After spending the next two weeks in the basement of the boiler house, quietly performing his duties as stoker and using this solitary time for writing, he still hadn’t come to a decision. Perhaps he’d thought that down here in the boiler house he could ride out the resentment that had focused upon him, waiting until the whole thing passed him by and passed over. . which incidentally, he thought, was a tried-and-true method in this country: emerging conflicts weren’t solved, they were allowed to age until they died of decrepitude. Besides, the writing blocked out his thoughts; the work he had to accomplish in the boiler house was gruelling, but it didn’t take much time, mainly a matter of shovelling into the boiler as much coal as possible in as short a time as possible. . and so, hunched over his notebooks, he sometimes felt that the hours passed too quickly, and especially at the end of the shift he felt a new surge of anxiety when he looked up, when he heard the racket of the mopeds in the factory yard, the first machinists arriving at work. . and all at once he was wide awake and asked himself what would happen when the three weeks were up. He asked himself how he would have acted in his colleagues’ place. — In their place, he thought, I’d never forgive myself. — He was in luck, the temperatures plummeted, the last of the regular stokers signed off sick, and W. continued to be required in the boiler house. . this stoker had always been sick, but he’d stuck it out; now it seemed likely that the foreman of the assembly department had urged him to finally see a doctor. So they didn’t want him up in the assembly hall. . but inevitably he was up there for half an hour or so each day; he was treated reservedly, even coldly, but he was left in peace. . ultimately this state of affairs could pass as a slightly exacerbated form of the universal suspicion that prevails in large industrial plants everywhere. .
That was one way of taking it! — Much, much later W. learnt by chance that they had visited the factory once more while he was in the boiler house, probably to assess the effect of their first visit. And then came something they’d probably never imagined: when they headed for the boiler house, a group of people from the assembly hall planted themselves in front of the entrance in what looked like a blockade; their faces were grim and resolute, at the fore the scrawny little bandy-legged foreman, hair on end, trembling with agitation — supposedly they’d had to prop him up from behind — losing quantities of saliva as usual when he spoke, yelling at them in a barely intelligible falsetto: No access to the boiler house for unauthorized p. . persons! — And they’d turned and left the hall.
If he’d learnt of this early enough, maybe everything would have turned out differently. — He’d waited for them in perpetual fear, they hadn’t come, gradually something like relief set in. . he ignored a further summons to the town hall, Room 17, and even after that they hadn’t visited, either in the factory or at home. Incidentally, the summons hadn’t been the usual ominous pre-printed form; this time it was just a slip of paper in an envelope, expressing the typewritten request that he agree to a casual conversation three days thence. The slip bore neither sender nor signature. . he didn’t know then that so innocuous a piece of paper marked the beginning of a new phase. He tore it up and tossed it into the heating stove. . he’d never set eyes on it! The date came and went and nothing happened.
Perhaps that was the moment when his sleep phase began; he didn’t know, and probably it was irrelevant, being the moment from which all notions of time became blurred. The beginning had come some time that winter; perhaps it was that the summons ceased to contain anything by way of a date, and that he met the breezy gentleman in the buff suede jacket — he knew by now that this gentleman was the boss — only on the streets of town now, apparently by accident. — In this time W. wrote with an intensity he’d never known before, poems and short, one- to two-page prose miniatures, particles that sprang from his pen when he was in a sort of half-sleep, or in moments of resistance, when some unknown thing within rebelled against the torpor that otherwise gripped him. It really was a thing unknown to him, he no longer had a word for it, the rebellion within him was a relic from the time when he’d lived without this sleep. And indeed all day long he barely sensed himself, his mother nearly always found him in a state of collapse, in a sitting position at the kitchen table, his forehead resting on his lower arms, before his closed eyes the scribbled pages on which the words were little more than runaway horizontal lines. She slipped past behind him, wringing her hands; sometimes he started up and scared her off with an alien, barking voice, with cries he himself no longer understood.
At work he was a pale, bleary-eyed figure, unpunctual, unreliable, not to be trusted with the simplest of tasks; and yet fractious, stand-offish, full of a strained, hypersensitive aggression which called to mind a perpetually angered insect. The foreman avoided saying a single unnecessary word to him; a worker like this was clearly one the old man would rather be rid of, and he soon banished him to the boiler room for good.
The sleep phase — as W. had decided to call these weeks and months; he recalled them with horror — was a time in which he didn’t seem to sleep at all. All he remembered about that winter was the sense that his brain was being sucked empty, down to the last stale dregs, down to the most necessary functions which just barely enabled his survival; and it was a time in which a great coldness grew within him. . and perhaps this had hardened him up for his nocturnal paths through Berlin’s frost.
The winter that year — his last year in the town — was long, icy and dry, almost entirely snowless. Permanent, dense, piercingly cold fog filled the streets, saturated with the sulphurous fumes of poorly burning coal; this oppressive, inert atmosphere had the entire town in its stranglehold. The streets came to life for just a few hours late in the afternoon, after the factories shut down. Then, around the marketplace, the eerily lit town centre filled with bundled-up pedestrians hastily running the most vital shopping errands, and with a multitude of crawling, smoke-spewing cars whose criss-crossing headlights tore to pieces the hurried melee in which all were in solitary, senseless flight. At any rate the quantities of food in town seemed sufficient, albeit with no variety whatsoever in the offerings, so that at least there were no shopping queues. When W. returned from his errands, he had the town’s taste upon his mucous membranes and its bitterness in his lungs; it was as though the air and the fog between the houses were filling irreversibly with toxins. . but perhaps, he thought, it was partly due to the quality of the coal he was forced to burn at work. It more resembled an earthen sludge, once wet, now frozen hard, mingled with sand and clumps of grass, barely describable as fuel any more. No doubt the excavator claws were scraping the very last remnants from the deposits, coal that didn’t burn, but stewed and smouldered. And the smell it emitted sank down into the streets, ochre and leaden, and even the daylight could barely penetrate this haze. Once the grocery stores closed at 6 p.m., the town went dead; in the space of half an hour silence fell amid the houses, which seemed all at once, all at the same time, to be bolted and barred, as though the town had been warned of a hostile invasion. For budgetary reasons, street lighting in the town centre had been reduced to a minimum; mute, huddled together, the buildings seemed to await a gigantic blow that would smash everything to pieces. . and indeed it was a state of siege that kept it in suspense, winter’s siege; some time in December the mercury columns had plummeted and remained alarmingly low, as though frozen in place. — When the town came to life again early in the morning, when the light blazed up behind the factory windows, W. saw the workers hurrying towards the factory, bundled up, arms wrapped around their bodies, heads ducked, . it was one of those moments he’d always found poetic. — He himself had stopped going to the factory, one day he’d just let it be. . one morning he’d woken up at the kitchen table, already an hour late; his mother hadn’t been able to wake him, or she’d thought he had a different shift. . he’d gone to the window and gazed out at the crippled town; it was dark still, and suddenly the town had seemed subterranean, buried and choked. He’d had to jot that down, and as he did time passed imperceptibly. . at the factory they’d been at work a long time now without him. . he could see the workers coming into the barely heated production halls early in the morning and making their cynical remarks: Just five inches of snow, and we can put the country up for sale! — Sure, they said, but there won’t be any takers. — And so they carried on. . and the snow didn’t come; it looked as though the country would last out the winter. .