He feared that, in the euphoric state he believed she was in, she might accost strangers on the street with her story about Karl the Great, oh dear, how could he prevent that, he had to get to her as quickly as possible and bring her back. .
Please listen to me very carefully now! he tried to impress upon her as clearly as possible, the best thing is to stay where you are now, don’t move from that spot until I’ve picked you up! Tell me exactly where you are, but don’t tell anyone you run into what you’ve just explained to me, and please try not to reveal to anyone else that you have now finally solved all the secrets of the world, because everybody who hears you say that will feel endangered and threatened by you, they might try to corner you, lead you away, lock you up somewhere, that’s why you can’t tell anyone anything of what you’ve tried to tell me, do you hear me?
Oh dear, you underhanded fake you, she replied, embittered, deeply injured, furious, unfortunately I can no longer ignore the fact that, not just now, but from the very beginning, you’ve thought I was completely crazy, abnormal, not quite right in the head, how it pains me that you’re incapable of appreciating what trust I’ve shown you, how willing I’ve been to devote myself to you, because I thought you were the only person who understood me, comprehended me, but now my blinders are off, I’m offended as never before in my entire life, I’m very bitterly disappointed in you, because you, even you have always only been making fun of me and my thoughts in secret, what a surprise that you never choked to death on all the secret scornful laughter you’ve been holding back, inside yourself, and I regret very much the affection I’ve shown you out of thanks for your putative help and because of the cunning way — as it unfortunately turns out now — you led me to believe that we were kindred spirits, because of which I felt I was closer to you than to anyone else; to think that you could deceive me like this, that you continue to betray me. .
Listen to me, Burgmüller tried to get a word in edgewise, don’t misunderstand me, I meant it entirely differently than you think now, quite the opposite, listen, and please tell me where you are so that I know where I can meet you, so that we can discuss everything in detail!
No, she shouted angrily back at him, I won’t tell you where I am, you won’t pick me up anywhere, you’ll never pick me up anywhere ever again, because I don’t want to see you again, do you hear me, I never want to run into you again, no, there’s nothing more you can offer me because you have just now so openly and irrefutably unmasked yourself that I, if I now found myself in your proximity, would want to whirl the ruins of your ransacked apartment around your head so fast that you’d pass out for ages, that your eyes would forget how to hear, and your ears how to see, but back then, when I undertook the devastation of your apartment, turning it into a debris-pile dumping ground, I did so out of love for you, because I meant well, for you and for both of us, you’ll certainly have noticed the deep concern that drove my actions, full of such feeling, full of solicitous thoughts of a better future for both of us, but from now on I will no longer regard that home-devastation as an act of love — carried out back then for no other reason than my profound and intimate feelings of affection for you — but rather as the ridiculous little retaliation, which is now proving justified, for your betrayal of me today: it was anticipated not only in my story, but also by me — you, oh yes, you, yes, you paralytic, you rock-hard chancre you, but I never really let you palm yourself off on me, oh no, I never let you drive me crazy with your endless talk, which is probably what you were trying to do, but once again my exaggerated caution has proven advantageous, how glad I am now that I didn’t let you sleep with me even once, oh you, yes, you filthy, prowling syphilitic, yes, you repulsively dissolute, pushy, infuriating, gonorrhea-spreading landscape-defiler you!
Burgmüller told all the people he knew who knew her, shared his worries about her situation, which in his opinion was cause for concern, and asked for news of her as soon as anyone caught sight of her. He also made inquiries at all the relevant hospitals as to whether a woman had been admitted who claimed that she had now finally solved all the mysteries in the world.
It was a long time before he really understood that he would never see her again.
At first, he still suspected her of having led him down the garden path, of not having gone to any office that morning, to any office building, and definitely not to any particular individual office to attend to any bureaucratic obligations; instead, wasn’t it possible she’d gone somewhere else entirely, to a private house, a certain room in a hotel to visit someone, and hadn’t she spoken to him about a letter, not an official letter, but probably a long-awaited private letter, and how happy she had been yesterday all of a sudden, but not about their planned trip, but rather about the letter she had unexpectedly received, and now he also thought he knew exactly why she had always pushed him away from her, as she had yesterday too: her time at his apartment had only been her way of going underground for a while, the better to turn up again at the place of the person who had written that letter — she, his darling, who would now remain irrefutably inaccessible forever!
Was it the plants growing rampantly out of the walls and gutters that made the sky get so dark, their excited flickering nervously goaded on until most of the flaming leaves, spraying in sprout-green foliage fire, pushed each other farther and farther over the ridges of the roofs into the evening — or were lost birds tearing the light into small scraps of paper that whizzed through the air like the letters of the alphabet in an unreadable story that had sunk into oblivion — or was it after all the bushes in the undergrowth thicket of the already entirely tangled, overgrown atmosphere that were plugging up the evening sky through which Burgmüller fought his way via a dilapidated sunset tunnel that seemed likely to collapse and crush everything now wrapped in its irredeemable gentleness? until he had finally reached the bank of the river washing into the city, following its curve inward, glistening in the sunlight, even though his intention was at first to accompany it away from the city, because he’d found his glances back in the other direction irresistibly attracted to something dark abandoned there like an overfull, bulging sack, and when he reached this piece of jetsam, he recognized it as the carcass of a giant pig, whose body, swollen up with the gases of decomposition, would soon have to burst. Nevertheless, the outer dimensions of the dead animal only continued to increase as darkness fell; it seemed to be inflating itself from within, to be pumping itself up more and more, until there could be no talk any longer of calling it a pig, it was an ox, rather, or a bison, but still the skin of the dead animal didn’t burst, although it billowed upward, joining the night sky that was pushing against Burgmüller’s eyes, it stretched across the firmament, and therefore, fundamentally, the skin of this nightfall too would have to burst at any moment. But even the night sky had no intention of bursting, because the fur of the dead animal had soon laid itself like a retina around the outer mantle of air, yes, had wrapped itself around the entire planet, and Burgmüller knew now that the earth was nothing more than a huge, inflated carcass being chased wildly through the cosmos, he inhaled the atmosphere of its wind of death, and it wouldn’t be long before its thinning skin would soon burst after all, he knew that for sure now, because he was standing right at the center, right at the heart of the dead animal that was being hunted through the universe!