Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word arrival, though, I’ve already said too much: there’s something so familiar in the soapy taste of the air that I wouldn’t dream of describing my walk into town as a return — I don’t think of myself coming back; I’ve never been away. No, I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that’s all: in truth it was the town that never really left me. The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval. I always had this impression, long before the whole country’s upheaval, and it lingered after the country’s authorities had surrendered and fled, after the government and its closest vassals had been replaced: this town seemed in no way to confirm the changing of the system. In a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis, and that collapse had survived the regime change.
For years I fled from the town, years that have sped from my grasp as though chased by the furies, and yet never passed quickly enough for me. These are all the years I can recall with ease, quite in contrast to those I spent here in this town. It’s as though in those other cities, the bigger, more attractive ones I chose to live in, I never really settled down. Those cities’ easily summoned images were dimmed by a sense of loss, a sentimental feeling originating in this town to which I return from time to time. It’s here that this barely explicable sense of absence grew on me, one I only really felt once I had settled down elsewhere with the more or less firm resolution to stay. It made itself felt as a kind of living without a background, it was a state of severance, a state without a past, and yet I’d learned to feel severed from the past in the small town afternoons.
Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog banks that merged beneath an earth-colored sky appeared unlikely to pass for decades to come. And more and more smoke seemed to spill from the sodden lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal.
Nothing new in the town of M., then. — Bahnhofstrasse, the station road, is still rutted by construction pits, as it was months before, the last time I came here: in the same darkness in which gusts of wind seem to snatch the faint light from the trembling lamps that mark, at irregular intervals, the edge of what was once the sidewalk. Cold fog with wind and rain knotted in it; now snow seems to mingle there as well. The way ahead of me has metamorphosed into a causeway of shadow, beginning to glitter treacherously. Ahead of me hurry a few bundled-up people who got off the train along with me; the street seems barely negotiable, on both sides the invisible looms. I look about for a better path: the alternative route is also broken up and blocked by railings behind which, in the yellow-red flicker of lamps, listing construction vehicles seem to sink into the sand. Every route has been torn up; evidently, after digging up half the town, all work was ceased; I’ve never known it to be otherwise.
For one fleeting moment — an eddy of wind parts the mix of rain and snow — I can see the clock on the station façade: it shows three! — There’s no mistake, it always told this time, its hands always formed this exact right angle in the upper part of the dial: three o’clock, as long as I can remember. I have a photograph a friend took of me at the lower end of Bahnhofstrasse, twenty or more years ago. Our intention was to record the strange sight of a bulky pipeline: along the side façades of the factory buildings by the road, the pipe, more than a yard in diameter with its insulation, ran straight across the factory windows, blocking both the view and the daylight, so that the lights in the factory halls had to be left on perpetually. The spectacle of this disconcerting stopgap constituted the charm of the photograph for us; it recalled some absurd technological fantasy. — The station stood at the street’s upper end: on the clearly discernable clock above its entrance it was precisely three o’clock!
Eternal afternoon prevails in the town. The photo shows not a soul on the sharply lit street; the trees, evidently sycamores, still in existence then, are bare. Beneath the white-gray autumn sky, the town has been struck by some blow of mysterious origin. At exactly three o’clock on an ice-cold Sunday, when none of the inhabitants were on the street, the town had been transformed into a phantasm. It had frozen to a motionless backdrop; no one noticed, not even that harmless hobby photographer, himself observed only from behind grimy curtains by several perpetually lurking informers. — Ever since then you were excluded, upon entering the city, from a fundamental law of human existence: since then you were excluded from the soft, relentless onward flow of time, which the trigger of an old-fashioned camera had brought to a standstill. There was only one copy of this black and white photo; the negative had vanished in the dusty back rooms of a photo lab whose owner retired long ago.
And ever since then you were transformed into a shadow upon entering this town, this sinister, bleakly motley heap of houses. And if someone had walked the streets at night, only years later might you hear his steps echoing up the walls.
Those were my thoughts when I’d walked across town and sat at last in my little upstairs kitchen. I thought of these steps, scuffing, hasty, sometimes dragging with weariness, and I thought that they had never ceased. . they were the only movement in the town. — Outside, human life and living voices still existed! Beyond the bounds of this obliterated town I sensed language still at work, and I believed that with its help certain things could be achieved. New generations will partake of it, I told myself; I’d long been waiting for the moment when young people would at last take on the language. And at last seize the ideas buried in the language, and put them on the line. Perhaps I myself had grown unable to guess at these ideas; for far too long now, words have seemed to give out on me. But in some obscure future perhaps the words will reemerge, I thought. Like lights that flicker and stutter at first, as when long-forgotten wires and connections are suddenly flooded with electricity.
I’ve always spoken of the wrong things, presumably! At least that was my perpetual suspicion. . and despite my change of scenery, I increasingly felt I was governed by inertia. Inertia kept me captive, lying constantly in wait, prepared to take full possession of me, to fix me like a botched statue to the spot where I happened to be. — The cause lies here in M., I said to myself. Here, in this town, annihilation planted its foot on me. — And how long ago was it that I began to dissect the doom I called M. into words and phrases in order to achieve clarity about it: how many years ago that I failed in the attempt and gave up again. .
When I visited the town of M., all I wanted was to return as soon as possible to a burning lamp over a kitchen table in a tiny, smoke-filled, eat-in kitchen familiar from my childhood. It had two windows facing the yard, and, on the other walls, peeling, blistered, yellow wallpaper displaying a peculiar pattern under the shadow of its discolorations: at first glance one had the impression that lines of dark brown vermin were marching straight up the walls. When I’d heated the coal stove, the wallpaper seemed to sweat, emitting the nicotine lodged in its pores since the beginning of eternity. The windows had warped in the damp; I’d used old towels to block the cold that seeped in at their edges. If possible, I left the lamp over the table burning all the time; its wires were heavily oxidized, porous. Dating back before the war, they refused to conduct electricity when switched on and off too often, and only protracted manipulation of the contacts could start the current flowing again. — In this old cave — in this relic from the early twentieth century — I sat and turned my pages, covered with crossed-out or not yet crossed-out lines. Instead of writing, I smoked cigarette after cigarette and listened to the darkness that hung inert outside the windows. There was nothing to be heard. . I couldn’t hear a thing, all sounds were swallowed by the enervating whine of the ancient refrigerator, whose unstable power unit kept starting up at far-too-brief intervals.
My reflections on this town had likely begun at a time now lost in mythic twilight. Indeed I had tried, again and again, to form a picture of the town which, if I was not mistaken, was still out there, which probably still clustered around my lighted interior, frozen and stony and hollow. I had even persuaded myself that this was my sole purpose. . and perhaps for that very reason it had become for me a senseless, useless undertaking. Often I believed that first I had to invent the town by describing it. . perhaps it could come into existence in no other way. The fact that I had been born in it was not sufficient to prove its existence. .
How can one demand of a shadow that he describe the image of a shadow town? — It was absurd questions like that I grappled with. And a long-familiar effect had taken hold: my goal, the image of the town, seemed to recede still further from me each time I believed, thanks to blind chance, that I’d come closer for a moment. . the goal sought to evade me! I was accordingly ill-disposed toward my endeavor. — But perhaps there did exist, somewhere in the streets, a certain shadow for whom such an image was possible. . weren’t there footsteps in the depths of town, padding steps I strained my ears after? First they had receded, but now they returned again. Weren’t those steps down on the pavement the proof I was seeking? I listened a long time, hour after hour, but there was not much to hear, due to the refrigerator noise — a central, recurring motif brought to me by the run-down things of the twentieth century — which constantly drowned everything out. And the light began to flicker, for seconds at a time, each time the refrigerator switched itself on.
How can you sit calmly at a table and write, I said to myself, and set down the impression of a completely inert town, when you’re constantly tormented by the knowledge that someone out there in the dark is being hunted, and may this very moment be running for his life?
However frightful the deluge of refrigerator noise: I seemed to keep hearing those hasty steps out on the street. From the moment I arrived in M. I was unable to escape the thought. The door to the next room, with the street window, stood ajar, and I heard the clatter and shuffle of well-worn shoes on the crooked stones of the sidewalk. First it was a single person’s steps; soon I thought several others were following him. After a while the single steps returned, and sometimes they strayed into the yard, sometimes coming right beneath the two kitchen windows between which I sat, listening in horror. In a moment I could expect him to call my name. . I stood up and extinguished the light. Once I felt safe, I turned the lamp on again: of course it wouldn’t burn; I climbed onto the table, lighting my way with the cigarette lighter, and jiggled the cable until the two fluorescent tubes shone once more. The whole thing repeated until my thoughts were in tatters: that crackling and flaring, and then again the slackening steps, once it had grown still.
Sometimes it ceased, but the hunt in the streets was far from over. He had managed to shake them only temporarily. It seemed he’d hidden himself in a dark corner; my yard served in a pinch to let his pursuers pass by. But all he got was a breathing spell; soon they tracked him down again. They were long since wise to all his ruses, they’d been after him for years; I would have had to count back to say when this story had begun. There was no reason for it. . no one out there knew any reason. — And often enough they caught him, presumably they could catch him at their whim. At any time they could corner him and let him run into a trap: he was one man, there were always more of them, they took turns, they could increase their force at will.
I recall all too well how once, in the very beginning, when their malice was still boundless — a few weeks, in other words, after setting their sights on him — they had snatched him off the street and beaten him horribly. It was a winter night, between three and four in the morning, when I heard a voice calling softly outside the kitchen windows and thought I could make out my name. With the last of his strength he’d dragged himself into my yard, where he collapsed in the slush. I had to help him up the stairs; evidently he could hardly see. I helped him lie down on the sofa in the kitchen and administered several shots of liquor. His lips were split, blood dripped from his nose. Both eyes had swelled nearly shut, and shards from his glasses were embedded in his lacerated brows, clearly due to a blow from a truncheon. I tried to get some explanation out of him, but he merely hissed out profanities and curses; he murmured on even after falling asleep.
Not long after this scene he was sent to prison for a year; on his release his papers bore a stamp authorizing him to cross the border. He had three days to leave the country; together we went around to the authorities, whom neither of us cared to visit, to gather the signatures he needed, attesting, among other things, that he’d paid his electric bills, had no outstanding library books, and had taken care of the fee for clearing out his cellar. An hour before his departure we packed his belongings, filling barely half of an olive canvas duffel bag. In the afternoon I accompanied him to the last bus to the district capital, which he had to take to catch the interzonal train to Frankfurt am Main that would bring him across the border before midnight. I refused to believe that he was glad to go. We were silent for most of the way to the bus station, or at least we didn’t speak of how he was leaving the country with no real conviction, and no precise notion what his destination was. He was limping, but insisted on carrying the bag himself; though it weighed nearly nothing, it pulled his slender shoulders askew. Before boarding the bus, he turned his face to me, now pale, and said he’d never set foot in this country again. — You’ve got no other choice, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud; I saw him sitting behind the grimed bus window, staring stoically straight ahead. There was no point in waving again, for as the bus drove off, I saw that his eyes were closed behind his thick lenses; an inscrutable smile played about his lips.
Just a few days later I could have sworn I saw his duffle bag again. I happened to walk down the street where he’d lived, and saw it lying on the sill of the ground floor window, which had never had curtains. I’d often worked myself up about that: he offered an unobstructed view through his window to every sewer rat and every belly-worm employed by the state apparatus. It was all the same to him. — I knocked on the pane; nothing stirred, so I went into the building and hammered on the door of his flat: no one answered; his name plate had been removed from the front door.
Revenge! Revenge, I thought, it could only be revenge that they’d wanted. — But revenge for what? — I still sought an explanation for the story, but there was no chance for an explanation. At any rate, there were always enough people to put together a posse! There were policemen and secret policemen, and any number of overzealous little snitches who would have given anything to play Inspector Maigret. Who even did it free of charge, just to show how much they cared about law and order in this town. How many humble citizens with windows on the street took up their posts behind the curtains at the least unusual noise? I couldn’t imagine that, of all their traits, this one might have changed.
And yet my friend wasn’t even a homosexual or a Jew, he wore his hair only moderately long, and he had no car to commit a parking violation. He was only a humble chemist who’d quit his job at the factory because he was over-qualified, and since then stayed afloat by repairing TV sets; word had gotten out that he did a better job than the official service company. He spent his spare time in his tiny apartment, hunched over inscrutable chemical formulas, painting abstract pictures, or developing his own amateur photos. Now and then he’d drink a drop too much. The anonymous letters about him received by a certain section of the municipal council described nocturnal gatherings in his apartment that went on into the morning. I had attended several of those gatherings; the way they talked about literature and music put me in a foul mood, and I went home early.
Now, when I walked past his former apartment, I looked back wistfully on those discussions; my arrogance has long since fled. The little discussion groups had scattered soon after his expulsion. And they had never come back together again, not even now. . even less so now, in the time after the system’s collapse, when it actually would have been possible: today there seemed not a person left in town who talked voluntarily about literature. Only the others, literature’s adversaries, had remained. They hunkered behind the haze of their curtains and kept the street under surveillance. But there was no one down there who was not of their ilk.
I had never succeeded in describing the town. Neither from up close nor from afar; I simply hadn’t found a way to look at it, I saw that more and more clearly. — It was he who could have pulled off this description, and in his own way, though quite unintentionally, he had pulled it off. This was what I thought when I passed by his window, behind which he was often seen puttering around; now curtains hung against the polished panes, and inside a TV flickered murkily. My friend had merely released the shutter of his camera one cold fall Sunday, and the snapshot produced at that moment had unmasked the town. Three o’clock: at precisely that second the town had frozen to an image of black and white lifelessness. And they had been after him ever since. — Maybe they’re only after the photo, I thought. If they got it, would they leave him in peace? — But I never really believed that.
I knew what awaited me in M.; I’d given up all hope for change. When I got off the rickety suburban train and crossed the station hall, already seeing several odd, loitering figures who took a striking interest in the bare walls when I passed, and when I walked down Bahnhofstrasse and turned further down onto the main street, not without looking about to see whether I was being followed in due form, then I knew that nothing had changed here. By the marketplace, at the latest, I ceased to care whether they were following me; I knew I was now in the past, in a time that hadn’t moved from the spot. I’d been unable to make out the station clock, but I was convinced that its hands hadn’t moved an iota. Fog, drizzle, and snow sank unchanged through the islands of reddish streetlights, as though even the weather were a mere expression of stagnation and the past. When I arrived in my kitchen at last, when the fluorescent tubes burned over the table, when the stove was heated, I spread out my papers in front of me. And as my perplexity grew, I began listening to the night outside.
Now and then I thought I heard steps down in the street: he, he alone could describe the town, but he didn’t, at least not as I would have done. — He was the restless spirit of this town, his presence spectral and indisputable. And when he thought about the town, it was in phrases that came ever faster, ever shorter; short-winded phrases; meanwhile he passed without pausing. They were after him, as they were every night. He fled, began to limp, I could hear it clearly; he was already flagging. He didn’t stop, he went on to the end of the street. There he disappeared, but only for a moment. He could think the town’s story only in fits and starts, without patience, without beginning and end. More and more often he stopped to catch his breath, pressing himself into an entryway, listening into the darkness. He knew they were there somewhere, listening as well. A little further. At the next corner he set down the olive-drab bag and asked a chance passerby for a light. The cigarette glowed in his cupped hand, and he walked on. After just a few steps he threw away the cigarette and ran. He came past the train station, skirting it, straight through the wet shrubs, then slid down a railroad embankment and returned to town via muddy side streets, as he’d often done before. But he couldn’t shake them off; they were always somewhere in the darkness behind him. At some point the church clock on the market square struck, like the reverberation of a second that had slipped into a coma. I counted the strokes, he did not; he ran on.
The photo he had taken years before was in my possession, and really it was I they should have hunted.
It was an odd thing: in the night, the dark morning, he’d feel driven out onto the street again. — How should he call it: a habit, a restlessness from former times that had grown old with him? He wanted no more part of it! — For instance, he’d walk up the street to the mailbox at this ungodly hour, as he’d taken to calling it. And he knew that he was trying to avoid meeting any of the people who set out this early, between four and five, on their daily way to work. It was long since C. had been one of them, more than fifteen years, but down on the dark street, on the maybe five hundred yards to the mailbox, it was clear to him that a disquiet from that time still lay deep within. This disquiet was otherwise silent, he was quite immune to the thought of it, but at that particular hour something within him responded. . Quite automatically! he said to himself.
A single stumble, and that old feeling resurfaced: he was driven by the duty to set out into the world, and yet he didn’t want to. He wasn’t even able yet to let himself be driven. In a daze he watched himself charge onward, coughing, sucking at a cigarette; the cold made his eyes water, he felt the icy runnels on his cheeks. The frosty air blew every bit of sleep from his brain, but his thoughts refused to clear, nothing but numbness was left in his skull. The frozen block behind his brow held but one aspiration: to reach the station in time, to drop onto the red-brown plastic upholstery of the dimly lit railcar, and there, for precisely eight minutes, amidst relative warmth, to collapse.
He had to get out at the very next station. There was another stretch of road before him, still more unpleasant, as it led through the open terrain of the mine pits. The wind howled here, raising sharp, icy dust from the road’s concrete slabs and flinging it into his face. But somehow he always seemed to have soaked up warmth in the suburban train, making the stretch to the factory entrance easier to cover.
Now, on the short trip to the mailbox, he felt abruptly transformed to a previous state: all that had befallen him in his later life, all that had changed him, suddenly seemed unreal, a way of life forced upon him by whim or by chance, for which there was no real inward reason. Now he was every bit the half-stupefied figure from back then, hastening onwards, coattails flying, beneath the wind-rattled lamps. He hurried through their circles of orange light that scattered, shifting across the pavement. In many places this pavement was uneven, bulging and split as though something pressed on it from underneath. And he often thought these places changed overnight, and kept tripping him unexpectedly; and each time his feet caught on the crooked slabs, a strange sentence came into his mind: I don’t need to know what’s down there beneath me!
He remembered: he’d already had a restless spell yesterday. Just after four, before the need for sleep came over him, the long-familiar emptiness gaped within, as it regularly did; if he hadn’t yet been to the mailbox, he’d pull on his coat over the faded old sweat suit he wore in the house, slip on his shoes, usually without socks, and run outside with his shoelaces untied. The street was usually deserted; it would have been awkward for him to run into someone he knew in his slipshod get-up. Only a few cars would pass him, headlights on full beam, and for a few seconds he’d jog along in their light; doubtless no one recognized him, he’d left town long ago.
They raced down the street as though hopelessly late. — Those who still had work, and that wasn’t many these days, might have driven off an hour ago already; it seemed they commuted to jobs in Bavaria, in Hof or even Nuremberg, driving hundreds of kilometers, spending up to fifteen hours away from home each day. Of course, they earned twice what they could have at the few jobs here. And here they paid much less rent. But they were hardly ever home; despite the money, their marriages broke up one by one.
He sometimes had half a mind to mention these things in the letters he sent. He had this urge each time he got a letter from West Germany sharing someone’s evident gratification at how the East German towns were finally being refurbished.
There you have it, he thought, now they’re replastering the façades, and bit by bit the former Zone’s houses will cease to offend West German eyes.
In actual fact, he wrote nothing of the sort; generally, when people adopted such a tone, he let the correspondence lapse quite quickly. The messages he sent consisted of just a few inconsequential lines, often addressed to people he barely knew even in passing. — He’d write to them that he had to remember, or at least thought he had to, because the town he came from, where he’d grown up, essentially no longer existed, and his memories of this place had turned porous, with more and more holes gaping in them.
It sounded like an attempt to justify his frequent visits to the small town where his mother still lived. No one whosoever had asked. And yet he volunteered replies; his letters and postcards were composed of evasive, overcautious replies to questions no one had asked, making the whole thing even more mysterious: it seemed he was merely answering his own questions. It astonished him that he couldn’t find a self-evident reason to visit the house where he was born, that coming to town to see his mother wasn’t reason enough.
What am I actually trying to remember? he’d ask himself, back from the mailbox. — In the old days I’d have had to get up an hour ago to report punctually for the life I barely recall now. — His mother had had to wake him each morning, and by the time he appeared in the as-yet unheated kitchen, which still smelled of his cigarettes from the night before, she would have the coffee ready. — Then we sat facing each other in silence; I drank my two cups of coffee while she waited for me to make it out the door. For years, at that ungodly hour, we were this taciturn, tight-lipped couple, sunk in our separate worlds. And shut away within, we probably held the knowledge of all the nameless generations before us that had sat just like this in the dark winter mornings, man and woman, waiting mute and servile for the urgent start of the workday to part them: my grandfather had occupied this place, and then she’d sat this way with her husband, my father, and after that it was the same thing with me; it seemed an inescapable fate. — C. asked himself at times how many memories were sealed within her, in the withered, forbidding old woman’s body from which nothing emerged to the outside.
He’d feel warmth again only once he passed the watchman, when he’d crossed the dark yard of frozen grass behind the administrative building and reported to the boiler room, which was located beneath the showers and changing rooms. Only after taking over from the night shift would the frost leave his limbs and warmth return to his unfeeling face. — The night shift was a scrawny, somber individual who answered to the name of Gunsch; his first name was unknown, forgotten because it couldn’t be pronounced, and as no one called him by it, perhaps he himself had long since forgotten it. Even his time card bore only the handwritten name Gunsch. He came from a town the other way down the railroad tracks, an old Pole who, it was claimed, had been pensioned off some unknown number of years ago and pursued his job in the boiler room for no reason but avarice. But these claims ignored the fact that at the start of each winter the factory had to talk him into postponing his retirement for one more heating period. It was nearly impossible to find workers to man this old, outlying factory wing; most of the people working here were indisputably in banishment. Production Area 6 was the official name of the steep bluff that jutted, a spit of earth seemingly spared by chance, into the foggy void of the mine pits. . on whose tip, next to a disused, derelict, red-brick briquette plant, a new production hall had been constructed, painted green, with glass walls that made it nearly impossible to heat. . This factory wing, this last loose fang in the lost dentures of the workers’ and peasants’ state, was the workplace of the delinquents, the alcoholics, and those who had rebelled against the factory hierarchy, people, in other words, who had to be sent out of sight.
When C. came to relieve him, Gunsch was ready and waiting in his street clothes; their color and cut differed little from his work clothes, but now his neck and head were muffled with scarves and a military-looking leather cap with earflaps. His little face showed shadows of coal dust and ash that the water of the shower could not dispel, and the color of the coal had eaten its way into his chapped hands. He pointed his stubby black finger around the boiler room, mumbling incomprehensible explanations; C. nodded pro forma agreement to everything, and at last the old man vanished. C. climbed back up the stairs from the boiler room to stamp his colleague’s time card in the factory hall; his card had been marked by Gunsch half an hour ago with the wrong arrival time. As day broke, one saw the old man riding his ramshackle bicycle into the fog and the ice. On barely detectable paths along the railroad tracks, he pedaled away between the chasms of the mine pits; each time one wondered when the ground in front of him would peter out into nothingness and this strange black bird, forced to flap up from the treacherous terrain, would rise into the air.
When Gunsch spoke, no one could understand a word, but that was all right, for he rarely said anything of a communicative nature. No one knew exactly how and where he lived, what he did with his money, whether he even kept human company outside working hours. There was a persistent legend that he dwelled in the midst of the mine pits, in a house without electricity, cut off from the outside world, his farmstead all that remained of a tiny village that had been bulldozed because it stood atop the coal. In the middle of his garden the ground broke off into the depths, said those who claimed to have seen it; of course most of the stories told in Factory Wing 6, the raving drunkards’ wing, were wildly exaggerated. He bought his necessities at the factory’s little store, wrapped them up in burlap and transported them on his bicycle rack out into the no man’s land from which he hadn’t set foot since the end of the war. At some point in the unfathomable years of his life he had come here from the East—the direction alone seemed to convey enough about that blurrily bounded region from which C.’s grandfather had also immigrated at the turn of the century. At any rate, the German Gunsch spoke was laid waste in a way C. knew from his grandfather. Due to these putatively shared origins, he had begun to take an interest in the old Pole. Gunsch regarded all attempts at understanding as pointless from the outset. When he opened his mouth, he seemed to spout only curses, and no one in the boiler room knew the exact object of this abuse.
Of course, proper German was no requirement for the backbreaking work of the boiler room. It sufficed that he could fill the iron coal wagon, which loomed taller than his alarmingly narrow shoulders, about eight or nine times every four hours, quickly enough that pressure would build up in all four boilers at once, sending the steam all the way back into the new factory hall. A bag of bones like Gunsch, the stokers claimed, actually had an easier time of it in the cramped coal bunker than a person of normal — that is, halfway brawny — stature, who’d tear his clothes and scrape his skin on the roughly plastered bunker walls.
And he leaped much more nimbly out of the cloud when the tippers full of ash were emptied outside on the dump. He’d stand off to the side with a pitying look, or rather a pitiless grin, while we sought cover under the tipper or waited with turned-up collars, bent backs braced against the exploding cloud, breathless, eyes closed, until the onslaught had passed. It was always blustery in the mine pits, and just as quickly as the ash flowed from the overturned tipper, it was beaten back as a scorching hot wave. Practice was required, and if you failed to anticipate the direction of the wind, you’d leap straight into an inferno meters high.
And finally, twice a month, Gunsch had to scribble something resembling his name in the proper column of the payroll when the secretary showed up in the boiler room with a little steel box full of money. — This, too, was one of the things that could just as well have been done by a deaf-mute.
I recalled a time I’d been able to observe the old man over the space of several days. It was a Christmas weekend, and then on past the New Year, when the holidays were canceled for Production Area 6 because of a special order. That of all times was when the temperature sank to minus ten Celsius; it was decided that a cold snap like that called for staffing the boiler room with two people, as the fifth boiler, regarded as the final reserve, had to be heated as well. No one wanted to work with Gunsch, and so I agreed to play the second man on his shift. — He doesn’t talk much anyway, I thought, and besides, I probably have the fewest problems with his German.
I was quite mistaken; Gunsch talked the entire time, but only, it seemed, to himself. The old man muttered and snarled, he groused and griped without cease; from between the thin red lips, the only mobile part of his soot-smeared face, a relentless flood of words poured forth, now softer, now louder again and almost menacing. There was scarcely a word of German in it, and in moments of great difficulty I thought I caught the sort of Polish or Russian slurs I’d heard from my grandfather when he vented his rage at the world, the German-speaking world in particular.
After I’d spent half the shift ignoring them, his curses slowly but surely began to have an unpleasant effect on me. They weren’t aimed at me, at least I couldn’t imagine they were, but I was still part of the boiler room conditions which seemed to incur the old man’s rage. I felt a long-familiar ferment begin within me. When we returned to the boiler room after our silent lunch break, and I instantly broke into a sweat in the scalding air over the boiler’s iron cover plate, I noticed to my dismay that the old man was jabbering on.
Once and for all, would you shut up? I blurted out.
Gunsch paid no mind and cursed still louder, as though to drown out some sort of objections that barraged him from the past, from the filth and soot and barely breathable air of the present, or even from the future, which could never be anything but miserable. By chance, my gloved fist was clutching the red-hot iron hook used to open and shut the sliding doors to the boiler’s feed chute; for a few seconds I was at the point of ramming the heavy thing into the old man’s belly.
Shut up. . just shut up! I bellowed. The old man faltered and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. Astonished, he didn’t even seem to realize he’d been speaking. I saw that Gunsch dwelled in another reality; he was mad, constantly chattering with his ancestors or with ghosts of some kind. .
For a long time after that C. was bothered by his fit of temper. It was one more thing that he’d probably inherited from his grandfather, or learned by watching him. And it was not without its hazards: there you go knocking out someone’s teeth, or even knocking him dead, and then you’ve got to pay for it! No one will believe that you can’t help this rage, that it’s in your flesh and blood. And that this rage is made of memories that may not even be your own, premonitions or memories that were sunk within you without your really knowing them. Without your knowing it, a time bomb rests within you, ticking inside for years, for decades, and you never feel it. But someday it’ll explode and kill an innocent person! thought C. And you’re lucky if all you get is ten or twelve years in the slammer. . and maybe you’ll have to keep stoking in there, with a still older and lousier boiler, because those are your qualifications. .
Among his most unpleasant memories were certain scenes that had transpired between him and his grandfather; he had never spoken of them. They always brought bouts of perspiration; the mere thought almost inevitably made him break into a sweat. . when his grandfather worked up a sweat and his temper howled from within him, C. began sweating as well; in the blink of an eye he was speechless, choked by rage. Later, he told himself he’d merely wanted his grandfather’s rage-twisted face to assume a different, pitiful expression, but that was an excuse. He’d grabbed the old man — in his eighty-year-old madness reduced to little but railing and ranting — by the throat, with fists long used to the crushing weight of iron and steel. Some lucky angel must have intervened, not a moment too soon; of their own accord his fists released the old man’s neck.
When he thought about it, he was relieved that the old man was no longer alive; toward the end he’d persisted for days, indeed for weeks, in his rage, probably irked by nothing other than his own increasing infirmity. When it occurred to C. that the image of his grandfather’s last years might presage his own future he was overwhelmed with dread. — Russian or Polish curses had always played a role in the altercations C. recalled. In these tongues, he felt, they sounded especially irate or even hate-filled. And then he’d seemed to hear them again from Gunsch’s lips, and his temper, which he really felt was homicidal, had immediately flared up again.
In this host of curses there was one word that began with a guttural sound and escalated to a virtual eruption. . almost a spewing of flame, thought C. — He recalled that it sounded like: Holéra. . holéra! His grandfather had uttered it quite frequently, invariably during the most explosive rows in their tortuous family history; now it had shot from Gunsch’s gorge in just the same way, lobbed into some random distance, though you couldn’t tell for sure. It sounded malevolent; the word seemed to distill the sort of loathing that could mount only in the souls of eternally oppressed peoples or races. — C. had no idea what it meant, for he had always refused — and in this he resembled his mother — to learn even a few words of Polish or Russian. At some point he’d hit on the thought that it had to do with the name of a half-forgotten disease: cholera. And perhaps they used the word so often, my grandfather and Gunsch, because it resembled the German word Kohle, the term, that is, for the stuff at which they slaved each day, which filled their lungs with black deposits and forced black sweat from their pores. And then the ghastly name of the disease had become, for them, the quintessence of the clan that surrounded them: the clan was an insatiable plague sucking away their strength, wearing down their bones, transforming their hands into calloused paws that could never again be cleaned, drenching their gullets with tar and smoke so that nothing could free them up but floods of alcohol — and all that for the clan that ate them out of house and home. .
When he was in town, visiting his mother, all these things came back to mind. That at least served to justify — at least in his own eyes — the visits of his, which had recently grown more frequent. When he returned to Berlin afterward, the tumult of the city slid like a screen in front of the thoughts from which he felt he was compounded. — What ought he to write about, if not cholera. . he, C., who called himself a writer, albeit with a discomfort of which he seemed unable to rid himself? Ought he to write about Berlin, the city everyone else wrote about incessantly? Or should he write about his years navigating between East and West Germany, which had felt like a constant shifting back and forth between plague and cholera? He didn’t know, and he refused to know. He’d come from cholera, and he seemed to have survived it, and perhaps he could write about that. .
In Berlin, very rarely, he’d suddenly picture his mother, vegetating in the junk-stuffed, barely functioning flat he called a slum, to use a modern English expression for once. Growing older and older there, regularly falling asleep in the afternoon in front of the flickering, babbling television, as though no longer equal to the unwieldy mass of the consciousness hidden within her. And he knew that from the neighboring flats too, through the thin walls, the televisions could be heard: the breathless smarm of a host, the sycophantic applause of the audience, the perpetual, witless ooh-ooh of the mob, feigning enthusiasm over the sums of money or preposterous products flogged off on the never-abating game shows.
Amid that drivel she lay there on the red-brown couch, a thing that belonged on the junk heap, while in the yellow-tiled heating stove the spent coal crumbled to ash and cold seeped in through the crooked windows. She appeared to him then as a vessel of moldering memories that were undealt with, unspoken, that no one asked for, no one wanted to know about, and that began like unused coal to decompose.
Oh, how long these memories had led a life of their own, suicidal and shading into insanity. — What was left of the old woman, thought C., had long since been seized by a ferment of madness and little by little was being ravaged. — In some way, he thought, he was bound up with those memories that lay there swathed in thick, worn clothing, buried beneath woolen, coal-smelling blankets. — In some strange, barely explicable way, I am bound up with these memories, and no doubt I dread the moment in which they’ll descend into utter confusion, flickering and vanishing into the void.
I only need to stumble on my way to the mailbox, and already everything comes back to me. My foot only needs to catch on the uneven pavement, and at once I feel cast back into that time made up of never-ending winters. Of black winters covering other winters, black and long-decayed. And I ask myself over and over what I never asked myself then: What is it that lies beneath us? Bygone clans lie there beneath us. Long-forgotten clans lie down there, clans no one now asks about, clans long fermented to coal, clumped together blackly, clans rising up at night against the life that lives on above them. Rising up like the ferment of memories, like endless tribes of memories no one knows of now. And I am, yet again, the uncounted member of a clan surnamed Choléra that once set out early in the morning, at an inhuman hour, into the cold and the darkness that lay over the coal and over the ash. Ash lay over the coal, and coal lay over the ash. And my past lies down there, I thought, down beneath the coal, beneath the ash.
And I recalled one day when I’d tried to ask my colleague Gunsch about his background. One Sunday, the day after Christmas, the watchman had brought down a letter from the section head assigning me to the night shift in a different boiler room on Monday, December 27, because someone had called in sick. I didn’t mind, it considerably shortened my way to work, but I immediately asked myself whether Gunsch had complained about my fit of rage two days before. I watched him as we worked and concluded that there was some dark thing in his obtuse skull that no light could be shed on. — No, he certainly hadn’t complained, he had no interest whatsoever in demanding any rights. He might not even have been able to formulate a complaint; his capacity to express himself was so stunted that he no longer even understood what he was subjected to, short of pure physical pain. Moreover, he didn’t even seem to believe in the necessity of disputing things. And when I thought about it, a similar reluctance or inability had arisen in me as well. — And so we’re two creatures of the dark, used to keeping silent, I thought, and there are probably few things left in our minds whose expression would give another person any pleasure.
Perhaps it’s that we’re unable to love the world enough anymore. Why should we tell ourselves things about a world that matters less and less to us?
In other eras you’d set your memories before the world, convinced they’d find listeners or readers in coming times. But no one believes in coming times now, at least not here, in the class we belong to.
At the end of the shift, while we waited to be relieved, I did try to strike up a conversation with him. It was rather one-sided: Did you hear? Tomorrow I’ll be sent off again to a different boiler room, tomorrow evening. .
There was no sign that I’d been heard. The old man had returned from the showers and sat in the common room in his coat, wet hair plastered to his skull, audibly slurping the last of his coffee from his thermos cup.
Starting tomorrow you’ll be on your own again, Gunsch! Too bad for you, it’ll be quite a slog. But I have the feeling you don’t care one bit. .
He seemed to nod. Or did he merely sink his black watery gaze still deeper into the coffee cup, turning it in the black fingers of both hands?
Say, what neck of the woods are you from, Gunsch? My grandfather was Polish too. . we might even have been countrymen if certain things had happened differently. But then we’d probably just be shoveling coal in Poland or the Ukraine. .
For a moment he showed a strip of pink gums with scattered yellow teeth in them; he seemed to grin. He’d jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the common room’s coal-dust-smeared skylight; it seemed to me he’d mumbled a few words. If you followed the motion of his thumb, Gunsch had pointed across the mine pits, the direction indeterminate; perhaps he’d pointed in all directions, perhaps he’d described a circle whose trajectory lay in infinity. That afternoon the leaden hue of the sky merged on all sides with the vapors that rose from the freezing sheets of water at the bottoms of the mine pits; ever since morning an opaque atmosphere had ringed the whole horizon. When you came up the stairs from the boiler room, there was a smell of snow and glowing ash.
Maybe you don’t have any family, Gunsch? No relatives. . no relatives left? — I’d lost my confidence, my talk about “countrymen” seemed foolish; what nonsense, when speaking of regions that seemed to have no fixed borders. — I hadn’t even been able to find my grandfather’s hometown on the map. And it had never seemed to interest him which country he belonged to. When I thought of the mix of peoples in the chaos of regions Gunsch came from, of course he was no one’s “countryman” in the strict sense. If you came from there, you were a leftover person, remembered by no one.
He grinned again and pointed his thumb at the floor, averting his eyes; there was a dull dog’s look in them: They’re all under the ground. .
Those were perhaps the only words he’d ever really directed at me. And I asked myself whether I’d even understood him right. It didn’t matter exactly what he’d said, at any rate he must have meant more or less what I had heard. — Walking back from the mailbox, it surprised me that I’d forgotten the words so quickly: They’re all under the ground. .
All at once I wondered if most people on this street weren’t living with similar sentiments. . Quite possibly that was the case! — Weren’t they all, in some peculiar fashion, strangers? Of course they lived together, often harmoniously in their way, within their families they shared the quandaries and paltry pleasures of their existence, but they knew at all times how quickly they could lapse into oblivion. . weren’t they all forgotten the moment they stopped going to work? — They have a view of life focused on the bare present, thought C., on bare survival, on scraping by. — That’s how they put it, you hear them say it often enough.
There was something disquieting in that: a feeling he only came to know once he’d already escaped from this existence. Ever since he’d begun to call himself a writer, he was gnawed by the suspicion that it was the lack of memories that thwarted him as a writer, that brought him to the verge of failure: the gaps in his memory, the incoherencies, the impossibility of reconciling spaces and times. .
How many times he’d returned to the flat from his trip to the mailbox and first listened for a while at the door to the small back room where his mother slept. — Was she still breathing? — Dread filled him when he couldn’t instantly hear her noisy struggle to breathe, when her restless tossing and turning on the mattress was not immediately detectable. It was a noise as though the decrepit springs were slackening beneath the old woman’s ever-lighter body and softly beginning to sing. — It’s true, he thought, her body seems to be dwindling. And one day these fatigued springs of steel, these untuned strings, will cease to sing.
For a long while he sat in the kitchen with the door open and listened for noises from the back room. Sometimes it seemed, however hard he concentrated, that not another sound emerged. Muteness slipped under the door, flowed soundlessly down the narrow corridor, and began to spread like a cool breath of air in the kitchen. There, beyond the corridor, was a hermetic chamber filled with memories that pressed dumb and dark against the closed door; now speechlessness engulfed him even in the kitchen. And muteness reigned too on the floors below and above him; nowhere in this building, inhabited mainly by the aged, was there a sound, even on the street outside nothing more could be heard. He felt he could barely breathe now in this stillness, in the impalpable substance of the stillness. It was the hour when the town seemed utterly extinct. . always around the time when he jotted down a few inconsequential lines. On letter paper or a postcard: apologetic lines, sounding as though the writer’s sole intent were to give just one more sign of life. . lines that would arrive in Berlin at some point, whose blue, shaky, dwindling script was the only proof that he existed. And that he then took to the mailbox, and sometimes this outlying part of town was so still that he feared his scurrying steps made too much noise. And then, almost aimlessly, he walked past the mailbox and on another hundred yards to the intersection beyond which the center of town lay. It was as still as though the memory of his steps, of his stumbling, had been the last possible sound in this town. But soon, perhaps in another quarter-hour — you could already hear them from afar — it would be time for the first long-distance trucks to thunder from the left down the street that cut off his little neighborhood from the town proper. Now, at this still-nocturnal morning hour, the huge freight trains heading northward to Leipzig hurtled past the residential district at a reckless speed. Gusts of wind filled with ice shards and filth lashed into him. Though he stood on the sidewalk behind the guardrail, he felt a force that nearly made him reel back into the muddy grass behind him. When the deafening monsters passed through the town’s periphery, they blew a warning with their horns; the long drawn-out howl, the blaring din of their passage, penetrated deep into the district to which, his hearing nearly obliterated, he now turned back.
He pictured his former colleague Gunsch again and wondered whether he wasn’t under the ground as well by now. What a strange grin that was, over fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, at the end of the shift when he’d seen Gunsch for the last time. Hadn’t that grin been like his grandfather’s?. . that grimace with a curse behind it: choléra! — He’d meant his clan; the coal; the darkness; he himself, a stranger to himself, ignorant of his forbears.
It began to snow again now, in late February or early March, as though winter were unable to have done with itself, and the wind blew stronger and stronger from in front. Once again C. felt on his face the icy breath he could not contend with; he saw light flare up behind a few windows in the houses, for just a few seconds, quickly extinguished. The din of the long-distance traffic entered people’s sleep and made them restless; like aimless ghosts they wandered their rooms, roused but not really awake, until they realized that it was still quiet on the street. But the traffic noise had come up against the wind, which seemed to turn stormy, so that C. had trouble making progress against it. And now it sounded as though imaginary thunderheads of din and ruin were surging through the sky above the roofs. Sometimes C. turned around to let the gusts spend themselves against his back. . he thought of the waves of ash, blazing hot, that had descended on his bent back twenty years before. But no, on the street it was freezing cold!
He gazed up at the rows of buildings: perhaps it was true that most people who lived here belonged to a lost class. — That sounded histrionic, but wasn’t it true that most of them had long since lost their work. . and thus lived without their ordained purpose? Up there, behind the black windows in the ash-gray walls, dwelled the members of a refugee class among whom he had once counted himself.
Hardly any of them knew quite where they’d once come from, and no one pondered the question. And still less did they know where they were heading. And they didn’t ask who would carry on the life and the work in which they’d had their share; that they had never asked. It had always been ordained by others. Those others derived this privilege from their ancestry. . they’d inherited this ancestry and passed it on down; by ancestry they had the power to ordain how, where, and when the factories that exhausted the land would be built, maintained, and perpetuated: by those living behind the ash-gray walls of the buildings with the dark windows. For these people had no ancestry, they didn’t think about their ancestry, they’d forgotten it, they’d forgotten their memories, their memories were all under the ground.
And though a forty-year-long attempt had been made to convince them that they themselves were to ordain the work in which they had their share, they hadn’t understood it. Their purpose permitted no such understanding, for their purpose was so much older than they.
Perhaps it was as though an old dark deity governed them, a deity of the underground. It was a black god from endless past times who had altered them; he had altered their bodies and their minds, their hearts, their tongues, and their organs of procreation, he had altered the blood in their veins, in them it flowed a distinct touch more darkly and slowly, as though they all descended from that dark deity they no longer recalled. .
They dwelled on above in the stifling air of their rental tombs, the damned who couldn’t wake up after nights in which idleness kept them from sleeping. They had failed, they had little love for the world; when they gazed back, there were their fathers, their forefathers, but they were barely discernable — they had lived in the same shadow. The factories were closed, keys rusting in distant safes in Munich or Dortmund until they were sold to a demolition firm. If they were lucky, and not yet too old, they might find a job driving one of the long-distance freight trains transporting rolls of pink toilet paper or tins of condensed milk from Munich to Leipzig. — And looking ahead, they shuddered to think of their sons who went about with shaved heads, in combat boots and black bomber jackets, staring with alcohol in their eyes into a future that was none. .
C. sat in the kitchen and listened to the wind, which made a soft, often polyphonic howling sound in the old building’s flues. The fire in the heating stove had gone out; the cold could be felt, barely held back by ill-fitting windows. A murmur seemed to come from the neighboring apartments, the few of them with young people, cars started on the street, but the stillness of the kitchen went untouched. — Once, too, there were steps in the stairwell; they padded through his half-sleep, and he raised his head. He wondered if he’d heard the sound of the front door closing. . just once, before the cars started up on the street; the sound was so familiar that he might easily have missed it. Or perhaps he’d only imagined the soft, shuffling steps in the stairwell. And then another door clicking into place, the door of the flat, just as familiar a sound. It seemed he hadn’t fastened the safety chain to the doorframe, he’d forgotten. .
And he’d left the door unlocked when he went to the mailbox. Afterward, he’d returned to the apartment with the absurd suspicion that someone had been there in the meantime. The smell of a stranger hung in the chilly air. There was quite clearly, almost too clearly, a muteness in the silence that was not his own muteness. Once again, for several minutes, he’d listened at the door of the little back room: not a sound had emerged. — Dark and bowed he stood holding his ear to the gray-yellow wood: in the room behind the door it was still.
What memories are sleeping, sleeping on behind that door. . for how much longer? And after that I fell asleep at the table myself, deciding to postpone my trip to the mailbox until the next day, he thought. Or I only thought I did. And I only thought up the steps in the stairwell, they padded solely through my imagination. And then I thought I saw a shadow, dark and bowed, in the kitchen doorway, making a grotesque attempt to grin and saying:
They’re all under the ground. .
The words were hard to understand, like a noise I’d left far behind me, and they were swallowed by the stillness. Or drowned out by the town as it awoke at last.
Best of all I seemed to remember the phone call with which the story began. The voice came from a pub, around ten in the evening, I heard the unmistakable background noises: a babble of voices, laughter, clinking glasses. I was not in the mood for a phone conversation; I was packing my suitcase with the TV on, and my relationship with my wife had reached rock bottom more than a week before. At first I thought it was a wrong number, I even hoped it was.
I’d like to see you, the voice declared, won’t you come over? — It was a deep voice, if not exactly a bass, and might have been described as melodious had it not spoken so execrable a dialect, made still more distasteful by the evident effort to speak High German.
Where am I supposed to come. . and who wants to see me?
To the pub Zum Doktor, you must know the place. I’ll be waiting for you at the bar.
Who wants to see me, is what I asked. And why, who am I dealing with here?
He didn’t want to tell me on the telephone: Come on, you’ll find everything out soon enough, half an hour might even do the trick. .
When I said nothing, he grew more insistent: I have to see you, it’s imperative. . come on, do me a favor!
But I don’t have to do anything. . what’s the matter, anyway, what’s this all about? — It struck me that he avoided the word “meet,” using only the word “see”; I felt there was impatience in his voice, just a few shades away from a tone of command.
Can’t you tell me what this is about already! If you don’t tell me who I’m dealing with, what the matter is, I won’t come!
That’s a shame. . that’s a real shame! Nothing’s the matter, I’d like us to have a few beers, it’s on me.
I don’t drink beer, I don’t drink alcohol at all. .
Oh! Then you’ve changed quite a bit, back then things were very different. .
This was dragging on and on; at intervals we both fell stubbornly silent. — You won’t tell me who you are. . what this is about. — I sensed that all my questions were pointless.
If you have a beer with me here at the pub, I’ll tell you.
Would I recognize you? I asked.
No, I should hope not. — Again he hesitated; by now I was shifting from foot to foot.
But it’s sure to interest you, he went on, very much indeed. You are that writer, aren’t you?
Don’t act like you don’t know exactly who you’re dealing with. How about you tell me who I’m dealing with?. .
You don’t want to see me! he said, not sounding too disappointed, more contemptuous.
No, I can’t, I don’t have time. I’m flying to Dresden tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to get ready.
You really aren’t coming?
No, goddammit. .
Then I’m sorry to hear that, said the voice, a shade deeper. He didn’t hang up at once, clearly waiting for me to change my mind. For half a minute I heard nothing but pub noise; the place must have been packed. He coughed into the phone — a heavy smoker — but didn’t say a word. I heard him breathe laboriously, as though following physical exertion. I said nothing more either, finding the silence almost menacing. He cleared his throat, fastidiously, it seemed to me, and hung up.
Who was that? my wife asked. I was astonished; she hadn’t said a word to me for days. Sitting in the kitchen behind the open door, she’d heard the entire thing.
Some crazy guy, I said. A nutcase who wanted to ask me to some pub. I don’t know him. .
Maybe you’ll figure out who it was. Didn’t you recognize his voice?
No, that’s the thing, the voice didn’t sound familiar at all. He was going to tell me who he was in the pub.
He definitely wasn’t crazy, she said. He wasn’t going to reveal himself except in public. Didn’t that strike you? — That was an intelligent remark on her part; incidentally, I called her “my wife” only for simplicity’s sake. We’d been living together for several years, for better and for worse, for some time now much worse, and thus far I’d refused to be chained down by marriage.
That evening it was taking me especially long to pack my suitcase, and it was straining my nerves still more than usual — for fear of forgetting what I needed most, I regularly packed much too much unnecessary stuff — because I was constantly distracted by the inescapable jabber of the television, which had driven my wife into the kitchen. I felt a vague obligation to watch or hear what had been playing out on screen for more than an hour; it was one of those panel discussions — a so-called talk show — where people tirelessly, exhaustively, with exhausting repetitions and barely comprehensible fervor, debated a topic that for years, at least three years, I thought, had refused to go out of fashion: it was that the government had opened the archives of the defunct GDR’s demised state security service. — How long the list had grown of the prominent figures, or self-appointed prominent figures, who were suddenly exposed as informers for that security service, or who, preempting the publicity, exposed themselves, which of course made them still more prominent. It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurring torrents of verbiage; no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television. The writers talking on screen about the opening of several tons of Stasi files, talking it up and down — I knew several of them well, was even friends with them — seemed bent on making it the central theme of their literary lives. . Ah! I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! — And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives! And I wondered if they got fees for talking on television about Stasi files and Stasi informers. . I didn’t know, so far I hadn’t taken part in any of these discussions. . and I wondered whether the exposed Stasi informers who occasionally took part in the discussions received their fees as well. — No, they wasted not a word on what was happening with the earth, they didn’t mention the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer. Not a word on global climate change, the now-undeniable melting of the ice caps, the contamination of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect that would inevitably bring undreamed-of catastrophes: their sole topic was the Stasi files. . And no doubt they’re perfectly justified, I thought.
I had applied for access to my own files as soon as I had grounds to suspect there were dossiers on me as well: so far my files had not been found. I registered that fact almost with relief, for the scant excerpts from other files I’d been shown — because my name cropped up in them — had exuded a boredom so paralyzing that I’d broken out in sweat. I literally feared these files — not that I’d learn they’d secretly made me out as an informer or a denunciator, something everyone who undertook to read their files had to reckon with, for the Stasi’s mind worked in mysterious ways — I feared the gruel of language, these files’ distinguishing feature, I feared the nausea, these paper monsters’ brain-rotting stink, I feared the gray type, so like that of my own typewriter, I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages.
When at last I’d finished packing my bag and managed to turn off the TV — my wife had long since gone to bed — I sat at the table and smoked about five cigarettes in a row. My breath rattled, I panted as though I’d run a marathon or shoveled a ton of coal; I drank a whole bottle of mineral water and felt as though the greater part of the fluid immediately reemerged from my brow and my temples. And yet all I’d done was take a short walk, one of my routine walks up a narrow, steep street to a mailbox into which I dropped a hastily written postcard. — In the cool night air the whole situation had become quite clear to me: the mysterious call several hours ago and those endless panel discussions on the opening of the Stasi files— those two things were directly related.
A few hours later, early in the morning, as I started my trip — first in the taxi to the station, then in the various trains that brought me to the Frankfurt Airport — I had almost entirely suppressed the thought of that night’s phone conversation. For several hours I’d tossed and turned, half asleep, getting up a few times to smoke, not daring to take a sleeping pill, which I would have had to steal from my wife, for fear of sleeping through the arrival of the taxi I’d ordered the day before. For some time my wife had refused to wake me when I had to get up early. — I’m not your mother! she hissed when I asked such things of her: I should finally learn to cope with the chaos of my life by myself. — My objection that she also lived from the money I earned with readings and events of that kind counted for nothing with her. Her voice lingered in my ear, asking from the bedroom on the upper floor if I’d been sure to mail all the letters to my bimbos, if I hadn’t forgotten any; I’d made no reply. She had two rooms on the upper floor, a study and a bedroom; I had only one, on the ground floor, which served me both for working and sleeping. . I paid the rent for this tiny house on the edge of town where the vineyards began, I paid the electric bills, I covered the rising costs of the heating oil we used in winter, but I hadn’t the slightest interest in confronting her with these things; I had my back to the wall and said not a word, I’d had as much as I could take of our constant quarrels. But my silence wounded her all the more; she took it as an affront. . I was hurt by her silence as well, but eventually felt almost grateful I didn’t have to hear her voice, in which I seemed to hear nothing but aggression. I no longer touched my wife, I avoided her, I shut myself in my study, filled with dense cigarette smoke, where late at night or early in the morning I tried to fall asleep amid coughing fits and nausea. And my coughing fits would disturb my wife’s sleep, and there’d be new grounds for a quarrel. In fact I did correspond irregularly with several “bimbos,” as my wife put it; when I was away she searched my desk, and naturally found stowed in the drawers the letters I’d received from the “bimbos,” and systematically spotted the erotic or sexual components — how to put it? — which the letters contained; she spotted them even in the phrases where they weren’t. Of course my wife wasn’t entirely in the wrong; a long time ago I’d brought back a stack of postcards from Holland that, if you really wanted to, you could describe as pornographic. When my wife noticed the stack of these postcards growing smaller and smaller, she told me to my face that she understood perfectly what kind of correspondence I was conducting; and she called this correspondence nothing less than “swinish.” I couldn’t even shake my head at that.
There was one case, though, for which my wife made an exception: Marie, who lived in Leipzig. I had known her a good deal longer than my wife, and with Marie I really had had a short-lived love affair. When it came to Marie my wife held off, Marie never came up in the tangled mass of her reproaches; evidently, in the manner of feline predators, she granted her a certain prior claim, or it was simply that, in Marie’s case, I’d been honest to my wife for once and told her about it. — I’d never told her a thing about the other so-called affairs: in those there had never been any opportunity for physical contact, nothing of the kind, and that was probably why I was ashamed; it was the shame of failure, and my wife, however mistakenly, managed to goad it within me again and again. — I noticed that now and then she talked to Marie herself: the last time was just a few days ago; and then my wife had handed me the receiver and indicated that Marie wanted to talk to me.
I was alarmed by the voice that emerged, a mere wisp, from the telephone. Marie said she wasn’t well, no, not at all, kept alive by a constant haze of morphine, but it would all be over soon now. The end was near, that she knew, it would only be a matter of days or weeks. — Marie’s voice barely breathed into my ear, as absent as though it came from another universe; the long pauses between words were filled with labored breaths that seemed deafening after her voice. — Following her last cancer operation, just as unsuccessful as all the previous ones, she was lying, her body slit, in her tiny room in Leipzig, dependent on the care of a friend, a painter who’d come to stay a few days ago, though the apartment barely fit two people. — You’ve got to see her one more time, my wife said after I hung up. If she’s even still there, you can be sure it’s the last time you’ll see her. And you’ve planned enough time on your crazy trip to Dresden and your mother. .
For flying to Dresden, my wife had declared me certifiably insane. A new academy had been founded there — in the East new academies were springing up like mushrooms— and I had been invited, along with several other poets, to read fifteen minutes of poetry at the inaugural event. The reading fee was negligible; besides, I’d booked a flight, albeit one of the cheap flights you could get if you reserved in time, and the trip included a weekend. The academy could only reimburse train trips, and so I had wound up with a losing proposition that vexed me quite enough without my wife’s derision. — She told me I was acting like a whore. All they had to do was wave, and there I was. — Whores generally get paid pretty well, I retorted. — True, she said. But not the old, beat-up whores.
After that quarrel we gave each other the silent treatment for more than a week. In secret I had to admit she was right; just to save some time for a certain piece I wanted to work on — which, I persuaded myself, I could best do at my mother’s. . because the manuscript was set in the town south of Leipzig where I was born and where my mother lived on in the same apartment, now almost utterly dilapidated — just for that I had dreamed up this idiotic itinerary: the best part was that I was planning to jettison the return flight from Dresden, since the train from Leipzig to Frankfurt am Main was actually quicker. — But now I’d lose the time I had gained: on the postcard I’d taken to the mailbox the night before my departure, I’d told Marie I planned to visit her in Leipzig. . just for a few hours, a single afternoon, due to time constraints, but I hoped, or so I’d written, that she’d look forward to seeing me again. — If I spent days hanging around at my mother’s first, my wife had declared, it might be too late to visit Marie. .
Maybe, the thought crossed my mind, before taking the train back from Leipzig I could pay Marie a second visit. . a farewell visit! I thought.
Nervous and bleary-eyed, I sat on the suburban train to Mannheim, where I had to change for the so-called airport shuttle to Frankfurt Airport, and kept running through the stops of my trip in my mind. I was passing through the vast wine-growing region that lay below the Palatinate Forest: vineyards, nothing but vineyards, and the sun rising over them. I was traveling through a landscape of pure cultivation; it was, in my view, one of the most beautiful regions in Germany, and so far it had not appeared in a single work I’d written. Though I’d lived here for several years, I wrote on and on about the moonscapes south of Leipzig, stretching to the horizon, on and on about the industrial town of my birth, surrounded by pits from whose fathomless depths lignite had once been mined. Now there was nothing but dead, shut-down mine pits, and those tracts of land seemed to have lapsed into an irreversible futility, a uselessness that dragged each of my thoughts into the depths to shut it down and make it useless. — Or I wrote on and on about journeys, confused and haphazard, more like evasive actions, flights without cause, without aim, a perpetual flight in the wake of a crime committed only in a dream. .
Here, all the way to the horizon, across the whole Rhine Plain, the stuff of human pleasure was coaxed forth from the earth, here there was nothing but vineyards. And when it grew light and a beautiful day dawned, hosts of birds swooped down into the vines, whose grapes were nearly ready for the harvest. And at the edges of the plots, sometimes still lapped by mist, the field wardens came to life, appearing out of nowhere and firing their shotguns wildly into the air to scare off the raucous flocks of birds.
Before reaching Dresden — that city so ravaged during the war, then ravaged once again by the so-called reconstruction the GDR had indulged in. . and now perhaps for the third time, I thought, by the mass of exhaust fumes that found no escape from the Elbe valley where Saxony’s new capital nestled — and two days later, on the express train from Dresden to Leipzig, I had plenty of time to think. Again and again the newspaper slipped from my fingers as I tried to read, my head fell back against my seat in the compartment where I was the sole passenger, and the twilight of half-sleep engulfed me, more restful, I found, than the mindless non-place deep sleep plunged me into when, rarely enough, I achieved it. You could sleep and yet you could think, quite lucidly even — a surprisingly satisfactory state! Oddly, I thought less about what might await me in Leipzig; I couldn’t get my mother out of my head, who over the years had grown very quiet and old, meekly fulfilling my every wish. . and for my wife this very meekness constituted an offense whose magnitude unsettled me, for increasingly she traced my behavior — my lack of character! — back to my mother’s. There were no such frictions in my mother’s home: when I needed peace and quiet, I was left in peace; Mother asked me no questions and expected none from me; she let me sit alone in the kitchen, bent over some draft; she made herself invisible in the next room and even turned off the television if it bothered me. . and she’d make me more tea when she saw that the pot on the kitchen table was empty.
It occurred to me to simply stay with my mother as long as I wanted, to work there on my manuscript as long as I wanted. My mother had no telephone, my wife couldn’t reach me. . the idea of vanishing from her horizon for a while, leaving her in the dark, suddenly filled me with the calm that made me nod off in the train. I knew it was a lust for revenge, however modest. . but at least it was the opposite of the panic I fell into whenever my wife threatened to throw me out or go her own way.
Excruciating tensions had arisen nearly every time my wife and mother met. . which could happen only in our house in Rhineland-Palatinate, for my wife refused to travel to the east. It was, admittedly, my wife’s house; she had found it, leased it, and furnished it as she saw fit, for here, I had to admit as well, I had proven completely incompetent. . and it remained my wife’s house, even if I paid the rent each month. Every time my mother visited us, which she did once or twice a year for little more than a week, the same thing happened: my wife felt ousted from her house, seeking refuge in a village with one of her girlfriends, where, I could feel it in the air, she waited as though on a bed of nails. During this time my mother was charged with watering the countless plants that stood about everywhere, a task my wife wouldn’t entrust me with, regarding me as completely unreliable. . and my mother overlooked a ten-inch-high orange tree that stood all by itself in a clay pot on a windowsill: the tree had dried up and couldn’t be revived. . it was my wife’s favorite plant. From that point onward, open hatred erupted; the next day I tried to persuade my mother to leave because we were busy and had no more time for her. My wife refused to drive Mother to the train station in her car; I called a taxi and took her to the little station, which would have been a good forty-five-minute walk with an old woman like Mother. I stood mute, close to tears, on the platform next to my mother, who had no idea what had just spun out of control.
What had spun out of control was my wife’s rage; she regarded us both, my mother and me, as people who were devoid of independence, eternally anxious to do everything right, and who for that very reason — because they were constantly trying to hide, to avoid reproaches. . because they had no desires and no questions. . because they skulked about the house as though under some tyranny from which a devastating verdict might come at any moment — for that very reason did every possible thing wrong. — You people show no initiative, my wife said, all you’ve learned is how to wait for orders, you have no sense of self, and that’s why you can’t enjoy life in this little house of mine. .
One time, I defended myself and accused my wife of acting like a Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany. When we were on her territory, we had damn well better be happy and show it. If we didn’t, we were an unacceptable proposition for the country that had just annexed its brothers and sisters from the other side. — You let yourselves be annexed with the greatest of pleasure, she said, things couldn’t move quickly enough for you. But lead independent lives — that you can’t do! — And she added that Marie was the only person she knew who’d at least tried to live independently. .
My wife was not entirely wrong. But she was unaware that Marie had lived too independently, that ever since the reunification we were constantly discussing she’d been unable to find her way to the welfare office, that she avoided going to the doctor because she was uninsured. And that was probably why her cancer had been diagnosed far too late. Marie lived more or less from handouts, but no one was allowed to mention it. I, too, had occasionally slipped a hundred-mark note into the purse that hung from her doorframe, secretly, knowing it would have humiliated her. .
Over time my messages to Marie, sent on postcards, had grown sparser, arid, monosyllabic; it struck me that she virtually never replied to my mail. She gave no more response than to the bills I slipped her. When I had a chance to phone I’d ask if she’d received my letters or cards. . and she would ask in return which letters and cards I meant. She probably would have responded the same way to a question I didn’t ask: Which hundred-mark bills do you mean? — This behavior was typical of Marie: if you sent something her way, she simply didn’t seem to notice. And she seemed not to notice when someone desired her; if you ended up in bed with her, she merely seemed to follow some sort of imaginary instructions. . though I put this down to my inability to show my desire, much less articulate it, which I felt was one of my innermost weaknesses. .
Filled with thoughts of this kind, I arrived in Leipzig: I saw at once that it was too late for all my questions. Marie’s bed had been moved into the tiny kitchen, close to the gas stove, as though now, in mid-September, heat was already needed. . often, as I recalled, Marie had heated with the flames of the oven, because coal was too expensive. And often enough I’d told her it was dangerous. By the bed stood a narrow table with the telephone, dirty dishes, and a quantity of open vials containing various morphine preparations. Next to them, in a torn-open envelope, I saw the card I’d written her a few days before. — It had arrived that morning, Marie said. — The painter who had let me in, a girlish creature with short blond hair, sat sketching in the next room, keeping an eye on things in the kitchen through the open door. Marie lay in bed in a white nightgown, speaking in a voice as soft as a breath, barely a whisper now, the words slipping, incorporeal, from lips that barely moved. Between words she caught her breath, smiling as though to apologize for the long pauses. — Could she show me her stomach, she asked; gingerly she pushed aside the blanket and lifted up her nightgown. Her abdomen was crisscrossed by bluish-red, barely-healed scars. Next to the alarmingly thin body a plastic bag collected her urine drop by drop.
Later, on the bus on the way to my mother, I remembered glimpsing for a few moments, barely covered by the white nightgown, her breasts, which alone were still completely unscathed. Marie seemed to know full well that I was staring much less at her wounds than at those breasts, those still-smooth, soft hemispheres, bared halfway up the brownish nipples. . those breasts were still firm and their beauty was flawless. Smiling, eyes alert, she had acknowledged my gaze; there was irony in her eyes as she pushed the nightgown down again. I knew this irony; it had been in her gaze whenever I said goodbye to her, when, late at night, I went out her door and she shut it softly behind me.
Why hadn’t I given in to impulse and laid my hands on her breasts? As ever, the target of Marie’s irony had been my suppressed desire. . as ever, when I left late at night, irked that I couldn’t make up my mind to spend the whole night with her. .
But perhaps, I thought, there would be another chance to visit. .
Around eight in the evening, in a turmoil, I arrived at my mother’s; she seemed pleasantly surprised. — I almost wasn’t home, she said. You know I often go to the theater on Fridays. But today they’re showing something I’ve seen twice before. — You know I’ve still got a key, I said. And I always have it with me when I come without telling you. — That’s right, she said, I almost forgot that. . did you write me that you were coming? — I don’t think so. — My mother forgot many things, now that she was going on eighty. What she never lost was her gentleness and solicitude toward her son, having forgotten all the old rancor over my unreliability, and especially my frequent drinking. — I ate almost nothing that evening, wouldn’t let my mother make me tea, making it myself instead; I’d already put my notebooks on the kitchen table, a sign that I wasn’t up for conversation. . several years ago my mother had begun taking my writing seriously, and accepted my silence. — I immediately began another card to Marie, telling her I meant to visit again on Monday, because, as I said, I’d been annoyed with myself for not staying a little longer today. Or not spending the whole night with her. — When she read the card on Monday, I knew, she’d have that ironic smile in her eyes again. — However — I added this qualifier at the end of the card — she shouldn’t hold it against me if I didn’t come, because I had to catch my flight from Dresden to Frankfurt early Monday evening, and I might have trouble making the connections. — On Monday, yes, if Marie was to have the card on Monday, I had to put it in the mailbox that night, at any rate by nine the next morning. It was always the same thing with me, the last act of my day’s twenty-four hours before I tried to find sleep was a five-hundred-meter trip to the mailbox.
After Mother had gone, I sat in the kitchen, thinking back on the afternoon. Outside, salutary darkness shrouded the small industrial town, which, following the so-called change, had swiftly metamorphosed into a sociopolitical rubble heap of vacant houses, empty shops with dusty windows, and defunct factories. The town didn’t even have a policeman now; that was perhaps the clearest benefit of the change so far. But a benefit for whom? If there was a chicken thief on the loose, you’d have to phone the riot squad in the district capital, a difficult matter, there being no phone booths here.
The sad jokes that came to my mind: I thought back on my life, on afternoons, countless overlong afternoons I’d draw out into the first light of dawn. . indeed, my life, what I called my life, had unfolded in the afternoons, in idle afternoons — and a few of them I had spent with Marie. I had always gone again in the evening, at least at a time when I could catch the last train from Leipzig.
That afternoon in Leipzig, as I sat on the edge of her bed, I had sensed that this thin body was now subject to doubt, already in the process of dissipating. More and more it seemed to take on the color of the bedclothes, barely standing out against them. I had tried to encompass this body with my gaze, as though compelled to imprint it on my brain. . How much longer would it be possible to see her? — Below her navel, where the surgical scars made a star shape on her skin, a small wispy patch of light appeared, seeming to circle the wounds, atremble; the afternoon sun cast it through the ground floor window across from her bed. In the next room too, the bedroom where the painter now lived, these flecks of light had often come in the late afternoons. When the sun sank toward the west, its rays broke here and there through the tall dense yew hedge that bordered the yard outside the windows, and for a brief time aimed their vibrating spears at the glass and the curtains. — When this light disappears, so I’d thought, then I’ll go. .
I gazed at her slender white thighs, which were seized now and then by an infinitesimal tremor; Marie said no more, breathing heavily. Her legs were shut, and I saw the small flat pubis, whose hair had always been light and transparent; now it was denuded. — Why hadn’t I gotten up, shut the door before the painter’s eyes, and lain down beside the white body whose contours slowly slipped into nothingness? — There was some incomprehensible darkness inside that had stopped me, and to the end of my life it would fill me with profound regret.
Here too the trip to the mailbox took little more than five minutes if I walked quickly. It led toward the town center, ultimately just an extension of the main street that cut across town from east to west. We had always lived on this street; behind us, a few hundred yards on, the town expired, petering out into the allotment gardens on one side and the ranks and echelons of garages and the premises of small service companies on the other; then the street broke off, splitting into a delta and sinking away into the mud and the stillness. A short way further rose the wooded hills climbed by winding, stepped paths. But you could no longer enter the forest: it had been bought up by the architectural offenders who were erecting their single-family homes behind tall chain-link fences or stockades, Tyrolean or Upper Bavarian travesties with stag’s antlers over the brown-stained wooden balconies. . built with the money they’d made at the ramshackle kiosks that filled every empty lot in town, where the jobless fed on fatty, evil-smelling West German bratwurst and cans of beer from Dortmund and Bremen. With the authorities’ blessing they sawed up the forest and covered it with concrete, and in the vestiges left standing they drilled their attack dogs. — It was the forest of my childhood, and it loomed behind me when I walked to the mailbox, and in the warm time of year on my way back from the mailbox I saw the sky grow light over the last stands of trees. And more and more often in recent years I felt depression shadow me as I returned.
The mailbox is mounted on the front of the so-called “main co-op,” as many of the town’s inhabitants still refer to the building complex. Once it was the largest of the town’s stores; today it has become a rather pitiful chain supermarket with small crammed shelves. The upper floor — the former clothing, stationary, tool, and toy departments, and on the other side facing the courtyard, the administrative office for all the cooperative stores in town and the surrounding area — is vacant, apparently impossible to lease out. Behind the sales building. . in the fifties, before there were self-service shops, Mother had manned the cash register, whose drawer opened with a jingle at the turn of a crank, surrounded by several sales clerks who served the customers under her supervision. . on a side street, beside the entrance to the multistory administrative wing. . whose endless wooden stairs I had to climb to pick up a form to attend the co-op’s children’s camp on the Baltic. . across a granite-cobbled yard looms the hulk of the former industrial bakery, its courtyard surrounded by nineteenth-century façades of dark-red brick, with stone steps outside and ramps with guardrails where the delivery trucks used to line up and load the bread. . so that the whole side street smelled of it, freshly baked, still warm. . and drove off, fully laden, through a massive cast-iron gate: from here the town, the surrounding villages, and the industrial plants were supplied with this chestnut brown, eternally same-tasting foodstuff — a kilo for fifty-two pfennigs. . the bread was of incomparable quality, and it never changed. Now the bakery is empty too, cleared out, abandoned to decay.
Pardon me, could you give me a light?
It is this hackneyed code phrase that startles me from my sentimental thoughts, far too trite to convey to me what it stands for: imminent danger!
I give him his light, and the lighter, which I have to click several times, illuminates his face; a face between fifty and sixty, the age at which you try once again to lose weight, because the mellowing effect fat has on the face is gradually wearing off. But you won’t look striking again, merely wrinkled, and a stubbly beard, generally gray-white, heightens the impression of something aimless and unformed. Little gray eyes, eternally on the lookout: Don’t worry, we’re alone, no one will disturb us. . I’d rather I could hide in a throng of people — a crowded pub, for instance — all at once the square seems bleak and much too large: like a square in a dream whose edge, however fast you walk, you’ll never reach in time, and may never reach again. Dawn is breaking, it grows brighter and brighter; that too is repugnant.
You’ll have guessed right off who you’re dealing with, eh?
I say nothing at all; off the phone he’s still speaking that High German he’ll never really learn. But he no longer speaks it with such fastidious reserve; there’s an oafish familiarity in his injections of dialect. — What does this bastard want from me, with his bad conscience written all over him? I think. Of course I know this can take a different turn quite quickly; I’m curious how he’ll start chipping away at my conscience, they learned that at their so-called Firm.
How long will you be staying? he asks me amiably. Getting away from it all for a few days, eh? Visiting the old homeland again. .
Old homeland, that’s reactionary language! That’s the sort of thing you always accused the radical Bonn imperialists of, I say.
Oh! Do you suppose I ever dealt with that — language usage? What do you think we were doing the whole time? We didn’t have time to kill with language usage. Although. . sometimes I’d rather have had that to deal with. You’d be surprised how much alike we would have been.
Us. . alike, okay! Why don’t you explain to what I owe this honor. I know, back then you didn’t have to, but times have changed. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for you!
True, times have changed. . He opens his eyes wide as though he’s only just realized it. . What do I want? Well, nothing, there’s nothing I can want anymore. But I’d like to take a stroll around the block with you and tell you something. Something about myself, if you’re interested. — He lights a new cigarette from the glowing butt; a heavy smoker, as I’d suspected.
I don’t want to hear it, I say. I’m not some Father Confessor. Let’s go our separate ways, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. You’ve done nothing to me, probably not, and I’ll do nothing to you.
You don’t know I’ve done nothing to you, he says.
Come on, let’s drop the whole thing. As you see, I’m the more successful of us two, I’ve got academies falling all over themselves. Now you just let me do my thing in peace, I’m not going to give you any absolution. And certainly not a job reference.
Maybe you got a reference like that from me one time, you just don’t know it. Could be, eh? — I see him grin in the morning light. — But this isn’t getting us anywhere. Come on, join me for a bit!
He noticed I hadn’t given him a clear enough dismissal, but that probably wouldn’t even be possible. The clearest no bounces right off them; if there’s anything they’ve learned, it’s how to ignore rejection. I light a cigarette as well:
All right then, let’s walk around the block. .
I wasn’t one of those who had to loiter on the street, he begins his story. At least not for long, I didn’t do so well there. Pretty soon I stumbled up the ladder, they saw what I was better at, and soon I had a desk job. I liked dealing with written material, but I wasn’t terribly good at writing reports. I handled evaluations: for instance, this and that is perfectly fine, this or that can go through, or that there mustn’t get where it’s going. In other words, I read the things my poor victims wrote, and believe it or not, I always served them well. .
That’s what they all say!
I know, but still, that’s how it was. If there was something in there that was outright embarrassing, I kept my mouth shut. Tighter shut than the people who’d written these things. . He laughs and chokes on his smoker’s cough.
You’re trying to tell me that the. . the victims had no idea what a friend you were to them?
Oh! He’s still coughing. That’s nice of you, but honestly, it’s much too nice. .
So, if you weren’t a stool pigeon on the street, what were you, a kind of case officer?
I don’t know exactly, and it doesn’t matter anyway. We called ourselves a secret service, you know, so we were secret on every level. As I said, I stumbled up the career ladder quite quickly. If I’d wanted to, I could have asked to get an informer. . a stool pigeon, we called them that ourselves. And I tried two of them, but they didn’t pan out. You’ll. . you’ll laugh, but I’d have liked to get you. .
Very flattering, I say. What was so appealing about me?
Oh, he says, you were difficult, that’s all. You were unreliable, always caught up in your own craziness. And that would have been totally convincing. You were always running away from things, completely egotistical, phony, and neurotic, a real artist, in other words. All that stealthiness of theirs was second nature to you, they wouldn’t have had to give you a new image. Officers with charisma, no, we had enough of those. But you. . you would have been it!
Well, and. . what put you on to me, anyway?
Quite simple, I was responsible for reading the mail.
You’ll excuse me for thinking that’s a pretty sleazy job. Quite clever, by the way, to wait for me here at the mailbox.
Yeah, that was kind of dumb! He says it with a grin. But we always did call for an ability to free-associate. Besides, you didn’t want to go to the pub with me. And incidentally, sometimes I’d wait for you at the mailbox back then, too; there was a vacant apartment nearby, and I could watch when you came, almost always at the same time. But I did that on an extracurricular basis, it was almost a hobby of mine. As I said, I started to take quite an interest in you.
A hobby! I repeat. So that’s why you’re here. . you’re just keeping up your hobby!
Sensing the anger in my voice, he suppresses his ironic tone effortlessly:
It was more than a hobby! I can tell you — in this case I was more on your side than on my Firm’s. It’s true, you were an extracurricular pursuit of mine, even after closing shop, so to speak.
But that’s how your Firm wanted it. Vigilance by day and night, round the clock, isn’t that so?
You know your stuff, he noted dryly, but you misunderstood me. I meant the big closing-shop. . I meant when everything closed down, the state, the Party, us, the party newspaper, and the whole centralism thing. Don’t you think we still had a few people in the post offices afterward who were quite capable of picking out the things we needed. .? Oh, give me a light again, would you!
I give us both a light, and we go on walking our common path; I’m silent while he speaks:
You know, your private letters interested me more than your, so to speak, business correspondence. Hey, don’t get excited, now. . by the way, I know that for you everything was private. Even your business dealings with publishers and so on, that was ultimately private as well. That was the thing about you. .
You call those business dealings!
Well, that was how you made your living. . sometimes better than I, but that’s not what it was about for me, that you can believe. I was more interested in the human side, as they call it. Now you’ll yell that we had to be interested in that side, working for the Firm. . oh yes, I know all that. Let me tell you, more than once I risked a disciplinary transfer for failing to report certain things, practically hushing them up. .
Heroic! A resistance fighter, that’s what you were!
Just as little as you. As heroic as you. When I read your mail, sometimes I’d sit there thinking, what business is this of mine? Here I am, I thought, constantly dealing with all this paperwork, and what am I missing out on in the meantime? Nothing the whole time but letters, letters, words, phrases! And now and then you take notes, and they’re in writing too. It’s like a blanket of writing covering everything. . and often enough it’s illegible writing! A film you maybe can’t see through anymore. A haze of writing. . and can you even still see the life behind it? Is there actually still flesh behind the writing? Or just more writing? Does this writing mean just writing now, or did there use to be something else behind it? Is this writing just writing about itself. . didn’t there use to be women there somewhere? But is a woman really still what this guy means? These were the things I thought about.
A haze of writing, I repeat, that’s probably quite well put.
It could’ve come from you. Maybe it really did come from you, and I just. . what’s the literary term. . appropriated it?
You read it somewhere. Still, I don’t doubt that you really felt these things.
Yes, well, I was a real bloodhound. I even found out the woman you were writing those lovely cards and letters to. I don’t know if you remember her, it’s ten years ago now. Ten years ago or longer, first the cards came from the east, then suddenly from the west. I mean that little woman from Leipzig, who wanted to be a writer too. . nothing like you, of course! Marie A. was her name, I think, just like in Brecht. A name for a Madonna, eh. .?
He breaks off; with his keen instincts he noticed quite well how I flinched. I’d flung the half-smoked cigarette in the gutter and immediately lit another one. The name’s been said. . I feel I’ve been expecting it the whole time. I don’t know how to describe my feeling: rage or horror; at any rate, I feel exposed. . a feeling they still manage to provoke, with the same ease as ten years ago.
Ah, you’re seeing red, he says. Take it easy, we’re men of the world, after all!
Her name was Marie H., not Marie A., I say. But I’d rather we stayed on the subject of literature. You know the poem by Brecht. . could you explain that to me, so I can be impressed?
No, no! he replies with a laugh; it seems to hold something like relief. No, it’s nothing, really. .
I say nothing, taking hasty drags from my cigarette; without my noticing, we’ve already passed the mailbox and are heading around the block for the second time. — He’s got a hold on me, I think, just the way he meant to! With an effort I remind myself that I must have an edge on him as far as my relationship with Marie goes; he can’t know how things stand now; he’s speaking of a state that’s passed, washing the dirty linen of his memory. . all the same, it’s a nightmare.
I don’t have to let you shock me anymore, I mumble, not anymore, you’re harmless!
Oh, that Brecht poem, he says. The little cloud! You see, we do have more in common than you’d think.
Had, I say, we had more in common! Enemies always have something they share, that’s a truism. But we have nothing in common now.
You weren’t my enemy, he says with that grin on his mug again. When he sticks in the next cigarette, I’ll hold up the lighter flame to his filthy three-day beard, and when he staggers back, I’ll beat him to the ground.
No, you weren’t my enemy, he repeats; he’s observing me now, walking a stride behind me, and I wait for him with my head turned to the side, on my guard. He speaks as though under some kind of pressure:
I was forced into it, simply forced by the situation, I had nothing at all against you personally. I know, they all say that these days, and it’s not something you need to hear. I just want to confess that sometimes all I wanted was to erase your signature from the cards you wrote Marie A. and add my own there instead. . My little cloud! Didn’t you write her that?
Hardly, I say, that’s a figment of your imagination! But did you do it, did you add your signature? Whatever happened to the cards you read, anyway?
Of course I didn’t do it, and it would have been tough anyway, since you wrote in ink. . though we had ways of dealing with that too. But it would have been too risky, with people breathing down my neck. What happened to them? They were read and passed on, as a rule.
Passed on where? And what wasn’t the rule?
If there was nothing relevant in them, they continued on the normal postal route, quite simple. Of course, copies would sometimes be made of certain things, but that wasn’t the rule with you.
And you can’t recall there ever being something relevant?
Not that I know of. Unlike you, I can remember quite well. I was the only one who was personally interested in you. . that was what I lacked, you see, a little cloud like that.
Could you stop with that goddamned cloud already! She wasn’t a cloud for me. . and she still isn’t. Another thing, can you remember making copies of my letters too?
Goodness me, I couldn’t do that, we kept scrupulous lists of every copy we had to make. But you’re probably asking because you’re still fond of her? Or you’re actually involved with her — I always wished that for you. Though I envied you. I even went to see Marie A., made a special trip out to her part of Leipzig, trespassed on someone else’s beat, and questions were asked, very embarrassing questions. And then I envied you all the more. . how can I manage to write little A. those kinds of letters and postcards, with such lovely photos from Amsterdam? I pored over those cards of yours. But building on what was in the postcards, I would have started expressing myself more clearly, I wouldn’t have left it all in this lovely haze. For me, she wouldn’t have stayed a cloud, or a Madonna up there in the clouds. .
And after a while he said: I wonder if it’s this haze that’s still so appealing to you. Times have changed, no one has to read between the lines anymore. You don’t need to be left out in the cold, as you once put it so nicely. Did you just make that up too? No, you don’t need to do that anymore, you’re successful enough now, now you can reach out and take what you like. . and I’ve helped out a little there, I’ll have you know.
What did you help out with?
That doesn’t matter; I don’t want to brag in front of you. You. . you can go looking for life now, after all it does exist. .
Behind the haze of words! I say, leaning exhausted against the mailbox, where we’ve arrived again. I’ve had enough, I’m not looking for life now, I’m looking for an escape. I won’t come along for a third time.
I’ve talked myself blue in the face, haven’t I? Shall we have one last smoke? Don’t tell me it wasn’t interesting for you!
We light up again; it’s my last cigarette, and I put the empty pack in my pocket, there being no wastebasket nearby. — Interesting or not, I still don’t understand what you actually want, I say. Surely we have less in common than you think. By the way, I’m sure there were other men who were interested in Marie A., and who. .
Oh! he shakes his head. Don’t speak ill of her, no one has that right. I’ll always defend her!
Where she is now, she can do without your defense, believe me.
Sure, he says, I’ll have to take your word for that. But one more thing. . I’ve got to finally come out with it, the reason I had to see you. I’ve still got one long letter and a few of the cards you wrote her. I wanted to give them to you.
I was barely surprised, as I recall. — Come on, I snarled, hand them over, they’re my letters! What took you so long?
I wanted to get an idea of you first. .
And is the idea such that you can finally give me the letters? How many do you have, anyway?
Quite a nice big stack. But I don’t have them here, I didn’t know for sure if I would see you. I can’t go carrying everything around with me all the time. Where I’m living now, one of my superiors might crop up, you never even know them all yourself. I hid the stuff. . I’ll bring it tomorrow. Same time tomorrow, right here, and we’ll take another stroll around the block, eh?
I returned to the flat in indescribable agitation. — Could I believe what I’d just been through, or had it been a figment of my imagination? I’d turned around when I was halfway home: he’d already vanished; I hadn’t seen the direction he’d gone off in. Or had he not been there in the first place. . had I gone mad? In this town there was a person who knew more about me than I about him. . which might not be unusual. The only unusual thing was the way in which he had acquired his knowledge: it was almost as though he’d appropriated my life, or at least a part of it, a part — I suddenly knew — which had meant a great deal to me.
I tried to remember how he looked, his face, his build. . and strangely, as I did so, I looked into the mirror, as though I could remember his face only with the help of my own. — Why hadn’t I taken at least one good look at him? He had seen me, but I hadn’t seen him. .
His face. . I thought. It was unshaven, I was unshaven too; the nicotine of many cigarettes had left a yellow-brown rim in the stubble on his upper lip; on my upper lip I saw the same yellow-brown shadow. He was about my size and stature; he wore a jumpsuit of dark, glossy material, dark-blue or black: a jogging suit, that was what they called it these days. . it was the uniform of the early retirees and the jobless who loitered at the kiosk hour after hour with their canned beer. . It was a catastrophe: the collapse of the system had even robbed people’s resolve to dress themselves at their own discretion.
I felt there had been many more similarities between us. . when I thought of my wife, the image she had of me— and never wearied of confronting me with — perhaps it was really an image of him. His character, I thought, had that mixture of self-loathing and calculation that employs truth and lies indiscriminately. . for years my wife had offered therapy for a comparable sickness in me. My hopeless submission to every authority — or everything I regarded as an authority — had enmeshed me in an inextricable snarl of half-truths, evasions, and subterfuges, she claimed. Every official letter I received transformed me at once into a charlatan, and unable to believe in my true feelings, I hid behind pretended sensitivities. I did try, over and over, to tear through my web of lies — when I myself lost my way in them, that is — but I seemed to think this could be done only with one big, decisive lie. . And perhaps, she said, and this was the final straw, that decisive lie is all that stuff you write! — You’ve been leading a double life for ages! she cried. And she could never forgive herself for feeling attracted, at first, by this of all things. . by your dark existence! It was a mistake, she said, weeping. . and her weeping, for me, had unimpeachable authority. . it was a mistake, all attempts to shed light on your darkness are doomed to failure!
I hadn’t asked what she meant by that stuff you write: did she mean only my secret correspondence, or everything I wrote, that is, my literary work as well? — If it was the latter, this gave me an argument for a counterstrike when the time was ripe.
When my mother got up, between seven and eight, it was time for me to go to bed; first Mother invited me to drink a cup of coffee with her, which I did; I knew I’d have trouble falling asleep anyway. Furtively I swallowed half a sleeping pill. . this too was a habit I kept hidden to avoid reproaches. . here the two women were in agreement: Mother thought all these chemicals wouldn’t really help, I’d do better to live healthy and not overtax my nerves; in my wife’s view I had to sedate my guilty conscience before I could relax in bed. — And in fact my wife was right to accuse me of a guilty conscience, for I took the pills from one of her bottles, secretly, every time she was prescribed a new ration by a doctor she was friends with. . I regularly stole two or three when the bottle was still too full for her to notice; I stole them, as it were, for the long term, stocking up a supply I needed when my reading tours got too grueling. My wife took sleeping pills for granted; she needed them for the phobias that often gave her writer’s block. . as I never had writer’s block, in my wife’s view I had no need for sleeping pills.
The dose was too small, I realized soon after lying down; I snuck back into the bathroom to take the other half of the pill. Then, as I lay in bed, a sort of sleepless twilight descended on my brain, a haze of exhaustion and unrest behind which the film of my thoughts went on restlessly unspooling. My ears were defenseless against the onslaught of traffic noise from the street; even on Saturday mornings it was twice as loud as it had been on weekdays before the changing of the system, back when the town’s industrial plants were still operating. For the first time in years and years I thought of going out again to buy alcohol, but I lay where I was, immobilized, beads of sweat on my brow, unable even to fetch another half sleeping pill from the bathroom. At some point I sat on the edge of the bed, smoking; my mother had already left the flat to run some errands. . What was he after, the guy who’d ambushed me by the mailbox early that morning?
Could he want money for the letters and cards to Marie he’d pocketed, could he want to sell them to me? Hard to believe. . All he sought, it seemed, was the gratification of a crude, voyeuristic urge; he wanted to carry on what he’d begun ten years before in the back room of some bleak, poorly lit post office. But how did he plan to continue. . with my consent, evidently? Had he discovered in my letters to Marie that character trait that so resembled his. . didn’t the word see, which he used so obtrusively, actually come from me, from a letter of mine, or even several of these letters? Hadn’t my letters, too, displayed a certain voyeurism?
I fetched the half sleeping pill from the bathroom and flung myself down on the bed again: a memory surfaced in the haze of my consciousness, though I couldn’t say whether it was the memory of an actual scene, or merely the memory of a fantasy of that scene, the memory of a haze of words in my imagination that I then described in a letter, probably a longer letter to Marie. . she hadn’t answered it, as often happened she said not a word about it; and I remembered that in her silence I’d been seized by a lasting sense of shame, the suspicion that that letter had simply been too lascivious, too tasteless. Now it occurred to me that the letter might not have been tasteless at all, at least not in Marie’s eyes. And I thought of the ironic smile with which, often enough, she had requited my failure to act. .
It was a luminous letter, by no means shadowed by the darkness in which I was so often said to deal. — Marie had once called me a verbal eroticist, evidently, so I threatened to ravish her. . and I described the incident to her so vividly that I’d come to doubt it was just a figment of my imagination. — One day, I claimed, I’d gone to her without announcing myself. . I believe that in the letter I even asked if she too could recall that sunlit afternoon. . I never asked her in an actual conversation, which is why I doubt that afternoon’s reality. . she opened the door, and after barely exchanging three sentences with her, I went into the next room, the bedroom, and said, without any transition, that she should undress and lie down on the bed. . completely naked, I said. She did so, unquestioning, still dazed by the unexpected onslaught, which I carried out in an odd, commanding tone. I stripped as well, down to my undershorts, and knelt on the floor at the foot of her bed. I don’t know whether I told her to part her legs; after a time, at any rate, she spread her thighs and bent her knees: her sex was delivered up defenseless to the sunlight that flooded the broad window through the gaps of the yew hedge and over its straight-cropped edge, iridescing in the weave of the curtains. I said not a word, entranced by the sight of what faced me, female, alien, mocking all appellations: no, I had no idea whether I was entranced or ensnared, or possibly dismissed. . I could reach out and plunge in, but some mysterious mental malfunction prevented me; I was hypnotized by the expression of a mouth drawn slightly crooked, filled with covert irony, offering itself to me and yet in some unfathomable way refusing itself. Marie, too, said nothing, not moving, except that her legs barely perceptibly slid further and further apart; after a long time she asked what I wanted. . What are you doing down there, she said softly, out in the cold. .
I could think of no reply, still staring at the curving cleft, which extended down a hand’s breath from a little mound until it closed to a seam at whose end, hidden between swells, another opening appeared. My searching eyes returned to the slit that was like a sleeping mouth; its lips were closed, adhering as in breathless dryness. Only in time, in a patch of light, it seemed, that struck them from the window, did the lips grow suppler, an invisible melting that came from within, and parted by a few millimeters. Then the light illuminating Marie’s body from the window grew cooler; barely visible, merely imaginable tremors skimmed her skin. All that remained was one bright reflection, the tip of an arrow of light that pierced the hedge and clung to her body, fragile still, nothingness made visible, and as she moved a bit, growing restless, it darted across her lightning-quick and grazed her sex, now open, beginning to gleam in naked hues. — When this light is gone, then I’ll go, I thought. .
The image lingered before me when I woke in the evening: it was growing dark; the streetlamp across from the bedroom window had gone on; it was past mid-September, the days growing noticeably shorter; for a few moments I didn’t know where I was, then I heard the television, volume muted, in my mother’s living room. I went into the kitchen, took from my bag a postcard with a picture by Egon Schiele showing a woman with legs spread wide, put it in an envelope and addressed it to Marie in Leipzig; I didn’t write a word on the postcard. — In the morning between four and five, I brought the card to the mailbox; all night I had clicked my way through the countless television programs and kept falling asleep in my armchair. . not an image on the screen had the least thing to do with the truth or the reality of life. My mother, who kept nodding off in front of the TV as well, had soon gone to bed. . we were two sleepers from a past time; time’s tide had caught up with us and overtaken us; the hours of sleep were the only time we still struggled to hold. .
Should I give you a light? I asked when, as though out of thin air, he appeared before me in the darkness by the mailbox.
No. . he gave his soft, strained laugh, immediately stifled by a coughing fit, no, today I’ve got my own lighter. But you’re right, let’s have a smoke before we take our little stroll. — With the cigarette ready in the corner of his mouth, he let the lighter burn longer than necessary; he was still unshaven, we were both unshaven. — Did you recognize me? he asked. And then: Come on, he said, let’s walk a ways. That same old way. .
I don’t have much time, I returned, not stirring from the spot. Actually, I don’t have any time at all. . did you bring the letters?
I thought you’d be in a hurry, you want to catch the early bus to Leipzig, right?
How could you know that. .?
I figured it. You know, we’ve got plenty of time to think now, we’ve got much too much time, we don’t even know what to do with our time. We spend the whole time thinking, and for me it makes sense that you’d go to Leipzig to visit our little lady friend. But you’ve got more than two hours left.
I’ll spend my time as I please! And where are my letters?
I’ll tell you. .
You’ll tell me? Are you trying to say you haven’t brought them with you?
It would be pretty awkward for me if you were in Leipzig today and plunked the whole bundle down on the table. . and if you told who you’d gotten the stuff from. Besides, this has its risks for me. Where I’m living now, you’ve got your hiding places, everyone has a hiding place for sensitive things. And you can’t put things in or get them out at any time, in front of everyone.
I don’t care about that, I just want my letters back. Now we’re going to go to where you live, and you’re going to give them to me. I’ll wait until you’ve gotten them out. What your colleagues think doesn’t interest me. Or what your superiors think. . go get them out, and we can both close the file on this one. Or do you want to make a deal with the letters?
A deal? Not at all, don’t give me any dumb ideas. I’ve got the letters in a safe place; I liked your letters, and I still like them. Besides, if we go there now it could end badly for me.
It’s time something ended badly for you!
Oh, you’re taking a hard line with me. . and you think you’ve got a perfect right to. When I always went easy on you back then, in the old days. — He laughed as he lit his next cigarette; again and again he seemed about to fall into a stroll, his stroll around the block, once even reaching for my arm; I followed him just a short way down the side street, to the big gateway of the former bakery; there I tore myself away and stopped in my tracks.
You know, he said, you can hardly call it living, the place we’ve organized. It’s just holing up. Everyone comes and goes as he pleases. . or as he’s forced to. Someone’ll arrive, and then he disappears again, sometimes for weeks, before suddenly showing up again, and no one asks questions about anyone. It’s all pretty crazy, it’s chaos. . it’s probably just that we don’t have a homeland now. Today I’ve still got a bed there, tomorrow I may not, or I’ll have a different bed. It’s a madhouse, not very cozy, if you know what I mean. No one knows anyone else, and no one wants to know, all kinds of hoodlums could be holing up there. Romanians, Russians, all that scum, let me tell you. And soon the Cubans will come too. . they’ll come and go and run off with everything. How can you hide anything properly there?
You could carry it on you, on your person.
Oh, they’d even steal out of your ass in your sleep. And you sleep like a dead man there, I can tell you, because the only way to sleep in that commotion is with liquor and sleeping pills.
Then you’ve finally achieved your true lifestyle, life in the underground, I retorted. That’s what you always wanted! And you really think no one would be surprised if someone suddenly failed to show up?
They’d even thank you for it, in absentia, so to speak. There are always too many people there, way too many people, it’s a truly artistic existence. Totally Bohemian. . as if we’d learned from you people.
He’d talked himself into a frenzy; his voice, barely skirting dialect now, vibrated with a strange enthusiasm. I had to interrupt him:
Let’s get back to my letters already. .
The letters. . well, it’s a special situation. Can’t you see that they were a kind of identification for me, the proof that I’d belonged? As long as I had the letters in my hiding place, I enjoyed a kind of protection in the house. They wouldn’t put me out on the street.
So there are more people who know about the letters?
Not what’s in them. . I hope. Only the official stamps were important, and the signature mattered. There were some people who’d stopped believing my alias.
Does that mean you don’t have the letters anymore? I took a step toward him; he leaned against the wooden gate of the bakery, rubbing his back against the slats and seeming to bend at the knees, while pulling his dark sweatpants up over his stomach:
I don’t have them anymore. . but I know where they are. I can easily get ahold of them again, with us nothing gets lost, not even now. . I’ll get ahold of them again, you can count on that. How much longer will you be here?. . I can tell you more tomorrow morning, same place. I can even find out more today, in Leipzig, I could come with you to Leipzig, and while you’re with your Marie, I’ll get the letters. Tell me Marie’s new address, I could come by, and I’d have some positive news for you.
So the letters are in Leipzig now? And you want to come along with me to Leipzig?
In Leipzig. . they’re not there yet, I’m sure of that. But I can meet certain people there!
This is getting to be too much, I said. And you really think I wouldn’t mind your showing up at Marie’s apartment?
Oh, he said, that’s what I always wanted. . not just to see the little cloud from below, not just to watch her fade away. You’d really do that, go to Leipzig with me? — All at once he seemed agitated; smoking nervously, he laid his free hand on my shoulder as though to clasp me in his arms:
And you’d pay for my bus ticket to Leipzig? The trip has gotten insanely expensive, it’s not an easy thing for me. . I’ll have the letters in two days, you can count on it!
You’re quite the poor bastard now, eh? I said.
Now, he said, now I am! You’re right about that, but such is life. — He dropped his cigarette and wriggled adroitly out of his tight spot, pressed against the bakery gate; as he did, he pivoted, and suddenly I was thrown against the gate’s wooden slats. He thrust his face close to mine; I felt his stubble on my cheek:
And I’m telling you, I’ll make sure the letters reach their addressee, once I know where she is.
You’ll know, you can count on it, I said; and now I embraced him as well. I pulled him to my chest and reached for the knife tucked away behind my back, beneath my jacket and under my belt. With both fists I drove the blade home beneath the left shoulder blade. It was a long, narrow bread knife, and slipped almost without resistance through the jogging suit into his body; he lifted his head and gazed at me in astonishment. It was like something in a movie; when he opened his mouth, bloody foam welled over his lips instead of a sound. I kept holding him in my embrace, kept him from collapsing. Through the little side gate I led him into the bakery yard and opened the door to the former administrative entrance I knew from my childhood. The door stuck, and I had to push it with my knee. He followed me willingly, with tiny, shuffling steps; I set him down on the dusty wooden stairs in the narrow vestibule. He was still gazing at me wide-eyed; I waited until his head fell against the wall beside the stairs. I dragged the grating door shut behind me, picked up the glowing cigarette butts from the pavement outside, and went home. On my way I tossed the butts through a storm drain into the sewer. I made a short detour along a brook, and dropped the knife into the milky, murky water. I saw not a soul the whole way, it was Saturday or Sunday, suddenly I couldn’t have said which; the jobless were sleeping away the morning, but it was only just growing light.
Mother was delighted when I told her I’d stay a day longer. I pleaded a headache as my excuse. . I’m not feeling so great, I said, it must be the weather. — Yes, what kind of weather is this, so hot and humid, she said. We aren’t getting a proper autumn. But tonight it’ll rain for sure, I can feel it in every joint. — I’ll fetch you some coal from the cellar just in case, I said.
Mother’s rheumatism had not deceived her; when I got up — with the help of two sleeping pills, I’d slept like a stone — it was windy and rainy; well past midnight, when the old woman had long since gone to bed, the showers seemed to let up. As I left the house at last, the pavement gleamed in the light of the few streetlights as though it had been washed. — It was quite easy to find a suitable conveyance in the bakery’s spacious yard; I didn’t even need the flashlight, with the moonlight that broke now and then through the tattered clouds. Several so-called sack trucks — used in the old days to transport flour sacks — were lying or standing in a corner. I picked out the best one: it would have to move almost silently; the rubber tires of the two small wheels still had to be well inflated. Outside the administrative entrance I laid the sack truck flat on the ground and arranged his body on it, upside-down, his head on the bottom steel ledge; I bent his knees over the truck’s upper crossbar, lodging his feet under the two steel struts that formed an X extending to the lower crossbar, then I stuffed his hands under the waistband of his jogging pants, which seemed tight enough. In his pants pockets I found an ID — not bothering to read the name in the darkness, with the moon behind the clouds once more — a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a key ring with two safety keys; I stuffed the things back into the pants pockets, which could be zipped shut. Finally, I covered his face — his eyes, I saw in the beam of the flashlight, were still open wide, but the pupils were now sightless — and part of his torso with several tattered pieces of plastic sheeting the wind had blown across the yard. Instead of carting him down the main street, I took a detour, which cost me a good quarter of an hour, but here, years after the changing of the system, there were still no streetlights to speak of. I reached the wall that separated a sprawling factory complex from the streets at the edge of town: I knew all the tricks for getting through sections of fence that slid open and shut, back doors in the depths of the factory halls that no one ever locked because no one knew about them, through junk rooms, through never-used showers, through twisting passageways in a wing that had last been used before the war, until I reached the old boiler house where I had once worked as a stoker. We used to smuggle alcohol onto the premises through this labyrinth; I was probably the only person in town who still knew the secret route. It wasn’t easy to steer the sack truck down the winding passages, across thresholds, over rubble heaps, upstairs and downstairs all the way to the boiler room, as the load seemed heavier and heavier; it was especially difficult, with the flashlight between my teeth, to climb the narrow iron stairs to the top deck of the three boilers, where the coal chutes were. Having reached the top, I had good reason to take a breather; I smoked a cigarette and looked around in the light of the flashlight: except that everything was rotted, rusted, begrimed, and hung with cobwebs, that the table and chairs lay broken in the dust at the foot of the boilers, nothing here had changed. . As I opened the chute of the middle boiler — I had to force it — I saw that the fire grates and the ash channels hadn’t been cleaned. — How could I describe the strange feeling that seized me at this moment? — Here I’d put in part of my so-called youth; here, somehow, I’d been at home. Indeed, it was a sense of home that came to me here, for in this place — and nowhere else, it seemed — I had once been needed. .
I tossed his body into the feed chute of the middle boiler; due to the fuel chamber’s sharply tapering inner walls, he got stuck just over the fire grate, and using a poker that lay nearby I moved him to a horizontal position; I could no longer see his face, which had slid through the crack of the internal walls, his brow bedded in the ancient cinders. Then I dragged the coal hopper over the chute; the hopper, shaped like the stump of an upside-down pyramid, hung from a slide rail mounted on the ceiling, and could be moved back and forth over the three boilers by means of a chain hoist; the strength this took told me that the hopper was still filled with coal. I wrenched open the hopper’s slide gate; rumbling and hissing, spreading a tremendous cloud of dust, the moldered, dried-out, raw lignite, that once-valuable, now utterly deteriorated substance, poured into the boiler and filled it more than halfway full. . the corpse could no longer be seen. All the things he had known about me — while all I knew of him was that we had been very similar — had suddenly vanished; I closed the openings of the coal hopper and the boiler chute, tossed the sack truck behind the boiler, where a tangle of steam and water pipes rusted, and crept back out through the labyrinth of passages and courtyards.
Outside it was pouring rain; all at once, autumn had come. I hung my clothes in the bathroom to drip dry, toweled my hair, and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I was in bed even before Mother got up, and slept more deeply than I had in ages, as deeply as after an arduous night shift back then. . and without a single sleeping pill.
When I arrived a day late in Rhineland-Palatinate, my wife asked whether I’d managed to see Marie. — I wanted to, I said, but. . The question, her first words, had taken me by surprise, and immediately I’d floundered. — My wife said: I’m surprised to hear that; a young woman called, a painter. She asked me to tell you that Marie died the night of your visit. — Yes. . I said, yes, I thought as much. — I lit a cigarette and coughed; when my wife finally went upstairs to her room, I was still sitting at the table, smoking. In one flash, or so it seemed, I’d seen Marie before me again: the ironic smile in her eyes was no longer meant for me, it had frozen fast.