Awakening to the Great Sleep War. Gert Jonke

mingling mechanism by which the news you heard about yourself could conceivably and in the very next moment be attributed to someone else, to someone recently added to the system, and soon, perhaps tomorrow, or in a few hours or minutes, it could be surprisingly attributed to yet another someone else, who until then had been completely unknown—so then in order to find out something really new about himself, Burgmüller would have had to ask after news of some entirely different people, unknown to him, people to whom just then the newest stories were being ascribed, things that would only be supposed to happen to Burgmüller in the near future. But how could he possibly have known about whom he should ask if he wanted to find out at least the most important things about himself? Or should he simply have asked: Tell me, about whom would it be most advantageous for me to ask in order to hear things about myself that would otherwise remain unknown to me? Of course people would have been confused if they were suddenly asked questions like that, but he might have succeeded in finding the key to their secret system—when, where, in what direction, and how often the names were to be exchanged as far as their respective stories, and with what downright artistically masterful nastiness their intrigues were adding storied ruins to whose past, and indeed in such a way that catastrophes were sure to follow. Or was it possible that Burgmüller, in those people’s descriptions, really had managed to do things he’d not yet thought himself capable of?

      But usually the only important thing to them was that they were talking, it didn’t matter about whom or what; to such people, their own talk was a means of rehearsing the mechanics of imbuing storytelling with slanderous powers of destruction, of keeping the ball rolling. Unfortunately, thought Burgmüller, most of the so-called normal human conversations and discussions that allow people to better understand one another have almost never been anything but diligent practice for the spreading of lies—which intentionally and predictably result in human destruction.

      His memory of those first days with Elvira was rather sketchy, but as far as he could remember, he had noticed her “love of animals” early on, especially her almost intimate familiarity with certain species that did not exceed a certain size; he had noticed it on their almost daily walks on those paths along the edge of the forest. She heard the mandibles of stag beetles clattering with all the conviction of a new type of can opener, saw their backsides shining as if with fresh black shoe polish. Foliage suddenly fluttered down from some trees, but before the leaves had fallen to the ground, some of them had turned into rare butterflies whose wings were as discreetly multicolored as oriental prayer rugs. Ladybugs frequently flew to her, and she counted the number of white dots on their two red wing cases and entered them in her notebook, because she was keeping statistics on the dots. When she talked to herself, he couldn’t understand what she was saying, because she used fragments of words from the untranslatable language of natural sounds that are used to transmit news of a catastrophe; through the waves of shining, swaying, putrefying twilight in a forest that was slowly dying and evaporating, the dense veil of gently threatening swarms of spruce web-spinning sawflies swung over the unstoppable invasion of migrating silver-fir wooly adelgids that had soon spread through all the undergrowth, reinforced by the merry drilling sounds of well armored pine weevils and elm bark beetles.

      The woodlice that had settled in the underground coal cellars of the building were doing well since she moved in with him; she reported on such things promptly, and told Burgmüller that at the same time every day, and perhaps also during the night, the walls of the building were shaken, barely perceptibly, but undeniably, as if by a gentle earthquake that was passing through, tenderly stroking the walls and rocking the roofs, and went on to explain to him in detail that in her opinion a small colony of termites or some such thing had settled in the building walls. Anything larger than, say, a dragonfly or a praying mantis no longer attracted her attention, which was not so much scientific as deeply sensual in nature.

      Sometimes, when he looked at her, the answer she sent back to him, light as a feather, was melancholy sheet lightning from her eyes.

      The autumn air was filled with fog-fairytales of bereavement and quivering cotton-batting clouds; embedded in the foehn, they trailed through the bushes and hedges in the park, tearing the last petal sails from their twigs; passing out of the city and through the suburbs into the lowlands, they flooded the banks of the streams and ravines formed by the streets, washing premonitions of an early winter ashore, and the landscape picked up on those feelings and rehearsed them carefully as études to accompany a silent movie.

      Burgmüller was sitting with his girlfriend at the breakfast table by the window and looking out into the bleak half-light of the season, which, coming from the surrounding countryside, started then to arch up over the edge of the city like a deliberately threatening wave of putrefaction slowly rolling in, and soon it had playfully covered over all the roofs, and then it remained glued across all the windowpanes and entranceways to the buildings like a greasy piece of tinfoil that had been wrapped around butter, but that someone had carelessly allowed to get dirty.