I can’t stand it here anymore, she cried, I have to get away, right out of the room that will crush us, don’t you see the walls closing in on us, the ceiling sinking down, soon it will touch the floor; after her knuckles are beaten raw, her grazed forehead will start to bleed, thought Burgmüller, now she’s finally had it, it seems, what would be the best thing to do with her now, he deliberated, and tried to touch her gently on the shoulders, which she didn’t even notice in her frenzy, otherwise she would probably have pushed him back again right away; then he tried to guide all the force of his thoughts, the thoughts still dominating him and making him sympathetic toward her, tried to turn them in her direction now, drive them into her firmly with all the concentrated anger of his wounded longing for her and with the entire devotional force of his evaporating feelings; yes, astonishingly, he wouldn’t have thought it possible at all, considering this instead to be a deceptive, transitory intermission before the final failure of his raging love, but it actually had an effect: whether it had something to do with these efforts, or was just the result of her being overcome by exhaustion, in any case she calmed down, her shouting got quieter, became whispering, she suddenly started complaining about how he had let his apartment deteriorate into a pigsty, how that can only be tolerated for so long, when was he going to start cleaning it up, until she finally sank down onto the chair at her desk, almost speechless, and then with a strangely quite brightened, clear facial expression, as though she had just turned up from a forced march, she looked at him and whispered to him, asking him to please excuse her, to forgive her for having lost her self-control to the point of being almost unreachable, she had been so far away, and had just now found her way back, but from now on everything would be fine again, and entirely different. .
For the time being, your story has reached an ending, Burgmüller then explained to her, you can’t find the real conclusion of your narrative from here because you’ll be hindered by your own writing, which doesn’t let you step outside of it; you’ll just have to be clever, like a stage magician who escapes his magic trick just before its climax by using another trick designed for just that purpose; for one thing, that’s the only way the first trick can work, and for another thing, without the second trick, or if he negligently implements it too slowly, he’ll remain stuck in the first trick forever, caught, wrongly imprisoned in a spell of his own making. That’s exactly the way you have to get out of your story right now, otherwise something similar, or worse, will befall you. The best thing would be if we left on a trip tomorrow, without delay, a trip necessary for our own survival and the survival of your story: we should get away from here, you’ll be surprised, we’ll suddenly be able to really experience, see, and understand everything, real landscapes, cities, you’ll feel everything yourself, we’ll both experience it, we’ll both be able to experience ourselves at last, do you understand, we’ll understand each other as we understand everything else, we’ll be grasped in mutual contact, and sometimes our embraces will be so strong that we won’t be able to feel ourselves at all anymore, just our feelings, whose streams flow toward each other, as we travel on this trip for the first time through real landscapes, not through descriptions of landscapes: I won’t be taking any maps on this trip! I’ve had enough of them for all time, do you understand? Then the landscapes of the trip we’ll set out on tomorrow are also a possible end to your story, after surviving all the described adventures, the two main characters of your narrative, you understand, will presumably still find a way out to freedom at the last moment, and this way out will not be described; instead, they will simply, surprisingly, find themselves again in the landscape of the trip that will begin tomorrow, or is that too ordinary for you; if the two of them, like the two of us, together with the two of us, find this way out tomorrow through the apartment door there, do you understand, down the staircase, out the front gate, around the corners of a few buildings, into the main entrance of the train station, into a train gliding out of the city, away, out with us to the end of your story, then the definitive disappearance of the two of them with us in the landscape will be a landscape solution, a dissolution back into the landscape, where they had always wanted to go, on the evening of the narrative of that boundless region.
How surprising, thought Burgmüller, that she is listening to me for so long without interrupting, without contradicting, but no, quite the opposite, she was agreeing with him, she told him he was right, he could hardly believe it, she was happy, that was evident, happy for the first time, she breathed a sigh of relief, not only as though she’d been rescued but really freed from her story, there was an expression in her eyes that he had never seen before, both melancholy and charming: heavy with happiness, from the depths of her face, wild lily-of-the-valley had surfaced in her gaze, and he would be hopelessly at the mercy of her gaze again and again, illuminated by the flaring up of a feeling of happiness that arose in her and flowed through him; he was more devoted than ever to the sight of her, transfigured as never before by a feeling of belonging, and quite relieved, as though she had been able to put indescribably more than what she had written behind her — and as though the fact that she had found her way out of it again was not a miracle, but a natural phenomenon.
She suggested that she should help him clean up his apartment, the state of which alarmed her, she thought they should provisionally try to remove at least the most conspicuous things before leaving on their trip together tomorrow, so that they wouldn’t be mercilessly subjected to the present circumstances right away again after their return, but Burgmüller didn’t want to, no, he said, he had no intention of dealing with that anymore, never again in his life, before departing he would hire experienced cleaners, in writing or by telephone, to put everything back in order while the two of them were away, they’d be able to manage for this one night as they had before, wouldn’t they? though if she couldn’t stand this situation for even one more night, then they’d leave immediately and go to a hotel, yes? No, she said.
The best thing would be to start packing, so that we can get away as early as possible tomorrow morning, right after we wake up, through the apartment door, down to the train station, and then out of the country on the next convenient express train, to the high mountains by the sea, as though crossing the ocean toward each other from opposite ends of the world. For a long time he described the landscape-acquaintanceships they would soon make, as if speaking of old friends, and she began to reply to him with landscape stories, as if they were descriptions of her affection. .
. . so he tried to describe how the Hungarian lowland plain of his body-landscape sank down over the hot celestial skin of her Amazon delta estuary, and she told him about the opening of her gulf shore there, about her impatient waiting for him to cross the Atlantic, so that they could finally glide inland together. .
. . and soon after that he told her how long he had already been wanting to heat up the subterranean cave system of her Siberian tundra for her, whereupon she answered him in a few sentences with all the concentrated bustling of the artesian-well installations of the Atlas Mountains, saying very dryly, like the Sahara, that she would grant him entrance into the boundlessness of her northern forests. .