Since one does not recognize people, in a visible manner, except by the invisible and imperceptible things they themselves recognize in their own way.16
I thought: maybe the translation is just off? — I followed the quote with the word: Ghastly! — Then the cigar made me queasy and I left the room.
The second event, on the sixth floor of a different house, had about half the audience; only his most faithful followers, among whom I could now count myself, came to the third. . and the student stayed away the third time as well. In my report I noted in passing that the whole thing lacked fire, insipid and watered down, a sort of dishwater which had lost its cleansing effect.
And evidently he’d realized this himself — or the little West Berlin editor had told him — he’d announced a fourth reading, but it was cancelled. — In other words, the success of the venture (the success of Kesselstein’s idea?) definitely had its limits.
Its limits! That meant that the writer S. R. had to go further now. He had to go further now! Further down the path. . but what did going further look like? He had to cross the boundary, of course, the Western boundary, now he was ripe for the West. But how could someone — a type like him who used to turn down Western invitations by the dozen — suddenly get to appear in the West? That was where the student came in, but she had to see a convincing reason too. She had to see that Reader (the author S. R.) was making no progress on his path in the East. He had to find himself in a position that could be described as no longer or just barely tolerable — for a type of Reader’s constitution, that was the only convincing reason to go West. And how did you end up in this position: first you needed an informer! In the West they were allergic to informers, anyone who’d had an informer came to the West with a guarantee of a good reception. The trajectory of Western success had undergone this shift: if you wanted to be something there, you had to have had — provably, if possible — an informer. .
I had assumed this function, I was the proof that he’d had an informer. . and I was there in reserve, there was proof I’d been after him, and after her, the editor, I’d created the proofs myself, I’d virtually constructed them, you could refer to me by name and address, and by proof of seventeen poems that established my actual existence. — And I didn’t know, in fact, how long I’d already been performing this function. .
In this function everything repeated for me, time and again I’d walked the compass of my paths, so many times now that I often felt subjected to the infinite series of a déjà vu. . subjected on and on to this path, up the streets, down the streets, above them, below them, time and again. . I’d seen every stone, I’d registered every name, heard every word that fell from these faces. . it was desensitization work. Informing was ideological work, its essence was to investigate the same thing over and over until the appearance of deviation had receded into unreality. The work of the informer was a sort of promotion: it lavished its target objects over and over with the same attributes until the contrary attributes had receded into shadow. . then the object was severed from its shadow — and the eternal life of this object was assured.
I now found it utterly impossible to sort in terms of temporal affiliations the constant repetitions of what I blundered upon. . and it was no longer necessary, either, as we invented a retroactive time span for each episode we registered.
Here I increasingly had the sense of lagging years behind (sometimes just one year!) in everything I thought. Often I lived under the impression that the entire society over me, over me in the city’s hum and drone, was lagging just as far behind. Behind whom or what. . I didn’t know. And this lagging behind (this coming too late in life17. . I believed the expression came from Cervantes, referring to the great Don Quixote), this fear of being punished like a backward pupil for coming too late in life was the reason for the depression I kept sensing in the city.
More and more often I had the feeling that everything that passed our lips was being said for the third, for the fifth time. — For instance, when I presented First Lieutenant Kesselstein with my plan to flood the non-official literary magazines with poems, with a whole raging torrent of poems (by this time the collection of my available texts had doubled, there were fourteen of them, and three were near completion). . And, I said, this time under the name Cambert. . since that other name will soon be contaminated by the rumour. . or the proof. . of being a Stasi informer! — And besides, it’ll heighten the charm of the fresh start. . so I’ll have to adopt a new code name immediately. . Do you have any suggestions? — At that the Major swayed his head thoughtfully. . A fresh start? he said. All you ever think of is the goal, my dear fellow, I believe you’re aiming too high. When you’d do better to think of the way!
(And C. believed he’d been told the same thing yesterday, and he thought it possible that this yesterday had been a year ago: they were sitting by the window in the cafe on Frankfurter and gazing melancholically out onto the street, where torrents of vehicles raced burst by burst towards the centre of town, towards the West, washing a gas-logged mixture of fog and early dusk against the big pane; it was like explosions feebly ebbing. They sat in the ‘dive’ quite a lot again, peaceable at their observation post by the window. . We must look inseparable, thought C. — The Major tried to convince him finally to order a champagne shandy—coffee and schnapps, somehow that’s just not our style!
You only ever think of the goal, C. said to him.)
And so it went, until one day I discovered by chance that the writer S. R. had homoerotic proclivities. . or even a homosexual orientation. — Reader is queer! In any other context this would have been an especially valuable finding because it opened up points of attack. — I recalled the story with Harry Falbe: they’d virtually tried to prove it on him or persuade him of it, perhaps because they thought they could use it to blackmail him. What I’d heard about the matter had barely seemed plausible. . now I asked myself how I could use my findings in the present case; for the time being, at any rate, I kept it from my superior. — Probably the fact wouldn’t interest him, it might not even have found its way into the pink file that had been set up for the IntelOp. . evidently it could only mean something to me. Lately the West Berlin editor’s relationship with Reader seemed to have improved, she came over more often now. . I had no idea how to evaluate that in this new light. — Did she even know about his homosexual proclivities? I asked myself. . she didn’t speak to me, her dark eyes studied me from a distance, I seemed to detect a scornful interest in her gaze. . As if I were the queer! I thought.
(And what does she know of me, what does she think about me? C. asked himself. I’ve been asking myself more or less the same thing for a year at least, it seems to me. And some day it’ll devour me, this operation, it’s probably devoured me already. I’ve been thinking since yesterday now about bailing out of this whole Reader affair. . but haven’t I been thinking that for the past year? Since a yesterday a year ago? Since then maybe all I’ve been after is what ‘I’ am in this story!—C. thought: ‘I’ am the one who believes nothing, except that all the characters in this story were made up at a writing desk. . made up as characters who deify the State. But now we’re forced to see that these characters won’t play the game. — They’re condemned to founder because they deify the State. . and they founder, and the deified state along with them. And in the end they want to get across the border to escape the deity. . And ‘I’ too want to break things off, he thought.)