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When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Whatever has taken a life will be swept away, I thought to myself. I couldn’t picture a coffin, only a window.
I didn’t know how the word transfinite came to be here in the graveyard. But beside this grave, I realized what it must always have meant.
I never forgot again.
I could have said to Tereza: Transfinite is a window that doesn’t disappear once someone has fallen from it.

Who loves and leaves turned out to be us. We had come under the curse of the song:
God shall punish him
with the pinching beetle
the howling wind
the dust of the earth.

I had told Kurt as well: Hold on to Tereza. A friendship isn’t like a jacket that you can pass on to me, he said. I could slip it on. It might even look as though it fitted, from the outside, but on the inside it wouldn’t keep me warm.
Whatever we said became final. The words in our mouths do as much damage as our feet on the grass—every goodbye was like that.

I didn’t want Tereza to be alone, and I said: Hold on to Kurt. Tereza nodded. You’re taking part of me away, she said, and you’re giving the rest to Kurt. And besides, I’m only half the nut anyway. It’s easy to share out something that isn’t whole anymore.
...Tereza knew that the door would close between us, that I wouldn’t be allowed back into the country to visit her.

The butcher birds stayed in Kurt’s wardrobe, in a shoe. In their place, Georg had flown out of his cul-de-sac into the sack with the window. Maybe the puddle where his head rested reflected the sky. Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud …

Grandfather, the barber, Toni the clockmaker, Father, the priest, and the schoolteacher all referred to Germany as the Motherland. Even though it was fathers who had marched off into the world for Germany, still it was the Motherland.
By leaving, Georg had beaten a path for Edgar and me to follow. Out of the cul-de-sac, he used to say. And six weeks later he was lying on the pavement in the Frankfurt winter.

Each of us imagined how we might desert our friends by committing suicide. And we each accused the others—without ever saying so—of being the sole reason for our not going through with it. In this way, we each became self-righteous, armed with a ready silence that blamed the others for the fact that we were each still alive instead of dead.
What it took to save us was patience.

Failure was as normal to us as breathing. We shared it just as we shared our trust. And yet each of us quietly added something special for himself as well: an extra bit of personal failure on the side. We each had a wretched image of ourself, along with outbreaks of agonizing vanity.

The woman looked at her two children and said: What can you do, some children are poor because they don’t have parents, others because they do.

Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn’t honest even with itself.

I wanted love to grow back, like the grass when it’s mown down. To grow differently, if need be, like children’s teeth, like hair, like fingernails. To spring up at will, wild and untended. The chill of the sheets made me shudder, and so did the warmth that followed when I lay down.

That moment came: I locked myself up in the pounding of my heart and was out of Kurt’s reach. My coldness could not come up with any angry words, it couldn’t come up with anything anymore. In my fingers, this coldness felt capable of violence.

Kurt and I laughed out loud into the room, as if we had to take hold of each other before our faces started to twitch out of control. Before we each began to worry about mastering the corners of our mouths. While we laughed we watched each other’s mouth. We knew that at any moment we would be abandoned, deserted by the other, by the controlled lips as much as by the uncontrolled twitches.

...At the time I still believed that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.

Tereza started walking ..as though she weren’t walking on the pavement, but on top of the world. I..could only walk the way people did in our country. I felt the difference between this country and the world. It was bigger than the difference between Tereza and me. I was the country, but she was not the world. She was only what people in this country thought of as the world when they wanted to flee.

But Tereza sensed, like me, that we belonged together only where there were no secrets. We didn’t belong together in such short words as you and me. She rolled her little eyes and said:
No one will ever know again
Who those two people might have been.

One of the books in the summerhouse was called: On Suicide. It stated that only one way of dying can fit into a given head. But I was caught in a cold circle between the window and the river. Death was whistling for me from afar, I needed to sprint to get to him. I almost had myself under control, only a tiny bit of me refused to go along. Maybe it was my heart-beast.

The word nail-clippers in a sentence will mean interrogation, said Kurt, shoes will mean a search, a sentence about having a cold will mean you’re being followed. After the greeting always an exclamation point, but a comma if your life’s in danger.

We always picked our quarrels deliberately; only their consequences were inadvertent. Each time the rage subsided, we declared our mutual love without inventing any words. Our love was always there. But in our quarrels, it grew claws.

...Watching each other collapse under our rough love and realizing how little we could endure. One insult led to the next like beads on a string until the victim stopped speaking. And stayed that way for some time. And for some time after that, words would fall upon his silent countenance like locusts on a field already chewed bare.

We needed the rage from all those words to separate us. We invented them like curses to gain distance from one another. Our laughter was hard, we used it to drill into our pain. Everything happened quickly, because we knew each other inside out. We knew exactly how to hurt each other, and we enjoyed watching each other suffer....

We could see whose fear was where, because we had known each other so long. Often we couldn’t stand each other, because we were all we had. We had no choice but to lash out at each other.

We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our heads, just as we’d brought it to our meetings. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there.

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that’s how it is with friends where the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that’s how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

I didn’t know yet that the guards needed that hatred to perform their bloody work with daily precision. That they needed it to pass judgments in return for their wages. They could only pass judgments on their enemies. The guards proved their reliability by the number of their enemies.

And I thought to myself that everything that harms the graveyard makers was useful. That Edgar, Kurt, and Georg, by writing poems and taking pictures and now and again humming a tune, would inspire hatred in the graveyard makers. That such hatred would harm the guards. That little by little this hatred could make all the guards—and finally even the dictator himself—lose their heads.

...You could see it in their hands: Soon they will build balloons, fragile birds made of bedsheets and saplings. They hope the wind won’t drop, so they can fly away. You could see it on their lips: Soon they will whisper to a stationmaster in exchange for every penny they have. They will climb onto freight trains so they can roll away.