Here for example is a street on which it is always raining. No one knows what pipe runs above it or why it burst. Streams of water pour onto the roofs of the apartment buildings, flow down the windows and gather far below between the façades. Cars move along the roadway as if it were the bottom of a deep canal, where it is dark and greenish and umbrellas sprout like algae. The passersby find it hard to breathe, as happens under water. Mothers drag small children on their daily route from store to playground. Not inclined to sentimentality before dinner is ready, they no longer pay any attention to the suffering of their own lungs, accustomed to the fact that everything immersed in this water manages to go on living. At dusk the tenants sail away on the current to distant bodies of water that only they know. Their thoughts begin to tip one way and then the other, unstable boats without a crew. No one maintains these boats; every one of them has something missing, and the brightly colored fish of coral reefs swim amongst wrecks that are already lying on the ocean floor. At times a sea horse swims up to a window ledge, working its little snout, or a wave carries some fish behind a wardrobe.
There is also a street that is enveloped in cold separated from heat, the way that in other places ravines are enveloped in morning mist. The cold separated from the heat turns into ice all around — ice that is so icy that all the coal in the world would not be enough to melt it. On the perpetually frost-covered windowpanes there grow together and then descend toward the ice-strewn roadway soaring gates, magnificent ice arches, sky blue, purple and white galleries, hanging bridges and glassy mountains that fill the entire space of the street. The delicate yet strong construction enwraps roofs and gutters and eats into the walls of buildings. For this reason the street is closed to traffic and special road signs direct drivers to a detour. But the inhabitants of the ice-bound apartments fall into a profound sleep right after dinner and dream that they have frozen to death.
The heat separated from the cold must also gather somewhere. An excess of heat makes the underground installations boil over. Thus there is a street in the city on which high temperatures have not ceased even for a moment for many years. The grass there has dried up and turned to dust that is blown into clouds by the torrid wind. Dust specks fly into people’s eyes, making the whites bloodshot; this in turn gives their faces an expression of suppressed rage. Sand gets everywhere, ruining clocks and sewing machines. At night shouts are heard and the red glow of cigarettes flares in the entranceways of buildings. It is so hot that no one is able to fall asleep. Some there have gone for years without slumber, growing ever more irritable. Under every street lamp there stands a drunk and a prostitute and every ten minutes an ambulance or fire truck goes by, its siren wailing. In kitchens cabbage fried in lard is burned to the pan; children run in front of trams; young women put garish lipstick on mouths black with curses; burglars escaping over the rooftops fall onto the sidewalk and smash their skulls. Later, during the autopsies sand is found in their hearts.
In yet another place an excess of clay has accumulated. Every year after winter the apartment buildings subside into the miry earth. The lowest floors were the first to disappear. The inhabitants realized that there was no hope for them there and moved to suburban villas with ivy-covered turrets. In this way the swamp ceased forever to pose a threat to them. But it swallowed a living part of the city which — like rebellious tissue — began to grow downward. Hoists bring clay up to the surface to make room for successive floors. Apartments, stores, shops and parking garages wait to be occupied by those who are unable to find their place. Spent light bulbs burn there. Lathes without blades, sewing machines without needles and cranes without pulleys operate day and night.
The most dangerous emergencies cannot be eliminated, nor can further disasters be avoided. Yet the city will grow accustomed to anything. The sky of movable clouds drops lower every year, but till it starts to crush the roofs no one spares it a thought. It is not inconceivable that even the most important part of the machinery, that which turns the sky of fixed stars and above it the sky of suns and moons, is nothing but a pile of junk. It is not known exactly what it was made of or how. It may be that the plans are still stored in the archives, but there is no one who is able to decipher them. It can only be very roughly guessed which installations were set in motion overhead above the rooftops and which were put in underground. To this day some of those who mixed the mortar, carried the bricks and bent the pipes are still alive. But they know nothing except that in the beginning they labored hard and did not spare themselves. One or another of them can even show a hand missing fingers that were cut off by a chainsaw, the stump of a leg crushed by a block of stone, a scarred hole in the skull. They remember only themselves, in scraps of memories, scurrying about sun-drenched building sites in pants spattered with lime.
If they were to build the city again the main thoroughfares perhaps would run through the admissions room of a hospital, the halls of train stations would contain immense dormitories, and trams would drive along their tracks into the river. For there is no one here who could control the chaos of the countercity, no one who knows the laws that give truly accurate estimates, no one who knows how to prop the sky up, no one who could tell the bricklayers and architects what to do. There exists no knowledge better than ours, no building materials better than ours, and no way out better than the worst. The belief that the city could be different was not borne out. The juices that gave it life at the beginning of the season of vegetation have dried up. The choral songs have sounded their last and have fallen silent. No brick is passed any longer from hand to hand; the lenses of the twin-lens reflex cameras with which the sunny building sites were once photographed are covered with dust and have clouded over in dark drawers, useless because they no longer let in light. In these days of the world’s old age everyone here is alone, and everyone has their own city which showers them with crumbling plaster, dead leaves and the dust of worn-out words.
On cold sleepy mornings blood stops flowing in the veins, the eyes can barely see and people lack the strength to take the next step. Nurses, seamstresses, fitters and chauffeurs, barely alive, doze off on the stairs holding onto the banister. At times someone opens their eyes all of a sudden and begins to look around, finding nothing familiar anywhere and amazed at how close it is from the youth of the world to its old age. And they cannot understand where the mistakes of youth have gone to, the outbursts of feeling, the songs. What has become of the new path of life: Could it possibly have turned into this exhausting, steep, lonely, cobweb-strewn path up and down the stairs? Where is the joy of the parents whose infant sat up in the baby carriage for the first time one warm afternoon, now, all these years later, when everything is already known about advancements, promotions, accidents, divorces and funerals?