Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

Not a single report. . nothing, in a good month’s time? When he pictured his boss’ voice, it didn’t sound good at all; if he wasn’t mistaken, there was even a kind of rabidity in it, something so rare that it had to be valuable. When Feuerbach turned rabid, and W. could count these instances on the fingers of one hand, he didn’t raise his voice; it shifted from a jitter to a hiss (when things had calmed down, W. described it as frothing at the mouth), and he hissed faster and faster, as though to eerily accelerate the words linked by his hissing. Get outta here, man. . nothing, nothing, nothing, nothingandnothing-again, isitmeoristhisfuggingnuts. . he shot off random outraged noises, and gradually calming down again: Man oh man. . how the hell are we going to explain this? You haven’t got a clue! We’ve got to have something to show four weeks from now! I praised you to the skies up there, despite the problems we had, and now this. Is this your annual spring blackout, or what?

And then, for the first time, Feuerbach might put his cards on the table: Of course all you’ve been working on is your special op again. . and probably you’ve even got a report on it. You think there isn’t a single problem in all Berlin except this so-called writer S. R. You tried to tell me once it’s like a wildfire. . well, where is it? Gradually I’m starting to think you’re just envious of the guy’s success. . what passes for success in those circles. Don’t you think it’s getting a bit old? Leave the guy alone, for Chrissake, whatever the real story is with him, you’ll never find it out. . because you just don’t want to find it out. How long has this been going on now, how long has this so-called author been peddling his wares around the Scene, since March, since February your report on Operation: Reader arrives punctually every week, since January already, every time I forget it’s Monday, there’s your report on Operation: Reader to remind me. Since December, you say, or even since November. . you don’t say! But what’s in your report, always the same old thing. And to this day we don’t even know who the guy goes to bed with, for instance. Or if he even does, or if he does it from behind or from the front, or standing on his head, that’d be just like him. Or if he just fuggs Mary Fist. Nothing about that in your memoranda on fine literature. How long do you think it’s been since I stopped even passing them on. . solely for your protection. Three months ago the higher-ups were already saying to me, What do we want with lit crit. . Beckett, they said to me, half of it’s taken from Beckett, what do we care about Beckett, wasn’t that some English monk from the Middle Ages? But thinner than Beckett, just Beckett’s bathwater. . do you really think I can pass that on?

W. had been waiting a long time for the first lieutenant to shake these cards from his sleeve; so far they’d stayed stuck up there, apparently for his protection. But in his imagination the chiefs had been asking for ages: What are we supposed to do with the lit crit that UnCol writes? Is he trying to teach us some literary taste? What good are these punctual, pedantic essays supposed to do us, is this UnCol down on the street a moralist or something?

That UnCol knew it couldn’t go on like this for ever. . and he heard the jitter swell in Feuerbach’s throat, though for now it was just in his mind. — Yesterday he’d started hearing it again (and in the pub he’d been seized by the fear that at any moment Feuerbach could come through the door he saw in the mirror). . the rant’s verbose unreeling, the mixture of remonstrance and monologue, which, empty as it ultimately was, infected him at some point, perpetuating itself in some receptive language centre of his brain. . so that he could carry on the ‘discourse’ without ever having heard it. This UnCol down on the street could read his case officer’s thoughts. . because they were his own thoughts. . because it was the Firm’s faculty of speech.

Of course he’d long been trying to change this (trying to work out new perspectives on this case!). . sitting for days on a report about the young woman in the writer S. R.’s entourage. But everything in these reports just revolved around Reader again, and now they expressed envy not only of his popular success (he could have relaxed; it was dwindling) but of his success with the young lady whom W. called the student.

Two or three times he’d almost gotten into a conversation with her, but Feuerbach had learnt nothing about that. . there would have had to be at least another three UnCols at the readings to give such fleeting verbal exchanges the chance to appear in a report. . it was understandable that they hadn’t shown up in W.’s dossiers either; aware of his occasional awkwardness when faced with female target persons, Feuerbach might well have taken the relevant passages for fiction. — Once, for instance, they’d greeted each other! Her handshake had been very tentative, and she’d said, ‘Grüß Gott,’9 which W. had heard only in archival films; in real life it sounded oddly ironical, she’d said it in precise standard German without a trace of a Berlin accent. Another time she asked him where his curious dialect came from. . If I were the perfect UnCol, he’d thought, I’d be simulating a blush for her. It was on the third (or fourth) occasion that he recklessly let slip his code name. . and for that he’d spent hours in the pub on Frankfurter Allee beforehand, giving himself some liquid courage.

And it was amid the ongoing lack of opportunity that he’d drawn up the dossier he hadn’t delivered. . because of the portrait of the young woman who darted across his field of view. And then she had lingered a while in his field of view, at least he’d managed to fix it that way. And he had regretted that there was no one around to introduce him to the student. . a poet with something of a name, first two poems published — illegally! — in a West German journal, six months later three poems in three unofficial and two official domestic publications!

Towards the end of last April she’d showed up unexpectedly in the park-like garden of the church in Rummelsburg, and because he hadn’t passed on her portrait, along with a whole bunch of similar documents (withheld as camouflage), he was at loggerheads with his case officer nearly all summer long. — In fact, he had hidden the portrait. . hidden it so well that one would have marvelled at his distrust of life. He thought: Distrust of life’s probing rationality, which gives no weight to non-weighty things. He had folded the two pages comprising the portrait into a weighty packet and stuffed it into the gap of his chair, sinking it so deep that the fingertips no longer felt it in the tight crack.

And so he had failed to give Feuerbach a whole stack of portraits, rather than simply removing No. 30 (the student). . he would have had to type it all up again, Feuerbach simply wouldn’t believe it was possible to miscount. . It was Feuerbach who consistently encouraged him not to take meaningless things as meaningless. . — After quite a while the first lieutenant had stopped mentioning the missing reports, as silent on the matter as though it were meaningless. . but there was nothing the first lieutenant was less capable of than letting go, W. was sure of that.

He recalled sinking into depressions which confounded all attempts to finish his profiles, not only the student’s; it merely seemed to be the catalyst, and after that depression ran rampant. Perhaps because of the thought that encounters with a young woman such as she never went beyond compiling attributes to be listed in writing, estimated measurements (which couldn’t even be realistic), conjectures as to the content of the words so hard to read at a distance from her stranger’s lips, or just words such as pointed, pale, bare , which were neither level-headed nor informative. And then these ‘data’ were swallowed by an institution which was little more than an archive, so that he never saw them again. In other words, everything about this woman that grazed his five senses was prostituted to a bureaucracy. . and could end up filling entire filing cabinets; you’d have to search far and wide for such a selfless pimp.