Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

Why are you running away? I heard him pant as I mounted the stairs to the train platform. . evidently I’d finally managed to insult him, but he didn’t show it. He kept one step below me and hovered behind me as we stood on the platform. Watching the people waiting for the train — relatively few, it was evening already — I felt his breath on my ear: How come you’re so hypersensitive, anyway. . all I can tell you is, cut it out!

Were you trying to get wet, or what? I asked.

You know what, he started up again, you’re just overly sensitive about certain things. And since there do happen to be people who are always thinking along with us. . oh yes, we’ve got our experts for that. . this could end up hurting you. Because they have a seventh sense for it, so to speak. Overly sensitive people — that tends to be the thinking — are unreliable people, because at some point they let their sensitivities guide them.

What sort of things, I asked, am I too sensitive about, in your opinion?

Not in my opinion, it’s no skin off my nose! But to answer your question. . I hinted at it once, I’m sure you’ll recall. I said that you simply clam up about some things. And we have trouble keeping certain things straight, you know what I mean. Usually to do with the ladies, you’re trying to put something over on us there. And it’s all out of hypersensitivity. . apparently it’s a catastrophe for you whenever there’s some dame you can’t manage to lay. . and you don’t say a thing about it, no, you actually seem to believe it happened, you actually seem to believe it! And we’re left hanging and have to fit the pieces together. For instance, at one point there was a rather daft paternity affair. . remember?

Vaguely. . I said, I have a murky memory, the whole story was pretty murky. I didn’t even feel it was me they meant, it seemed like something I wasn’t capable of. I thought it was altogether a bit too much. .

That’s just it, he said, once again you played the sensitive character. You couldn’t claim nothing had happened. . and you signed for the child. .

No, I said, that’s not what I signed for!

Maybe it was! And now we’re having problems with your signature. . which is pretty distinctive, by the way!

When I was sitting in the train at last, the only passenger in the entire car, Feuerbach’s interfering murmur still rang in my ears. What was it he kept trying to remind me of? For months he’d been raising the subject, almost regularly, but always taking me by surprise, so that gradually I came to fear these moments. But he never went beyond innuendos, always leaving me with the unpleasant feeling that up there, on the so-called higher levels above us, they knew more about me than I did myself. But probably I was just being too sensitive, for of course that was one of their tactics, two-bit police routine; you come out of every interrogation with that feeling, I didn’t have to go buying into it too. . the troubling thing was that Feuerbach’s insinuations had such a lasting effect on me. — And it was in the nights when I hunkered in the cellar on my seat by the yellow-grey concrete wall, when I was beyond his reach, it was then that his talk gnawed at my nerves. . the ringing tone of the cooling unit behind me, purely imaginary, the clink of keys behind me, purely imaginary, sparked this anxiety within me. I went over his insinuations from start to finish. . they made no sense to me; if anything, they slid in front of my flimsy memories like verbal barriers, their resolution lying in a snarl of disquieting emotions behind this barricade. . It was impossible to unravel Feuerbach’s words because the reason for them had to take me back to the time before my conversations with Feuerbach began. It was almost as though I had to think about things that dated back before my birth.

For me the time before Feuerbach lay fully in the dark of oblivion. . it had slipped from my grasp entirely, so far beyond the pale that I hardly counted it as part of my real life; over it hung a grey, hectically woven web of language which in fact I could describe as an impregnable fabric of simulation. Or everything that lay beyond these grey layers was simulation. . behind them was my mother, like something from Beckett, I hardly remembered how she’d looked. . and I’d had a different name back then, that of course I remembered. . but only because it had become a kind of code name for me now.

Feuerbach had spoken of that ‘hypersensitive character’ again today. . that was supposed to mean me , it could only mean the character from the time before my ‘contacts’ began. And if I rightly recalled, he’d even called me by my former name. . I could be mistaken, but I wouldn’t put it past him: by calling me by my code name the rest of the time, he violated the rule of secrecy. . he destroyed the conspirative consensus between us. . and increased my dependency on him! — In some instances Feuerbach had even described my sensitivity as ‘neurotic’. . at which I had asked him whether he’d also describe someone like Thomas Mann as neurotic. — He grinned at me and said: Way to go! Just keep resorting to literature. . we can be proud to have such people in our ranks. .

The train had pulled into the Warschauer Strasse Station and hadn’t budged since. Probably I’d failed to hear the instructions to transfer to another, waiting train, a frequent occurrence here. . I was sitting way on the right, the far side of the car from the platform, torrents of rain lashing the pane beside me, the inside of the car filled by the rush of the storm on its roof, on the roofing of the platform and in the air, whose blackness was impenetrable, broken only by the glare of a few lanterns which the plunging water blurred. I had laid back my head, resting it on the back of the seat. . I listened to the rain’s monotonous noise, the way this noise grew fainter to my ears, finally resembling the hum behind the concrete wall in the basement, that machine noise that shifted gears with a slight jitter, spreading into regions beyond — that hum which went on all the same, which he could pick up only with the greatest of effort, which perhaps did not exist at all, which rushed only in his imagination when he nodded off on his wooden crate, his head leant back against the wall.

Earlier. . that was an utterly unreal time, slipped from his grasp like a flimsy web of overwrought fancies and self-deceptions. Scrap for scrap it had vanished from his memory, an untime. The reality which had commenced one day, which by degrees had taken him in and overwhelmed him, was finally all that was left in him; and that other, finished time, obliterated bit by bit, now seemed like a fiction. It included a third of his life, much more than that, almost half. . and he felt that he’d gambled this time away, and no longer knew what it held. Indeed, back then he had simulated —for himself! — that chunk of life; he no longer knew how he’d managed, it was a life in which each command. . that was the word. . that drove it had come from his own person; and yet he’d never been a personage in that play! Now it was the other way around — all his commands came from without, and he was a personage. . the proof being that he received commands clearly tailored to certain idiosyncrasies of his lifestyle.

Earlier, then, he had simulated his life. . so he was experienced in simulation, and now it had become a necessity! — When had he actually woken into this reality. . when had he been awakened? Even this was unclear — and he thought of the long spell of sleep that had been prescribed for him. . he’d never known it was prescribed, he had neither noticed its beginning, nor had he once foreseen its end. At any rate, it was a time he thought of with a touch of pride: he’d lived these years rather boisterously, at least he’d thought so, unconventionally, a little bit, he said, he hadn’t scorned the pleasures available to him, and all the while engaged in harsh, sometimes filthy work, shovelling coal, coal upon coal; none of this had placed serious demands on him, for during this time he was always occupied with literature, focused on it alone: in his free time — deducting that of his pleasures — he was constantly snarled in writing attempts. . snarled, he said. . in vast numbers of drafts which he was always starting again differently or modifying and with which he surrounded himself as with an invisible screen, cutting an absent and obdurately opaque figure behind it. He lived in a sort of mental cavern which he always dragged about with him. He thought of positioning himself in public as a writer one day, not knowing himself if he could believe in such a possibility. And yet he wrote almost without cease. . some of these attempts were the only possessions he’d salvaged from the time of his simulation.