Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

Once, up in the dining hall, he realized he was left all alone at his table. . and soon after that it dawned on him that for more than a week now he’d been sitting by himself at the dining hall table, rapidly gulping his soup and barely taking time for a cup of coffee. For a week he’d fed like a leper, wanting to go unseen. And yet it wasn’t even that they saw him. . they all seemed to pass his table without a thought, crowding at the other tables, playing cards with a clamour of voices; each latecomer found a chair and pulled it up to one of the already overcrowded tables, preferring to set down his soup bowl in the smallest of spaces, in a flurry of playing cards, between ashtrays fuming with unextinguished butts. . it was on a day like this that W. decided to hand in his notice.

Can you give us one good reason why you don’t want to come any more? one of the grey-suited men asked him in the town hall. We’d also rather we didn’t have to drag you in here. We’d much prefer to visit you at a location of your choice. Can you suggest a location?

Because I walk around the factory as if I had an infectious disease, said W. No, there’s no place in this town to meet unseen, all eyes are always on you here. . no, it’d have to be somewhere underground.

You’re right, these small towns are just awful, said the other. Do you want us to find you a new job? What do you mean by somewhere underground, anyway. . do you know a place like that?

No, said W., no, actually I’m very happy with my job at the factory!

What do you want to do, then?

I won’t come to you in the town hall any more. . and I’ll tell my colleagues about the whole thing!

The gentleman in the grey suit grinned: I wouldn’t do that. . I’m advising you from experience. . deconspiration is no picnic, it takes a lot of tenacity. And you have to be prepared to give up everything. . and then suddenly you’ve got the enemies you only thought you had before. And as a writer you can’t give up everything. . you need a typewriter, stamps, you need contacts. .

His relationship with his mother was becoming increasingly fraught as well. At first he put it down to the close quarters they shared. There was too little space for his writing attempts, so he’d got into the habit of waiting until she went to bed, content to devote himself to his writing for an hour or two until fatigue overtook him as well. Now he suddenly felt hemmed in for some reason and began to extend his sessions into the morning hours — which meant that on the early shift he was rarely able to get up in time and no longer arrived punctually at the factory. But he wrote more often in the afternoons as well, obstructing the kitchen and reacting with increasing rudeness to his mother’s presence or her mere appearance at the door. More and more often she found him asleep at the table before dinner; when she set down the plates he woke in a foul mood and lashed out at her. Usually their fights ended with him threatening to find himself another flat. His mother, a quiet, unassuming woman, was alarmed, but expressed with no trace of gratification her fear that he’d have trouble finding a suitable flat. — I’ll get help finding a flat, he said. I have support! — They had never spoken about his writing attempts. With characteristic self-effacement, the old woman — who firmly believed that she would never understand a thing her son did — had transformed herself into a silent shadow whenever she found him in what had long become his typical pose, bent over his notebooks, which seemed to absorb him entirely. . and now he claimed it was her silent scurrying that bothered him the most, in fact it was practically orchestrated to bother him — her constant, cautious, reticent circling of his person was an unconscious orchestration and the expression of her doubts about the necessity of his writing. She stopped making dinner and disappeared into the next room; of course she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. And a short while later he understood himself no better than she; all he knew was that he’d become capable of this kind of carping only in the past few weeks.

Perhaps there was something he saw as a threat to his writing lately. . not a concrete threat, no one wanted to hinder him. Perhaps it was enough that since recently there were people in town who recognized him as a writer. Yes, they affirmed him in his capacity as a writer; it was a challenge he had yet to live up to.

They dealt him the death blow at the factory by coming to visit one day. He had the early shift that week, and on Friday he topped off his tardiness by arriving at the factory two hours late. The foreman came up to him pale in the face; W., prepared for a royal dressing-down, was surprised by his long-time boss’ trembling voice; he’d never heard him talk that way before. The foreman mumbled, barely audible in the drone of machinery, that he shouldn’t bother changing his clothes, he’d been expected up in the engineers’ office for an hour already.

The management office’s two adjoining rooms had been cleared of all staff; two engineers and three female typists huddled by the window at the end of the corridor, leaning silent and shamefaced on the sill, expelled from their power’s abode; they ignored W.’s greeting as he came up the stairs. In the back office, the inner sanctum, sat the breezy gentleman in the distinctive grey suit, and the same gangling assistant who’d once towered over W.’s doorframe, dressed in a green ski anorak of a quilted, silkily gleaming fabric blend. There was no leather coat hanging on the manager’s coat stand, just a medium-length beige suede jacket with a fur collar.—W. was horrendously sleep-deprived and barely capable of following the breezy gentleman’s words — he kept asking himself: Just who am I looking at now . . which member of that grey-clothed series, or is there just one of them with six different grey suits? — and besides he didn’t feel like following the chatty conversation he started (meanwhile the younger man in the anorak confined himself to nodding his close-cropped head, either earnestly or smilingly, as required by his superior’s casually reeled-off words). It wasn’t exactly a mystery to W. why the conversation had to take place here in the factory, since it seemed to concern absolutely nothing new or urgent; besides, it wasn’t a conversation, since W. barely responded. . he was busy mulling over the consequences of the visit, which had to have been noticed down in the production hall — of course they’d all noticed it, and if he wasn’t mistaken, that was the very purpose of the visit.

Indignant at this dirty trick, W. didn’t absorb a thing until the end of the conversation. . he feebly recalled it centring on the understandable woes of a factory like this one, all attributable to the labour shortage; in concrete terms, for the past several years, each winter people from the assembly department has been assigned to the boiler house, where there was a lack of stokers; for the past two winters W. had been one of these people, which he liked just fine, for one thing because in the boiler room he was largely left unsupervised. . the gist of the conversation was as follows: with all due respect, in the long run it was hard to sympathize with such measures because they kept people from developing their potential. These words having prompted the underling’s last earnest nod for a time, the senior visitor laid a slender booklet on the table, bound in glossy black pasteboard, and pointed the cigarette he’d just lit (smoking was strictly prohibited in the manager’s sanctum) at the title: Full Steam into the Morn . It was a ‘Workshop Anthology of the Railroad Workers’ Literary Working Group’, as the caption declared; the working group met in the district town of Z., where the brochure had been published.