Awakening to the Great Sleep War. Gert Jonke

all his time with them, and everything would inevitably have started over again and would have gone on approximately as already described and had a similar ending once more, and if that happened then he would have gone through everything up until then for nothing, because he would have had to go through it or something similar a second time, without being able to leave anything out, just to get back to his current state, this stage that he’d reached only with great effort, but he had reached it. Or might he have been unable to reach this point a second time? The likely catastrophe always lurking so successfully around the next corner might take on alarming proportions en route, proportions that don’t need to be described in any additional detail here.

      For a long time, those calcified memories were still vividly present for him—particularly evident in the fact that, albeit with decreasing frequency, he was overcome, characteristically, by a peculiar feeling, namely that he was playing the role of a very mobile caryatid, no, a very mobile atlas who, to be sure, had no building, no gateway, no oriel to support or to carry on his shoulders, but in its place, and certainly comparable in terms of weight, he had a column of air, its dimensions unimaginably overwhelming for him, and it accompanied him loyally everywhere he went, stretching from his shoulders up to the farthest outermost roof-truss skin of the atmosphere, and he had been growing increasingly weary of carrying its load of late. I’m not going to do this much longer, he often thought to himself when he had collapsed from one of the sudden attacks of weakness that overcame him, accompanied by nausea, gasping for breath, no, he thought to himself, not me, no, not like this, and so he often tried to shake off that column of air, but it didn’t let itself be shaken off so easily, it stuck to him stubbornly as if it had grown onto him; but then he was at last able to manage it, at least sometimes, it had taken him a long time to find out how to do it: having assumed a position of repose, for example, sitting outside on a park bench, he needed first of all a period of concentrated relaxation, and then a simple rest, closing his eyes, with his body, and particularly his head, very peacefully balanced: then he noticed how his inner feeling of relaxation streamed out of him and transferred itself to his column of air, of course only gradually, things like that take time, until he could feel quite distinctly that the cylinder of atmosphere on his shoulders had gotten quite light and downy or fleecy, it rolled itself in or up and off his shoulders with something like elegance, often swaying iridescently as it did so, like immensely huge, wide wings that were made of a thickly woven mesh of various crystal threads; then he just had to wait until the column of air had finally quieted down and itself gone to sleep; then it was easy to remove it, if you were gentle, but that usually resulted in its waking up again and hopping right back onto his shoulders—which is why Burgmüller, once he’d removed the column of air, had to run away immediately, as fast as he could, to get away from there, go somewhere else. But even that didn’t help him for long, because shortly afterward, when he had stopped in order to catch his breath and enjoy his new freedom, the column of air again positioned itself on his shoulders or his head; was it the old one, having run after him, pursued him, which would always pursue him, that had sought and found him again, or was it another one, a new one, that had finally found a shoulder with a vacancy, yes, that seemed more logical to him, and sometimes he saw the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere as a pushing and shoving of assorted columns of air, aimlessly straying here and there, always fighting with each other, all of them looking for an empty shoulder on which they could settle, come crashing down. But those often only very brief moments of release made Burgmüller very happy, so his escape attempts remained rewarding for him, and he undertook the described measures more and more frequently. The only really stupid thing about the situation was that those people who observed him in the process of running away from his column, full tilt, not only immediately considered him suspect, but were in fact quite certain that he had stolen something from them or done something terrible, something criminal, because he immediately heard their frantic, hysterical voices calling after him, “Stop him! Thief! Stop the murderer!” etc. And once, when the forces of law and order really did detain and question him as to the reason for his extreme haste, when he told them about the business with the column of air they naturally didn’t believe him. But since they found no stolen goods on him, they let him go again.

      Often, when he came across caryatids or atlantes, he did stay with them for a little while, of course without initiating contact, but very often with the intention of suggesting that perhaps now the time had come for them to go out for once, to go read newspapers in a café, or to go to the movies, he could recommend that, it would relax them a little, and in their absence, he, Burgmüller, would make himself temporarily available to prop up their archway, to hold their balcony up against the sky, and if they replied that he would probably be too weak to do that, he had his counterargument ready: given that he had been able until now to cope with his column of air, he would certainly be capable of lifting such miniscule things as buildings and doorways, at least for a while, and so on. But every time he was about to address them on this subject, it occurred to him that he unfortunately wouldn’t have enough time. Because the centuries required for them to have a quick cup of coffee, or the millennia it would take for them to watch even the news, no, he unfortunately didn’t have that kind of time.

      But it was important and long past due that not only he but all the other people in that city should begin to treat the telamones with more respect than they had previously been shown. If they didn’t, there would always be the fear that the telamones might some day grow weary of supporting their buildings. Yes, what if they fell asleep someday after all, and indeed did so intentionally? Then half the city would cave in, and it would be as if an undeclared war had broken out. Hadn’t the telamones already begun to shout at passersby in a way that was becoming more and more comprehensible, to hurl curses of stone at them? Of course the people were surprised to be yelled at so impertinently by their own buildings, but while at first they simply shook their heads over this lapse of good manners, they soon became accustomed to it, as to so many other things. But it happened more and more frequently that these scoldings from the walls became associated with certain unpleasant bodily pains. The people walking past the rows of houses were often struck still, as if rooted to the spot, stopped in their tracks, as if they felt they had been hit on the backs of their heads, or in their backs, by projectiles whizzing through the air. But there was nothing to be seen, neither shots fired nor stones thrown nor any of the other projectiles that people had thought to find. These were words of stone. Yes, yes, the telamones had clearly begun to defend themselves more and more, in ways that could not be ignored, against the people in the city. And they were quite within their right to do so.

      Judging by appearances, though, it was to be feared that they might not put up with things as they were for very much longer; yes, the walls were often roaring incessantly and indiscriminately now at everything that passed by below them, their whitewash seething, their mortar forming a dusty mist! And even if they weren’t capable of learning how to sleep, thought Burgmüller, at some point they would indeed step away from their buildings—even if they did so very slowly, it would still be a shock—and they would leave the city behind them, letting it sink into rubble and ash as they made their way out onto the plain and to the shore of the sea, taking a trip to the cliffs by the ocean, to the stone quarries of their birth.

      As previously described, Burgmüller had lost track of his beloved, but while searching for her in the shooting galleries of that city’s amusement park, he found Elvira.

      Elvira wasn’t actually called Elvira, no, the real Elvira didn’t turn up until later.

      This Elvira was only called Elvira when Burgmüller confused her with the real Elvira, which happened now and then later on too.

      Her real name is of no consequence; people should avoid this unnecessary naming of proper names in public, thought Burgmüller, he hated those people who were always fooling around with names called through the telephone wires; since he had withdrawn some time ago, they had nothing new at all to report about him, but they nevertheless knew more about him than he knew about himself.

      Whenever he wanted to find out something new about himself, he met with people like that and asked them: So, what’s the news about me? or: What’s the news about Burgmüller? Then he got to hear things that were really entirely new to him, that he would otherwise never have been aware of having done. They were confusing him with someone else, he often suspected, or else it was just that the different