But that’s ridiculous, don’t you think? There’s nothing for him to heat, but he’s still dressed as if he’s continually exposed to thick smoke, that’s really too much!
Or maybe he’s tending a secret, private little fire hidden away somewhere, unsuspected?
Up front at the bar, as if to signify the end of their conversation, while both of the men were nodding their heads at each other, the head cook had stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Just as he realized he had neglected to offer the stoker a smoke from the package that was almost back in his pocket already, a conspicuously sparkling-clean and lit cigarette lighter glittered at him from the stoker’s hand.
May I give you a LIGHT? people now heard the stoker say, quick as a flash, loud and clear.
I knew it right from the start, you could almost hear people sigh with relief through the dining car.
Then the stoker walked back through the dining car and disappeared somewhere to the rear, whence he had arrived a short time before.
He actually wasn’t a stoker at all.
No, back then it had already been a long, long time since stokers had ridden along in the trains.
But the night outside had gotten as black as the nostril holes of a ship’s stoker.
That one night in the sleeping car. That only real night in his life, basically, Burgmüller thought again and again, that darkness decorated by cracks of light, corridors of hot air, in the rhythm of their shared trip, regulating their pulses, subordinating them both to an identical beat during the deep exchange of their embrace, mutually deeply united in each other, as if they were busy mutually battering down each other’s doors, again and again, and more and more intensively, or as if they were alternately banging their back doors open and shut, with such force that each one’s individual presence was forgotten in their mutual transformation, as if they were saving each other’s lives, because each was respectively getting lost in the other, and he could only still find himself where she pointed the way along the route to the center of her happy dream-sorrow, and she could only still find herself where he pointed the way to the innermost room of his dreamy sorrow-happiness.
Their bodies had become far distant foreign lands to each other, familiar but exotic, vast areas quite near to each other, neighboring, but diametrically opposed: they brushed their provinces around each other’s faces while they sank into the enchantments they had constructed around each other, him feeling the impression of her feelings bursting on his skin cage, penetrating inward, while the wings of his feelings soared up until all his imaginable senses could melt into her, as if painted on, could surface on the ocean of the mirror-walls of her disguise; finally the two of them were as wrapped up by their train compartment as a landscape is by its sinking ceiling of air, until the waves of their bodily surf slapping together had completely closed around him, like a homecoming back through the vast rooms where he had strayed, returning to himself, as if, by giving himself away entirely to her, until her devotion too was entrusted to his ecstasy, he had finally found the way back to himself after a long time away; what was new was a space that was completely diffuse, but that he could comprehend as a place he could grasp playfully, yes, a region that distributed itself around her with hopeless bliss, while he, certainly strengthened, had entirely dissolved in her.
He didn’t think of their union as a penetration on his part into a female body, which is how he had thought of similar intimate acts until then; instead, he suddenly felt certain that he was going across a bridge with her, slowly and safely, a bridge over the entire Pacific Ocean, and which they crossed relatively quickly, as if it were only a somewhat wider river, its midpoint decorated by the equator, while the highest point of the steel girder bridge frame arched over the international date line, behind which a completely new epoch spread out: in the most hidden reaches of his mind, it was rising up from the pools of her eyes and coming toward his field of vision, until the shores of the continents touched one another, simply pushing aside the ocean’s towering spring tide, while the merging coastlines piled up, folded upward to form a mountain range, sank together, and fell back onto the seabed of the night-darkness that was flooding past.
Yes, indeed, the ocean, swept aside, has towered up like a spring tide to form a waterspout tube spewing out toward the cosmos, and after its heated collapse, with its hot clouds of steam hissing, its continental laundry tub boils over, shrouding the vast land below.
When he woke up again, he saw that the train was already rolling through a homey region that seemed very familiar to him in the first light of dawn, the last scraps of the darkness’s nightshade-flower garments still stuck to the outer skin of the window, dragged along like little cleaning-cloth flags in the airstream through the dried up sultriness of a landscape completely exhausted by the disappearing gloom.
Of course the life that was wrapped around the trip the two of them were taking had not come to an end, as he had momentarily but prematurely assumed when he first opened his eyes; though, to tell the truth, he had almost hoped it had, because the intensity of their being together had been almost violently happy, as if this happiness might with corresponding violence push away everything else around them, so that only the two of them would be left over to turn up in this homeland that seemed alien to them in the first light of dawn.
But it sank in soon enough that they weren’t alone: after coping with the plugged toilet, he wanted to wash away last night’s darkness-pollen, which had stuck to his entire body, mixed with train sweat, but he couldn’t do so, because it would have meant waiting too long outside the occupied washroom and he wanted to go back to their compartment — but just then he heard the washroom door snap open with a deliberate bang, as if to make certain that he, the person waiting outside, knew that he could now get into the washroom right away; and when he turned around to see who had found it necessary to be so kind as to hurry on his account, he saw the stark-naked body of the stoker from yesterday evening, who had painted his face freshly black for going on duty today, although or because he was not a stoker, and who flung a radiant, resounding, howling good morning at Burgmüller like a knife in the back.
The clothing of the landscape they passed through got lighter and lighter: the simple monks’ habits of a seemingly endless assembly of hills behaving reservedly at first toward the passing train, but then gradually greeting it more and more congenially, waving to and after it, and then at first some of them, then more and more, started singing, yes, the gigantic hill-church choir along the edge of their route wasn’t going to let anyone stop it from singing a really excellent song for the train gliding past them, probably “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” or something similar? but no, no, it wasn’t that, it really sounded very different.
In any case, high above these countless hilltops, entire cloud stairwells succeeded in sneaking furtively away, in making a misty escape behind the back of this first light of dawn, moving fleetingly in the direction of the noontime boundary.
In the morning, a few hours before the expected arrival of their train in THITHER, it had become clear to the two of them that they would only separate for a short time, they had agreed that he wouldn’t get out with her right away in THITHER and she wouldn’t continue on with him right away to HITHER, so they’d be apart, but only for a very short time, they had sworn that they would meet again immediately afterward, regardless of what might intervene, no matter where they were, they would continually seek each other out, when suddenly, in spite of the fact that it was already late morning, a few hours before the arrival of the train in THITHER, the dawn-fragment in the restless window of their almost-flying bedroom somehow staggered backward, tipping sideways, in any case turned right around into an interleaved intermezzo night that must have been hiding away in some corner of this day that had dawned, maybe inside a crevice in a cliff that was a member of the hill society still singing, still dominating the region, though now its choir had suddenly made the transition to a very sad song of departure, and either he and she had again assisted one another in freeing themselves from the bonds of their clothing because they wanted to experience the adventurous security of their confusingly unalike figures merging into each other one more time before their temporary separation, or else the backward-pointing dawn of their bedroom rolling through the country had sent them back to their first night of love, to an hour that didn’t belong in any way to this day that had now dawned: an hour that had grown out of an unsuspected corner of the morning like a pitch-black flower of darkness that could no longer be driven away.