Under the Neomoon by Wolfgang Hilbig

Author:Wolfgang Hilbig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press

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Or are you the ones who vanished there, you who are blind to my body’s empty shell…are you vanishing into the mists, abducted by a gigantic mountain, are you the beings dwelling in that massif’s civilization of huts, are you the ones living in the semicircular structures made from animal dung…and what do you live on, are you living well in your immeasurable realm of the dead…your realm is dead and lost to the world.

I’d been mistaken; there was no precipice the huts adhered to, the whole thing was one single mountain of dwellings, the shape of that world had been erected in the image of the first hut built on Asiatic soil once upon a time. But when those huts had densely covered the whole land, all the way to its shores, they started building upward, a third layer atop the second, and so on, until that prodigious oval peak took form, a gigantic building in the same necessary shape as each of its component parts. A path taken from the ground to a dwelling in the middle of, let’s say, the 150th floor would inevitably pass through all the occupied interiors of the stacked and nested huts; it was hard to grasp the advanced culture of coexistence those circumstances dictated; in that world a single injustice could become the epicenter of a quake, spreading in all directions and bringing down the entire realm…each individual in that world had to possess a single, open I, nothing was hidden, and nothing could be allowed to be hidden…the light’s harsh rays in the high mountains’ thin air had slowly dried the building material and fused all details into one whole; it must have taken eons for that world to achieve perfection. Mild red mists enveloped the whole thing, and gradually it vanished, soon all I saw was the yellow-green silhouette of the egg-shaped tip looming from the clouds, seemingly borne off by invisible wings.

My final recollection—as vivid as though my remote mind were receiving proof of a reality—was of the warm, vegetative vapors that flowed from all the building’s openings, so warm and strong that the air currents over the ice-blue water of the shorelessly sprawling mountain lake were set in motion, propelling the sailing ships away in all directions; no one reached that legendary culture that took in prisoners no longer.

(On my way to the train station it occurred to me that in passing I’d actually glimpsed a white piece of paper behind the grille of my mailbox. I went back and retrieved it; it was a summons from the police.)

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