I was spooked by places where I came up against the people, mindboggling throngs of milling idlers. . throngs crossed in turn by hurried masses pouring from the packed S-Bahn trains; and when I saw how the latter ranks had to fight their way through the snarls of loiterers, how they were slowed by the lethargy of those who merely moved from one snack stand to the next, I got nervous. And finally the hurriers seemed to succumb to the rubberneckers and gadabouts and started dawdling as well. . transformed seamlessly into tourists, into schmoozing chatterboxes who, seemingly oblivious to their duties, gazed at the facades, the monumental blocks of metropolitan architecture, the Television Tower and the City Hall, gazed past the little churches buried between the concrete hulks, the first trees, now that spring had come, blooming amid the neat raked lawns. . all this made me suspicious, and what was more, I felt I was being observed: at my side I sensed a constant distrustful gaze and the question whether I was always sufficiently suspicious of the bustle on the city squares. Again and again I felt the question from beside me, and half from behind, whether I’d spotted a person who didn’t want to stay. . there were moments when this eternal question really made me sick. — Unable to hide my annoyance, I left Feuerbach standing there and headed for the S-Bahn station; suddenly I didn’t care if this offended him. On this evening, murky and cold, Alexanderplatz looked nearly deserted on both sides of the rail line, the nasty weather chasing off the last of the pedestrians; dark smoke fell back from the equally dark clouds and mingled with the foggy dusk, which withdrew from the centres of the squares and crept back up the buildings. Only there, in the semidarkness, were there still a few people. . in the midst of the open spaces the first streaks of rain lashed down, slapping the pavement, full of smuts; the rain stopped again, it grew darker still, the Television Tower reared up into a dense dark fog. I seized the opportunity to make it across to the station entrance, but already it was raining again, big fat black drops pelting the con- crete. Sensing the first lieutenant behind me, I refused to run, and filthy water was trickling down my forehead by the time I finally reached the station.
Why are you running away? I heard him pant as I mounted the stairs to the train platform. . evidently I’d finally managed to insult him, but he didn’t show it. He kept one step below me and hovered behind me as we stood on the platform. Watching the people waiting for the train — relatively few, it was evening already — I felt his breath on my ear: How come you’re so hypersensitive, anyway. . all I can tell you is, cut it out!
Were you trying to get wet, or what? I asked.
You know what, he started up again, you’re just overly sensitive about certain things. And since there do happen to be people who are always thinking along with us. . oh yes, we’ve got our experts for that. . this could end up hurting you. Because they have a seventh sense for it, so to speak. Overly sensitive people — that tends to be the thinking — are unreliable people, because at some point they let their sensitivities guide them.
What sort of things, I asked, am I too sensitive about, in your opinion?
Not in my opinion, it’s no skin off my nose! But to answer your question. . I hinted at it once, I’m sure you’ll recall. I said that you simply clam up about some things. And we have trouble keeping certain things straight, you know what I mean. Usually to do with the ladies, you’re trying to put something over on us there. And it’s all out of hypersensitivity. . apparently it’s a catastrophe for you whenever there’s some dame you can’t manage to lay. . and you don’t say a thing about it, no, you actually seem to believe it happened, you actually seem to believe it! And we’re left hanging and have to fit the pieces together. For instance, at one point there was a rather daft paternity affair. . remember?
Vaguely. . I said, I have a murky memory, the whole story was pretty murky. I didn’t even feel it was me they meant, it seemed like something I wasn’t capable of. I thought it was altogether a bit too much. .
That’s just it, he said, once again you played the sensitive character. You couldn’t claim nothing had happened. . and you signed for the child. .
No, I said, that’s not what I signed for!
Maybe it was! And now we’re having problems with your signature. . which is pretty distinctive, by the way!
When I was sitting in the train at last, the only passenger in the entire car, Feuerbach’s interfering murmur still rang in my ears. What was it he kept trying to remind me of? For months he’d been raising the subject, almost regularly, but always taking me by surprise, so that gradually I came to fear these moments. But he never went beyond innuendos, always leaving me with the unpleasant feeling that up there, on the so-called higher levels above us, they knew more about me than I did myself. But probably I was just being too sensitive, for of course that was one of their tactics, two-bit police routine; you come out of every interrogation with that feeling, I didn’t have to go buying into it too. . the troubling thing was that Feuerbach’s insinuations had such a lasting effect on me. — And it was in the nights when I hunkered in the cellar on my seat by the yellow-grey concrete wall, when I was beyond his reach, it was then that his talk gnawed at my nerves. . the ringing tone of the cooling unit behind me, purely imaginary, the clink of keys behind me, purely imaginary, sparked this anxiety within me. I went over his insinuations from start to finish. . they made no sense to me; if anything, they slid in front of my flimsy memories like verbal barriers, their resolution lying in a snarl of disquieting emotions behind this barricade. . It was impossible to unravel Feuerbach’s words because the reason for them had to take me back to the time before my conversations with Feuerbach began. It was almost as though I had to think about things that dated back before my birth.
For me the time before Feuerbach lay fully in the dark of oblivion. . it had slipped from my grasp entirely, so far beyond the pale that I hardly counted it as part of my real life; over it hung a grey, hectically woven web of language which in fact I could describe as an impregnable fabric of simulation. Or everything that lay beyond these grey layers was simulation. . behind them was my mother, like something from Beckett, I hardly remembered how she’d looked. . and I’d had a different name back then, that of course I remembered. . but only because it had become a kind of code name for me now.
Feuerbach had spoken of that ‘hypersensitive character’ again today. . that was supposed to mean me, it could only mean the character from the time before my ‘contacts’ began. And if I rightly recalled, he’d even called me by my former name. . I could be mistaken, but I wouldn’t put it past him: by calling me by my code name the rest of the time, he violated the rule of secrecy. . he destroyed the conspirative consensus between us. . and increased my dependency on him! — In some instances Feuerbach had even described my sensitivity as ‘neurotic’. . at which I had asked him whether he’d also describe someone like Thomas Mann as neurotic. — He grinned at me and said: Way to go! Just keep resorting to literature. . we can be proud to have such people in our ranks. .
The train had pulled into the Warschauer Strasse Station and hadn’t budged since. Probably I’d failed to hear the instructions to transfer to another, waiting train, a frequent occurrence here. . I was sitting way on the right, the far side of the car from the platform, torrents of rain lashing the pane beside me, the inside of the car filled by the rush of the storm on its roof, on the roofing of the platform and in the air, whose blackness was impenetrable, broken only by the glare of a few lanterns which the plunging water blurred. I had laid back my head, resting it on the back of the seat. . I listened to the rain’s monotonous noise, the way this noise grew fainter to my ears, finally resembling the hum behind the concrete wall in the basement, that machine noise that shifted gears with a slight jitter, spreading into regions beyond — that hum which went on all the same, which he could pick up only with the greatest of effort, which perhaps did not exist at all, which rushed only in his imagination when he nodded off on his wooden crate, his head leant back against the wall.