Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

Tired of his colleague’s insinuations, W. left for the notorious Beer Nook several blocks away, one of the pubs patronized by the other faction of his acquaintances. There he ran into Harry, who was part of this group, though not, in W.’s view, the best of company, what with his rather tiresome quirks. First, he never paid for his drinks, and second, he’d fasten himself night after night to any listener willing or defenceless enough to be regaled with tireless accounts of the prison terms Harry had served. These were so dragged out with endless repetitions that W. — initially intrigued by this intimate knowledge of all conceivable institutions — now found them unendurable; besides, he’d begun to suspect that Harry, at his age, could really have seen just a fraction of it all. Harry had always struck W. as a particularly shady character, though he’d felt moments of pity, even empathy towards him; he was an extremely thin, almost see-through man of furtive, hasty demeanour who wore his white-blond hair down to his shoulders, though that was long out of fashion; his face was sallow and sweaty, and in the overheated bar he had removed his light blue faded denim jacket to expose upper arms covered with crude tattoos. When he saw W., a flush of joyful excitement spread from his face down his thin sinewy neck into these upper arms; now that W. had patiently lent him his ear a few times, Harry thought the world of him and vaunted his friendship just as tirelessly as his acquaintance with penal institutions. W., about to beat a retreat when he saw the white-blond figure, was collared and told — after a gush of enthusiasm about finally running into each other again after all this time — that he’d come at just the right moment, like he always did, because Harry was arranging a rendezvous that wouldn’t even be possible without him, it was a rendezvous for four, and W. absolutely had to come along. So W. sat down, they drank beer, Harry wrapped himself in pregnant silence — there really had to be an event in store if he was acting like this — only now and then twitching his white, nearly non-existent lashes. Sometimes he’d disappear and actually seemed to be settling something at the bar. At closing time, W., who paid the bill, was put off until the next day: same place, at the Nook, don’t forget! — The next day W. went out of sheer curiosity, but Harry seemed to have forgotten about the rendezvous. Shortly before closing time he suddenly appeared with a young, slightly feral girl and announced that they could now go to the flat as arranged . He introduced the kid as Herta; she was utterly nondescript, dressed much too thinly for the autumn night, and said not a word the whole time; her brown eyes had such a blank, absent look that W. began to think she was either deaf and dumb or feeble-minded. — But we’ll have to bring along a few bottles, said Harry, and W. went up to the bar and bought those bottles too.

Shortly after that Harry rang furiously at the door of Cindy’s building; it took an incredibly long time — next to W. the girl froze wretchedly in the already biting-cold air — for the light to go on in the stairwell. — Cindy went up the stairs ahead of W.; he’d barely recognized her. She was wrapped tight in an enormous bathrobe that dragged on the steps, its original colour impossible to guess. . her hair, too, was so ruined and discoloured that W., eying her as they climbed, was unable to suppress a shudder. It looked as though her head had recently been shaved, and now the hair had sprouted back in irregular tufts that stuck out every which way, bare patches still showing like marks of violence or the traces of a skin disease. A clearly inadequate attempt had been made to dye the individual strands, leaving a botched tangle of unsightly shades with white bald spots gleaming in-between. And Cindy showed other signs of disfigurement: her face was scabbed, swellings not yet subsided were suffused with dark blood. W. was just about to ask what had happened to her when he saw the appalling state of her flat. Wherever he looked, some indefinable mush, grey-white to yellowish in colour, had been spilt. . or stashed away. The substance was like a strange discharge, already partly dried, the mush accreting like plaster in every corner; pails, pots, cardboard boxes were filled to overflowing; the kitchen was saturated with a cloying smell of spoilage that could come only from this pale mass covered with brown patches of fermentation. . W. promptly learnt the erstwhile purpose of the substance: without missing a beat Harry vanished into the sole adjoining room with the nondescript girl. . Cindy yanked a pram out of the cramped room, as though it needed rescuing from the couple. In the carriage was a baby: it began to cry, and Cindy lifted it and rocked it with listless resignation at her breast, hidden by the filthy bathrobe, and after a while the baby actually quieted down. . From sheer weakness, W. thought, now realizing that the omnipresent whitish mush was uneaten baby food; it was so-called instant formula, the kind concocted from a granulated powder and water or milk to make a drink ready for the bottle; now he also noticed the empty paper packaging scattered around the kitchen. The baby had clearly rejected this food, and now the liquid, in various stages of putrefaction, indeed petrifaction, filled every available container, wallowing across the floor and mounting in the recesses of the kitchenette; on the stove, on three quarters of the tabletop, on the unused chairs towered pots, pans, bottles and jars, all of them filled or half-filled with the mush which, as it fermented or solidified, sent up bubbles and turned everything into an insoluble sweetly stinking chaos before congealing. The sink and the drain pipe were full of mush swallowing mountains of dishes and paper bags, also filled with mush. . but the grimmest sight was the stove, where the ash-bin jutted out brimful of mush; the rings of the top plate had been removed, in the heedlessness of desperation the weeks’ worth of mush cooked in vain had been dumped into the stove, and now it oozed out the cracks in the fire door, seeped out again through all the leaks in the guard-plate and collected on the floor. There the viscous, spreading puddle had been dammed up with baby nappies; but the dike of nappies, partly used nappies, had failed to contain the flood, which seeped through the petrified nappies and beyond, discoloured by the soiled bulwarks of cloth and paper, and flowed in reeking brownish rills towards the centre of the kitchen.

It seemed that all attempts to feed the infant this mush had failed. . and W. saw the tiny frail creature dangling motionless in Cindy’s helpless hands, he heard it utter cries in what could barely be called a voice, so faint and strangled that it was impossible to tell whether they weren’t merely the short quick breaths emerging from the withered bluish little face. In that first moment W. fled to the toilet, but he found it too brimful of mush, stuffed with nappies which in turn were drowned in mush. . when he came back Harry emerged — not half an hour had passed — from the adjoining room, holding a pair of elastic-less underwear over his flat stomach, tattooed like his nearly consumptive pink chest with its covering of white down; he pointed through the open door into the unlit chamber: Go on over if you want. . I’m done, and you can go on over if you want.

W. shook his head, casting about for an opportunity to disappear. — Is there a bar still open? he asked. — You might be able to get in the Fuse the back way, said Harry. But how come you don’t want to go on over first? You paid for the bottles of wine, after all. — But not with me! Cindy broke in. — No, said W., I’d better be going. .

He was already in the hall when Cindy gave the baby to Harry, who was sitting on the couch, and followed him. She grabbed W. by the shoulder and pushed him up against the banister until he was pinned by her slender sinewy body with the railing at his back. He breathed the smell of the matted, scabby bathrobe and leant his head back; she wrapped her arms around his neck and stared him in the face, her eyes flashing inches away: Why don’t you want to go on over, over on little Herta, maybe she’s waiting for you?