Simon was noticing more and more that the Copyists Office was a small world all its own within the larger world. Envy and ambitions, hate and love, preferential treatment and honesty, vehement and modest natures manifested themselves here in microcosm, where only the pettiest advantages were at stake, just as clearly and unmistakably as anywhere people struggled to make a living. There were no sentiments or urges that could not find themselves actualized here, if only on a paltry scale. Glorious troves of knowledge, to be sure, were of little use in the Office. A bearer of such knowledge could put it to use here at most improvisatorially, it could boost his standing, but it wouldn’t help him to acquire a better suit. Several members of the copyists fraternity spoke and wrote three languages to perfection. They were put to work translating, but doing so didn’t earn them any more than the loutish address writers and manuscript copiers received — the Copyists Office did not allow any one individual to rise within its ranks, that would have contradicted its own goals and purpose. After all, the point of its existence was to permit the unemployed to eke out a meager existence, not to disburse high, outrageous salaries. A person had to consider himself fortunate to find work at all at eight in the morning. Often enough it happened that the administrator would say to a group of waiting men: “Terribly sorry. Unfortunately there’s nothing today. Come back at ten. Perhaps some jobs will have come in by then!” and then at ten: “You’d better try again tomorrow morning. Not too likely anything else will turn up today.” The ones thus rejected, a group that included Simon on more than one occasion, then walked slowly and gloomily, one after the other, back down the stairs and onto the street where they remained standing for a little while in a nice round group, as though feeling the need to reflect first for a moment, only then to disperse again in all directions, one after the other. It was no pleasure to go rambling about the city streets with no money in one’s pocket, each of them knew this and each one thought: “What will it be like when winter comes?”
Sometimes elegantly dressed people with dainty manners came to the Copyists Office to ask for work. To them the administrator was in the habit of saying: “It’s my impression that you’d be better suited to the hustle and bustle of worldly life than to the Copyists Office. Here a person must sit still all day long, bent over and diligently working if he wants to earn his pittance. I’m speaking to you openly in this way because I have a feeling this work would not in fact suit you. Nor do you appear to be suffering doleful, needy poverty. I, however, am charged with giving employment first and foremost to the poor, that is, to those whose clothes might well be hanging off them in tatters as proof of their squalor. You, on the other hand, look far too grand, it would be a sin to employ you here. My advice to you is to mingle with other elegant people. It seems you’ve failed to recognize the gloom of the Copyists Office if you come here wearing such a cheerful expression to ask for work, as though you were going to a ball. Here it is customary to make clumsy defiant bows, or, most commonly, none at all, but you bowed to me a moment ago like a perfect man of the world. That’s no good, I have no use for you, I have neither employment that might satisfy you nor a world in which you might fit. You will have no difficulty finding a position as a shop or hotel clerk, should you have other intentions than just seeking adventure in this city, as I am inclined to suspect. Here a young man will experience only discouragement, but no other sorts of adventure. A person who comes here knows why he has come. You appear most assuredly not to have known this. Your entire person is an affront to my workers, you’ll have to admit this if you cast so much as a single look about the room. Just look at me: I too have seen the world, I know every metropolis, and I too would not be sitting here if I were not compelled to do so. A person who comes here has already experienced misfortune and all manner of adversity. Those who come here are the good-for-nothings, beggars, rogues and shipwrecks: in a word, the unfortunate. Now I ask you: Are you such a one? No, and therefore I now ask that you depart at once from this establishment, which contains no air that you would be capable of breathing for long. I know the creatures who belong here! Know them better perhaps than suits me! And now farewell!”