And as another consequence of drinking inferior alcohol in an East Berlin dive, he had rung Frau Falbe’s doorbell again on his way back. Now he lay here in the bed of her long-vanished husband and had to extract his thoughts with an effort from amid the painful convolutions of his brain.
He hadn’t been able to get the date 27 April off his mind, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t necessarily connected with the fact that he had once set it down beneath a list of profiles despite it being the wrong date. . no, it was connected with Feuerbach’s disappearance and reappearance. At the time he had mulled fruitlessly over the first lieutenant’s absence. . and yesterday in the pub his mind kept wandering and he’d recalled the start of the summer season, which the cafe on Frankfurter Allee marked by setting tables and chairs out on the pavement on the eve of 1 May. . for some reason he knew that in the year he was thinking of, this had happened for the last time: since then the cafe no longer had outdoor service.
And then he’d gone to the flat and got back to work on his dossiers (Criminal profiles! he vividly recalled the thought). Feuerbach hadn’t showed the next day either. . perhaps he could easily have found him. . on the holiday, with Frankfurter Allee bustling. . Had so-called counterdemonstrations on the national holiday been anticipated even that year?
Yesterday in the pub he’d glanced at the calendar behind the bar and happened to notice that it was 27 April. . he could count on Feuerbach being back again on 1 May, or even the evening before, or even now, sitting in the cafe as though nothing had happened. . except that the tables and chairs were no longer outside, one less bit of metropolitan flair in the city. . Feuerbach had said: Just like in Amsterdam! Twelve at night, and everything’s still full. — Now he’d be forced to agree, like it or not, if W. remarked again that in the past year bad vibes had moved into the city. . Indeed, he’d replied back then, quite reliable, your seventh sense! And hopefully you’ve also guessed that it’s because of our presence. .
The problem for W. was that he couldn’t remember exactly — that possibly he’d been lagging behind the times a year longer than he’d thought. . how else could he know there was no more outdoor service on Frankfurter Allee? — Ultimately it didn’t matter, the bad vibes hadn’t let up, over the past year or the past two years. . and now, this spring, in Feuerbach’s absence, they were even worse. You couldn’t put your finger on it (and the Western journalists, who came more and more often to check that all was well in the Scene, didn’t notice it at all, on the contrary, they seemed electrified by an ongoing exhilaration, tossing Russian words about and beaming like Indian wise men on the threshold of nirvana). . the bad vibes were really only something you could feel, assuming that you wanted to. They were like an additive to the air people breathed, making them gloomy and depressive; W. had thought he sensed them even in the still-grey early spring, late February, early March, though the window of the cafe. But perhaps they — Feuerbach and he — were still feeling the shock of 17 January, when the grassroots groups had disrupted the Liebknecht-Luxemburg Demonstration and caused ‘riots and provocations’ (the official statement!) on Frankfurter Allee. . At the time between one and two hundred people had been nabbed; by now they were all at large again. . and since early April everyone had been claiming that a new production of the drama was planned for 1 May. . and so it was a safe bet that Feuerbach would be back in the city on 30 April at the latest.
No, the bad vibes weren’t visible: it was business as usual, the crowds emerging from the U-Bahn tunnels or vanishing into them had lost none of their haste and bustle, everyone wore their usual faces and greeted one another as emphatically as ever. . on Frankfurter Allee the distances were large, and this was inimical to the typical Berlin understatement. . and people talked just as much or as little, and, on Frankfurter Allee, in all sorts of dialects.
Frankfurter Allee was not the Scene, and it was not Alexander-platz, dominated by the average folks and the tourists; by the time you found out anything on Frankfurter’s eastern end, things were probably already going up in flames all over the place. And yet it seemed to him that the floods of humanity coming from the underpasses had suddenly thinned out. . it wasn’t noticeable yet, but their squadrons were less compact, fewer of them were spat out from the U-Bahns in the Magdalenenstrasse Station; even during the afternoon rush hour, when the trains came more frequently, there were fewer pedestrians walking down the boulevard and past the gigantic complex of the Ministry. — Even then W. had started taking long trips with public transportation in an effort to fathom this feeling for which feeling might not even be the word. . and which possibly was nothing but a mood of his own. He almost always came late when there was a reading somewhere in the Scene, a stand-around party (five hours long, not good for legs you had to earn a living with), a costume affair (theatre with gender-swapped roles — very interesting!) or a scattering of shredded paper (described as a performance — with literary pretensions). . he arrived too late — missing the male protagonist’s bare breasts once again! — because he’d ridden a few stations too far so as to wander along several streets which were still unfamiliar to him (often, later, through the sombre neighbourhoods near the Storkower Strasse Station). . and as lifeless as always; it was hard to believe how lifeless some parts of Berlin were on inclement evenings. And when he did he sensed, again and again, that a vague odour of futility had crept over the city. . And the only interesting things in this city, he thought, are playing out behind the doors of the flats: the Western TV and radio channels were playing. And they were playing because people were looking for the country they lived in. . but this country was hardly mentioned in the news and the commentaries. . As if we’d already been gobbled up! said Feuerbach. — Things in Poland and Hungary, and especially the Soviet Union, played a far greater role. . Finally our people are taking an interest in the Russians! said Feuerbach. — Even China had suddenly gained importance. . W. had the impression that the country he lived in had been forgotten, and quite probably this impression was rampant among the citizens of the Republic in general. The Republic had sunk into an animated sort of deathly silence, against which any Eurasian earthquake was more stirring; there was no earthquake here. Suddenly the whole country’s state was best described by a strange word: absence. . it was as though no one had had to invent the term; all at once what it described was omnipresent. — Meanwhile the buzzwords of the day were of foreign origin, hailing from Moscow: glasnost or perestroika. For the first time the little German republic seemed to turn a deaf ear to Moscow; here it was the same old, same old, or no, it got older by the day — and the old men in the government seemed never to have heard those words before.