The band plays and the elephant, raised on its hind legs, dances a tango; its trunk sways to the rhythm of the music, and a splendid pink bow flutters on its flat forehead. The leather-clad wise guy cracks a whip for effect. The audience grows quiet, mightily amused that the elephant is dancing solo, and that it keeps misstepping. Festoons of colored lights are turned on around the ring. The standing ovation goes on and on. From one bar to the next the tango turns into a circus march — it isn’t clear exactly when, as hardly anything can be heard. The chaotic finale is drowned out in a storm of applause and cheers. The elephant makes a triumphal lap of the ring. In a moment it will be led offstage. The leather-clad wise guy suddenly leans out from behind its immense body, makes a face and in lieu of a farewell throws something at the narrator. A crumpled ball of paper. The narrator smoothes out the letter, once torn up and now taped back together. He would read it, but it’s too late. As the spotlights go out, everything is swallowed in darkness.
The sentences will be shorter and shorter. They do not have the strength anymore to break away toward the expanses of the future tense. They contain less and less sky and more and more fog and earth. Hardly anything is possible any longer. And no truth will appear until the secure forms of the past tense impose order. Toward the end, the story descends into chaos; words go missing, lost between the lines. The life slowly ebbs out of them. The narrator had not thought about this before. Made weary by the burden of the story, he had not asked himself what kind of future awaits him when all the story lines come to an end. When the circle is complete. When the last of the sentences falls silent. And the last bar of the circus march. The band plays ever faster, as if it were being pursued. Let those crotchets be allowed to sound out, for goodness’ sake! But the musicians are already leaving; the final chord has vanished somewhere, unheard by anyone. They carry out their instruments: French horn, bugles, and side drums. But where are the violins? Those that at the beginning sent the sound of open strings into space? It was they who imitated the buzzing of flies, starting with the first one hatched from some word to show the way. Could the violins have slipped away without waiting for the finale? The memory does not stretch far back; in it sounds have already been erased. Nothing more will be seen or heard. The silence is like a boundless ocean in which worlds are submerged. Against darkness and inertia no one has ever yet prevailed.