He looked around. Another tram had stopped across the street. A middle-aged woman with a shopping bag, a guy and a girl holding hands, an elderly man dressed in blue. They seemed ridiculous Targets to him. Patience, patience, don’t act like a little boy, have you perhaps forgotten your craft? It takes patience, don’t you remember anymore? So much patience, days of patience, months of patience, paying attention, being discreet, hours and hours of sitting in a café, in a car, behind a newspaper, always reading the same newspaper, for entire days.
Why not wait for a good Target reading the newspaper, like this, to know how things were going in the world? He bought Die Zeit at the nearby kiosk, it had always been his weekly, in the days of real Targets. Then he sat on the terrace of the würstel kiosk, under the lindens. It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but he could have a nice würstel with potatoes. Normal or with curry? asked the little man with a white apron. He decided on the curry, something entirely new, and asked for more ketchup, really postmodern, which was a word on everyone’s lips. He left practically the whole thing on the paper plate, just disgusting, who knew why it was so popular.
He looked around. Everyone seemed so ugly. Fat. Even the thin ones seemed fat, fat on the inside, as if he could see them on the inside. They were oily, that was it, oily, as if covered in suntan oil. They were practically gleaming. He opened the newspaper: let’s see how the world’s going, this vast world that’s waltzing along so happily. Well, not so much. The Strategic Defense Initiative, claimed the American. Who’re they defending themselves from? he snickered. Who are they defending themselves from? — from us? — when we’re all dead? There was a picture of the American on a podium, alongside a flag. He must’ve had a brain no bigger than a thimble, as the little French ditty went. He recalled the song he liked so much, that Brassens sure was quite a guy, he hated the bourgeoisie. Long time ago. Best mission of his life, Paris. Un jolie fleur dans une peau de vache, une jolie vache désguisée en fleur. His French was still perfect, no accent, no inflection, neutral like the voice over the loudspeaker in an airport, that’s how he’d learned it in the special school, you really had to study back then, no kidding, five chosen out of a hundred and those five had to be perfect, as he was.
There was a line in front of the booth of the Staatsoper, must be an important concert that evening. And what if he went? Why not, I could … A man was coming down the staircase of the library, an elegant man, a thin briefcase under his arm. There he was, the perfect Target. He pretended to be buried in his newspaper. The man passed right by him. What a goose. He let the man walk on another hundred meters or so and then he stood up. Crossed the street. Always better to stick to the opposite sidewalk, that was the old rule of thumb, one mustn’t ignore the old rules. The man went in the direction of the Scheunenviertel. What a sweet Target, he was taking his same route, couldn’t get any better than that. The man seemed to be heading to the Pergamon. And in fact he went inside. How clever, as if he himself hadn’t understood. He chuckled to himself: sorry, dear goose, if you’re here on a mission or are pretending to be a university professor it’s logical you’d enter the Pergamon, do you really think someone with my experience would be fooled by such a cheap trick?
He sat on the base of a statue and calmly waited for him. He lit a cigarette. Up to now the physician allowed him only four cigarettes a day, two after lunch and two after dinner. But this Target deserved a cigarette. Waiting, he glanced at the newspaper, the arts page. There was an American film that was a popular box-office hit. It was a spy film set in Berlin in the sixties. He felt a strong yearning. He had the urge to go where he’d decided to go and not lose any more time with this stupid little professor he’d gotten involved with. It was too banal, too predictable. And in fact, there he was, exiting with a clear plastic bag full of catalogs that probably weighed a ton.
He threw his butt in the canal and stuffed his hands in his pockets, as if he were just dawdling. This, yes, this was what he liked: pretending to stroll around. But he wasn’t strolling around, he had a visit to make, he’d decided on this the night before, an agitated night, full of insomnia. He had some things to say to him — this guy. First of all, he’d say that he’d worked everything out. So many of his colleagues, including those at his level, had wound up taxi drivers — fired just like that — but not him, no, he’d fixed himself up quite nicely, he’d had the foresight, like you should, and so he had, to set aside a nice nest egg. How? That was his business, but he’d succeeded in setting aside a nice nest egg, and in dollars — in Switzerland, no less — and when everything had flopped he’d bought a nice single-family home on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, which was a name that meant something, a few steps from Unter den Linden, because this made him feel at home. All told, it was a house that made him feel at home, like when his life still held meaning. But did it once? Of course it did.
The Chausseestrasse seemed deserted to him. Few cars passed. It was Sunday, a nice Sunday at the end of June, Berliners were in Wannsee, taking in the first rays of sun on the Martin Wagner beach, drinking aperitifs before their nice little lunch. He realized he was hungry. Yes, if he thought about it, he was hungry, that morning he’d had only a cappuccino, maybe because the evening before he’d gone overboard. He’d eaten oysters at the Paris Bar, at this point he went to the Paris Bar almost every evening, when he wasn’t trying out other chic restaurants. Don’t you get it, you knucklehead, he murmured, you acted like a Franciscan your whole life, but now I’m having a ball at chic restaurants, eating oysters every night, and you know why? Because we aren’t eternal, caro, you said so yourself, and so it’s worth eating oysters. He liked the courtyard. It was simple, uncluttered, it resembled the knucklehead, rough as he’d been, with tables under the trees where two foreign tourists were drinking beer. The man was in his fifties, with the round eyeglasses of an intellectual, metal frames, like his own beloved knucklehead, bald with fringes on the side. The woman was a brunette, pretty, with a determined and frank expression, big dark eyes, younger than the man. They were speaking in Italian, with some snippets in an unknown language. He pricked up his ears. Spanish? Maybe Spanish, but he was too far away. He walked by them with a purposeful air and said: Hello, welcome to Berlin. Thank you, replied the man. Italian? he asked. The woman smiled at him: Portuguese, she answered. The man spread his arms wide looking pleased: changing countries more often than shoes, I’m a little Portuguese too, the man said in Italian, and he caught the quote. Very nice, my little intellectual, I see you’ve read that knucklehead, congratulations.
He decided to have lunch inside. You had to go down to a cellar, and maybe that’s what it was once. Of course, sure, it was that cellar, now he remembered, often the knucklehead would meet a little failed actress there, a bitch older than Helene who then told all in a book that came out in France, called … he could no longer recall what it was called, even though he’d followed the whole thing himself, during his Parisian years, ah, yes, it was called Ce qui convient and ostensibly it talked about the theater, yet it was also a kind of philosophy of life: gossip. But what year was that? He couldn’t remember. The knucklehead had set up a sofa and a side lamp in that cellar, right under Helene’s nose, Helene, who in her life had swallowed more bitter pills than mouthfuls of air.