Wolfgang Hilbig - 'I'

By the time I saw her again I had met with Feuerbach (he was and remained a ray of hope for me: in his presence I repeatedly managed to step back from thoughts that were plainly and simply impractical). . I tried to remind him of my travel schemes, which had crossed my mind again now that I could picture trailing the student even in Grunewald. But Feuerbach was no help; he seemed to be in a strange state of shock, uncommunicative as never before, using barbaric expressions out of the blue, such as ‘shitty literature’, ‘shitty underground’, ‘shitty GDR’. . I concurred assiduously in the hopes of turning the conversation to West Berlin; he didn’t say ‘shitty West Berlin’, but it was impossible to get a proper sentence out of him; I started to feel bored in his presence, which happened only rarely. I asked him whether he was aware that Reader was beginning to meet with a fair amount of resistance, people thought he was too out of touch, he’d probably even been dumped by his girlfriend, the student, at any rate she hardly ever came over from West Berlin any more. — He shrugged his shoulders, a tiny bit too fast, was my impression: He didn’t give a shit about that either. . All at once he looked anxious: We aren’t getting anywhere with the shit at the Permanent Mission! — Probably, he said, we’re pretty much shit ourselves at this point. .

That was my last conversation with the Major before the summer came. . it left me feeling rather brutally dropped. . left in the lurch, uprooted. His former cynical grin had often annoyed me, but it included me, I was in the know about the object of his disdain; in many cases I didn’t share his disdain, but his scorn sought my approval; after I’d swallowed my irritation he even struck me as paternal . . now I missed his grin. — Once again I thought of travelling to A. (I had time!) — was it two or even three years since I’d last seen my mother? I simply couldn’t work it out, I couldn’t even dwell on the thought — and I would have gone immediately if it hadn’t been for the student: every time I’d made up my mind, she suddenly appeared for the day. . without the chase I wouldn’t have been I .

There were one or two months that summer that reminded me of the time when I’d worked as a stoker in the REWATEX laundry — the Chausseestrasse branch, across from the Bertolt Brecht bookshop — only that I didn’t stagger through the day so drugged by exhaustion now, only that I wasn’t woken by Frau Falbe between three and four in the morning. — Berlin was overrun and paralysed by a similar series of heat waves, but I was able to take refuge in my basement passages. The heat seemed to take a special toll on art and literature, there was nothing going on in the Scene; what passed for events (a couple of exhibitions, readings, lots of talk interrupted by groans. . Operation: Reader went into summer recess, and I sensed it was already on its way to the happy hunting ground), the arduously organized manifestations of Unofficial Culture were relocated to wild green gardens on the outskirts of Berlin, near bathing lakes, and the meet-ups resembled picnics or camping chaos. As I couldn’t bring myself to embrace the bathing life, I lost touch somewhat. . when I did join in I usually found that the student was missing. Probably the locations were too far from the border crossing for her; when she did come, she had to head back late in the afternoon; I would have followed her half a minute later, at an hour when it would have drawn attention. I was careful and took my time, sporadically contriving to cross her path. . I wanted to see whether she would at least greet me; I couldn’t figure out whether her gaze had ever lingered on me consciously. — By August the summer already seemed to have spent itself and proceeded to turn cool and rainy — and now I got back to business with full resolve.

During the sweltering weeks I’d had enough leisure, in the basement, to think about what I was actually doing. I already had the red armchair standing by the concrete wall beneath Normannenstrasse. . before the summer began I’d bought it from Frau Falbe for a token sum (in the end she’d wanted to give it to me for free), just in time before the worst of the heat; a little later and the monster’s transport via S-Bahn would have turned into a debacle. . now I had a comfortable seat by the wall, in the cool basement smell I sat enthroned on the armchair like a broad-beamed deity (and like a Prince of Darkness, when the dense fumes of expired excretions wafted in from the city), arms outstretched on the armrests, head and back upright on the backrest, feet on the produce crate, and above me the phallic symbol on the wall behind which the cooling units purred — where a circumscribed parcel of Western affluence lay resplendent, installed by the Ministry in this earthly realm. . and beneath me I had the papers tucked between the cushions. Admittedly these were not possessions of a particularly delicate nature — at most the fact that I hadn’t delivered them was delicate, but I was as reliable an archive as a file at the Firm, the stored findings for me being even more timeless — and yet the fact of them reminded me of Harry Falbe. He had fled to the Permanent Mission with a bundle of documents, resolved, according to Feuerbach, to extort his freedom from the godlike state. I wouldn’t have thought him capable, but there was tenacity in his flimsy body, in his skull — the egg-shaped albino head with the red rabbit eyes, as Feuerbach had once described it — was initiative and guile; the other people at the embassy were pure and nonviolent, as befitting the empty-handed, but Harry had broadened his knowledge at the Firm and taken along a bargaining chip which might earn him some spare change on his arrival in the West.

They’d been more careful with me; what code names did I know, anyway (I didn’t even know the Major’s real name). . I’d had my Reader and a few other Intelligence Operations along those lines; my main task had consisted in making the mess in Sect. 20 even more hopeless. . sometimes I suffered from the fixed idea that I had been activated (I was blameless) as a poster boy for an office purge, and sometimes I had the impression that my duties consisted in penetrating Unofficial Literature in a missionary capacity, infiltrating it with my Firm’s love of literature (wherever I cropped up, all my employers were blameless). . and never had I had an inspired notion which provoked anything but laughter from my managers. — And I had no inspired notion how to make something out of the business which I had long since privately named IntelOp: Student . — My activities came straight from the cheapest training programme for bumbling new recruits: shadow a young West Berlin woman on her errands through East Berlin and write down, without her noticing, the addresses of the buildings she entered. It didn’t have the makings of a career à la Harry Falbe. .

I told myself that the appeal for Cambert, the old pro, lay somewhere else entirely. With respect to the Major — if he came to me again with a job or proposal along these lines — I was inclined to continue acting as though I felt completely unqualified for such cases. . as though I were simply too hypersensitive for them. Observing men, perfectly OK, sniffing out the Scene’s better halves, the Eastern ones, even more OK, there were even some women whose trust I enjoyed — but some hoity-toity little thing from Grunewald: impossible, I was bound to be shut down. . or rather blown wide open, which wasn’t necessarily the opposite. I decided to explain it to Feuerbach that way.

Without instructions, without the weight of expectation, it all worked out much better for me! And one day when I had enough material, I could plunk it down on his desk. . not because I wanted a watch for a present; I was counting on the suggestion to keep pursuing the IntelOp in the West. — Besides, when I performed my work in peace and on my own initiative (judiciously, as they put it), I got a much better handle on the specific quality of such an activity.