weather with him in advance or limit the weather she wanted to her room, leaving him his weather in his rooms, but when he once carefully tried to broach the subject with her, she denied everything, the weather in the apartment, no, she didn’t have anything to do with that, how could he get such an idea.
Once — or had he dreamed it — he woke up in the night, that is, it wasn’t night at all in his room, it wasn’t dark, though outside in the city, as was clearly visible through his window, it was indisputably the dead of night, while it was bright as day in his room, and that without an electric light!
Another time, in the middle of the day, it had gotten pitch-black inside, even though the curtains weren’t shut, and through the windows one could see the gleaming daylight wandering over the rooftops, but it couldn’t or didn’t want to come in through the open window, the light simply brushed along the walls of the building, ignored the windows, brushed quivering past the dark rooms, so that one stood at the bright windows in rooms that were black through and through and observed the day outside through the window glass like a huge, bright, illuminated aquarium that stood in an entirely dark room.
Do you know that I’m very often afraid? she asked.
Why? he responded, afraid of what?
Of you, she answered, and of the fact that you may only be here to keep an eye on me, that you’re betraying me, writing down information about me, furtively writing down what I tell you in secret, that you’re just pretending it’s nice to talk with me, pretending that you’re doing so entirely of your own accord; has it never occurred to you that I could deceive you, betray you, by writing down later what you’re saying to me now?
The thought only crossed his mind once, very fleetingly, he answered, but when he thought about it some more he considered it impossible.
Why did the two of us turn up in this room here, how did it happen, where did we come from, and why did we get separated from all the others? she asked, why don’t people separate us, since they must suspect we will make another attempt to break out of everything? One might almost think that they’re only allowing it so that we can observe each other. Do you understand? That’s the reason for my having doubts about us being together. Maybe someone is playing with us, and everything we do in secret is transformed into writing behind our backs, without our knowing about it, even though we think we’ve taken effective means to prevent that from happening, and that’s why I’ve asked you again and again if anyone can hear us or observe us here, perhaps through the walls. .
Again, Burgmüller assured her that the neighbors had moved out and the janitor’s position was vacant. .