As far as he recalled, just a few days later he’d thought he noticed changes in himself. He had a certain detachment from his affairs, in some unclear fashion taking them more lightly than usual. During his early shift at the factory one of the foremen confronted him because he’d vanished after lunch several times recently. Instead of the usual stammering search for an answer he’d come to expect from himself, he’d given the foreman the brush-off: he hadn’t seen him hanging around the factory then either, not to mention a couple of other guys from division management; in fact, when he left the production hall he’d seen them back in the factory yard busy washing their private cars during working hours. That had demotivated him. . incidentally, in the near future he had better prospects opening up. Better than killing time tearing up holes in this factory because elsewhere more conspicuous ones were being temporarily plugged.
He recalled uttering this in a voice that made the foreman flinch. The man was left speechless; W. had enough time to turn around calmly and walk out of reach, head held high, listening through the noise of the machinery for any sound from behind. And the foreman didn’t come after him; later W. saw him sitting solemnly behind the window of the production hall office, his face drained of colour, or so it seemed to W. No more cars were washed in the factory yard that week. . the foreman must have sensed that W.’s speech was more than a feint. W. was surprised at himself: he’d actually spoken as though he had some sort of backing no one knew about.
And then once again he’d sensed that his colleagues were avoiding him. Previously he’d put this impression down to various flukes; now he noticed that they fell silent when he entered the staff room where they sat drinking beer. . they were practically about to hide their beer bottles from him. But no, they didn’t hide their beer bottles as they would have done if the foreman had come in; they fell silent and changed the subject. . they wouldn’t have changed the subject if the foreman had come in. Probably he was starting to notice things that had always been the case. . in a strange way his awareness of things he’d never thought about before was heightened. Like it or not, his attention to details was growing. . like it or not, he behaved like a person with an ever-honed eye for others’ idiosyncrasies, for the interplay of these idiosyncrasies within the factory collective. Suddenly he registered banalities, he’d developed a sensorium for minutiae. . it struck him that they nodded to one another when he approached them; when three or four of them stood chatting amid the factory noise and he came past, they communicated with their eyes. . no longer would he learn the latest football results they’d just shared; when he tried to ask, they dispersed without a word. — It occurred to him that several colleagues had once observed him making notes for one of the writing projects he’d meant to return to after work. . they’d tried, using the dirtiest of tricks they’d tried to sound him out about it. . at the time he’d sensed them observing him, he’d felt their eyes incessantly scanning him, he was the sole theme of their mistrust, they nosed about him. . from a distance, but with unflagging zeal (with heightened vigilance!); they grew eyes in the backs of their heads when they knew he was behind them. He’d wanted to confront them about it, at least one of them, the one he’d known the longest, but he hadn’t managed it. Then he had tried to ignore the whole thing. — Now the tables had turned. . now they had decided to ignore the matter.
Once, up in the dining hall, he realized he was left all alone at his table. . and soon after that it dawned on him that for more than a week now he’d been sitting by himself at the dining hall table, rapidly gulping his soup and barely taking time for a cup of coffee. For a week he’d fed like a leper, wanting to go unseen. And yet it wasn’t even that they saw him. . they all seemed to pass his table without a thought, crowding at the other tables, playing cards with a clamour of voices; each latecomer found a chair and pulled it up to one of the already overcrowded tables, preferring to set down his soup bowl in the smallest of spaces, in a flurry of playing cards, between ashtrays fuming with unextinguished butts. . it was on a day like this that W. decided to hand in his notice.
Can you give us one good reason why you don’t want to come any more? one of the grey-suited men asked him in the town hall. We’d also rather we didn’t have to drag you in here. We’d much prefer to visit you at a location of your choice. Can you suggest a location?
Because I walk around the factory as if I had an infectious disease, said W. No, there’s no place in this town to meet unseen, all eyes are always on you here. . no, it’d have to be somewhere underground.
You’re right, these small towns are just awful, said the other. Do you want us to find you a new job? What do you mean by somewhere underground, anyway. . do you know a place like that?
No, said W., no, actually I’m very happy with my job at the factory!
What do you want to do, then?
I won’t come to you in the town hall any more. . and I’ll tell my colleagues about the whole thing!
The gentleman in the grey suit grinned: I wouldn’t do that. . I’m advising you from experience. . deconspiration is no picnic, it takes a lot of tenacity. And you have to be prepared to give up everything. . and then suddenly you’ve got the enemies you only thought you had before. And as a writer you can’t give up everything. . you need a typewriter, stamps, you need contacts. .
His relationship with his mother was becoming increasingly fraught as well. At first he put it down to the close quarters they shared. There was too little space for his writing attempts, so he’d got into the habit of waiting until she went to bed, content to devote himself to his writing for an hour or two until fatigue overtook him as well. Now he suddenly felt hemmed in for some reason and began to extend his sessions into the morning hours — which meant that on the early shift he was rarely able to get up in time and no longer arrived punctually at the factory. But he wrote more often in the afternoons as well, obstructing the kitchen and reacting with increasing rudeness to his mother’s presence or her mere appearance at the door. More and more often she found him asleep at the table before dinner; when she set down the plates he woke in a foul mood and lashed out at her. Usually their fights ended with him threatening to find himself another flat. His mother, a quiet, unassuming woman, was alarmed, but expressed with no trace of gratification her fear that he’d have trouble finding a suitable flat. — I’ll get help finding a flat, he said. I have support! — They had never spoken about his writing attempts. With characteristic self-effacement, the old woman — who firmly believed that she would never understand a thing her son did — had transformed herself into a silent shadow whenever she found him in what had long become his typical pose, bent over his notebooks, which seemed to absorb him entirely. . and now he claimed it was her silent scurrying that bothered him the most, in fact it was practically orchestrated to bother him — her constant, cautious, reticent circling of his person was an unconscious orchestration and the expression of her doubts about the necessity of his writing. She stopped making dinner and disappeared into the next room; of course she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. And a short while later he understood himself no better than she; all he knew was that he’d become capable of this kind of carping only in the past few weeks.