Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

Perhaps it was just a few sentences that had kept him from delivering the dossiers. He could have taken it if Feuerbach had learnt only that he found the student ‘rather pretty’ and regarded her as ‘rather intelligent’ (which he couldn’t prove). . but then under the heading special behaviour patterns he had described how, despite the lingering warmth from the afternoon, she began to shiver in the garden as darkness fell. Standing in the light of a lantern hung from a tree, he’d written, she closed the black leather jacket over her white T-shirt, pulling up the zipper with a provocative-looking, resolute gesture, as though she sensed that she was being watched. Now her body seemed boyishly slender; she’d concealed her breasts, which stood out distinctly against the thin fabric of the T-shirt. — Oh no, that’s practically a striptease! Some such exclamation would have been called for from the first lieutenant; W. had dozens of these quotes filed away. Oh dear, that’ll have them drooling! We can’t possibly inflict this on our venerable comrades up there, their pacemakers aren’t the newest, they won’t be able to take it.

From your prose style it’s obvious you don’t think much of Hemingway, Feuerbach commented on the reports in which W. hadn’t remained completely level-headed. Now and then that sort of thing slipped through again. . though by now he thought he had a handle on it; he’d written hundreds of reports (up until last April), and he knew how they had to look: dry and matter-of-fact!

Amid coughing fits, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth (like a screenwriter in a Hollywood movie), he pecked them straight into the typewriter, so absent-minded that he felt guilty when Feuerbach exclaimed admiringly: You’re made for this work! — He typed so quickly and unthinkingly that the pages teemed with typos; Feuerbach described this as authentic grassroots work. . for instance, in his haste he frequently wrote the word night instead of right , and the other way around; Feuerbach was enchanted by the phrases that resulted. He said W. sometimes dissolved language’s semiotic character in a way that was practically analytical. . you’d just have to watch out that the venerable comrades didn’t have a heart attack at having so much darkness foisted on them, when he wrote that the Party is always night.—W. had noticed, however, that his case officer secretly changed back the switched letters.

Now that W. was focusing on Operation: Reader, this dissatisfaction persisted; his powers of observation were impaired by the student’s presence, his relapses into sentimental prose increased, and it was found unacceptable when his reports gave too free rein to his literary verdicts. . A creative thinker doesn’t theorize, he composes! said Feuerbach.

There were occasions, though, on which theory produced quite astounding effects, W. said to himself, and he had experienced these occasions himself. — When Frau Falbe managed, for instance, to entice him into her double bed (still banking on the wisdom of the formal ‘you’), he had suddenly found it astoundingly easy to achieve arousal by imagining himself in a comparable situation with the student rather than with his landlady. When, in other words, he felt theoretically embraced by the student, while practically his landlady was clamping him tight in her bed. . and Frau Falbe seemed quite inclined to see the advantages. She had even started a conversation with him on the subject, impressing him with her theoretical insights. As she often did, she had proceeded from her ex-husband. . All he’d ever had on the brain, she said, was other women, and always several at once. Ever since then she could tell exactly when a man wasn’t all there, when his mind was somewhere else. Who knows, she said, maybe I never really appealed to him that much.

How do you know all that, W. asked, did he tell you?

He practically pieced me together out of those other women, she said, and one time, yes, he told me. But it didn’t bother me that much, I’d mostly figured it out already anyway. You ought to have the body of such-and-such a woman, and your head on top, and then the other way around, he said once, and I slapped him. But then I thought to myself, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. . and then I was supposed to have a different bust, smaller, and then I was supposed to have a different waist, so-and-so’s bust and so-and-so’s waist, that’s what he wanted. But your bottom, he said, is always just right. . Her voice had that rough, slightly hoarse tone again which he knew by now and which goaded him. And of course he wanted to know what had happened after her husband told her this. .

I know, she said, it’s just the same thing with you. . And after a while she turned on the light so he could see her. . You’re an intellectual, and you need fantasies, it was just the same thing with my husband.

How, just the same thing? asked W.

There were plenty of men who couldn’t perform with a woman, young men too, she said. Desire and capability were two different things. But these men weren’t bad sorts. It was easy for women to talk, they didn’t have to perform. She’d been married, after all, and a few times after that someone had tried to marry her, that didn’t mean she was experienced, but she knew the ropes a bit. It had been just the same thing with her husband. . Didn’t I tell you he also worked for Security?

What’s that supposed to mean, also worked for Security?

It’s almost always like that with the guys from Security, yeah, that’s probably why they go into Security in the first place.

And what does that have to do with me? asked W.

Well, she said, they’re all intellectuals there at Security, my husband talked about that sometimes, he said, we’re all at Security because we can’t get anywhere with women. Because we can’t get anywhere with people at all. All we can ever do is investigate people. Yes, I could really see that with my husband. Then he said: But I’m not like that, and I’m leaving Security now. Of course they wouldn’t let him go. .

And what did he do then, then he went West?

Yes, it was before August ’61 still, we’d only been together two years. . I didn’t think about all that until later. I could tell he was like that after all, he always wanted to try everything out with his hands.

W. wanted to hear what her husband had tried out.

It seems like they do everything with their brains there, she said, and really letting go, that’s also something they can only do with their brains. Foreplay, my husband once said to me, that’s the real thing for me, that’s just like my work. We only ever do foreplay there, that’s much more exciting. Then he wanted me to kneel down in front of him, on all fours, he wanted to see everything, for example. He always wanted to see everything. . Watching, he said, that’s the thing. . Or he wanted us to play with ourselves and watch each other.

Back down in his room, W.’s fantasies about the student kept going through his mind. . and it was as though Frau Falbe had given him the cues. Was this because of Frau Falbe’s eternal formal ‘you’, with which she involuntarily created a distance between them?

(As in a conversation with that young woman from West Berlin, he thought. For C., the reserved manners she displayed placed her in a certain lofty class of human beings. The student had erected a virtually insurmountable barrier in front of the informal ‘you’; could it be that she came from high society? At any rate from different, more sophisticated spheres, or so it seemed to him. . C. had observed only one person who had surmounted the barrier to her informal ‘you’: the writer S. R., in his eternal pastoral black. All the other denizens of this primitive, vulgar territory, for which the oddly uptight term ‘domestic’ was used when trying to avoid long-winded explanations or politically conformist abbreviations, all the rest held to the formal ‘you’ and regarded her as rather fey. And of course that was exactly what made C. want to jump her bones. .)