Awakening to the Great Sleep War. Gert Jonke

he woke up again, he saw that the train was already rolling through a homey region that seemed very familiar to him in the first light of dawn, the last scraps of the darkness’s nightshade-flower garments still stuck to the outer skin of the window, dragged along like little cleaning-cloth flags in the airstream through the dried up sultriness of a landscape completely exhausted by the disappearing gloom.

      Of course the life that was wrapped around the trip the two of them were taking had not come to an end, as he had momentarily but prematurely assumed when he first opened his eyes; though, to tell the truth, he had almost hoped it had, because the intensity of their being together had been almost violently happy, as if this happiness might with corresponding violence push away everything else around them, so that only the two of them would be left over to turn up in this homeland that seemed alien to them in the first light of dawn.

      But it sank in soon enough that they weren’t alone: after coping with the plugged toilet, he wanted to wash away last night’s darkness-pollen, which had stuck to his entire body, mixed with train sweat, but he couldn’t do so, because it would have meant waiting too long outside the occupied washroom and he wanted to go back to their compartment—but just then he heard the washroom door snap open with a deliberate bang, as if to make certain that he, the person waiting outside, knew that he could now get into the washroom right away; and when he turned around to see who had found it necessary to be so kind as to hurry on his account, he saw the stark-naked body of the stoker from yesterday evening, who had painted his face freshly black for going on duty today, although or because he was not a stoker, and who flung a radiant, resounding, howling good morning at Burgmüller like a knife in the back.

      The clothing of the landscape they passed through got lighter and lighter: the simple monks’ habits of a seemingly endless assembly of hills behaving reservedly at first toward the passing train, but then gradually greeting it more and more congenially, waving to and after it, and then at first some of them, then more and more, started singing, yes, the gigantic hill-church choir along the edge of their route wasn’t going to let anyone stop it from singing a really excellent song for the train gliding past them, probably “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” or something similar? but no, no, it wasn’t that, it really sounded very different.

      In any case, high above these countless hilltops, entire cloud stairwells succeeded in sneaking furtively away, in making a misty escape behind the back of this first light of dawn, moving fleetingly in the direction of the noontime boundary.

      In the morning, a few hours before the expected arrival of their train in THITHER, it had become clear to the two of them that they would only separate for a short time, they had agreed that he wouldn’t get out with her right away in THITHER and she wouldn’t continue on with him right away to HITHER, so they’d be apart, but only for a very short time, they had sworn that they would meet again immediately afterward, regardless of what might intervene, no matter where they were, they would continually seek each other out, when suddenly, in spite of the fact that it was already late morning, a few hours before the arrival of the train in THITHER, the dawn-fragment in the restless window of their almost-flying bedroom somehow staggered backward, tipping sideways, in any case turned right around into an interleaved intermezzo night that must have been hiding away in some corner of this day that had dawned, maybe inside a crevice in a cliff that was a member of the hill society still singing, still dominating the region, though now its choir had suddenly made the transition to a very sad song of departure, and either he and she had again assisted one another in freeing themselves from the bonds of their clothing because they wanted to experience the adventurous security of their confusingly unalike figures merging into each other one more time before their temporary separation, or else the backward-pointing dawn of their bedroom rolling through the country had sent them back to their first night of love, to an hour that didn’t belong in any way to this day that had now dawned: an hour that had grown out of an unsuspected corner of the morning like a pitch-black flower of darkness that could no longer be driven away.

      They were back again in their only night—or was it perhaps a somewhat different, quite indefinable night after all, a night belonging to some unfamiliar in-between region of time whose hours had been lost somewhere by the day before, left lying here only to turn up for them again in that dark overcast nightmorning, completely lost in this morningnight mist that appeared briefly on the fields, in the darkness swirled through with night mist—although it couldn’t have been a “real” night, that curtain of morning mist pulled shut in front of the landscape’s performance, keeping the public out, pulled shut for the approaching noonday eclipse of the sun in an interposed nature reserve of time set aside just for him and for her, that’s how it was, Burgmüller, wasn’t it, at the point of parting from your sleeping-car rendezvous with your beloved who has been lost to you ever since, a few minutes before the scheduled arrival of the train THITHER.

      And after that?

      Don’t you know anymore?

      No? Or not exactly?

      In your opinion, the train never arrived THITHER back then, Burgmüller, or at least you weren’t able to notice if it did. Could this arrival possibly 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