Of course, I thought, there’s a peculiar paradox inherent in my account. For, though it’s a fact that I chased the women all over this country, and from all the bars where I’ve lurked I’ve been incapable of staring in any direction but theirs, in some way I’ve always avoided them, too. Yes, I knew they enjoyed the love of a state that ordered me to look them cleanly in the face. The state that ordered me to do this must have seen me as essentially filthy. Filth… from the very beginning I must have been filth to them, just a filthy, greasy worker’s uniform. But I have to say, I avoided the women out of cleanliness, out of cleanliness I avoided them like a leper… like a leper. Now I understand that the cleanliness commended to me was leprosy, evil-smelling, snot-green–oozing leprosy. — Again I looked at my hands, where some indefinable foamy substance seemed to have dried into a dark scab reaching up my lower arms… is this some sickness I’ve caught from the trash can? I asked myself. — What cleanliness underneath, I thought, what cleanliness under this peeling, where my skin is in continual rosy renewal. It’s just the kind of sight that would drive away the women, in the face of this cleanliness they’ve made themselves invisible, and the source of the cleanliness is my brow, the castration scabs on my brow that constantly spread like wildfire over my skin.
I was coming from the trash heaps, heading down into town; the bus from A. drove past me, and I saw the men sitting in its brightly lit interior on the way to their night shift in the factories of M…. for a moment I thought I saw women sitting in the bus, even my mother coming back from a trip, but I must have been mistaken. — An awful loneliness came over me; at that moment I would have given everything, half my life, to be able to sit on the bus among those workers… I’d even have given up my attempts at writing had that been the condition for being hired back. My writing attempts, which the women found so alarming… only on very rare, exceptional occasions had I’d dared confess to a woman that I was trying my hand at literature, but my brow bore the stigma of this contemptible secret. — I recalled that once, at the age of six or seven, I’d confessed to my mother in a fit of blind faith that I wanted to be a writer, in fact that I’d already begun and was writing constantly, and my most fervent desire was to be allowed, one day, to read my efforts to her. My mother, though barely replying to this disclosure, showed every sign of being rudely surprised. First skeptical whether to believe my fraudulent words, and expressing indignation at them, her face turned into a mask of such violent suspicion that I fell silent at once, then resorted to calming her down. Presumably it was just my childish impression I was recalling; in reality, perhaps, my mother was incapable of taking me that seriously… but I thought I saw her tremble, only her bewilderment preventing her from instantly recognizing me as a wretched traitor to all her intentions for me; I began to placate her, saying that I’d pursue such things only to pass the time, of course, I’d write only in hours that I truly had to spare, and never would any of my stories describe the true circumstances of our life. Though my mother seemed relieved, her face remained mistrustful, her initial pallor giving way to a blush of shame, as though, without guessing it myself, I’d just voiced a crass obscenity in front of her or announced my intention to betray every utterance made in our home to the neighbors, the public, the secret police. I hastened to assure her that my writing attempts would not compromise my obligations in the slightest; they would not worsen my performance at school any further, or conflict with society’s moral demands upon me, nor would they induce me to abandon even one of the ideals, ideological or hygienic, impressed upon me by the home, the school, and the world. In particular, I’d always respect my family life; she could rest assured of that: the public, should I ever enjoy its attention, would learn nothing to our disadvantage. — Wasn’t I ashamed of myself, she finally asked, to be thinking about a public at all, what with all the nonsense I had in my head? But fortunately I’d never even make it that far, fortunately that wasn’t even possible for a person from such a humble background. You needed a special gift for that, or at least the wherewithal to hold your own in select circles. — But I have that gift, I retorted. — What kind of a gift? she asked. Your father was a person with a talent for everything. Everyone knew him as an excellent tailor, and he sacrificed himself entirely for his profession and his family. He was a paragon of propriety and goodness, welcome everywhere and liked by everyone. He was someone people could rely on, but you’ve turned out just the opposite. One would think that you weren’t his son at all, that you’d turn out to be nothing but an unskilled laborer, cleaning up after other people. You’ll probably just end up on the wrong track, and all your life you’ll do nothing but disgrace us. — And so, I thought, I’ve actually lived up to her opinion of me.
That bus, barreling past the trash heaps without stopping—I should have flagged it at the bus stop, or, even better, hurled myself down onto the road, right in front of the snout of that bellowing beast carrying life away in its belly, I should have let myself be run over rather than hold back—wasn’t that bus a constant menace to me… hadn’t it once given me a ride after all, picked me up from the side of the road? I tried frantically to remember when that could have been. All I could recall was the scene itself, filled with such deathly dread that I could never board the bus with an easy mind again: it had been packed, but no one had taken the seat beside me, in the aisle behind me the women remained standing, and from that day on I seemed shut out of life. I felt I was in a tightly locked case, being flown through a space where all my memory was annihilated, and from that moment on I knew I was in hell, every single fiber of my being. I arrived in town that evening not knowing how I’d gotten there, August, the month of my birth, or at least I hoped time could still be defined so precisely. The air was brown that evening… by that time of day I’d already been born, a little bundle, appalled to the point of stupefaction, lying paralyzed in its cage and staring out at its first night… the brown seemed to be sucked up by a black yawn, and somewhere in that blackout sparks glowed, eerily red, giving no light, emitting nothing but smoke, heavy noxious smoke. — The town received me with great silence—the spellbound silence that anticipates an attack—and with an emptiness whose borders seemed sealed, so that even now I found myself inside an empty container… and I was part of the emptiness, I was its empty, reinstated consciousness. I had misgivings about returning to my apartment… I could make no headway against my aimlessness; I had grasped that life was a crude, clumsy fake.
A while later, standing in front of the police station, I began to shout—that much I could remember—I shouted something several times, as loudly as I could. I waited for a reaction, perhaps for someone to recognize me and arrest me… I felt that after the speech I’d trumpeted in A.—loud and hopefully clear for all to hear—I ought to have been locked up at once… but no reaction came, or if so, only a stupid, empty-headed reaction: grins at how long it had taken me to realize that everything… the whole republic, the whole world… had been faked.
I dreaded the apartment… at least the part of it I’d barricaded myself in… for some time now its dark, unclean chaos had filled me with indefinable horror. For a long while I’d been at loggerheads with my mother—who occupied the other, larger part of the apartment—as, like some inexorable toxic swamp, my disorder, my filth had begun encroaching on her space. Now that my mother was gone—as a retiree, she was allowed to go abroad, and she’d been staying with her sister in West Germany for more than a month now—this swamp had overwhelmed her part of the apartment. The dark stench lingered in her rooms as well, because I never opened the windows, because moldy stacks of unwashed dishes towered on the windowsills, because even here I smoked without stopping, though my mother always protested vehemently. Until recently my body had seemed to cope effortlessly with an insane degree of chain-smoking, so I’d gotten into the habit of letting the butts burn in the overflowing ashtrays… or rather I lined up the old butts with the embers of the ones I’d just discarded, so that gradually all the butts ignited and burned all the way through, until—meanwhile I was smoking a new cigarette—crackling, blue-black clouds rose and settled on the ceiling, concealing it behind a flood of smoke three feet deep or more. More and more I was falling prey to fears—as I planted my elbows in the litter on the desktop, capable only of smoking without cease, as I let the desk lamp burn on—increasingly menacing fears of the movements I thought I glimpsed overhead, which I was trying to cloak with smoke clouds… but now the movements went on behind the smoke and their obscurity increased my fear.