You’re pale. . what’s wrong, aren’t you feeling well? — I started; it was the young woman at my side — very young, in fact, evidently a student — who had addressed me. I stared at her in bewilderment; I’d known her for some time, but she didn’t seem to know me. The Reader had finished and left, the listeners came to life and shed their almost transfigured expressions of worship. Did he say where he’s going to read next time? I asked the student, who gave me a worried look with what struck me as overlarge eyes. Her eyes were dark, and matching them her hair was dark as well, with a reddish shimmer at the ends, standing up straight in a short spiky cut. Her temples were bare and snow white above the cheekbones, where they formed shallow hollows which gave her face an exceedingly narrow shape. It’s all right, I mumbled, I just felt a bit queasy. I think I need to get some fresh air.
Down on the street it had grown slippery; the slush had turned to ice, and a frosty glitter flew at me out of the fog. I walked slowly and gingerly, eyes lowered, and suddenly I was standing in front of a familiar-seeming house. The outside door was open; I went in and a moment later found myself outside the same basement door I’d been unable to unlock. I took the next best hook out of my pocket, and after a single concerted effort, the lock gave way as though its spring were made of paper.
The basement passages beneath Berlin’s houses are generally clean, and most of them are well lit. And this winter they were warm; the frost barely penetrated to their foundations. There were places down there — I thought of one place in particular I often resorted to — where I’d sat for hours on a wooden crate, smoking cigarettes and listening to Berlin’s vast mass asleep above my head. Of course it was quiet down here, you couldn’t hear a thing; down here probably nothing but explosions could be heard. There was but a quiet hum in the stillness, perhaps only my imagination, or perhaps it was the air in the windings of my ear, compressed by the colossal weight above me. The city above my head was like an enormous generator, its ceaseless vibration barely perceptible in everything stone, echoing that faint faraway hum, inexplicably present in all the cement foundations surrounding me, and in the mind-boggling quantities of red and brown bricks assembled and reaching down and anchoring the city’s sea of houses to the earth. A thousand years long — how long, I didn’t know — the stones had been sunk into the bowels of the earth, and it was unclear how many more thousands of years the city could hold out, could endure, with the inconceivable weight of its foundations driven into Europe’s heart. And all we could learn and grasp, all we could clarify and reveal, above and below and in Berlin’s midst, was the realization that we must cease — but not the urban Moloch Berlin. . that we must vanish like street-sweepings and sooner or later the stones of Berlin, grown into the earth, would tell nothing of our era. — That was what I had discovered in my years of operation, and I had a great desire to submit my findings to First Lieutenant Feuerbach.
I already knew his reply. It would consist of his grin — in which I increasingly felt I detected uncertainty — and a dictum such as: Arrival isn’t the goal, the way is the goal! — The way! he stressed. You know that, and if you don’t, you can look it up, probably word for word, in the great Le Fou you think so highly of. Or in one of his colleagues they’re lapping up these days. . there’s much food for thought there about desire and its mysterious ways. .
By Le Fou, as I now knew, he meant the philosopher Foucault, who along with his following had indeed come increasingly into vogue. The Major was enthused by all that was allusive, fond of circumlocutions, grammatical riddles and abbreviations; that is, he loved the accoutrements of his duty. . besides, he seemed to have believed for a time that le fou was the French word for fire; it was a mistake I might have made myself. — I, on the other hand, knowing only the titles and a few of the first sentences of Foucault’s books, probably didn’t love him. It irked me that in certain enclaves of the so-called Scene, being an avid reader of Foucault provided your raison d’être, and that this then entailed the obligation to read Derrida or Paul de Man as well — I didn’t like books printed in Gothic type. Next thing you knew, I’d have to read Heidegger. . and then Mein Kampf to top it off. — Admittedly these were merely obsessive notions of mine, but my aversions were increasingly disqualifying me as a collaborator in such serpentine circles. Staying in context: my only chance would have been to see myself as the simulacrum of a collaborator. Thus attaining the ultimate goal of each one of us. — Reason enough for Feuerbach to repeat with a smile, by now slightly menacing: All you ever think of is the goal, Cambert, I do believe you’re aiming high. But as I keep telling you, you’d do better to think of the way. .
My way was still the sojourn in the substructure. And I hoped they’d need me there a while longer. No, I didn’t want to move up, by no means: certain linguistic developments running rampant up there seemed to present themselves in quite concrete form here below, and examples were more important to me than theses. It always astonished me, for instance, to see here below how cavern led to cavern, in this I seemed to see something both imperative and static: the extended network of underground cells virtually forced me to follow it, and yet the whole thing was but one closed circuit. — And it made me think of a sheet of paper I’d once stumbled on up there. It was covered with peculiarly interlinked sentences whose meaning revealed itself only when I made the effort to follow them step by step. — I had little time; never mind who, intentionally or not, left the piece of writing on the desk and me alone in the room. I’d smelt it immediately: it was classified material, the sort of thing our ilk usually never set eyes on. — Get your nose out of Kesselstein’s papers! came the permanently aggrieved bass from the adjoining office, a voice I knew, though I didn’t think I’d ever seen its owner. I knew I was in the eye of the camera. . and yet I had the audacity to jot down a few lines:. . stipulation of the implementation of the disruption and neutralization measures on the basis of the precise appraisal of the achieved results of the processing of the respective Intelligence Operation . .
One of these days, I thought, a document like this will get leaked. . and once again everyone will plead ignorance — the minister wrote his classified material for his own eyes only. And every secret service in the world works with these devices, they’ll say. — Quite right, all too true!
All that actually interested me was the monstrosity of the serial abstractions I had before me. I’ll recognize this usage to all eternity, I thought, within myself as well. . in future it will serve me as a signal. By their rampant genitives shall I know them. By their genitives sequenced until they obscure the starting point, by the excesses of the second case. . as though again and again disgorging itself as the first case, as the worst case. It was ultimately a usage that destroyed realism. . an unintentionally surrealistic method producing a psychotic automatism. Something the real surrealists might only have dreamt of. . they’d originated the famous image of the cube emerging from the cube, with another cube inside it, and another inside that and so on. — The machine of the genitives does this in earnest, I thought. It subverts reality with this phantasm. . thus it’s the simulation of an infinite logic.