Simply stop. . sometimes I stared at the whole story as though at an audio tape, unwinding faster and faster towards the end. . but it refused to stop, it was a nightmare. And finally I hit on the idea of resorting to a minor disruptive measure. I typed. . on the new electric typewriter I now had in my room, a Western model, which did a fine job of printing respectable, non-identifiable characters. . a note which I smuggled into the editor’s purse. It said that she shouldn’t let herself be taken in, I could tell her many interesting things about the writer S. R. Just as a hint: I knew definitively that he had homosexual tendencies, which she might find significant regarding the ambiguities that surrounded him. But I could divulge even more. I suggested a date and time, and, as the meeting place, a pub on Hannoversche Strasse across from the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany. — I dispensed with a signature, closing with: A very good friend.
Why I’d chosen the pub on Hannoversche Strasse of all places, I didn’t know. It was evidently due to a sentimental recollection of the time in which, as far as my sexuality went, I was still living in satisfactory circumstances. . in this pub I had sat and thought of Frau Falbe. Sometimes I was seized by the impression that it had been just yesterday; and I gasped for breath as though the city were buried by heat waves.
I had no idea how the student—I still called her that, in memory of my private IntelOp — might have received the message. Had she even read the note? — All I counted on was her curiosity. — In mid-December as I set out for this meet-up, Frau Falbe seemed to suspect that I was going to rendezvous with ‘another woman’. I ran into her in the stairwell; a harmless question — she sensed my guilty conscience — immediately sparked an argument with her. I quickly escaped and had to forget the scene just as quickly, since I was in a hurry. . on the way to Hannoversche Strasse I was arrested.
.
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***
I spent just a few weeks in the cell, in solitary confinement — there is little to say about that time, if I discount a few moments of fright. Towards the end I provided a second signature, once again without really reading what I signed. It was a commitment to observe secrecy on all I had seen or heard in the institution; the declaration was buttressed by the usual threats of punishment for any failure to comply with the commitment. The document was ultimately unnecessary, as I had seen and heard virtually nothing in that time; everything that had happened could have been engendered just as vividly by my imagination. After twice twenty-four hours had passed and the perfectly ordinary frenzy of panic was over — fear of beatings, fear of never getting out again, fear of madness — I led a tranquil, almost relaxing daily existence, at any rate a fairly regular one, and my face took on the pugnacious smile of a heavy who’d paid the hard way for the silence that surrounded him. All I saw was the man who brought me my grub twice a day and reacted to my questions like a deaf-mute, that is to say not at all. He struck the bunch of keys against the door, I stepped back to the far wall, as per regulations, then the hatch on which the dishes and coffee pot were placed rattled inward to a horizontal position; the hatch was left open until I replaced the empty dishes. I also saw him during the recreation period which I was allowed a week after my arrival; along with three other men who moved to cover all the entrances and exits with their hands on their shooting irons, he took me to a concrete quad in which I had to pace back and forth for twenty minutes; above me wire mesh spanned the walls, breaking the blue-grey ceiling of sky into tiny hexagonal segments. On the first Sunday — for a week I kept track of the days — the deaf-mute slapped a thick, greasy book down on the concrete floor of the celclass="underline" The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. It was undoubtedly a friendly greeting from Kesselstein, who was a big fan of this writer. — He’s the greatest, he used to exclaim, he’s the only one who understands people like us. Unfortunately you have to get his books about the secret service smuggled in from the West, which is just typical of the idiots at the Ministry of Culture. Now that I know Mailer, I love the CIA. . and not the KGB, that bunch of slobs. A secret service and glasnost, just picture it. .
Feuerbach-Kesselstein visited my twice in my cell (and brought smokes, which was the main thing) — the second visit probably doesn’t fall under the verbal secrecy agreement I signed right afterwards. He came in and immediately tossed a pack of cigarettes onto the table. — Man, he said, I could hear you coughing up there in the yard already, it’s time you started smoking again! Oh, you’ve got something to read. . I guess there’s not much else you can do. . what are you reading there? Ah, Mailer (he said the name with an exaggerated British accent, it sounded like the word Mylar). . as a matter of fact that’s not allowed here, it looks to me like you’ve got privileges again. — I’m reading it for the second time already! I said. I demand a lawyer immediately! — You arsehole, he retorted, don’t give me that icy glare, nothing’s happened to you, anyway. If I get you that lawyer, then things’ll get serious. I won’t get you one until it’s a question of putting you in a long intensive training course, but that’ll be worked out at court, just like it should be. Yeah, I’ve been there too, it’s no vacation, I’m telling you. If I were you, I’d rather go home instead. Do you want to? Tomorrow the cop will bring you some crap to sign, if you do, you’ll be out directly. And then you’ll proceed straight to A. and report to the boss there. . no, don’t worry, you’re not getting dumped! Down there they’ve set up little shock troops now, public order groups, they call them. . the Workers’ Fist, you understand, you can join in with that. So you’re going. . OK? I’ll come and get you soon enough when I get nostalgic for you, you were my buddy, after all! You’ve got to go, because we’re banning you from Berlin for the time being anyway, you know the deal. How was your New Year’s, by the way? Mine was quite pleasant, in the dive on Frankfurter. . all I can say is: champagne shandy.
I hadn’t realized that the year’s last midnight was approaching until the muffled bursts of exploding New Year’s firecrackers began to filter through. When the light in the cell went on late in the afternoon, I heard the first impacts. . or so this warlike din sounded. My count had been off by a day, and at first I was alarmed, then relieved, without knowing why, not guessing at my departure from here. — Oddly, at first I associated the explosions with the Major’s rage I’d experienced a few days before.
It must have been around ten when the dogsbody came by, the deaf-mute, on duty again; he yelled through the spyhole the only words I would ever hear from him: Hello. . I wish you life and three days, you crook! If you’re not asleep in half an hour, there’ll be hell to pay! — Hearing him yell these words only once, I gathered that I was the only inmate on the basement level. I lay on the cot with my eyes closed, only now and then squinting at the red light above the door, and hearing the distant in-rushing flicker of fireworks set off over Berlin, over all of Berlin. And down here my ears probably picked up only the very loudest reports, the rest swallowed by the walls; it must have been an infernal din out there. Sometimes there was a red or green flare in the square of glass bricks that formed my window up in the corner. . one of these bricks could be tipped to open up a little crack for air. . and when I closed my eyes again I saw people firing flares at one another from both sides of the Antifascist Protective Barrier, I saw the rockets’ burnt ochre trails cross in the smoke-heavy air above the Wall and the coloured canopies of their light cascades unite. . and coughing fits choked my laughter, as though the sulphurous fumes of the New Year’s night had filtered into the cell to me.