He would have liked then to ask Feuerbach about the two Russian words; they had never discussed them, apart from a few vague allusions. For half the month of May the first lieutenant complained about the profiles which W. was withholding from him. . W. couldn’t imagine what the superfluous stuff was needed for. — Much later he recalled that Feuerbach had mentioned a different division, evidently another section was putting him under pressure.—W. had kept putting him off, claiming he had to touch up the drafts, fill in the gaps, and Feuerbach reacted aggressively, threatening after several days of this to come to W.’s flat and tear the scraps from his typewriter.
On one of those aggressive days he waited for the first lieutenant in his flat until eight in the evening, windows wide open (it was mid-May, and chilly) in the hope of hearing the sound of the front door from up on the fifth floor. . and then he really did hear the door’s cumbersome leaf scraping across the tiles and falling to. Actually he’d finished the dossiers, apart from a few insignificant things, and he didn’t quite understand himself what he was doing. — He kept thinking about the description of a young woman which had turned out somewhat oddly. . which perhaps hadn’t ended up being entirely objective. The page was in the second bundle which he had been carrying around in his pocket back on the eve of 1 May. He’d been relieved when the handoff miscarried; after that he had tried to rewrite the passages about the young woman. . they were a failure yet again, now they seemed lustreless, lacking esprit. . they were missing something, he didn’t know what. . Feuerbach would have sniffed it out at once! — Then he’d reread the first version, which had turned out. . he hated to use the word. . too poetic. Yes, the woman was portrayed too sympathetically, without expertise, Feuerbach would have said, now the word intimate occurred to him. A certain something. . no, an uncertain something about this woman was a phenomenon (at least in his dossier), and discord always brewed in unexpected quarters whenever the word phenomenon cropped up.—W. slipped the relevant page from the stack of paper, rolled it up, put a rubber band around it, placed it in his desk drawer and pushed everything else in the drawer up against it and in front of it: pencils, rolls of adhesive tape, packs of cigarettes, cutlery, wadded-up coffee filters; then he went to a pub. — On his return he immediately suspected someone had been in the flat. . the light was burning when he came in, no, he’d already seen it burning from the street. The dossiers on the desk looked very jumbled, and possibly some were missing. . he removed the thin roll of paper from the desk drawer and took it down to the cellar.
As he stood down in front of his basement storage space — which wasn’t even padlocked, just shut with a wobbly latch — it too seemed unsuitable: How could someone not hit on the idea of a basement hiding place? His basement had almost nothing in it, just a scanty heap of coal briquettes, left over from last winter. W. gazed further down the basement passage, irresolute. . he had been left with the last storage space, the farthest away from the door. . and then he lived on the very top floor, the fourth or fifth, he’d never really counted — and so the other residents had reckoned the longest possible distance for him to lug his coal. . and the shortest one for the people on the ground floor, who of course had claimed the first storage spaces near the entrance. — Feuerbach had told him that the previous tenant was an old woman with no family, the great aunt of an officer who’d absconded to the West before the Wall was built. And one day the old lady had been found in her flat. . frozen to death! In the meantime it had gotten warmer again, and she was already semi-liquefied. . it was a story W. couldn’t let himself think about alone in the flat at night. . but of course it also reminded him of Frau Falbe’s story, of her husband who had vanished to the West.
A few steps onward the passage turned a corner, where a door had been removed, and there was another light switch. He turned the switch and saw another long, lit passage in front of him: he was under the next building. . he lived in No. 35, and here someone had chalked the number 33 on the wall, no doubt to guide the coal carriers. And the slatted doors of the basement cubicles bore the names of each tenant, but there were empty spaces too, ones left open, or ones in which every conceivable kind of junk had been stowed and hoarded. . he walked onward as though through an utterly different, unexpectedly fantastic world. . another bend, another passage, also lit, cubicles, gates, a little card with the tenant’s name tacked to each, already No. 31, he guessed. . and then onward, No. 29, more passages. At some point the way was cut off by a wall; he tried to picture the area: the grounds of a factory had to begin behind the wall. Turning back, he discovered a cross passage. . by the time he was past he had already forgotten whether he had taken it or kept going straight. Once, possibly having already passed his building again, he climbed up a set of basement stairs, went through several open doors and found himself in a completely unfamiliar courtyard, a narrow rectangular shaft, dizzyingly high, dark, with a tiny square of starry sky above it, four doors leading through the four sky-high walls, and he took the nearest one, over which a tiny lamp glowed, and immediately discovered another basement, another basement passage, perhaps parallel to the one he had come from, or heading at a right angle towards it, or at a right angle away from it, or past his house in no particular direction, or towards a cross passage that crossed a never-before-seen cross passage, which crossed another one, or paralleled it, or met it at an angle. . perhaps down here escape was possible? Who did he want to escape from, except his superior Feuerbach from time to time? And he resolved to get to the bottom of all this. . if he couldn’t find his way aboveground in Berlin, perhaps he could do so in this system down below. Was it a system congruent to the network of streets and rows of houses above him? That would have to be explored. . this could be his task for the next few days, at least until Feuerbach had calmed down.
He found himself here — or so it might seem with a bit of imagination — in the very bowels of the city. It was like crawling under the skirts of Berlin, that monstrous old hag, and suddenly seeing all that she hid from the world in shame. Down here the hag had concealed everything that embarrassed her. . and betrayed her true nature. Down here was all that remained of her whoredom with the changing systems. . here she’d hidden her cast-off fetishes, here the languages of her past were buried, in the bundles of old banned newspapers, for instance, Wilhelmine, nationalist, democratic, fascist, Stalinist, post-Stalinist. . down here in the dark the corrupt old paper phosphoresced like unwashed undergarments. . and down here the dead and the undead walked, amusing themselves with the remnants of their erstwhile obsessions. And here lay the city’s unhatched eggs; no one knew what might yet crawl out of them. And here the city’s excrement rotted. — After a week spent searching the passages beneath the city for a place to hide his little roll of paper, he happened upon a space that opened out in a cone shape, ending at a visibly new concrete wall. Up in the wall he discovered a still-usable light-bulb socket, and a stable wooden crate lay nearby. . This, so he thought, is a safe place to think things over. .
(Once C. had had a bad dream, he’d forgotten when and where he had dreamt it: he had lost his body. . at least it had been transformed into some sort of mass which at that moment seemed completely unacceptable. Something slimy, slickly gleaming, brown, excrementous, and he’d kept casting about for an apt expression. He hadn’t detected any smells, but they were in the words he used, the whole dream was filled with the bitter taste of foul words he felt forced to repeat and repeat, not only because he forgot them again immediately but because he had to bury all public and conformist language regimes beneath them. He had crawled down passages, or perhaps it was just one straight passage, very low, and yet he’d moved forward unimpeded. . or rather he had been moved, it was a ploughing forward, slipping, sliding along an inclined shaft — a mining term, as he recalled from earlier days — on the slope of a passage that ran deeper and deeper into the earth, a square channel about a yard or a yard and a half on each side. There was light, glittering, and the walls were slurried and indistinct, seeming to consist of a loose, slimy substance that kept sliding along with him, he was a part of this substance, brown to black, and like a chameleon he blended in with each shift in the colour of the walls, all the while gliding or being propelled along. — At first he’d been appalled by the words in his throat, then they came to seem normal to him, until finally he was intoning them rhythmically, and soon they sounded like someone pounding at a typewriter: ex-cre-ment-ex-cre-ment-ex-cre-ment. . Words such as shit, crap, crud struck him as innocuous and inapt, it was only the two old-fashioned terms excrement and faeces that expressed the full import. And in his dream he carried on with his rant and kept on moving these words even after waking: Faeces all around me. . I am excrement. . Code Name Faeces. . Code Name Excrement. . — The words slid out of him without resistance, as though they consisted of the stuff they named. — And suddenly Feuerbach had woken him with the words: It can’t be all that bad. .