And now he felt that Feuerbach’s question had ultimately been: Did you notice whether Frau Falbe has deconspired? — Right after moving out of her room that autumn, he realized that he’d developed some vague interest in his landlady; there was something incomplete, unsatisfying about his story with her. .
In W.’s assessment, she was a woman — a good bit over fifty — who had resigned herself to a life as a housewife with no family. She had no relationships with men and probably barely entertained the thought any more (though she wouldn’t have been too old for it); she played the role of a woman for whom such matters were a thing of the past, and probably this past itself was meagre and disappointing enough. Now her whole appearance sent the message that those years were behind her. . and this itself made W. suspect that she still harboured desires. And there were even signs of that, but she didn’t seem conscious of them, or at any rate she compensated by venting her nurturing instinct upon her lodgers. And she did it so uninhibitedly, once you had acquiesced, that it exhausted her libidinous energy. Only now and then — at moments when there had been some expression of gratitude on W.’s part — had something flared up in her ever-insecure features, and her body tautened beneath the eternal bathrobe, which changed in colour once a week, her movements became quicker and more youthful, her gestures took on a look of unpractised grace and always went a touch too far, she thrust out her bosom, and a barely noticeable blush glimmered in her face.—W. had often wondered what she lived on, as it seemed impossible that she was already drawing a pension. She couldn’t be especially well-off; when W. slipped the envelope with the rent through the letter slot, he rounded up the numbers. Once W. asked her about the husband she occasionally mentioned, but he had addressed the subject too directly, and she shied away. Evidently she didn’t know herself whether her husband (they weren’t divorced) was still alive. He had worked ‘for the State’, then he’d been on business in West Germany, where he hadn’t been heard from to this day, over ten years later. — Hadn’t she ever tried to have him traced, W. wanted to know. — He’d forbidden her. . she said; as though she’d already revealed too much, she shook her head and started talking about the bedclothes again.
He recalled that one day he actually had brought a plastic bag full of bedclothes — for Frau Falbe and for himself — home from REWATEX. This was prohibited, but common practice; each of the forgotten pieces of linen was marked as rags with a triangular cut which could easily be patched. W. had gone to the container in the yard, which the rag collectors emptied very irregularly, picked out a number of the best pieces, duvet covers and pillowcases and sheets, had them washed and ironed and took them with him. As he left the pub on Hannoversche Strasse (across from the Permanent Mission of the BRD) with the plastic bag, a policeman stopped him and checked his papers. This proceeded in the usual fashion: the man in uniform demanded his ID, opened it and stared at it. — Tell me your name, citizen. . address. . birthdate, birthplace!—W. reeled off the information, a tape recorder now storing his voice for the police records department. Then the officer examined his plastic bag, pulled the folded bedclothes halfway out and slid his hand between them: What have you got here? — Washing. . picked it up from the laundry. — And why don’t you use the laundry in your neighbourhood? — Because I work in the laundry here. — OK. . move it along now.
Normally that sort of thing happened only when you came directly from the Permanent Mission; on this particular day it looked as though something unusual were going on in a swathe around the building; the mission’s gate opened, big dark limousines lurched out, drove towards Friedrichstrasse and disappeared.—W. told Frau Falbe about the incident; she said: Maybe they let out the people in the embassy who were waiting to leave the country. — So Frau Falbe knew about it too; Feuerbach was wrong in claiming that these things were hardly public knowledge yet.
Later on the first lieutenant had made his usual remarks, just to show how well informed he was, as he kept deeming necessary, with a suitable delay to heighten the effect: Had W. taken along any of the ripped-off bedclothes to the new flat? — It was autumn, and W. had already moved. And this didn’t surprise him; ever since moving to the flat he’d lived in the perpetual sense that all his things were swathed in an unbroken web of alien knowledge, and he himself was woven into a system of complementary bits of information, even if he formed but a tiny segment of it. . and on the surface, as far as he could survey it, there was no possibility of escape from this web.
He’d told Feuerbach more than once that he was thinking of taking a trip out to see his former landlady; maybe he could learn more about Harry Falbe after all if he made a more concerted effort. — In that moment Feuerbach seemed uninterested, his reply blasé: Why not trek out there, it can’t hurt to cultivate old acquaintances. Do whatever you like. — It was the first time W. had heard a phrase like that from the first lieutenant. . what was that tone behind the casually spoken words? — I imagine a lady of that calibre is more your line, Feuerbach had added later, more than all the other women running around in the Scene.—W. could swallow insults like that, but those nonchalant words — Do whatever you like! — had given him pause, and it was another ten days before he visited Frau Falbe. She hardly seemed pleased; in fact, he thought she acted strangely. They had afternoon coffee in her kitchen, but the conversation was so dry that he stayed no more than an hour.
The very next day Feuerbach came up to him and asked: Well, what’s the story. . was he there? — Was he there. . You mean Harry Falbe? — What are you doing trekking out there, then? So you still don’t have a clue what we’re racking our brains over. . or what we’re even supposed to be doing here? — What we’re racking our brains over, that’s exactly what I don’t know, said W., and I can’t even make it out. I’m just not as well informed as you are, Comrade Major.
And once again Feuerbach had asked about a photo of Harry: Mightn’t the ‘old girl’ have a photo of him after all?. . finally it dawned on him that Feuerbach had asked that before. — He’d forgotten the occasion — he’d forgotten so many things he’d been asked and what he’d replied to so many questions he’d forgotten. And between the questions and the answers lay periods of time about which he no longer knew a thing. All that was clear was that this web had spread over his life, woven of questions and answers, a web of information that often enough was concealed in questions alone. And many of these questions had already received their answers in the past. . but in that past no one had asked these questions. In the firm in which Feuerbach was employed (as W. put it), the chronology of events played only a subordinate role, serving merely to place a message — which might be contained in the question or in the answer — in a workable sequence.