What do you mean?!. . What?!. . Inconsiderate, you mean, yes, what are you getting at?. . What?. . Forced on you?!. . Well, how then, by whom?!. . Unreasonable, you say. . it was hurled at you?!. . heaped on you. . thrown at you?!. . We really heaped it on? Well, where on earth did you get an idea like that?. . So you were framed, too?!. . But by whom, then?. . What could anyone do here?. . As far as you’re concerned, someone could do something?!. . Oh, well, if that’s what you mean, I guess one can hardly take that amiss. . So, you want to be left alone? What? You don’t want to keep on what?. . You want to keep on being observed from here?. . No, you don’t want that? but. . You don’t want anyone spying on you either?. . What are you on about now?. . You forbid?. . Oh, so you’re forbidding yourself. . but what is it that you’re forbidding yourself, please?. . To describe, you say, . How do you mean that?. . From this side here ever again to be described in any form, you forbid yourself, but what’s that supposed to mean. . Invented, you say, you don’t want to be invented anymore. . Listen, please explain that, yes, where are you all of a sudden, yes, where. . Yes, where has he got to?. . Are you hiding?. . Did he hide himself. . Can’t understand it. . Gone without a trace. . Where could he be. .?
Who?
Burgmüller, of course.
But he was here just a second ago!
He’s disappeared, gone, simply vanished, submerged in the thicket of the crowd there, or maybe somewhere else. .
How inconvenient. Right at the last moment, how could something like that happen? Shouldn’t people have kept an eye on him better? Still, on the other hand. . it was quite understandable, wasn’t it?
No. Actually, not at all. Do you think all that happened to him with that woman was just too much for him?
Yes. That too. But not just that. If it was just that. . that’s the sort of thing that happens again and again, and you get through it. If it was just that, it’d be pathetic, wouldn’t it?
Yes, but what else then, if it wasn’t just that? Was there something else in addition to that woman?
The fact that she was right.
Who? Who was supposed to have been right?
That woman, of course.
Yes, yes. But what was she supposed to have been right about?
About her invented world, life lived in stories being described, etc.
Does anyone here really think he could have found all that out, that the woman was somehow right, no, I don’t think so, how could he? I mean, really. . do people here really think that he now knows that that woman was right or at least not so entirely wrong, despite the fact that she gave him his marching orders. . and do people also think that he might now have cleared off precisely because of that. .? Look, you’re underestimating him, and that’s dangerous! In case he unexpectedly turns up again, comes back out of the blue, it’s better not to behave as we have until now, because he might have noticed something, might have figured something out, or who knows what. . We’ve been almost obtrusive, almost overbearing toward him at times, so let’s stop that right away! Understood?
Yes sir.
Burgmüller wanted to get away. To be gone, out of this city.
Of course he would have liked to avoid going back once more to his devastated apartment, but he still had to pick up his luggage, for the trip, that is, he had already wanted to embark upon the day before.
He noticed that she must have been to the apartment again during his period of despair, of near derangement, and he almost fell right back into the previous night at the thought that he had now missed his last opportunity to see her again, perhaps to win her back; if only he had stayed at home — insofar as it could still be called a home!
The only thing left in her former study was his typewriter, hers had disappeared, presumably been picked up. As had all the documents of her story, including the parts he had written, as if she’d wanted to make certain he no longer had access to all their shared, communally invented memories, all the memories of their future together, which had never happened.
The fact that she had had no scruples about this and obviously felt justified in taking away from him the past that in his opinion belonged just as much to him and then their draft versions of it made him extremely bitter. If he had been here, he could have talked things through with her again, and then she might have let herself be repersuaded, unexpectedly, to begin a new and different life together with him. Because given the way things had been going, it was certain that neither of them would have known how to continue.
If only he had stayed here, he kept thinking, then he could also have spared himself that all-too-destructive shaming he’d brought on himself at the bridge.
But no, of course it wouldn’t have worked that way, she had probably been waiting somewhere outside the building until she was sure he’d gone out, and only then did she come to retrieve her story, to deliver Burgmüller up to this all-encompassing sense of trace-lessness and spacelessness, leaving him at the mercy of this feeling like someone returning home from a war he had slept through, so that when he turned up in the ransacked rooms, that apartment-chaos was itself the only remaining evidence for him of those last days spent together with his beloved, who was now forever out of his reach: swarms of moths had already taken up residence in the clothes piles, and columns of ants had moved in through the open slits in the walls; or was he simply seeing the first ravages of an on-coming termite invasion, which had already taken every possible measure to drive him from this suite of rooms, to hunt him down, to remove him at last from the ruins of his home, the ruins of his foredoomed future-pluperfect-rooms. .
Or had she sent someone else over, had she herself not come at all to pick up her documents, her typewriter, the fragments of their unfinished story about the two of them. .?
Immediately, his boundless jealousy flared up again when he thought of the letter-writer from that office, a Weltgeist Planning Committee member from that office that had written to her, perhaps a long time ago, perhaps only recently, as Burgmüller thought ironically, while at the same time he was glad now that he hadn’t been present, so that he had avoided that sort of encounter — I would have killed him, he thought, or forced him to kill me, because I wouldn’t have stopped making threats to his life!
He had the feeling now that he had been deprived not only of his past with her, but also of his own past. Entirely without history. . entirely without stories. .
He had broken off contact with the caryatids a long time ago, but then again it seemed like such a short time that it might as well have been yesterday, when on this day he came across a caryatid in a not very central part of town and remained standing before her, somehow deeply moved.
Did he want to try to get back in touch with them again? Because that woman had left him, and so his memory of her had almost driven him to self-destruction?
He couldn’t shake off the recollection, so he was forced to pull a new tone-color coat on over his memory, as if the chatter in his head was about someone other than him, someone he had nothing to do with; by and by he became practiced in directing the stream of his thoughts past this waking sleep, he had become independent of his own thinking, finding refuge within a realm like a secondary memory, filled with the flow of substitute thoughts, and it proved to be an absolutely effective sanctuary against everything he had come to dislike, while his real thoughts, which had become foreign to him, went on to undertake the most daring trips and expeditions outside of his person, trips about which he hadn’t a clue, and his feelings too learned to live without him, they forbade his involvement just as he in turn forbade theirs, which is why he no longer wandered along the banks of the river of his feelings anymore, instead he saw himself flowing through the landscape toward a horizon that for him was unattainable, he sometimes even observed himself breaking clean through to the other side of that region, no longer comprehensible to him, only a presentiment of himself still remaining, lost from view. His own behavior seemed to him as if it were no longer determined by him, but forced upon him by the nervous system of a foreign body lying far outside of him, somewhere up in the gray, wood-grained, streaked air, just hovering there or else flowing downstream into the ocean; it seemed to Burgmüller that none of it was happening in his immediate vicinity — neither his behavior nor the occurrences surrounding it — but rather in completely remote, unreachable zones where he would never set foot, and with which he had nothing to do, but that could also have been very close at hand, seeming so far away only because he knew nothing about them, until he began to feel as if he were being so inundated by these far-distant regions, against his will, that he thought he was representing the entire world in his actions, that world with which he wanted no contact, and so, though he still couldn’t understand it, he was nevertheless representing the world which guided him with its nervous system, even when he felt nothing, either of it or of himself.