So now we’ve got to keep an eye on Reader. . put it however you like, you’ve got to spy on the spy now. There’s no big difference there, instead of IntelOp: Reader, you have IntelOp: UnCol ‘Reader’. . I’m telling you, he’s doing everything he can to get the kid back, writing letters, writing reports, even talking to her on the phone. . but he’s doing it without us! Yes indeed, he’s a lot like you, my dear Cambert. . He laughed (and when he laughed he was the same old Feuerbach).
Not outwardly, of course, you’ve got more meat on your bones, though you have lost weight. So, what’s the story, will you take the job? We’ll get you a proper flat in the meantime. . come on. I’ll give you the money once we get out of here.
You were right, by the way, the stuff he writes is nothing special, he said to me when we were outside. He handed me the envelope full of money: Count it. . we’ll deposit the next payment in your account, do you still have the same account number. .?
(With you it probably would have worked out much better, said Kesselstein. But you’re too hypersensitive when it comes to female contacts, unfortunately, that’s just the way you are, it has its advantages too, we have to take people as they come. That’s another thing the bosses don’t always get. But the writing part, you pull that off better than he does! He doesn’t care about literature at all, that weird Reader guy, I think all he reads are comics. . he always mixes up the temporal planes, and in the end he leaves time out entirely! He ought to read Thomas Pynchon some time, Gravity’s Rainbow. . You probably know it by heart, I only made it up to page seventy or eighty, unfortunately. .
I’ve never even seen it, Cambert retorted.)
That put me back in the middle of my story. I sat in the cafe on Frankfurter Allee again as if nothing had happened, the waiter must have mistaken me for someone else, or Kesselstein had finally paid the overdue bill; I stuck with coffee and brandy, which imparted more inner warmth than champagne shandies — it was business as usual, I was on my way again. Only this way had grown somewhat longer, since I went on living at Frau Falbe’s. I wasn’t sure how it had ended up that way. . I just didn’t want to remind the first lieutenant about the flat. The fuse box in Frau Falbe’s stairwell was suddenly replaced, I could leave the radiator on day and night. . my landlady had her electricity bills paid punctually, almost too punctually, from some Berlin office, the same with my rent — the system worked, but she, Frau Falbe, had stopped speaking to me.
I could judge better than the first lieutenant what the texts of the writer S. R. (IntelOp and UnCoclass="underline" Reader) were supposed to recall or what they drew upon. The title of the work of which I’d heard about twenty instalments derived from a Beckett noveclass="underline" Brief Movements of the Lower Face. . although the author citing him had long since proceeded to give the lie to the claim of brevity in his title. — If I wasn’t mistaken, the phrase appeared on the very first page of a book by Beckett15. . incidentally, what interested me about it was the sense that Beckett’s characters had always reached their destination by the time the text began. They were already at the end, though they were constantly moving, or purporting to move, or waiting for movement or the end of movement: the end lay before the beginning of the text. A state, I thought, which Reader has learnt and grasped well. In Beckett he’s found a far-fetched but apt analogy for the state of the agency that employs him. — It, too, was constantly in motion (was always on the way, which was the goal, as the first lieutenant was in the habit of putting it). . only here it was no literary phrase but the practical truth: when the agency began to move, it was already at the end. The agency was the end (the end in itself, the end and the goal), for the simple reason that it saw no way to leave an escape route for a figure turning circles inside it. The Firm was the end which must never be finished. .
I thought these sorts of things as I wandered through the basements, almost warmer this winter than Frau Falbe’s room had been back then. And sometimes in the basement I stopped at the wall which was the wall of Reader’s study, if I thought of it as a perpendicular extension on up to the fifth or sixth floor. And when I gave free rein to my imagination, I could hear him typing. . through the hum of the city which was indelible in all that was stone, which down here had turned into a silence, through the impenetrable silence which down here had turned into a hum. . I could hear it, the keys of my typewriter (that Firm-owned machine I’d operated for a year or longer), I could hear them tick. Sometimes like an old-fashioned clock. And I could hear when he stopped again: he rarely kept the machine ticking for longer than an hour. I laid my ear to the damp bricks: there was the hum of the city, the hum of the city continued, and when in my ears stillness had settled over the hum, the typing and ticking filtered faint and clipped through the stone. . he was typing! He was starting a new work! Still typing. . now he’d stopped! And now I knew he had the beginning (and in it the end) on paper, I knew that in a few days his new reading would be held, I still had to find out the place, I knew the first lieutenant had persuaded him to start all over again. — Would it be a wildfire again, eating its way through all the caverns of a Scene gone inert? Or something flowing, a flood! I thought. Once before, a venture of this sort had succeeded for nearly a year, but then the Scene had breathed easy again.
He’d been unwilling, in fact, the first lieutenant had told me, and they’d really had to put the screws on him. But in the end he’d been inspired by a phrase from one of the Western literary magazines they’d borrowed from me. Couldn’t I remember the phrase. .? You underlined it in the magazine and wrote next to it: Ghastly! It’s a phrase from the Frenchman Gilles Deleuze. .
I couldn’t remember the phrase, only that I’d underlined something — something I couldn’t make heads or tails of — in one of the magazines that had been removed from my former flat (now the flat of the author S. R.). . I’d only borrowed the magazines myself, I was sure to be asked for them the next time I showed my face in the Scene.
Does anyone know the title of the new reading series? I asked Kesselstein. — No idea, he said.
I titled the work ‘Brief Movements of the Lower Face: Section II’. . I never found out if that was correct, since I arrived late at the first reading. It was held in a flat on the sixth floor of a building in central Berlin, overheated and packed with people; on my way up I’d spent too long catching my breath at a window in the stairwell; I was admitted as he was just beginning, I’d missed the title and a brief introduction. As always, he was dressed all in black, the round lenses of his glasses aimed at me for a fraction of a second as I started to smoke. . the first lieutenant had given me one of the cigars he puffed at sometimes so he could blow the stench of sulphur into the faces of people he didn’t like. . the lenses flashed at me like malevolent shards, Reader continued with a quote from Deleuze, which I noted down.