Unable to stand it in town any longer, I moved to Berlin. I packed my shabby cardboard suitcase with care—the yellow summer hat was the only thing I couldn’t fit—and without anyone noticing, I left my little germ cell and moved into a dilapidated building in Berlin. There, in the big city where I’d hoped to have better luck, I found work, and soon it really seemed that my diseases had withdrawn inside me; outwardly I seemed to become sleek, I even gained weight; I drank until I had a beer belly and observed my reinvigoration in the mirror. Only the sickness of my language still lingered; I sensed it distinctly, but made no attempt to put it to the test. Apart from a brief tram ride to my workplace, I barely left the house. I’d been employed by the boiler house of a large laundry, joining the crew of stokers who generated the steam used for heating and to operate the washing machines. The laundry proper was separated from the boiler room by a massive wall of yellowish concrete crowned by barbed wire; no one from the area I worked in was allowed to set foot in the laundry or have any contact with the people behind that wall, who were cut off from the outside world: the laundry was staffed by the inmates of a huge prison that abutted the laundry complex. But it was possible, I’d learned from one of my colleagues, if you were careful… infractions could lead to transferral out of the stoking unit, which was so congenial for me, or even to dismissal… to climb the fire escape to the roof of the boiler house and from there look down into the prison yard.
One Sunday morning… it was already turning cool, and the prison had to be heated even on Sundays… on a clear autumn day with a few clouds, I was strolling, bored, across the yard between the boiler house and that gigantic wall, when I heard voices. Quite close by I heard loud yells, commands, the shrilling of whistles, and even dogs barking. I knew it was the time of day when the prisoners were let out into the prison yard for their daily half hour of exercise, and on an impulse I climbed the ladder’s iron rungs to the roof of the boiler house. Up on the flat roof I ducked behind a chimney and peered over the wall. What I saw I’d known about already, but suddenly I felt that I couldn’t believe my eyes. The women were walking in the yard down there. Sedately, absorbed in animated chatter, the women were walking in rows of two or three, strolling in a circle, flanked by female guards with big German shepherds; they were dressed in dark-green, uniform-like woolen clothes, the institutional dress of this big women’s prison; they seemed in high spirits, laughing, tossing unintelligible jokes to each other. They were young and old, stout and thin; I saw the swells of their breasts, the glide of their thighs under their skirts. I saw their hair, brown and blond hair, sometimes cut short, sometimes falling to their shoulders in waves. I tried to see their faces; I couldn’t see them well, but I seemed to recognize some as harmonious, beautiful, angel-like faces. I felt that what was happening to me now had to happen as it did—I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen them around Berlin as well, it didn’t matter, it didn’t interest me… it was here that my eyes had opened all the way, here that I saw them in reality, here that I found them once again. I saw them at a distance of perhaps twenty yards, they strolled and chatted down below, watched by their guards… women, females. I saw them and shivered; it was no hallucination, in that instant I was freed from all doubts. — I love you all, I murmured in rapture, I love you. — What words, I said with a smile, as though among these fifty or so creatures I had seen one I could really mean those words for in so brief a time. It doesn’t matter, I said, one of them will understand these three words. — And I took heart and cried: I love you!… Aghast, I heard the cry and its echo reverberate across the entire laundry complex. But none of the women even looked up… I didn’t dare repeat the cry; I knew they couldn’t look up if they didn’t want to betray me, but clearly they all sensed that I was crouching, barely hidden, behind the chimney. Several minutes passed, and suddenly I sensed that they were giving a sign. They were giving me a sign; several of them had thrust their thumbs between their index and middle fingers and cautiously raised their hands to chest level, still gazing ahead jadedly. I understood: they were giving me a filthy sign, the filthiest one possible, they had allied themselves with me; it was a sign aimed against the pure State. And it also meant: wait for us… wait just a few more years… — The sign sank down into my innermost being, for an instant I shut my eyes in ecstasy. But then I started, I’d heard something behind me, as though a second reply to my cry had reached me from behind. I looked around, and in an open window on the other side of the street, almost exactly at my level, a man was staring over at me fixedly. I could look him straight in the eye, and I guessed it was he who had replied to me with an audible cough. I recalled that everyone in the boiler house was convinced the apartments in the buildings directly across from the prison were rented out mainly to low-ranking members of the security service, so that the prison gate and surrounding area could be under observation at all times. — Yes, yes, wait for me, he’d coughed out… a man, about my age. Quickly I climbed back down the ladder and fled into the boiler house… a shadow seemed to fall on the feather-light autumn Sunday. With a crowbar in my hand I positioned myself behind the door; a fit of trembling seized me… if he dared come after me, I’d… but the man didn’t appear in the doorway, he hadn’t followed me. After a while I calmed myself… I could think about the females, and soon it no longer seemed so surprising that I’d seen them once again. They had descended upon me with the glass-clear light of this bright-blue fall sky, they’d returned refulgent to my eyes. They’d been left behind inside me, with the singing and tittering of fall days that finally swept away the air of madness smoldering over the summer of my birth. Now I knew where they were to be found, I’d seen them again and preserved them in my heart; I could wait for them.
About the Author and Translator
WOLFGANG HILBIG (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to leave to the West. The author of over twenty books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor.