No, each night the three words I’d invented were answered only by a cripple. — There was nothing in that trash can to interest me. Nothing to love—truly, the contents of that cylinder precisely matched those of the cornucopia left for me by the Republic for the purpose of my education. None of those contents could be unambiguously named. — It wasn’t long before I felt wretched again. In just five minutes I concluded I lacked the education to glimpse the females, even if they were still present, even if they existed by the millions. To see them it was too little to be blind in one eye, it was too little that I had some anatomical notion of them from the time my mother let me visit the circus as a child. — Already Lenin, as recorded by Clara Zetkin, had described wallowing in sexuality as a hobby of the intellectuals for which there was no place in the class-conscious proletariat; the adjective denoted a level of consciousness miles above my own. Resignedly, I turned away from the trash can and regarded my arm, still damp past the wrist; I looked at my fist, which opened helplessly, harmless and hopeless, as though there’d never be any place for it either.
And yet there had been something… I was already walking away, but now I retraced my steps… hadn’t I discovered a beautiful object in the trash can, yes, it seemed to me that inside the trash can yesterday I’d felt a kind of uterus. I lowered my hand in once more, seized a round, firm object that had a certain weight and that I could pull effortlessly from the jumble of hair, filth, wet substances, old clothes. I couldn’t see what I’d brought to light, for there were no lights on this dark street… or I saw only what I wanted to see. Even so, I thought I’d found something unmistakably female. But what? I cursed the town’s dysfunctional lighting, even Lady Luna dimmed her radiance as though to follow her lovely playmates. — What should I do? I was free, free and nameless; but, divested of reality, I could not do a thing.
If I was free, then I was free from reality—free, I felt the impact of the word sink in; the light I had seen was the flash of a stinging ideological slap in the face. — As of this morning I was free: let go from the factory, that is. The only outcome of this thought was that time collapsed back into its proper dimensions: early that morning, after a bitter altercation in which I’d threatened to thrash my boss, I’d been fired; right afterward I’d taken the bus to A. to complain about it at the labor office, and that evening I’d returned from A. Many things might have happened in that time, but my hours had filled up with repetitions and absurdities, absurd attempts at the speech I’d kept making all day, until ultimately I’d spoken in exactly the wrong place—assuming that wasn’t just a figment of my imagination—and I’d probably said exactly the wrong things. Oh, in that wrong place… which, naturally, was the right place for my destructivity… I might have slandered the females, might have chased them away, and now I finally had to face up to my idiocies. It was probably the very gaffes and idiocies of what I said that could be directly linked to my identity, my name, but my idiocies by themselves could hardly meet with sympathy in our republic’s bureaucracies. — I hereby request permission—I believed I’d started off—I request permission, effective immediately, to wear skirts, even outside the home, without facing a reprimand for indecent behavior. — I pondered whether I’d really spoken those words; the one single bottle clutched in my fist couldn’t have been enough to make me do it. — And without, say, being subjected to that famous reflexological Pavlovian therapy: I’m not a homosexual. Please make a note of that. And I’m not just trying to blasphemously shock a fatherland that has evidently had all of its female parts castrated, I’m trying to make sure that, following my dismissal from the factory, the only one I’d consider setting foot in, I won’t be carted off to a labor camp for antisocial behavior if the factory can’t hire me back. So it’s not just fetishistic foolishness that’s made me start collecting women’s clothing from the trash; I’m trying to finally dismiss the state security forces from my trouser’s fly, where their employees made themselves at home early on, I’m trying to finally give them their freedom. Somewhere out there in town are three words that must be ancient, written on a public wall where everyone can read them, addressed to Jack the Ripper, to whom in many ways I could probably be compared—or at least I belong, albeit by a strange coincidence, to a nationality of similar characters—thus those three words, in some tricky way, must also be addressed to me, or must have been at one time, and I’m anxious to assert my claim to that avowal on the wall without the labor office hindering me with terms and demands. Don’t ask me just who I think I am; I’m not fond of these kinds of polemics myself. But now that I lack the money to buy a ticket, I have to put on my own cabaret… oh, and I did so love the ladies’ revue. At least my idiocies, at this moment, help me realize that I have a right to those three words. —