When he was back in Berlin two days later — after long arguments with his mother, who had realized he was serious about the move, and watched pale-faced as he packed his bags. . After all Leipzig wasn’t far, just an hour by bus, he’d told her, but his attempts at reassurance were fruitless — when, laden with the two heavy bags, he finally reached the little street again, he saw in the gathering darkness that the light was on in his ground-floor room. Probably that was why he’d walked past it several times already. . for a long time, almost all afternoon, he’d searched the neighbourhood’s short, identical-looking side streets, scanning all the facades behind the bare front gardens; he hadn’t found his building. . and he couldn’t find the piece of paper with the address in his bags. Of course he remembered the name of the street, but every time he was about to ask a passer-by, the person suddenly seemed suspicious. . afterwards he looked back on this afternoon as on an episode of madness. He’d told himself that from now on he’d have to find his way in the capital alone, he’d have to, and better than anyone else, as quickly as possible he had to become an expert at urban orientation (a resolution he couldn’t even have fulfilled in his home town). . and so he’d failed in every way on this first day in Berlin; it was a bad omen for his fresh beginning. He’d worked up a sweat in the spring breeze which blew about the not very urban-looking houses (and which wasn’t exactly warm); soon he was completely sodden and at the point of seeking the train station again. . and there he was, standing in front of his room’s lit window, standing for what had clearly been quite some time, staring into the stopgap interior of which he had a full view from the pavement. . had he seen a human form in the room just now? Now he recognized it by the gigantic, bright red plush armchair which, completely incongruous, took up the middle of the room, flooded by the light of the burning bulb. . he’d forgotten to turn out the light when he left two days ago! — Towards noon the next day he woke up in the plush armchair, and darkness filled the room.
His torso produced a sharp crunching noise when he moved against the back of the chair; his shoulders, hair and upturned face were covered with the shards of the light bulb, which at some point that night, unable to cope with the unbroken supply of electricity, had burst. He recalled that on returning to the room he’d let down the blind, then collapsed into the armchair and immediately fallen asleep.
And the crack of the bursting bulb had entered his sleep once, deep though that sleep had been; dimly he thought he recalled the explosion, breaking through faintly as though from a remote terrain. . the aerial mines exploding in the streets must have sounded like that, when in the war’s final years he sheltered with his mother in the cellar. . probably he couldn’t really recall this time; it was in the first three years after his birth. . but he vividly recalled the target of those air raids, the bombed-out industrial plants outside town, the playground and exploration zone of his childhood.
The memory of the sound of the bombs hitting is probably the idea of a memory, he thought. . often the idea of a dream’s content is more vivid than the dream itself. . and it occurred to him that he must have dreamt of his acquaintance Cindy that night: in this dream he was somehow embroiled in the fairly hair-raising story of how Cindy had had her baby. Suddenly the waters had broken from her body, in a muffled explosion like a fountain, and the walls of the room were sprayed with the slick, shimmering liquid, and the room was a closed cavern, a cramped cellar, a cell. . no one believed what was going on, her distress was ignored — and in the dream W. was among the few who wanted to get help. . but only partly; partly he was on the side of those who saw Cindy’s cries for help as a cheap trick. The dream’s clearest manifestation was the breaking of the waters. . in his thoughts a clinking spray had fallen: the light bulb!
He rose from the armchair, shook off the shards like drops of rain and raised the window blind. Light flooded in, for a moment so strong and glaring that he staggered back, blinded. — If everything had gone as planned, at the moment no one could know where he was. If anyone looked for him, at most it would be in Leipzig, presumably he hadn’t even told his mother about Berlin, all he’d ever mentioned was Leipzig. And he’d bought the tickets in Leipzig, Leipzig to Berlin and back; he’d always paid for the last stretch from Leipzig to A. separately — perhaps he’d managed to cover his tracks now.
The boss was not to be underestimated, of course, nor even the lanky guy. . but W. was prepared to claim — perhaps the dream had done this — that he was a different person since arriving in Berlin. If the boss cropped up, he’d calmly explain to him that he was set on living as a real writer now. . in fact, he was even grateful to him, the boss, for the salutary impulse, for the inspiration. All right, earlier he’d given a different impression. . since coming to Berlin he felt new-born. — The anticipated reply was utterly indifferent: Newborn? What mystical rubbish!
(But when he thought about it, that sort of reply wasn’t typical of the boss. It was much more like a later, younger arrival — little older than W. — who banked on objectivity. This arrival had introduced himself in the stairwelclass="underline" Sorry. . I’m Feuerbach!)
He was grateful to the boss for a very literary idea: one of his characters had hit on the notion of determining the time of his own birth. This character had unexpectedly landed in a big city, where he suddenly experienced himself as a synthesis — after the first spring shower which came in the night, after a downpour which cleared the air of the character’s memories of his former life in far remote territories inexorably falling to ruin. So as not to be guilty of drawing utterly transparent analogies to his terminated reality, W. had rendered his fictional figure’s memories as a kind of troglodyte existence. His character had vegetated in the rooms of a bunker complex, a legacy of the last war which no one else knew about. This complex was situated beneath an expanse of ruins that lay in a depression between the outskirts of town and large swathes of forest that rose uphill towards the east. . of course this setting was also taken from reality, but at least it was improbable, W. said to himself, and it seemed sufficiently abstruse that his character would visit the city only at night, when he crept out from his caves. And hour after hour this monster listened to a language which he couldn’t understand, which was nothing but gibberish for him, beneath the illuminated windows of the houses, where he stared from the dark into the light. . and stared anxiously at the gestures that aimed towards the outside, seemingly at him. Those inside had no patience with the outcasts who stood eavesdropping in the cold, no compassion for the phantoms whose heads loomed from the fog into the beams of light, for the shadows out there sniffing at the cracks of the doors. .