Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke

Author:Gert Jonke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

When he woke up the next morning, she was already gone.

They hadn’t intended to leave until midday, because a few days before this she had received a letter, an official or semi-official document containing the inviting request that she show up without fail on this day for a fixed appointment to discuss something of an urgency that wasn’t clearly defined, but was to take place in an exactly designated room of a very particular public building.

Why had she taken all her luggage along to the office—hadn’t he offered to take her things to the train station too, to speed the process up for her and so make that visit as easy as possible?

Had she forgotten his offer this morning, because she felt she had to hurry—or had she suddenly thought she would somehow suffer a loss of dignity if she let anyone else, including him, carry anything for her?

A warm morning lay spread out on the square in front of the train station, and in spite of the silent sultriness of its breath, it alleviated the boredom of the neglected pay phones by using merrily trembling, glittering dust cloths of air and cleaning rags of light to quickly wipe down their receivers and polish them to a shine.

The train the two of them were supposed to take later on had been waiting patiently for them since the early morning, standing ready at the platform in the main hall of the train station. The train station personnel used massive sledgehammers to hit the cars in the intestines, to test the durability of their various hoses to see if they had sprung leaks on the last trip, or would soon on the coming trip.

How good that he had ordered their tickets far enough in advance and had already picked them up, because, back then, behind the individual wickets for pre-purchasing tickets in the entrance hall the officials were trying to sell all that remained in the way of trips, open seats, and reserved seats on the trains that would still be leaving on that day, they made every effort to lure the members of the public who were in the train station over to their wickets, to show the people the beautifully colored train tickets, which they held up in the air so they were clearly visible, yes, and sometimes one or the other of them went so far in his zeal as to leave his cubicle to go up to a gentleman or a lady in a very familiar fashion, to convince the passerby he had personally addressed to please come back with him to his respective wicket, helping the person along a little now and then with a hand motion, gently pushing, or, if necessary, if someone was simply too equivocal, grabbing the person helpfully by the arm or simply taking him or her by the hand back to the wicket in question, where the convincing advantages of traveling off on the very same day were immediately impressed on the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.