I could confirm that, said W.
There you go, ultimately we are, aren’t we. . they must have once had a completely false, falsified image of us, who taught them that? The cliques that are in the West now, or what? And in the Scene they’re suddenly seeing the light. Because aren’t we actually extremely indifferent. . that’s our strength, you see. Or did anyone ever demand conviction from you?
Returning to the table, Feuerbach set down the two glasses; suddenly he had a grim expression on his face. — Maybe he was annoyed at the waiter? thought W.; that couldn’t be, since otherwise he found the waiter’s absentmindedness perfectly OK. — Cheers! Feuerbach’s voice had a hard edge. Do you have the faintest notion what I think sometimes?
W., his head tipped back to drink, gave him a questioning look.
Or what I actually think almost all the time? I think the reports you give me are all faked! Don’t say anything, let me finish. . at least they’ve been faked for quite a while. You know what you’re doing, my dear man, you’re writing poetry! Yes, you’re writing poetry even in your dossiers. But you’re doing it badly, if only you’d do it right. You’re doing the same thing you do with your poetry, you only hand in the second-rate stuff. Lately your reports are second rate too, edited and watered down. .)
How could he claim to know that? At what point in the reports could this suspicion have dawned on him. . an absurd suspicion, in W.’s view. — And perhaps it was only a blanket suspicion: since everyone was suspicious, at irregular intervals everyone was placed under suspicion. At any rate, infinite grounds for suspicion were always available: the most idiotic conjectures, the most unforeseeable, it was part of the routine that they came like bolts from the blue. . for instance, it had come to light that the lists of coup d’etat suspects put together by the Soviet state security service included, among others, the name Walter Ulbricht.8—When you needed security, you also needed suspicion; that was logical.
W. could no longer recall whether he had denied the accusation. . apparently he had simply said nothing. The matter was far from cleared up. . but it was like Feuerbach to leave him saddled with accusations. He was a trained security man, and he knew the devastating effects of deferment. — And finally it wasn’t clear either whether the suspicion Feuerbach voiced might not give cause for hope — to the effect that he was no use any more because he was unreliable! — Maybe they wouldn’t even come and get him. . maybe the best thing was to hold out here at Frau Falbe’s and see what happened.
Frau Falbe came the next evening; he gave a start as the door was suddenly unlocked. — You’re sitting in the dark? she said in surprise, and switched the light on. Are you sitting in the dark on purpose? — He felt foolish; since the evening before he’d neither bathed nor dressed, his discarded clothes still lay in a pile on the floor behind the rumpled cot, he was still wearing the badly fitting, not very clean pyjamas whose fly wouldn’t stay closed due to the frayed buttonholes, so that his hand always hovered warily nearby. But that wasn’t the worst of it; he’d spent a depressive night, too lazy even to go to the pub, sleeping just a few hours at intervals in the armchair, and every time he woke up he’d sensed vividly that the intangible beast still lingered in the room. Feuerbach had reached for him from afar and dragged him back inexorably. He recalled that if he’d any reason to think the first lieutenant was in the city, he would have set out in search of him!
The evening with Frau Falbe turned into a debacle; from a certain moment onward he’d positively dreaded having to get his sexual energies flowing for her. . he was glad that all she seemed to want to do was chat, but even then he wasn’t really listening. — At one point he had the idea of suddenly telling her everything (deconspiring, that would have been the technical term). . he scrapped the idea at once, otherwise Frau Falbe would immediately have seen him as one of the people who had gone at her protégé Harry with the gun. . when what he really wanted to do was share her disgust at the story, and at some point, he hadn’t yet abandoned the thought, have her play the game of the fantasy of the thing with the gun. . Today you keep looking at me like you’ve seen a ghost, she said at one point, I think I have come at a bad time. . After a while she’d suggested that he come and watch a movie on TV. It’s a James Bond movie, she said, Harry always liked those. — A movie. . he said, I don’t think that whole espionage thing is much fun in real life. Incidentally, he’d liked that thing yesterday noon much better, unfortunately it had gone a bit quickly. . — She didn’t give the impression of concurring with his words, it seemed more that the memory embarrassed her. But she did leave him with a glimmer of hope; already at the door, she turned around again and said: Yes, me too of course. .
And then she stuck her head back in: By the way, I had a visitor last night. . You can guess who it was. . — He’d almost asked if it had been Feuerbach. — He asked for Harry. There’s someone in the room again, he said, so Harry Falbe must be back. Falbe, he said. . didn’t you also think Harry has the same name as me? — What did you tell him? asked W. — I said, Harry Falbe, I don’t know the man, I don’t have any relatives. All I’ve got is my husband, and he’s somewhere in the West, and he works for the State! — Was it the same guy again, you know, the one with the gun? — No, she said, a different one, I never saw him before. And then he asked about you. In a roundabout way, who’s living downstairs now, he asked. . I said, that’s none of your business, you’re not getting any information from me. — What did he look like? Didn’t he say who sent him? — It was a tall guy, more than tall, I thought, good Lord, the guy’s over six foot. And you could tell from his voice that he’s not from Berlin, he talked the way you do.
About the name, W. explained, that just slipped out. I really thought Harry was a relative of yours. Maybe we’re not even talking about the same. . maybe you have a photo of him somewhere?
She shrugged her shoulders; W. said he wasn’t feeling so well today, he’d have to take a walk now. . And maybe we’ll see each other tomorrow. .
OK, she said, but not noon again already! — And it sounded as though she had felt flattered by W.’s obdurate desire.
His only option for the rest of the evening was to have a bite to eat in one of the neighbourhood restaurants. He knew of a tiny pub that served fried herring with fried potatoes, an exclusive rarity that constituted one of the advantages of the capital, and there he headed. He even managed to find a seat. First, with his back to the door, he sat across from a mirror that hung at a tilt on the upper part of the wall. He barely recognized himself in it; he had to hunt for himself among all the people at the table, strangely anonymous in their volubility. . and the mirror reflected only the lower part of the door, which kept opening and admitting new guests; it was impossible to identify who came in, and he had the growing fear that at any moment he would feel the tap of a very familiar finger on his shoulder. . or at any moment see a tall figure in the mirror, so tall that it lacked head and legs. At last a chair freed up across from him; he changed places, and now had time to think.
Before leaving the room he had cleared off the desk, stowing his papers in the empty drawers and leaving only a few white, clean sheets on the desktop. Intolerable, to return and have the first thing he saw be scribbled scraps of paper, phrases typed through a faded ribbon that were summonses to meet-ups, on their backs barely legible notes along the lines of the game of the fantasy of the thing with the gun . . the fantasy of the woman’s game with the thing of the gun . . the story of the woman’s fantasy of the game of the thing with the gun. . and so on. . the structure of the genitive of the genitives — that ought well to seem familiar!