The same went for Cindy; face pale, close to tears but fighting them bravely, she said: They can only do that because no one can bail out over their borders.
W. agreed; he would have thought she’d be more jaded, though, since it was hardly her first time, and besides it was really a minimal sentence. His explanation was that she’d had to live with the unpleasant prospect for an entire year. Now he thought he understood the rather grim expression he’d noticed lately in her otherwise soft and girlish face. Her eyes had begun to flicker, too; with the smoke from her cigarette she sucked air audibly between her teeth, then bit her lips together, which gave her a severe, determined expression. She stared at W. with bloodshot eyes.
He avoided her gaze and asked as casually as possible: Is it your first time in there?
Of course, she said, what do you think? But even if it weren’t, I know what it’s like for Harry. . for him it gets worse and worse every time.
It’s not like you have to compete with him! said W.
He didn’t believe her, incidentally; as far as he’d heard, it wasn’t customary to keep debutants waiting to start their sentence, given the incalculable risks which the involuntary postponement entailed; as a rule, self-reporters were repeat offenders whose behaviour was familiar to the authorities.
Over the course of the evening they drank a great deal of alcohol, and W. was nervous when it came to paying the bill. To console Cindy he walked her home afterwards. She lived at the other end of town, her street was in the exact opposite direction from his; she accepted his companionship in the ice-cold night as indifferently as she’d watched the bill being paid, taciturn and preoccupied as they walked. W., not without ulterior motives in accompanying her, was disappointed once again. — She had things to pack and didn’t have the time, she said at the door to her building, and even refused him the obligatory parting kiss. W., holding her by the hips, hesitated, feeling rebuffed. — You’d just regret it, she said; and the words that followed seemed odd to him, but he put them down to the tension of her situation: You’d think about it for ever, but you’d have gotten nothing out of it, you’d just regret it. It’s better if you keep your hands off me. . I’ve got other things on my mind. All you’ll get is trouble, if I were you I’d have gotten out of here long ago.
He wasn’t the type to assert himself against other people’s will; he headed home. — Over the following months he lost almost all contact with the circle of pub-crawlers; he had to admit to himself that it was really only Cindy who’d still kept him coming; and last but not least, he’d plunged back into literature, reading a whole series of books, each halfway through, putting back the rest for later, and continued working on a conglomeration of texts with no idea what it was meant to become. He’d been working on this opus — more a collection of fragments — for years now, but usually he’d given up again after a week of trying. This time he kept at it from early spring to the beginning of autumn, albeit without achieving any satisfying results. The text or texts — it was really impossible to say — were an uneven mixture of hypertrophic self-stylization (of an invented self) and the sober description of everyday details from his real life. In his ‘fictions’ his I often fled so far into fantastic realms — remote times or thought-up landscapes — that he had to drag it back by inserting his boring reality: to keep from losing it entirely! — Usually these were descriptions of his evenings at the pub, the alcohol he consumed there serving as a pretext for detaching his I from reality.
All that summer he spent most of his time at the bars his colleagues went to after work — as though this too might help him keep his bearings at a time when he seemed to struggle to maintain his grip on reality. And he was made to feel the extent of the mistrust that had already built up against him. A distance had developed, one he sensed nowhere near as clearly during working hours in the factory: now he suddenly realized that they had become suspicious of him. . no doubt, he surmised, due to his dealings with people who in his colleagues’ opinion disdained steady employment; in other words, his colleagues felt disdained by a bunch of barflies, and punished them for it with redoubled contempt! Earlier W. had mainly had to listen to his colleagues’ jibes after he racked up absences due to his alcohol-sodden nights (meanwhile putting up with his drinking buddies’ jokes when he left to make it to work early the next morning, which he didn’t always manage, not by a long shot). . now the accusations against him had become more concrete — the less justified they were, the more vexing they grew. — Once he was asked whether he only took notes on what went on at the factory, or also on what they, his colleagues, talked about here in the pub. Alarmed, he beat a retreat for that evening, shaking his head. — Then he recalled one time at the factory when he’d been seen noting down a few thoughts he wanted to remember to put in his literary opus. He was sitting in the empty staff room, a largish basement room next to the factory kitchen; above him, at head height, was a ground-level window, and suddenly its light had gone dark; looking up, he saw the awkwardly grinning faces of several onlookers who made off as soon as he spotted them.