have escaped you? And your beloved, who has been lost to you since then, is it possible she perhaps has a better grasp of events? No?
But if it didn’t arrive, the train, then what went on with it afterward?
Maybe it had an accident, you think? everyone rescued, of course, just that the two of you were so deeply caught up in one another that you lost your way in your sleeping-car compartment and wound up buried in the landscape?
Don’t you think so?
Or was this mutual inclination of yours so destructive that it perhaps somehow managed—melting apart, floating away—to dissolve your life into a different, communal, transparent form of existence?
Or is that not at all how everything happened, as one is still able to surmise, but entirely differently, yes, everything happening just as stated but only as reflections of a sort, flashes, you’ve only been signaling at one another from afar, the two of you did meet at the train station and then did see each other on the train, whereupon you simultaneously thought all the above things in each other’s directions, but, due to unfavorable external circumstances, it had not been possible to put these thoughts into action, even to openly imply them, before she quite normally got out THITHER and he rode on HITHER, without their having exchanged even a single word.
No, something very significant must have happened between them after all, must have been set in motion, otherwise they wouldn’t have searched for each other endlessly like they have.
Burgmüller had looked for her first of all throughout the entire region around THITHER, and his lost love had looked for him hither and thither in HITHER and then thither and hither around about HITHER, but he no more found so much as a trace of her in or around THITHER than she’d been able to find even the hint of a shadow of him in or around HITHER; nevertheless, they looked for each other their entire lives, all through their memories of the future, and maybe she had long since been together with another man, and he with another woman, but notwithstanding all that they had remained for each other an untarnishable image to be sought.
Maybe he had always been THITHER just when she came HITHER, or she hadn’t had anything to do with THITHER in a long time, and he hadn’t had anything to do with HITHER in ages, because all their searching here and there was so much in vain that it seemed as if neither of them had ever really lived, or that she had only looked for him in the time of his absence, while he on the other hand had looked only behind her back—or had the wind just let its opaque curtains fall in front of the windows of this neglected landscape-salon in such a way that the two of them had their visions mutually blocked whenever their searches happened to be underway?
But somehow a solution had to be found, you must have been able to hold onto something reasonably securely that only you, Burgmüller, and your lost love had in common, that no one could take away from the two of you, because it had only concerned the two of you, a city, a stretch of land, and for that the two of you naturally chose neither THITHER nor HITHER, after having had such bad experiences with those places, no, the two of you wanted to have absolutely nothing more to do with HITHER or THITHER, and so the two of you then chose that city there, didn’t you, with which neither of you was familiar, and the two of you made your separate ways to that city, until you arrived here, you, Burgmüller, from HITHER, and she, your lost love, from THITHER or from somewhere else, because perhaps the two of you had long since been somewhere else entirely and each of you thought, purely by chance, that you would meet each other again upon this plain outside the city here, or, each on your own, were jointly underway next to each other on opposite streets far apart from one another, but you never reached that city there, because you had lost your way in the enchanted ruins of the suburbs that spread out around you as if airdropped by a cargo squadron, or else you’d bogged down in one of the squares of steppe grass laid out like allotment gardens, bogged down in a fleet of camels and their scarecrows with parasols and hats to protect against the sun, traveling under the personal protection and with the efficient camouflage of a developing darkness caused by a swarm of locusts.
Or couldn’t it have been like this: for her, your lost love, THITHER was this plain spread around outside the city here; just as for you, Burgmüller, HITHER was also this suburban lowland, so that to a certain extent both of you have actually always been together here somehow, without knowing or suspecting it, since yesterday, yes, or anyway it was like yesterday, it was yesterday or like yesterday.
From then on, every morning began as if it weren’t today’s respective morning, but rather your stale day yesterday that had snuck through its day and its night, between the seconds and minutes, into the following day, so that finally, gradually, with a lot of effort, it had managed to rise up as its own continuation, and tomorrow too the day before would turn up in the morning again instead of tomorrow’s day, yes, tomorrow morning will still have been yesterday morning or last night, which never gave you cause to assume it had passed.
In the plain outside the city, where Burgmüller was standing, he saw a train coming toward him from the edges of the suburbs, and as he walked along a narrow path through the fields along the railway embankment, the train now arrived there farther out in the country and glided past him, and the skin of its cars was almost transparent, or the sun had covered it with a reflective coating whose blinding light started to melt in Burgmüller’s eyes without causing him any pain, but soon the train cars seemed to have become even more transparent than the air, and he saw the travelers sitting inside them, yes, indeed, not just faces in the windows, but the individual people sitting there from head to toe, they greeted him with friendly smiles, waving at him from the windows, but one of them caught his attention, a passenger was looking out at him from the pounding train particularly lovingly, with careful concern, and kept looking back at him for a long time even from a distance, indeed in such a way that it seemed as if this fellow were an acquaintance who was particularly fond of Burgmüller, but then it became increasingly clear that a woman had been sitting or standing beside that passenger, and her gaze explained everything to him, it seemed to him with great certainty that he himself had been sitting in the train with his girlfriend and had ridden past, yes sir, as if he had been waving at himself from the train car as he had stood on that path through the fields by the train tracks, while you, Burgmüller, yes, indeed, stood on the path by the train tracks and waved at and after the travelers in the train that was slowly gliding past, as if, having been waved at in a lively fashion by yourself from the passing train, you were standing there as it drove past and also waving back at yourself again at the same time, waving from the path along the railway to the train that was slowly moving off, and from the train that was now gradually disappearing behind the hazy wing-beats of a hill on the steppe, the you that waved back at yourself as you were continuing to wave while standing near the train tracks rode away together with your lost love.
So, back then, you got to that city here, Burgmüller, and it was almost as if you had never arrived here, never been in the city here, no, and you’d also never climbed the rage of its museum-wall copings, never noticed the pride of the ornamental plasterwork on its decorated buildings, which are well worth a visit; instead, at most, you often hid on the islands that wandered downstream in that river whose name you didn’t even know, or did it even still have a name then, that water-snake rivulet that was proving ever more inadequate? But people felt it necessary to prevent its water system from spreading out in too many branches, and to stop its snakeskin back, scaly with wave-mirrors, from rising all too high against the chains of the adjacent quay walls along its banks—no sooner had it entered the city, letting its wave-dances surface and tear through the municipal area, than it had been tied as tightly as possible to the ground, which was done by strapping it down with several bridge-girdles along its path, keeping it to prescribed areas; and perhaps this also made it easier for the islands floating downstream to cross safely through the city, escaping the threateningly looming tongs of cellar windows and sewer gratings that were always reaching out for them; and how many of these delicate chains of islands had probably already been swallowed by the sewers of the gigantic rows of city wine cellars built along the edge of this primary
