Of course—I was pacing back and forth among the trash cans, seemingly sedate, but clenching my fists in disappointment—of course I hadn’t begun with any such tirade, it was too idiotic, it wasn’t in keeping with my striving toward higher things… had I even started speaking at all? In A. I’d fallen victim to the usual blind alleys between the institutions. It was outside the labor office’s business hours, but an older man who was locking the door behind him asked me what I wanted. It was utterly superfluous, he said, to ask about a job at the labor office, because every enterprise in the country was looking for people. The notices hung on every factory gate, visible from afar. For untrained workers there was still the trash collection service, though in summer it was idle and thus they were choosy about new employees. Had I had that sort of trouble there? After all, I wasn’t dealing with the capitalist world here… he added slyly, and coming all this way had been, at the very least, futile. — I then walked across the entire town to the labor court to ask for an appointment with the public prosecutor, but she wasn’t there, even though her office hours had already begun. — Would I prefer to speak to her secretary or wait an hour until she arrived? — I decided to wait, but when I asked an hour later, I was turned away again with the same words. Once more I spent a full hour wandering the town aimlessly, losing confidence in all my neatly prepared rhetorical statements. On my punctual return to the courthouse an hour later—now I was addressed by a higher-ranking bureaucrat who had joined the policemen at the front desk—I was told that it was much too late to consult with the public prosecutor, the office hours had ended long ago. It would be pointless to come back for at least another week, and besides it was safer to apply in writing. — The situation seemed so typical of my entire life up to that point, seemed so perfectly to describe my relationship to this country’s society, that I almost felt a flush of gratitude. But that was only after my protest gave way to a kind of epiphany: Of course, in some confounded fashion, it was always I who brought myself to this point, even though I wasn’t quite sure how I’d pulled it off this time. At least it gave me a considerable reprieve before having to offer an explanation. And indeed it was impossible to do anything but come too late, however hard you tried. It was impossible to be released in time from captivity. — Thoughts racing, I searched the town center for a pub, but there was no room in the two or three bars I found; only at the station bar, filled with hollering men, did I manage to quench my thirst for beer. I drank sour, stale beer, and already I’d missed the first bus to M., so I went on drinking. Soon I was asking myself what I’d wanted in A. anyway—why the labor court, of all places? What had I planned to tell the prosecutor to avoid being told that they’d been quite right to fire me? Your attitude toward work is well known to us, Herr C.; for your own sake, you ought to look for a new job immediately… Anyway, the place where you’ve been barred from employment is mainly a women’s factory. — How could they muster any sympathy for me when I put forth my arguments without paranoia, citing perfectly objective things such as age and illness? In this republic, sick language is simply a necessity of life, it’s the only means possible, I thought with relief. — Have yourself examined, they’d surely have advised me—yet it was I who had to examine myself. Here in this republic, though, I had no possibility whatsoever of doing so.
Whenever I’d felt within me the unforeseen power to examine myself, even to know myself, and consequently, perhaps, expunge the germs of my sickness, I found that the state snatched every tool from my hands, or hid all those tools from me, obscuring the means of ascertaining any kind of probability. The inevitable result was a serious disease, a pervasive disease of my ability to really and truly perceive the world, and a disease of my ability to truly make myself known to another person as a figure in reality. For me, reality had been stolen and annihilated, so by necessity I had to exist as a form of annihilated reality, as a mere delusion of reality, and by that same token had to annihilate the reality of the people around me.
What, for instance, could the labor court possibly care when I lamented my fear of impotence? What an incredibly sad, pathetic question. Was that why they hadn’t let me in? There being no injustice in this country, there could be no justice either… I sensed that this sort of mental short circuit was already part of my speech. And—now the scales fell from my eyes—what I should have demanded from the bureaucrats was some kind of archive collecting complaints about the psychological transgressions of the past against the present; such a bureau, I now realized, was the only thing that could vindicate the existence of this country’s justice system. But there was no such bureau, or else that too had been kept secret from me. Desperately I wondered to whom I could turn. — There was no doubt in my mind that the person heading such an institution would have to be a woman, by no means a man; that, for me, was in the very nature of things… but when I tried to prove it, I was at a loss; once again I felt I would need almost visionary abilities to perceive the most natural, self-explanatory, and necessary things. I had to hallucinate in order to discover the world and the possibilities I had for living in it. But if I lacked the strength for that, even in a brief spell of faintness, those possibilities vanished, seemed to vanish forever, everything I could love vanished, justice vanished, right and wrong vanished, my hopes and reproaches vanished… everything I loved to touch vanished, happiness vanished, the women vanished. — Indeed, I probably vanished myself. I looked around in the station bar, and saw nothing but men, drunken, palavering, wildly gesticulating men who seemed to be talking away furiously at invisible opponents; I’d been noticed as little as if I’d never come in. And yet it soon seemed to me that accusations loomed from the stifling air, accusations about the isolation in which I sat, the isolation that was dissolving me. — I can’t be held responsible for the mistakes of this male society, I argued in my defense: not I alone. There are certain limitations I couldn’t possibly transcend. I’ve come too late, even on the occasions when those mistakes I’m referring to were made, Chairwoman. — You were dismissed too late, you mean. — For heaven’s sake, I cried, I’ve come to reverse my dismissal. — You’ll have to explain in full; you’ll have to pull yourself together and explain everything in full from the very beginning. Pull yourself together, remember what it means to you to get your job back. — Actually it means nothing, I replied, actually all it means, Madam Counsel, is that it was there, in that factory, that I was first able to recollect all the things that ultimately precipitated my dismissal. I think they go back to when I was about your daughters’ age, Madam Chairwoman, yes, maybe that’s when it began. At some point back then I underwent an amputation. Metaphorical, of course, not literal. No diseased limb was removed, but it was an amputation all the same, a mental amputation, a lobotomy. In the splendid springtime of my life, I suddenly caught a chill… since then the days have sped past. Believe me, now, compared to your daughters, my nature is that of someone twice as old. But recently I seemed to have been rejuvenated, evidently blossoming. No longer in my first youth, but still fairly healthy, I’m telling you, at least to a certain extent I imagined I was. Healthy, then, and with my life laid out before me; I had work, yes I did, I worked up until this summer. Of course I’d rather have been writing… you know I tried my hand at that, but I was working in a so-called women’s factory, day after day I went with the greatest of pleasure to work directly under the women. And as I did I recalled my youth; my youth was a kind of metastasis that grew out of me, not always to my advantage, but youth all the same… but now that factory has been amputated from me, just one more cruel intervention in my fate. And perhaps that completed my amputations. All at once I lost more cells, cells that steered me… perhaps they steered my breath, the crooks of my knees, my vocal cords, perhaps they steered the voice I put to paper, albeit unsuccessfully. Perhaps amputation is the wrong word, and I should speak of castration, castration that mutilated my interior world. I wasn’t operated on, it was all left attached to me, but the cells that steered it were dimmed; my cells, certain cells of mine, were sterilized and castrated. It was a castration of the brain, and fair femininity was the forceps they used.