'I'

First, then, I would crane my head through the crack of the door, seeking to take in the vestibule’s atmosphere as a whole with all my senses. I strained to pierce the darkness with my eyes by turning my face back and forth several times, almost a drilling motion: the vestibule was completely dark; even the window around the corner on the first landing admitted not a gleam of light, looking, I concluded, onto a dark courtyard. At the same time, listening with bated breath, I scented out the vestibule: I sniffed. . there were the usual smouldering smells of coal, the cool nitrous exhalations of old walls creeping out from beneath peeling oil paint; I saw the vestibule in front of me even before turning on the light. Perhaps I also caught a whiff of unappetizing cooking smells from the flats that mingled down here as in a trough, and noted that there was no sign of cigarette smoke; no one had smoked on the stairs for at least half an hour, which meant that I was very late on the scene. — All this I had observed and registered with my body still outside up to the neck, both shoulders pressed to the door’s wooden wings, my stooped back projecting over the pavement, legs slightly spread to keep my footing in the slush. — I monitored the vestibule this way for more than a minute. . and once, I recalled, I’d been surprised in this position. Someone had tapped me hard on the spine with an index finger, like a Morse signal. I started; I hadn’t heard footsteps. It was Feuerbach, who’d crept up behind me and said with a laugh: By Jove. . what kind of a pose is that? — By Jove! I mimicked him — I knew he liked to flaunt things he’d picked up from books, especially stock expressions from translations of English and American literature — By Jove, you sure sneaked up quietly! — I didn’t want to disturb you, he said, you’re on the scent of the Muses again, no doubt? — Not waiting for my reply, he moved on with that walk of his which was supposed to be a casual saunter but was always a bit too fast, too hectic, as if, in his mind, he were constantly trying to shrug off something disagreeable. — He’s just a military man after all, I thought, staring after him until he turned the corner. And I wondered if he’d glanced back at me as he vanished. — No, I said, that would have put him in the awkward position of having to wave again; he’s an observant person, and he must have felt me staring at him from behind. And since he makes a practice of deriding Prussian style in every shape and form, and generally greets people by waving two studiedly casual fingers, he’d have to resist the urge to look back at a moment like this — for discretion’s sake.

If I might digress this one last time: Feuerbach, of course, is a nom de plume, and it’s said — surely I’m not divulging too much — that his real name was Wasserstein. He himself despised the name; in a club that does all sorts of things with names, it was often cause for ridicule. Out of sheer spite, he refused to change it, though now and then one of the chiefs would ask him: Wasserswine, how long do you intend to go on provoking your clan with this epithet? It’s a bit much even for us philo-Semites. And if you ever have to go abroad, won’t it crack up the West German border guards? — That was a definite request, an ultimatum almost, considering who it came from. But it seems Feuerbach didn’t back down until a warning written in blue felt-tip was discovered in the lavatory: ‘Do not take the AquaRocks orally’! Everyone knew this referred to the lumps of a white, waxy substance that were dropped into the urinals as a deodorizer; it was a truly hoary joke, repeated almost verbatim on the walls of every public facility. But a long roar of laughter was heard echoing down the halls, and the stunt fulfilled its purpose. Feuerbach is said to have fumed: When I find out who that was, I’ll have him cleaning toilets for a year! — But in the end the butt of the joke adopted his honourable pseudonym.

I pressed the light switch and saw that my senses had not deceived me. The walls, painted murky ochre, let through the dry rot everywhere; just above the filthy, chipped tile floor the paint had literally been washed away; broad, brownish tongues of moisture crept all the way to the once-white stucco ceiling; seeming to emerge straight from Berlin’s swampy subsoil, they welled up especially around the basement door. — I headed slowly up the stairs, reading in passing all the nameplates on the flat doors; I can claim to have memorized at least half of them, which put me far above average; and there were two flats on each floor. At the very top, on the sixth floor, there was only one door, and here I’d reached my destination. On my way up, the stairway light had gone out and I’d had to switch it on again, first propping myself on the sill of a stairway window in the dark to rest; the last thing I wanted was to arrive at my hosts’ out of breath. From the window I looked out over the wide wild field of the roofs behind this row of houses, where smoke rose from the chimneys and merged with the haze of the sky. And I saw that the nights over the city were not really dark, only a shadowy smudged grey, reddened here and there by the light shining up from a few busy streets. — As I caught my breath I recalled a short story by Thomas Mann called ‘At the Prophet’s’. I thought of how the author spends an entire paragraph climbing a flight of stairs — but in what sentences, sentences that make the length and labour of this climbing so wonderfully vivid and ironically significant. — What a story! I thought. Amazing, a gem of prose, perhaps quite simply a work of genius. None of you will ever pull off anything like that!

I thought this with a strange grim fury that seemed completely uncalled for just a few minutes later, when I’d rung at the top of the stairs and been admitted. I was told to be quiet, since the reading had already begun. — Inside I found myself in a smallish room crowded with people lined up on long benches and rows of chairs, listening in what seemed oblivious concentration — hardly anyone looked around at me. Facing this audience, a young, very slender man — I knew him already — sat at a small table, quietly reading a text that poured forth into the room a jumble of words and sentences, without paragraphs and, I heard it at once, without punctuation. He didn’t falter as I entered; immersed in the sequences of his words, he went on reading unperturbed, soft and quick, not once lifting his eyes behind the little round glasses. But I drew reproachful or irritated looks from several listeners as I gingerly squeezed past behind the audience and sat down at the far end of the last bench, where there was just enough room for my left thigh. I mumbled an apology to my neighbour, who vainly tried to shift an inch to the side, turning her pale face towards me and raising an imploring finger to her lips. — Now the reader behind his desk lamp was invisible to me, hidden by massed shoulders and the phalanx of heads, some bowed, some tilted back. But I knew who was reading up there, and the text he delivered was familiar to me too, at least in essence. It was an interminable succession of metaphors, linked metaphor sequences; most of them were clearly taken from literature, but even an expert in the field could have recognized only a fraction of them. Thus many of these quotations might have been fabricated, or at the very least garbled, transformed, rendered unrecognizable. Yet the writer of this text had evidently developed a method that made all his constructions sound like long-familiar passages lifted indiscriminately from a whole range of works — especially works of so-called modern literature. Or this was just the effect of his delivery, non-stop, rapid but not hurried, monotonous but always clear and precise.

What I had before me was part of ‘Operation: Reader’; the operation I faced was one of the most interesting and vexing I’ve ever had to grapple with. At times — though perhaps only in my eyes — it took on the character of a wildfire, breaking out unexpectedly in the oddest parts of the city and keeping us in suspense. . though perhaps it only kept me in suspense. And this over the course of a year or more: again and again the fire seemed contained, or it seemed consumed — it was a mystery to me who could have stopped it, or how — but then, somewhere, it would flare up again. — Of course I was using a bad comparison; the whole thing wasn’t a wildfire, it was a well-organized affair, but still I’d occasionally succumb to the alarming impression that in the interim, in the weeks of its invisibility, it had worked its way onward underground, in the basements of the houses — I didn’t know all of them, not by a long shot — in the profusely, bafflingly branching passages beneath the pavement of the city of Berlin: there the fire had smouldered on, slow but steady, glimmering lurid in the darkness and filling the subfloor of this sea of houses with the dangerous masses and clots of its smoke, while up above in the light ludicrous figures like Major Feuerbach went about their vain, naive routine. — And of course it was presumably he, the lover of American novels, who was responsible for the name of the operation now resting in my hands.