Was this description from her story of a common past also a future that seemed desirable to her in a destroyed, ossified world, or had she simply seen the people of that city outside the window as if behind transparent walls, temporarily stripped of their houses, in which they’d been individually buried together, without ever being able to really discover each other?
Yes, for a short time Burgmüller too had seen those people relieved of their houses, and for a short while the houses had hopped up several meters into the air, but now the occupants had their walls properly wrapped around them again. On that occasion the behavior of even the poorest huts was, although not improper, substantially livelier, louder than that of the inhabitants who were hiding behind their splintering wooden walls.
More and more benches in the parks had grown tired of the people sitting on them. They started bouncing, shaking the boards of their seating surfaces, hopping up and down as soon as anyone sat down on them. The sitting people were then thrown off, as if by a horse; or even before someone thought to rest on them, they put a stop to it at the outset by hopping backward or to the side, surprisingly dodging the back that was already bent in preparation for them and the leather pulled tight over someone’s seat, or they clapped the boards of their seating surfaces vertically to the backrests, so that the people in the park wound up sitting not on them but on the ground. Or while people were sitting on the benches and comfortably leaning back, the benches got tired, leaned back too, stretched, and slowly slithered away, or they banged down all at once: the thoraxes of the sitting people dangling backward into the grass.
For days we crept on through the room-hall-landscape, she said, going on with her story, under tables, hitting our foreheads against the backs of the chairs on which all the other people were sitting in those days; creeping under the benches between tangled grass shrubs, we sometimes pinched them very hard in the leg, which they gave no sign of noticing — they didn’t even twitch — as we then crept farther along the walls, and soon it seemed unexpectedly that our hike was only growing longer and longer. Did no one, no, really no one notice or find remarkable our disappearance, no, rather our distancing ourselves, because it probably would have taken a while longer for us to properly have disappeared — or was our disappearing-distancing not at all able to be a properly distanced disappearance? Perhaps we also overestimated the significance of our worthy figures or persons and their respective distanced disappearances. Were we, together with our disappearance-distances, not interesting enough to anyone at all for considerable fuss to be made about our escape, and then, if so, what remained that would ever be of any significance at all? Nevertheless, for us, all of this had become like a — our — first adventure, an adventure holiday from a childhood we had never been able to comprehend, like a jointly delayed departure carried out from a parental home that had remained unknown — how long were we at it, that was difficult, impossible to estimate, it seemed rather endlessly long that we were ducking under benches, tables, rows of chairs; now and then we also, as already mentioned, ducked through between some legs we came across that had been placed in our way, scratching our faces in the undergrowth of flooring, the mounting piles of parquet slats growing rampant on the completely neglected, rotted, room-steppe-hill, until we were weakened to the point of exhaustion, and in order to be able to go on, we stopped bothering to bend down and duck, that took too much energy: instead, walking upright, we remained standing from time to time, without making any attempt to conceal ourselves now; but even then no one noticed us, until, continuing the travels we had begun, we finally arrived at a rushing seawall of almost incalculable height rising up before us: we walked along its gray, churned-up, sometimes foamy white, spraying-spitting shadows, along the perpendicularly erected surf boundary at our side, where we finally rested, our burning backs leaning against the coolness of the taciturnly beginning ocean, until one day, unexpectedly even for us, after we had seen an opening in the barrier from afar, shining with beachlight, we hurried toward this presumed exit, approached it more quickly, full of hope and joy, yes, there’s nothing like getting out, getting up and away, and we looked at last through the gateway we had reached, but oh dear, what kind of Outside was that, which presented itself to us there, just a big savannah room, almost identical to, at least congruent to the previous room-hall-steppe we had just crossed, and our skin being stung all over by the scraps of alphabet letters flying through the air more and more densely, almost razor sharp, gathered together in small clouds, falling down on us like dense insect-swarm clouds; it would probably have made no difference whether we went back into the hall-plain we had crossed or went ahead through the door into that other room-hall-land stretching out before us like an inverse reflection of the previous room-hall-province, but of course we didn’t go back, we continued into the newly opened recesses of the room lying ahead for us to cross, until we really couldn’t go a step further, yes sir, we collapsed, broke down, didn’t get up; we simply lost our self-control at that point in our lives, we dozed away, presumably fell asleep, slept for a long time, perhaps an endlessly long time, how long exactly we would never know, simply until we awakened again several weeks ago, awakened here, as you know, here in this room the two of us awakened together, quite cut off from all the other people there, seemingly left in peace in the vault of this small room that is wrapping itself closely around us, although we shouldn’t allow ourselves to trust the quiet here, because our current companionship has come into being much too simply, too easily — it’s so suspiciously vague, with such conspicuously loose filigree, like a life in an in-between area that will never become any easier for me to understand, not even after our recent discoveries; or what do you make of it, anything more than I have up until now, do you happen to know where we’ve actually arrived, where we’ve surfaced?