Sometimes I hoped to gain a sense of stability from those I’d once sought out, as a rule, ‘on official business’; I was forced to realize that I was barely known as a writer any more. Again and again I’d had to reply in the negative when asked if I had new poems. . I claimed to be collecting my thoughts, which evidently was too classic a phrase for them. I hardly ever got invitations any more; those hectographed sheets with the purple, barely legible, hand- or typewritten avant-garde monstrosities of syntax no longer turned up in my postbox. . though I also thought it possible that someone was removing them. My visits to the Scene were hit or miss, often inopportune; once again I was the tiresome literary hanger-on I’d been before my seventeen poems were published. . only that then living in the small town had prevented me from making unannounced visits, usually lasting half an hour, but sometimes one or two, during which I was silent or asked stupid questions: What’s happening? What’s going to happen? How’s it going, who are you, who else have we got here?
The writer S. R. had altered the form of his readings (though not his external appearance); suddenly he sat in the centre of the conversation circle, making it possible to strike up a dialogue with him. . not for me, though; I lacked the discursive capabilities for talking back and forth (I was utterly unarmed); and I had no desire to do so; and I almost feared I’d see the student sitting in that circle and then be forced to start a conversation, I feared drawing the consequences from my wishes. . fortunately she rarely showed up. — And when Reader held one of his now-rare readings, I wrote a report, unable to suppress my caustic comments: You could barely tell his texts apart any more; what he read today had the smack of reused dishwater. .
And I left early, having lingered near the door for that purpose, murmuring that I felt a bit ill — not because of the reading, though! — and vanishing onto the street. There I jammed myself into a corner and waited for the student; I wanted to see whether she would go off with him or head by herself towards the train station. Usually it was the latter, and I followed her doggedly at a constant distance (the role of the desperate lover was a stellar one which every self-respecting employee mastered perfectly!). . I had already adopted her stride, which was firm and sure, and the same degree of firmness and surety seemed to coalesce in me as well. . and so we proceeded in lockstep until she ducked into a train station and abandoned me. — Target person released from observation at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Station, I noted; I carried around a tiny pocket calendar already containing about twenty similar notes. . usually mentioning the Friedrichstrasse Station checkpoint.
And then I’d prowl about the station square, fully aware that what I was doing was madness: unauthorized, I was chasing a young woman from West Berlin. . I had utterly transformed myself into her shadow, and I’d lost my own shadow in the process. . all in the flimsy hope that one day I’d receive permission to keep shadowing her over in the West. I understood that it was madness. . it was foreplay without consequences, a pursuit without consequences, and the fact that I could tell myself this had no consequences either. And in my armchair in the basement I finished off the foreplay with my hand, thinking partly of her and partly of Frau Falbe. . yet knowing I could remain nothing but a shadow, the student’s shadow-man, even if Frau Falbe had given me the chance to change this.
And I stared into the dark city’s workings and heard it hum and murmur. . a sound I couldn’t forget, and perhaps no longer the hum of depression. — In my imagination I saw the student waiting on the platform where the train to Wannsee departed, in the midst of the crowd beneath the grimy, grim station roof whose gable ends were covered in scaffolding — yet nothing was under construction; the scaffolding served as an observation post for the border guards. . they’d stood there for a span of time I could no longer calculate, sleeping as they stood or as they paced up and down, and yet gazing down unwavering, unceasing, gazing on for all time to come. — Over and over I’d listened to the stories that began here in this station building: beneath the vault at the end where the trains pulled in and out hung a huge master clock, either stopped or utterly off. This clock had stopped counting long ago, perhaps ever since that 13 August 1961. . since the night following that Sunday it had run as it pleased, broken loose from CET, too fast, too slow, not at all, no use at all for human reckonings. The pigeons that lived in the station had taken possession of the clock, using it as a repository for their droppings, whose slowly growing encrustations began to encase the clock entirely; the corrosively seeping grey-white mass had paralysed the works and transformed time into a capricious, menacing authority. Below it this station resembled a theatre of war. . it was the expiring Cold War’s last theatre, overflowing with refugees and expellees, and the backward stronghold of a time turned impossible.
(And he himself had lived according to the time shown by this mad clock over this outpost of the Cold War. He had been at home in this ruined time. Since signing a paper covered with a tangled web of formulae, since setting his signature, spurred by exhaustion, renouncing the name his forbears had given him, to a contract of sale, he had become a traitor of human nature, whose essence it is to have bounds. — Think it over at your leisure before you sign, we’ve got time, we’ve got plenty of time! With these words the stranger had slid the paper over towards him, where declarations stood, declarations of assistance, declarations of support, declarations of paternity for the future generations of this state, he’d read all these words as veiled threats. . driven by a sudden awful haste he signed, darkness descended on him, he began to live like a sleepwalker, in reporting periods, an existence that consisted in committing strangers’ lifetimes to paper — for this his ‘I’ was uncalled for. It appeared only in the form of a figure by the name of M. W., fleetingly familiar, turning up by chance among others who fleetingly appeared and were later inserted into a reporting period that was often vague, and sometimes made up out of whole cloth when the game of intelligence demanded it. And at times he’d been forced to make up what this M. W. had said: trivial, vapid stuff which either riled up the others or placated them. . whatever the game required.)
At the end of September — the summer had expired in downpours, and then turned sunny and warm again — a little note in my postbox summoned me to Feuerbach’s office. The past several days I hadn’t returned to the flat until late in the evening; it was such a tiny little note, newspaper-margin-sized! — they were already skimping on paper now when they sent me messages — that I hadn’t seen it in the postbox: the meet-up was scheduled for 25 September, I’d discovered the snippet of paper on the afternoon of 29 September. . in Feuerbach’s office, not in the cafe; for the past half a year not much surprised me any more. — When I entered the room, for a moment I thought I’d blundered into the wrong place, another of the identical offices camouflaged as flats: at the desk sat a man I didn’t know, an older vintage. . only then did I see the Major, leaning against the wall by the door, looking pale and saying not a word in greeting. The man at the desk was broad-shouldered and evidently tall; though surely over sixty and slightly corpulent, he seemed athletic; beneath the short, curly grey hair a stolid face gazed out at me, now with a slightly strained and enervated look. . I sensed immediately that one answered back to this skull at one’s peril. Only his deep bass voice seemed familiar: Is this the young friend of ours we’ve been waiting a small eternity for? — The question was directed at Feuerbach, who merely nodded. — Good, said the bass, then I don’t need you any more, Kesselstein. You can go now, explain the necessary modalities to him later. — The door clicked softly shut, Feuerbach was outside.