W. was happy not to meet anyone in town who wanted to talk to him. He had the impression that people had begun avoiding him in public as well; an industrial plant as large as the one that had employed him held a certain sway over the public, and the opinions that formed among the workers soon found their way into town as well. If someone did talk to him, he hastened to assert that he was planning to move to Leipzig. . and immediately afterwards he generally forgot whom he had just met: it was time to be careful what he said! — In the town’s half-light he met the breezy gentleman in the suede jacket, the boss, who stopped and greeted him. — How can you go walking around in this toxic stuff? said W., pointing upward. . It’s not much better in Leipzig, either! the retort came after him. Or he’d simply walk past as though he hadn’t noticed him, the boss opened his mouth, but it was as though the frost wouldn’t let his voice out. . all the same, soon afterwards W. was no longer sure whether they hadn’t had a brief conversation. — At a grocery store, buying the last kilo of potatoes, he met the boss’ assistant in the green anorak, leaning on the counter and drinking a bottle of beer. Impulsively W. asked for a bottle of beer too (perhaps hoping to learn from the green guy what they thought about his moving to Leipzig). . Sorry, takeaway only! the green guy replied in the store clerk’s stead. It’s closing time already! — So he was pretending not to know W. at all; but W. recognized the same uncertain flicker of the eyes with which the lanky guy, it must have been months ago, had once leant on his doorjamb. It was, in fact, three before six; W. left without the beer and wandered with the bag of potatoes in his gloved fist through streets that were emptying of pedestrians, an exodus, it seemed to him. — That was it, then, the sleep phase, he walked around town like a ghost, people looked straight through him. . there was one incident, as though not all forms of reality had yet faded from the life of this town: he ran into Cindy, stopped her and said that he wanted to give her the watch back. — The watch? Why give it back. .? she said. No, he should go ahead and keep it, he’d be sure to need it. And if not, then for old time’s sake. — Harry had given him the watch as a pledge when he couldn’t pay up after a game of dice at the pub. . It’s Cindy’s watch, he’d said, it’s yours until I’ve got money again. — He last saw Cindy in the coldest, most unendurable phase of that winter, in the fuzzy, ferrous daylight, pushing an old-fashioned pram on softly squeaking wheels. She tried to hurry past him but he asked her how the baby was doing. — And you don’t care how I’m doing? she retorted. — Their brief talk was almost a talk between strangers, but it seemed to him that her voice throbbed with suppressed hatred. . How should he be doing, she said, maybe bad, . maybe he doesn’t even notice any more! — And she nodded in the direction of the pram; beneath the plastic tarp, patched and stuck together with filthy bits of sticking plaster, it was eerily silent. W. had taken her words for one of the coarse jokes one had to reckon with in Cindy’s circles. — Is your son sick? asked W., looking at the tiny bundle in the carriage, completely motionless beneath the recklessly thin blankets. — Sick or dead, as if it was yours, Cindy said spitefully. And after a while: It’s a crying shame to make a baby for a country like this! Making a baby in this country. . that’s something you can never, ever put right. — She said it in a strangely clear voice; W. was relieved that her anger had found another target: Why don’t you apply to emigrate?3—We have a chance at getting a flat in Berlin. Then maybe we’ll be a bit better off. .—W. announced that he was also planning to move away. . I’d rather go to Leipzig, though!
Subsequent to such chance meetings he could never swear to their actually having occurred. . Why is that? he asked himself. — Because no one asks me who I meet any more! he replied. — In point of fact, the gentleman he called the boss hardly ever asked now what happened to him on a daily basis. . Literature! — the only topic the gentleman cared about was literature. — And so for me all things in this life were mere figments of the imagination, he said to himself later. And they were imagined as vividly as though he’d had to furnish evidence of his existence for this time period. . as though someday someone would come and ask: Do you have any evidence for this time?
One or two years later he’d conceived the notion that during his sleep phase an unconquerable distrust towards every reality had been instilled in him. . or had he instilled it in himself? It was a profound distrust of all perceptions and at the same time of his memory which stored these perceptions; and all the things he later believed to be anchored in his memory were either ones that had withstood a thousand doubts as to their existence, or they were pure figments. . and that, he thought later, was as it should be.
Soon after the shops closed, town life had already clustered in the few lit rooms behind windows not sealed off by blinds or heavy shutters. Mostly houses with front gardens; it was there alone (apart from the activity inside the pubs) that human life still stirred. The light that spilt out soon faded in the fog, the shadow of the bushes in the front yard left you utterly invisible, even if you ventured up close to the window. — Most of W.’s perceptions were acquired by looking from outside into the interior of lighted dwellings; what he saw was filtered through double panes and veiling curtains. . while he, outside, was in a different atmosphere, the fog-swirled atmosphere of the dark where all movement within the living rooms’ inward light seemed unreal to him, shoddy fictions. He didn’t understand the words that were spoken in there; when not completely inaudible they assumed an utterly different meaning in the glow of the light bulbs, the violet phosphorescence of the television screens. . no, of these utterances’ meaning he knew nothing, he sought their probable sense in the gestures meant to underline the words, he sought to follow the movement of the speakers’ lips and read off syllables, finally he began imitating the interplay of the lips’ forms to get at the words, the phrases. . without knowing, of course, how they were received, these sounds, by those who showed him only the backs of their heads. He almost played the role of a person trying to follow the conversation of deaf-mutes. . no, his role was that of a deaf-mute, tracking down the secret of those adept at speech. Rarely did he succeed in deciphering a serviceable sentence, or at least a few intelligible words. . only one single fact could be assumed with certainty: if more than one person was present behind the window, the capacity for speech was exercised at least once each evening. — It was a capacity from which he was cut off, now that he had taken his place in the darkness outside the windows. — He had no recourse but to replace the unheard words from inside the rooms with ones from inside his head.