Such hysteresis of the genitives probably wasn’t even possible in a language other than German. In this mental language you were reduced to taking one step at a time, only to realize that you still weren’t at the goal and had to take another step: if at last you did arrive at the goal of the sentence, you already felt so entangled, and perfectly interpolated in a conspirative sequence, and possibly for ever, that you could only look back, obliterated, in infinite fatigue, to where you once had started — as though hoping for escape you’d kept chasing the end of the sentence, but this end had only revealed the full extent of the impasse.
When I thought of this piece of paper, fatigue followed me down into my basement passages. And at such moments I wondered whether the channels down which I dragged myself, with no thought yet of return, with the end speeding further and further ahead of me, were merely those of an ineluctable language. — Had I ever made a real effort to trace back the course of my thoughts step by step, with absolute precision, I told myself, I might have hit upon the source of my fatigue. And I would have stepped back into the space in which it had begun. . I was always too tired to take this path. — I remembered; it was a moment, a bare quarter of an hour, up in one of those offices of which multiple versions existed in the city, always with deceptively similar decor. . or no, it was earlier, in an office in the town I came from, in a deceptively similar room in that town: the neutral, unadorned interior went dark, and for a quarter of an hour the town’s brown, debilitating smoke seemed to have seeped inside. . for half an hour I’d done all they asked of me; it wasn’t much, just the absent dash of a signature on a paper lying in the gloom. .
Since then this fatigue had been stronger than I. . it wouldn’t let me sit to think it through in peace, to wander through its shadow, to seek the crack in it, the crack in its wall, the fissure through which sometimes the light fell. .
It was stronger; it was a caesura for which I found no comparison — only down in the basements were there moments which came close to describing the situation. I’d be standing outside the passages of an as-yet-unfamiliar house and ask myself whether I should enter here as well. And perhaps it was a door that suddenly barred my way. . when I went to work on it, it was usually already open, probably I’d forced it myself half a year ago. And when I’d turned on the light for the musty chamber before me — it too, of course, was long familiar — and now had to walk back several yards to turn out the light for the section of corridor I’d just left. . then, all at once, the fatigue would come. — I flipped the switch down, and this stretch I’d just covered was extinguished behind me as though it had never been a segment of my reality. And the memory of my steps through this reality was extinguished, the void sank down behind me in the passage. . it sank down over that brief portion of my reporting period, which I could now forget. The sudden darkness made me forget my entire being, all I had spoken and reported, and all conceivable consequences of the words and statements of mine I’d compiled and passed on. . and so that quarter of an hour that had filled an office with its darkness plunged the whole preceding reporting period into oblivion. . the numbing fumes of extinguishment descended on my origins, on all my ties from the time before. . and from the passage I’d left behind me and switched off, the I I’d served had fled, its reality fled like the result of a simulation.
And before me lay a new stretch in which I righted my ‘I’ again, seizing on the manifestations of the visible in the light I’d known so long. Slowly I regained myself as I brushed past the long-familiar walls through which strange liquids pearled in the yellow lamplight; the stone exuded acrid smells of faeces which seemed to change with the neighbourhood, and often enough I thought I could get my bearings by them. I spent most of my time in the lap of the underprivileged classes — or rather, below the lap — and here, in the depths beneath decrepit, densely massed housing blocks, beneath pillaged streets and courtyards, the foundation walls were porous and penetrable, more often and more persistently discharging the residues of human vital energy. The glittering flux from the walls told of brute nourishment; roughage, mixed with rancid fats and third-rate spirits, seemed to seep, searing and giving off dark emanations, from the joints of the bricks, and here harsh, acidic urine ate its way deeper and deeper into the ground.
I strayed more rarely into affluent areas, perhaps I only imagined I was there, and perhaps the basements of the middle cadres smelt of olive oil or vanilla. . there was nothing there but impermeable walls, clean, closed-off rooms of considerable size, empty storerooms that were more like garages, now and then bicycles or prams, empty rat traps that never snapped shut because there were no rats here. And here you never got far, you had to keep crossing the street when you wanted to move between high-rises, and then, once again, there was nothing but these clean-swept chambers in bright neon light. — There was no life beneath the high-rise blocks of Friedrichsfelde Ost or Marzahn, and in fact whenever I found my way into these basements the faint whiff of urine wafting through the concrete chambers smelt to me like medicine. — I would have liked just once to penetrate further, on into the higher cadres’ basement levels, for it was there, one increasingly heard, that the conspiracy’s true loci could be found. Perhaps you’d actually stumble across the workshop where the whispered-about mini-submarine was being built, or the basement where someone was sewing a blimp. . where the sons and daughters of the functionaries were preparing their timely getaway, familiar as they were with their fathers’ secret bulletins. . of course I wasn’t responsible for that sector — my higher-ups justifiably mistrusted me, sensing that I wouldn’t have betrayed the hiding place of such a workshop.
No, those parts of town weren’t Reader’s turf, the orbit of his readings didn’t extend that far, and so they were none of my concern. — In any case, the main thing for me lately was my interest in his texts, my interest in the opinion of his texts in the mind of a listener, male, for instance, or female; perhaps it was these very verbal sequences without closure that held the paradigms of the real conspiracy, only I was failing to find them out. — Time and again I returned to the shafts better suited to me, wandering once again down the rows of basement cells, cells indeed, barred with wooden slats or chicken wire, filled with rotting coal or stuffed with junk. . ultimately all these passages looked the same, though I had the impression that their desolation and decrepitude increased towards the city centre. — And here, too, in the same old new passage that now opened up before me, I saw expanses of standing water on the floor, dully iridescent in the dimming light, like gasoline or oil. Sometimes lines seemed to snake towards me through the deep pools, like the weird trails of creatures fleeing the light I had lit. And the vapours rising from the wet floors wove darkly about my senses and obscured my view ahead. I saw that a row of bricks had been placed a step apart through the puddles. . I had done that myself so that I could cross the water; the bricks had parted from the masonry almost without resistance; the walls were worn out, seemingly held up only by their own weight. Here and there rubble had slid into the passage as though, not too long ago, convulsions had taken place, upheavals of the earth, breaches as from major building activity. . and behind the broken walls came a trickling like urine, stale-smelling, milky and quicksilver from the vault’s greasy substrate, and more and more bricks worked loose as the swill soaked through: it couldn’t be much longer before this path was blocked to me. — But of course the piles of rubble also shielded me. . once I had passed them, I had a stretch of utter darkness before me, until after a sharp bend in the passage I came to another light switch; with the help of my lighter flame, burning faintly in the oxygen-poor air, I groped onward, seeming to hear the ticking trickle of excrement to my left and right. . but the flow from the walls let up, the harsh smells seemed neutralized, and a strangely cleansed air gained the upper hand — clearly few people lived above me now, clearly most of the buildings in the streets above me were vacant. I stopped and listened: What a silence up there. . I never heard anything in the basements, but this kind of silence was like extinction. Only rarely was the rush of liquid audible in the defective drainpipes, and when the sickly diarrhoeic fumes filtered down to me, I stopped short and pointed upward with my finger: What’s that stuff he’s drinking up there?