The conversations of the shore glistened in the river, which had stopped under the remaining shadows of charcoal soot that the previous night must have left lying there in its abandoned campfires, strewn out from its completely transparent, yes, even more transparent than the autumn air, its transparent albino darkness.
He stood at the wharf and tried to look across to the other shore.
Was it so wreathed in mist that he couldn’t see it? No, no mist, this day was almost exaggeratedly clear, but the other shore was much too far away, even the bridges spanned the river in vain and couldn’t reach it, they were just gigantic jetties built into the surface of the water, waiting for the ocean-going steamers to berth, whose tooting was answered by the friendly waving or calling from the people standing on the shore, whose conversations disappeared into the sea, yes, because the river was the ocean, the stream was the sea, whose smell had been accompanying him for a long time, hurrying ahead of him through the entire city, pulling him along behind it through the narrow streets, the streetcars rushing toward him with their pantographs flashing happily on the overhead cable, laughing in his direction, wishing him a good day, and ringing their bells as they passed.
At the train station a crowd had assembled outside the main entrance, swinging their beer bottles in unison and staring at a real spectacle:
The high glass partition at the front of the building had been broken through by a locomotive whose brakes must have failed as it came into the station. All the cars behind it had derailed, had broken, and were lying in ungainly and awkward positions in the hall. Of course no one had been hurt. Burgmüller was just in time to see the last of the inconvenienced travelers climbing out of some colorfully glistening splintered windows and brushing the dust off their clothes by hitting their hands against their coats and suit jackets, wiping and beating the arms and legs of their clothing, and blowing it off their hats. The locomotive engineer was surrounded by newspaper reporters who were celebrating him as the hero of the day and were busily writing down his explanatory comments, which were accompanied by many hand gestures: he told them that he wouldn’t have missed this very interesting adventure for anything, despite all the danger; it was the first time he had experienced anything like that, but if it should ever happen to him again, he’d do everything exactly the same way. The passengers confirmed his view, all of them nodding and smiling as they listened to his explanations, you could see from their faces that they felt like chosen ones, they were glad and happy that they had not, as usual, missed the most important thing to happen on this day, and indeed the bystanders were very envious of them, surrounding them and asking them questions, and wishing — most of them — that they had been on the train too.
Otherwise, it was business as usual at the train station; the accident hadn’t caused any major disruption.
Away from the turmoil, on a track set off by itself, Burgmüller now saw something he wouldn’t have thought possible, a train made entirely of glass, its cars all transparent, and on the signs affixed to its exterior, which normally named the destination and the most important intermediate stops, it said: Travel with the Federal Railway’s glass train through our beautiful land! Really get to know your unknown homeland!
While he stood there in astonishment, a uniformed railway official came up behind him and said: Don’t you want to come along? You won’t regret it; we still have some seats available!
Even the cost of the trip remained within reasonable bounds. Was the locomotive at the front also entirely made of glass, Burgmüller asked, but the official either didn’t hear the question properly or didn’t understand it, or he thought he didn’t have to answer it, because it was more important to tell Burgmüller right away the number and location of the special wicket where he could buy his ticket.
A little later they glide out of the city, or the city is shedding the travelers, or brushing them out of itself, one can’t say exactly, and Burgmüller feels the landscape starting to slide over him like a skin, feels the hills gliding gently through his fingers and the intervening valleys skimming across his face.
It’s impossible to say whether he’s gliding through this stretch of land or whether the stretch of land is running through him, whether the travelers are driving the landscape past them or the landscape is throwing the travelers out of it; or whether the region is perhaps just leaning back, has leaned back into the general background.
Outside, on a path through the fields running alongside the tracks, Burgmüller sees a few people waving at the train, one of them waving directly at him, greeting him very warmly and lovingly, showing careful concern, as if he were an acquaintance who was particularly fond of him; then suddenly he sees that beside this man outside the train, who seems more and more familiar to him, a woman is standing, whose gaze explains everything to him, and it’s as if he, sitting alone here on the train, is waving at himself and his own girlfriend, whom he has found again, outside, they’re standing on the path along the tracks, and as he waves back right away, to himself and to her, she then gives him a sign, tries to throw a few puzzling words after him with her hands, as if she wanted to tell him, right at the last moment, before the train is out of sight, that she will get on at the next station, or something like that, while the train keeps getting farther away and disappears into the hazy wing-beat of a hill upon the steppe.
Far behind him, the city suddenly swells up like a huge puffball that then explodes at the edge of the forest of air, as if its houses were crumbling in on themselves, or else bursting into brick-red clouds, accompanied by wall-chunks piling up on top of each other from far and near and then being strewn apart; they’re swaying through the trembling, melting light astonishingly slowly, or is it rather a waving, yes, it could be considered a form of waving after the disappearing train, as if by stony figures whose silhouettes, standing out more and more distinctly, are swaying and moving complacently away from the disintegrated edges of the city while waving after Burgmüller, who is waving back to them as if taking his leave until they meet again through the fractured time of that stranded day:
So the caryatids did awaken to the great sleep war after all, together with the atlantes they have begun the sleep war of the telamones against the inhabitants of the city, they have stepped away from their houses (is that why they sent him away on this trip?); or is this only the burning sleep of the desperately gleaming afternoon light, which has heated up as it burned down: are its atomized ruins causing the whole country behind it to swell up in this smoke-dust weather until the storm-twilight front of an incoming air mass drives this sunbeam-mushroom network apart? (Or is it the mean, fecal smirk of a president going senile, a president of a so-called new world: the grin that in his countries, illuminated every day from heaven above with his directives, elevated to law, determines the weather — has that grin now also crossed the ocean and broken out devastatingly there as that firmamental fit of laughter on the splintering horizon?)
Gliding past now is a lake whose surface is as smooth as if the water had begun to freeze, to congeal into a solid body in the heat of this summer, to a block of mirrors buried in the land. On the hard surface of the lake, which seems polished, rowboats, sailboats and windsurfboards are locked in. They wriggle like fluttering, buzzing flies in amber, or creep like awakening fossils through the mica schist of the mountains
The lake does not mirror the chain of hills surrounding it, but rather a mountain that seems to be deeply fissured, as if the eye of this stretch of water could see what had to remain hidden to Burgmüller, even on this trip; or were the mountains very far away mirrored in the sky in such a way that their silhouettes had fallen back down exactly into this lake again?