There were innumerable humps and hollows near and far, knee-high timber and alpine meadow. From this motionless turmoil, from this decayed, yellow-green frothy break of ground, again and again your glance was flung ever upwards at the high, red, overhanging cliff which sliced off the landscape in front and from which your glance retreated, shattered into a hundred vistas. That jagged cliff was not all that high, yet above it loomed nothing but ancient light. It was so savage and so inhumanly beautiful, as we imagine in the ages of creation.
Near the bench, which was seldom visited, a little mouse had dug itself a system of running trenches. Mouse-deep, with holes to disappear and elsewhere reappear. She scurried around in circles, stood still, then scurried round again. A terrible silence emanated from the sullen atmosphere. The human hand dropped off the armrest. An eye, as small and black as the head of a spinning needle, turned to look. And for an instant you had such a strange twisted feeling, that you really no longer knew: Was it this tiny, living black eye that turned? Or the stirring of the mountain’s huge immobility? You just didn’t know anymore: Had you been touched by the will of the world, or by the will of this mouse, that glowed out of a little, lonesome eye? You didn’t know: Was the war still raging or had eternity won the day?
So you might have continued at length to ramble on about something you felt you could not know; but that’s all for this little story, that had already come to an end every time you tried to end it.
I went to bed earlier than usual, feeling a slight cold, I might even have a fever. I am staring at the ceiling, or perhaps it’s the reddish curtain over the balcony door of our hotel room that I see; it’s hard to distinguish.
As soon as I’d finished with it, you too started to undress. I’m waiting. I can only hear you.
Incomprehensible, all the walking up and down; in this corner of the room, in that. You come over to lay something on your bed; I don’t look up, but what could it be? In the meantime, you open your closet, put something in or take something out; I hear it close again. You lay hard, heavy objects on the table, others on the marble top of the commode. You are forever in motion. Then I recognize the familiar sounds of hair being undone and brushed. Then swirls of water in the sink. Even before that, clothes being shed; now, again; it’s just incomprehensible to me how many clothes you take off. Finally, you’ve slipped out of your shoes. But now your stockings slide as constantly back and forth over the soft carpet as your shoes did before. You pour water into glasses; three, four times without stopping, I can’t even guess why. In my imagination I have long since given up on anything imaginable, while you evidently keep finding new things to do in the realm of reality. I hear you slip into your nightgown. But you aren’t finished yet and won’t be for a while. Again there are a hundred little actions. I know that you’re rushing for my sake; so all this must be absolutely necessary, part of your most intimate I, and like the mute motion of animals from morning till evening, you reach out with countless gestures, of which you’re unaware, into a region where you’ve never heard my step!
By coincidence I feel it all, because I have a fever and am waiting for you.
My room was strange. Pompeian red with Turkish curtains; the furniture had rents and seams in which the dust had gathered like tiny boulder beds and bands. It was a delicate dust, unreal rocks in miniature; but it was so very simply there, so uninvolved in any action, that it reminded of the great solitude of the mountains, bathed only in the rising and falling of flood light and darkness. In those days I had many such experiences.
The first time I set foot in the house, it was completely saturated with the stench of dead mice.
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