I told myself that the appeal for Cambert, the old pro, lay somewhere else entirely. With respect to the Major — if he came to me again with a job or proposal along these lines — I was inclined to continue acting as though I felt completely unqualified for such cases. . as though I were simply too hypersensitive for them. Observing men, perfectly OK, sniffing out the Scene’s better halves, the Eastern ones, even more OK, there were even some women whose trust I enjoyed — but some hoity-toity little thing from Grunewald: impossible, I was bound to be shut down. . or rather blown wide open, which wasn’t necessarily the opposite. I decided to explain it to Feuerbach that way.
Without instructions, without the weight of expectation, it all worked out much better for me! And one day when I had enough material, I could plunk it down on his desk. . not because I wanted a watch for a present; I was counting on the suggestion to keep pursuing the IntelOp in the West. — Besides, when I performed my work in peace and on my own initiative (judiciously, as they put it), I got a much better handle on the specific quality of such an activity.
The idea came to me that I must love the student in some very singular way and that was why I was running after her. . so far I hadn’t written any reports about this — first I wanted some clarity in my mind regarding the theoretical situation. Otherwise there was a danger that my notes would spiral into psychological tracts. I could begin with the reports (perhaps this autumn?) when I was focusing on nothing but the woman. . I had to fabricate a female character who fit the Firm’s conception! The appeal for me was that it appeared I would literally have to invent or design her at my desk. — To make the Firm a person. . and not one of our people, of whom there were millions we couldn’t quite come to grips with. . to produce a person for the Firm, that was the greatest service a collaborator could perform (and ultimately it was proof that we were unerringly right in all our exaggerated-sounding claims), to deliver into the hands of the Firm an exemplary person. . I knew how the individual, especially when young, always seeks to conform to the image made of him or her. .
The woman: that meant completely different thighs than the man’s. . they might appear weaker, but they were much harder to open than the man’s, probably due to their more stable anchorage in the pelvis. . completely different gluteal curves than mine, the scents arising from the hidden entries between these curves were completely different. Her difference was different by a further dimension, for it originated in the free West and had thrived in West Berlin, in an upscale area of Grunewald. And even her hands were completely different hands, her arms were different, her musculature made from a different, much finer stuff than anything I knew. . her DNA was an absolutely Western DNA. — She didn’t bear two breasts with palm-sized nipples flat against her torso, she had tiny pointed glands of some unknown material; she seemed somewhat plagued (in a very self-assured way) by these forms’ lack of fullness, but this had been the intention of the nature god who had shaped her according to the somewhat eccentric idea that less fullness sinks the force of desire more durably in the body’s depths. And below that came a belly which at its narrowest point tapered off beneath a patch of hair and vanished (the colour remained a riddle, the dyed hair of the head permitting no conclusions), and there beneath the hair (as beneath the hair of the head) everything dissolved into pure Spirit, timeless and thus untimely. And the intellect that perched upon this body was fluid and thus perhaps not describable as intellect; it had been endowed with freedom from the beginning (if all had gone with her as it should), for which reason it was able to soften the hardest logic.
When I followed her through the dark streets, a shadow in the night city’s shadow-vaults, she seemed so carefree that all I wanted was to turn and leave her in peace, and had to summon up all I had learnt: when it came to fulfilling our duties, we took no prisoners.
As I saw her, this woman, she was a being as unapproachable as could be — and yet in the guilelessness laid bare at her temples she was much stronger than I. I couldn’t help it, I had to surround the woman with an obscene thought if I was to gain hold of her.
With the thought of overtaking her one evening and laying her down on the cold stone in the murky half-light of the pedestrian bridge over the Storkower Strasse Station (when the station below was empty, giving me free rein), throwing her down into the Eastern dust of this concrete channel so that she lay at last in reality, and spreading her legs. .
You can think everything, said the bosses in Security, you have to, in fact. . Maybe they even said it was the writer’s duty to think everything. .
You see best when you look from the dark into the light, they said in Security. — That was true, and now it was time that I began: thinking about how my life would look over there in the Western world. . as a literary man! Making contacts and thinking. . it was here, from the haze, that you had to look upon that life. . make provisions, take precautions. — The boss in A., I recalled, had weighed in on the subject, two years ago, if not three, and today it sounded as though he had long suspected that it was time for us to think about a life after we were gone. Even though no embassies had yet been occupied — at least nothing of that sort had filtered through, even in the purlieus of Security nothing was known of it, it was the sole remit of a small team of Special Forces — there were as yet no grassroots groups of hostile-negative forces, no coalition movements, hardly any perceptible upheaval yet in the Warsaw Pact. — I felt that he’d said you had to think about how to live in a changed world — and that he’d added just in case: You’ve got to be allowed to think everything.
What, for instance, is a writer on the other side? he’d asked. Let’s take the writers in the West, what’s an author there? A market-driven subcontractor of the media society! He’s something like a hairdresser there, nothing more. . a hairdresser who attends to his clients’ mental exercises and if necessary validates them. Of course you give the customers a proper dressing-down, but you don’t harm a hair on their heads, the customers with their mental and verbal exercises. Well, here we can justifiably claim to wash a little deeper, a little deeper below the scalp! Yes, a hair salon, that’s what the West is with its free literature, and especially the Federal Republic and the Independent Entity of West Berlin.12 It never fails to astonish me, said the boss, that no one there has yet got a Nobel Prize for hairdressers! Am I exaggerating. . maybe a bit. Whether or not you believe me, if I were you I’d be cautious about pinning my hopes on the free literature of the West.
I know people curse about censorship here. . not just the non-official literature, everyone does. They all feel trapped by this cultural policy, by this censorship, by those idiots up there in the Ministry of Culture. . that last bit’s just a quote, by the way! And we especially, we’re supposed to be to blame, when in fact we’ve got very definite thoughts of our own. . and not just in the literary sphere. If you know someone who needs material for his new rain gutter. . send him to us! We’ve got thoughts of our own. . deviant thoughts, I tell you, we’d all have been deviationists for our Good Lord Beria,13 who’s long since burning in hell. . and we’d have been deviationists still for Andropov.14 And everything that looks oh-so stable right now, I wouldn’t like to see it in ten years. What difference would it make for you to wait another ten years, or let’s say three or four years? That’s no time at all for literature! How can a writer think in such narrow temporal terms. . for us, I tell you, such time scales don’t even exist.