the plains, stretching straight out over the edges of the map, perhaps to wind back again soon and seep into the city map you look at when you look at the city, you who roam around its frayed outskirts, at its canvas edges, aimlessly lost between the dilapidated shacks and the many machine-chassis gangs with their shovel loaders, digging trenches where they will bury meadows alive and toss entire rolled-up forests out of their path: they grin gloatingly, wielding their pliers, and mockingly threaten the hysterical swarms of birds of prey while sending clumps of old garbage whirling through the day . . . but they are also partially occupied with each other, with trying to unscrew, dismantle, and modify each other, whereby on the one hand they puff themselves up alarmingly with the steel-rib gears of their chromium- or nickel-plated thoraxes, spitting screws, almost bursting rivets, in order then on the other hand to shrivel up again into themselves, rumbling together, almost wizened, yes, sometimes they collapse in on themselves, clatter together in a huff, but more often they just attack one another with their grasping shovel tongs and mutually pluck each other’s headlight eyes out of their driverless cabs, yes, they usually can’t take a joke; but then again a lot of them wind up in an embrace after very clumsily pinching each other’s rear ends with the pincers on their clawed arms, sinking toward each other, getting wedged deeply into each other, gliding with their penis rods extended into holes the size of luggage lockers that are opening especially for them, and so in they sink, clutching each other, swinging over each other: they merge, and then, look, Burgmüller, how they all mutually roll each other through the air of this day, into the distance, or else they roll back into the municipal authorities’ fleet of vehicles, pushing each other out of the way . . .
It was on a previous day, yesterday, or like yesterday, yes, again and again, recently, like yesterday, a very foggy night, through which you had come here, back then, had driven through, had turned up at that stage of your solitary trip, which had begun so incredibly with someone else.
Your eyes are hurting from the edges of the forest that keep wandering away into the sunrise, and your back hurts too, as if grass-hoppers have taken your neck by storm. From the turnip fields, the crops hop toward you in swarms to heap themselves on your esteemed person.
But perhaps there might have been a secret way out, back then, much earlier, though not all that much earlier, just a wee bit earlier, when you hadn’t yet started to say back then, before that city, but it wasn’t just you, your lost love too would of course not have had a clue, would have found it utterly disconcerting that, quite contrary to what you’d both assumed, this trip you began together would remain your only common secret.
Back then, or somewhat earlier, before the silhouettes of that city’s walls had appeared with their exhibitionist, pseudo-prehistoric fortifications, much earlier than the two of you would ever be able to imagine again afterward, the beginning of the story of your lost love took place in a completely different city, and to be sure in a more distant foreign country, off the maps, and indeed in the train station there, no, maybe it wasn’t a train station, but rather a harbor,
yes, right, a harbor, no, it was a train station after all, you still remember that, vaguely, yes, this other city with that train station back then (or still today, one never knew what one could still say about it today), in a foreign country that had become invisible, off the maps, was located on the shore of one of the main continental rivers, or even at the edge of an ocean, one of those oceans that strayed and has been forgotten to this day, because how else would Burgmüller have hit upon the idea of talking about a harbor, or even have let its word-ships rise over the beach: not a single ocean-going rowboat subordinate clause, be it ever so ridiculous, would have slipped over his lips and out of his mouth if there hadn’t actually been something dissimilarly similar there, with ships along quay walls or steamboat-mooring points, anyway it wasn’t just he who was so certain, no, his lost loved one would also have agreed with him, maybe they would have argued about it briefly, just for an afternoon, whether it was a river or the beginning of a newly discovered ocean, but eventually the two of them would soon have agreed that it was both the ocean and the chameleon-skin rapids of a main continental artery, yes sir, back then it could well have been both at once, in the form of a swampy, branching, sultry, world-famous delta at the mouth of a river where it poured into a slotted gulf funnel at the entrance to the ocean—that much could also have been deduced from its cartographic representation, in those days, which also shows the exact location of the train station, easy to find with its slim tracks and the trains chained onto them, the station where the two of them first caught sight of one another, each in their respective lives back then, in the high-ceilinged waiting room of that train station, which had confoundingly similar facial features to each of its fraternal buildings, linked to it by iron rails, offering the same old things to eat from inside the cooking steam of their snack bars, they simply couldn’t be dissuaded from selling wieners that burst with laughter and exploded toward the traveler, spraying greetings at him, and there was the unmistakable smell of their exceptionally common types of mustard under the glittering hot downpours of the gleaming gold-toothed window-eyes of happily homecoming locomotives.
Yes, Burgmüller, remember how, back then, when you looked through the train station hall rising high above the tracks, you were suddenly touched by a gaze that understood you so immediately that you asked yourself what it must be like to see with such eyes; surely whatever they glanced at was immediately penetrated and assessed, and nothing or almost nothing could escape such eyes, you thought, but you didn’t feel at all as if you had been unpleasantly seen through, you would have let such eyes look through even bigger holes in you than there were in the segments of wire-mesh glass that made up the dome of the train station.
Back then, when he caught her looking at him, he felt a slight pressure at the center of his deepest and most intimate feelings, as if he had been forced to toss his thoughts to her across the waiting room, at first almost with a hint of reproach that she had kept him waiting so long, but she had finally turned up after all, though who knows how long she might have taken if he hadn’t happened to meet her here on the platform, whereupon he sensed that she was sending a transparent, silent answer-chain back to him, something to the effect that today was the first day that had been created for the two of them alone, for the two of them as for no one else, and that’s why they could only today begin their now inevitable simultaneity, because, in the future, they would be spending all their time together, yes, in our mundane futureland; and Burgmüller believed that he was receiving her answer loud and clear, without a word of it getting lost, they then thought toward each other with a perceptive clarity never previously experienced, without the slightest loss of meaning or interruption of a word, saying approximately this: that soon now everything would be cleared up, so much better than before, so much better than even a few minutes ago, when they had not yet sensed anything of each other, but everything had been steering them toward this point, as if all their past-regions, whose boundary lines had mutually stood in each other’s way, had just now touched each other, bringing with them the contrapuntal voices and moods of their future memories, the memories that belonged to both of them.
On the skin of his eyes, then, Burgmüller felt in every detail—as he looked farther back through the train station scaffolding, sewn with tracks—how the contours of his beloved’s face began to impress themselves upon him in its gaze-reply, how it had been planted in him, sliding up under his eyelids along with the light of the train station in the heat of this twilight; and a mirror image remained fixed over his pupils, as if, from the partly cloudy eyes of his beloved, a pleasant weather system had descended over the low-lying fields of his gaping eyes, a mirage extending from her dear face that then sank in behind his forehead.
The train the two of them were supposed to take later on had been waiting patiently alongside the platform since noon, ready for them and at their disposal; wasn’t it black, like the chimney sweep uniforms of its conductors, who were throwing motorcycles and bicycles into the dark recesses of the baggage car, and now also the story-cases that belonged to the two of them, nailed together with the boards of their fragmentary experiences to be sent off into another time zone, packed full of things they’d dealt with and not dealt with, their crossbar-titles black as the conductors and the waiting train that, as before,
