I didn’t know whether I was recalling the speech verbatim. That was beside the point… it seemed as though I’d wished to be attacked in some still more dangerous form: panic filled me, and to contain it I struggled to repeat the woman’s speech in every detail, mentally amplifying the vehemence of her statements; if one of the arguments aimed against me seemed too weak, I tried to improve it until its keenness actually wounded me to the quick. I let her speech knife through my mind—while pacing up and down in a panic by the icy, rain-lashed trash heap, and later while walking toward town, the next bus not being due for another two hours or so—and I suddenly realized that the crucial point for me was neither the inanity nor the malice of what I’d heard, but the fact that it was a woman, not a man, who had spoken to me like that. Had it been a man, I could quickly have chosen to take the accusation as a mere insult, I could have replied in kind; ah, I could have laughed about it and forgotten the whole thing as soon as I left the building. The accusations seemed to become a real threat only because they came from a woman’s mouth, with a cold impassivity against which I was powerless, with a stony resolve that relegated me to the trash.
The injury caused by the woman’s words, an injury I could not separate from the fact that a woman’s mouth inflicted it, shielded me all the same—with the very cruelty of the injury—from the naked recognition that it was the state that had an eye on me, it was the state, with its ability to punish, that believed I was on the wrong track.
If I ever managed to feel that I possessed an identity, if I was able to develop any nebulous ideal of my I, it was only through experiencing myself, in writing, as an active subject, albeit a subject I never dared disclose in public: I had made that mistake at the labor office, and my I had instantly been rebuffed in the harshest conceivable fashion. For the bureaucrat my I was not even a valid category, for her it went without saying that in the form presented to her it had no right to exist whatsoever. She hadn’t even explicitly threatened me with forced labor—for that I would have had to be a subject worth reforming in a labor camp—but her words made it more than clear that the option was being kept open. Here, fortunately for my addled mind, I could indulge in a simple projection: that I was faced with the perfectly ordinary hostility of a woman toward an apparently feckless man; I was someone who didn’t work, who made no provisions for the future, who might be living at his family’s expense, with all the unpleasant social consequences that entailed, and, on top of it all, I gave myself erratic intellectual airs. I was all too familiar with this uncomprehending attitude from my mother—when my mother heaped reproaches on me for my fecklessness and laziness, she rationalized her disappointment with her fear that I’d end up in a labor camp someday. — At this thought I actually seemed to feel a touch of warmth and calmed down for a few moments; the monotonous drone of the bus motor sent me into a light slumber.
My compulsion, later on, to get off at this stop was prompted by another thing, though ultimately it served as an equally inadequate explanation: at some point, ages ago, maybe in the early 1960s, I’d produced a manuscript I then lost later on. Its existence was an incredible embarrassment to me, and I’d so thoroughly mislaid, misplaced, repressed, forgotten it that if it had suddenly reappeared, I’d easily have claimed I hadn’t written it, and perhaps I’d even have believed that claim myself. That winter a year in the past, returning home from A. to M. after my summons to the labor office and nodding off in the bus—asleep perhaps for only a minute—I dreamed of that manuscript, which must have shaken my faith in myself, and in myself as a writer. In the dream, I was horrified to see the notebook I thought contained the sorry piece of work some distance from me on a broad desk or judge’s bench, behind which people in dark disguises held proceedings against me. The charges were unintelligible, read out in a woman’s voice, undoubtedly the voice of the bureaucrat in the office I’d just left, and naturally bearing a strong resemblance to my mother’s: the most aggravating circumstance, annihilating me morally, was judged to be the existence of the manuscript that lay on the desk for all to see, which I, in agony, had to recognize as my own, and which I vainly tried to seize, thus revealing myself once and for all as its author… they must even have misunderstood me so drastically as to think I insisted on retaining possession of it. — When the bus stopped for a little more than half a minute at the edge of the garbage dump, I’d woken from the dream with a start; dazed, sweating, racked with horror, I tried to get my bearings; outside, the wind and rain whirled up great quantities of scattered paper scraps that whipped across the road in front of the bus—and at the moment the bus started up again, a page from a notebook, torn nearly in half, momentarily stuck to the window in front of my face, a page from the elementary school exercise books I’d used for years, with writing in green ink in an immature hand which I seemed to clearly recognize as my own from earlier days. It was a hallucination; I thought I could even decipher parts of the text; seized by craven dismay, I persuaded myself that it was a fragment from that childishly obscene story that had vanished, that I’d forgotten… suddenly the text came back to me, a shameful foray into pornography I’d written for myself… the paper blew away, the bus was moving, I couldn’t get out now. Perhaps, of course, I’d merely succumbed to an illusion, but it was a fact that my past contained a piece of writing so repugnant, repugnant due solely to my being its author; the dream had recalled that to me all too vividly, it could no longer be denied. — It was a nightmare, a hallucination, but it was enough to make me search like a madman for those compromising old pages as soon as I got home; I couldn’t find them, though I dragged out the oldest bundles of papers from the most obscure corners. I made another nasty discovery: at some point my mother seemed to have moved old papers of mine from one place to another—ancient, idiotic texts I’d thought I’d burned long ago—and I was convinced I’d find the pornographic pages among them… but I didn’t.