Earlier. . that was an utterly unreal time, slipped from his grasp like a flimsy web of overwrought fancies and self-deceptions. Scrap for scrap it had vanished from his memory, an untime. The reality which had commenced one day, which by degrees had taken him in and overwhelmed him, was finally all that was left in him; and that other, finished time, obliterated bit by bit, now seemed like a fiction. It included a third of his life, much more than that, almost half. . and he felt that he’d gambled this time away, and no longer knew what it held. Indeed, back then he had simulated—for himself! — that chunk of life; he no longer knew how he’d managed, it was a life in which each command. . that was the word. . that drove it had come from his own person; and yet he’d never been a personage in that play! Now it was the other way around — all his commands came from without, and he was a personage. . the proof being that he received commands clearly tailored to certain idiosyncrasies of his lifestyle.
Earlier, then, he had simulated his life. . so he was experienced in simulation, and now it had become a necessity! — When had he actually woken into this reality. . when had he been awakened? Even this was unclear — and he thought of the long spell of sleep that had been prescribed for him. . he’d never known it was prescribed, he had neither noticed its beginning, nor had he once foreseen its end. At any rate, it was a time he thought of with a touch of pride: he’d lived these years rather boisterously, at least he’d thought so, unconventionally, a little bit, he said, he hadn’t scorned the pleasures available to him, and all the while engaged in harsh, sometimes filthy work, shovelling coal, coal upon coal; none of this had placed serious demands on him, for during this time he was always occupied with literature, focused on it alone: in his free time — deducting that of his pleasures — he was constantly snarled in writing attempts. . snarled, he said. . in vast numbers of drafts which he was always starting again differently or modifying and with which he surrounded himself as with an invisible screen, cutting an absent and obdurately opaque figure behind it. He lived in a sort of mental cavern which he always dragged about with him. He thought of positioning himself in public as a writer one day, not knowing himself if he could believe in such a possibility. And yet he wrote almost without cease. . some of these attempts were the only possessions he’d salvaged from the time of his simulation.
A child has got to have a father! they’d said to him. This notion was not news to him, but of course they’d meant that this child. . a very particular child. . needed a father because none was available. Now this was a view he didn’t share at all, he himself had been a fatherless child all his life, and clearly it had done him a world of good. — But he listened to the story. . it had begun with these words, and from then on he was embroiled in those conversations which he often called his conversations with reality. Starting with these words — it wasn’t Feuerbach who had said them, nor any other person he ever set eyes on again — the conversations took their course. . by the time the problem those words raised had evaporated from the conversations, it already seemed impossible to escape. What was the sticking point that even in his long sleep phase had kept him from believing in escape? Even before truly grasping the fact that retreat was no longer possible, he’d stupidly suppressed all thoughts of his ensnarement: doubtless this had been their intention. They had left him alone until he simply ceased to ask himself whether, and how, he’d still be capable of leaving. . he didn’t have to leave, since they were really just conversations, and no one even minded that he conversed like a somnambulist. — And then suddenly they’d brought the term reality massively into play. . this hadn’t come from Feuerbach either; this too was a person he couldn’t recall, he only heard a rather penetrating bass voice, he no longer knew whether this person had been in uniform, and he didn’t know whether it had been in Berlin or back in A.
Nor could he recollect the exact words that had been said; their basic thrust was extremely simplistic, they were taken from the endless stock of generalities specially designed to relegate the mere attempt at a counterargument to the realm of evil, or at least belligerency. — Herr W., said the man behind the desk, someone has to tell you this loud and clear! At some point you have to stop living life as one big retreat from reality. No one can sneak away from his place in society. All of us have a responsibility towards reality, if you try to weasel out of it, it’ll catch up with you one day. . hopefully before it’s too late. Because for you that could be a bitter pill — reality takes no prisoners!
Later W. knew that these words had signalled the end of his sleep phase. When he heard them he immediately felt overtaken by an attack of fatigue so severe that he began to teeter on the chair diagonally opposite the desk. He felt overpowered by the urge to rest. . I can’t take another word, was his only thought, not another word, however meaningless! — In that moment he would have done anything just for a gesture releasing him from his seat and allowing him to walk out of this office. The lids sank over his pupils as though he’d spent days here on this chair already — it had been little more than a quarter of an hour. And the room swam with whirling vapours, darkness from nowhere seemed to veil his interlocutor, his tongue and vocal cords were seized by incomprehensible paralysis, he no longer saw a thing. . perhaps the gentleman behind the desk had stepped outside; shaking his head, he signed the paper on the desk in a barely legible scrawl. In that instant the gentleman was back in the room and began to talk soothingly to W. while quickly stashing away the piece of paper. Now, the man said, now everything was hunky-dory. . It was an expression W. later thought back on with feelings of disgust. . Nothing could go wrong now really, that had been the right step to take! — Later W. wondered for whom nothing could go wrong: the officer behind the desk or him, W., the undersigned. His signature on the paper had been completely illegible. . and later he’d changed his name on his own; he invented a name which, in a pinch, could be discerned in the ballpoint hieroglyph under that declaration.
For some time after that he’d tried to work out the repercussions of this signature. Sitting on his basement seat he sought to recall what had preceded it, sought the reason for reality’s abrupt departure from that room; he’d sat in barely breathable air, amid shadows that had materialized, that were no longer contained by the walls of the room. . Without reality, there isn’t the slightest reason to go on withholding my signature! he’d thought. Right after the signature, reality had returned; he couldn’t have said in what way it was changed. The little gleam of triumph in the sharply appraising eyes of the man across from him — that didn’t count as a change. And he might have been mistaken there; the man behind the desk had assumed the most serene of expressions, his words were reassuring, his gestures dismissive, as though through his own persuasive example to eliminate any hint of ill feeling, of irritation. . W. couldn’t have said whether this had had any effect on him.