No, answered Burgmüller, where?
What was that noise? Down in the city, inside the front window of the public kitchen across from the adult education center library, the big stewpots were lifting their lid-hats, which ran aground on the shore of the cheerful kitchen ceiling and then fell back down like a landslide onto the kitchen floor; their barely begun lid-concerto, wobbling briefly through the large kitchen, settled now into a marching rhythm, accompanied by the whistling songs of the kitchen-fan saucepan-choir that joined forces with them, while the apprentice cooks tried helplessly and in vain to rescue the noonday stew they thought they had just completed, brandishing their wooden spoons and beating on the pots to quell their revolution, but the pots, now that they saw what power they held, carried away by their newly recognized right to stage a cooking-insurgency, by the violence of their volcanic eruptions, could neither be contained nor restrained: contrary to all attempts to calm them, they hopped away from the glowing home soil of their stoves, there was really no reason to stay, they had simply started to feel sick, and no wonder, given the foods that had been imposed on their hopping stomachs for years, so today they hadn’t been able to hold themselves back any longer, they had thrown up, and then they hopped down from their stoves, out through the kitchen doors, and out into the city, through the streets and alleys, spraying traces of stew, away into the woods, pursued by their hovering lids that had become airborne like flying saucers, and the lids, passing the tangled outskirts of the city, went whirling on into the rust-flower growing paradises of the lonely seclusion of the garbage pits overgrown with ferns.
Of course she hadn’t heard his answer with all that noise.
Do you have any idea where we are? she asked again.
No, I don’t know, answered Burgmüller, who didn’t want to ambush her with a reckless answer; maybe it wouldn’t suit her at all if she found out she was at his apartment?
Don’t you understand what’s happening here? she kept asking, in this surprisingly charged, overpowering atmosphere around us, you aren’t seriously going to claim that you know anything at all!
No, Burgmüller answered, I don’t know anything at all, what should I know, where did we come from and where are we now? Right now, at this essential moment, he couldn’t allow himself to be an opinionated know-it-all maker of claims in her presence, because he hoped that she was now finally surfacing from her story in his apartment, which was however still incomprehensible to her, that she was entering this room properly at last, although she had already been there for such a long time; soon he would also be able to start gradually showing her around the city outside, or would she refuse even that?
Until now, she had invented their common past, which hadn’t even existed before her story, but which now seemed almost finished as it lay before them; but she would also want to invent a present for them, which in any case already existed, it didn’t need to be invented at all; how would a present invented by her find its way around in this city here, he didn’t want to, couldn’t think about it, couldn’t get it into his head — it would lose its way, get lost in her invention, no, he must try to spare her that.
Don’t you even know approximately where we could be? she asked. No, he said again, but she should take a look around; he was trying very carefully to point out to her that here, in this room, she happened to be with him in his apartment, and didn’t she notice that?
No, she didn’t notice that at all, what was that supposed to mean?
Because the noise from below slowly moved off behind the building, he directed her gaze out the window again by starting to talk about the adult education center library vis-à-vis the city kitchen, something like this:
Couldn’t it be that it’s not only over there the pages of all books are merging with one another, the content of the stories between their covers starting to move, because their letters have started to dance, hopping, hooked together, springing into readers’ eyes, and then, toppled headfirst in bent, crossed, intersecting lines, or flowing into black puddles in blotting-paper swamps, presumably reaching in time beyond the edges of their books to roll at last through the valleys whose rivers have drained away through the white plains like lakes in the paper-fiber of the snowfields; yes, one day soon, all our shelves will become cascades of life, waterfalls springing with infinite slowness from our walls of books, breaking through, yes, even here, even out of the walls of this very room, slowly plunging through the corridors of every apartment, down the stairwells, out of the buildings; yes, even the ocean and its Sargasso Seas will come to rustle with the book-heaps that have filed out of our library doors through the streets of this city; soon they will be full of all our always-being-imagined stories, thoughts, pictures: inundated, our protagonists having already hopped down undisturbed from all the library ladders, clambered down out of the windows, and then, staggering outside, being caught by a wind, blown up and away through the entire Republic, only going to ground beyond the farthest limits of vision — soon they will even start crossing the unimaginably high wall of the sealed-off ocean!
As if our hope had not yet turned to rage!
But she was shocked, not at all in agreement, no, she didn’t notice anything at all like that, not in the slightest, what unthinking bits of nonsense he so unrestrainedly allowed to issue forth from himself, once again one sees how vague a sense he has of this world, namely, none at all, no, no, not even a weakly twinkling glimmer; how unrealistically lost you would be here without me, it’s a good thing I’m here with you, which I am, aren’t I? she called out to him.
Burgmüller knew then it wouldn’t be so easy to lure her out of her story.
So had he entirely forgotten everything they had overcome, that lay behind them, she went on, did he really think one could behave as if nothing had come before?
By the way, when looking through documents dating from a time that lay far behind them, she had come across a piece of writing that had flowed from his pen, perhaps he still remembered what he himself had set down on this official document, and indeed, as she remembered, during the final days of that previous era, no? She handed him a very yellowed piece of paper that might be at least ten or fifteen years old and was recognizable to him by his own handwriting from that time: Back then I wrote entirely differently, much more plainly, clearly, he thought, but what he was supposed to have written there ten or fifteen years ago, no, he had never written that, it would never even have occurred to him, no, so how could it nevertheless have wound up in his old handwriting on this piece of paper. .? Forged! of course, the piece of paper was forged, but how, that part was inexplicable to him, how could someone have been able to imitate his previous handwriting so perfectly, where could the culprit have gotten such insight into the apparently so clearly progressing lineaments of his handwriting from that time, which couldn’t be compared in any way with his handwriting today, such that not even he himself could have imitated it so welclass="underline" a forgery, which someone had somehow known how to palm off on him, the very first forgery in her story of the invented life the two of them had previously lived together, yes, the first falsification of that history, and he felt somewhat deceived — lied to, no less — unfortunately, no, not by her, he would never have considered that, no, but by her story instead.