Towards the end of last April she’d showed up unexpectedly in the park-like garden of the church in Rummelsburg, and because he hadn’t passed on her portrait, along with a whole bunch of similar documents (withheld as camouflage), he was at loggerheads with his case officer nearly all summer long. — In fact, he had hidden the portrait. . hidden it so well that one would have marvelled at his distrust of life. He thought: Distrust of life’s probing rationality, which gives no weight to non-weighty things. He had folded the two pages comprising the portrait into a weighty packet and stuffed it into the gap of his chair, sinking it so deep that the fingertips no longer felt it in the tight crack.
And so he had failed to give Feuerbach a whole stack of portraits, rather than simply removing No. 30 (the student). . he would have had to type it all up again, Feuerbach simply wouldn’t believe it was possible to miscount. . It was Feuerbach who consistently encouraged him not to take meaningless things as meaningless. . — After quite a while the first lieutenant had stopped mentioning the missing reports, as silent on the matter as though it were meaningless. . but there was nothing the first lieutenant was less capable of than letting go, W. was sure of that.
He recalled sinking into depressions which confounded all attempts to finish his profiles, not only the student’s; it merely seemed to be the catalyst, and after that depression ran rampant. Perhaps because of the thought that encounters with a young woman such as she never went beyond compiling attributes to be listed in writing, estimated measurements (which couldn’t even be realistic), conjectures as to the content of the words so hard to read at a distance from her stranger’s lips, or just words such as pointed, pale, bare, which were neither level-headed nor informative. And then these ‘data’ were swallowed by an institution which was little more than an archive, so that he never saw them again. In other words, everything about this woman that grazed his five senses was prostituted to a bureaucracy. . and could end up filling entire filing cabinets; you’d have to search far and wide for such a selfless pimp.
Perhaps it was just a few sentences that had kept him from delivering the dossiers. He could have taken it if Feuerbach had learnt only that he found the student ‘rather pretty’ and regarded her as ‘rather intelligent’ (which he couldn’t prove). . but then under the heading special behaviour patterns he had described how, despite the lingering warmth from the afternoon, she began to shiver in the garden as darkness fell. Standing in the light of a lantern hung from a tree, he’d written, she closed the black leather jacket over her white T-shirt, pulling up the zipper with a provocative-looking, resolute gesture, as though she sensed that she was being watched. Now her body seemed boyishly slender; she’d concealed her breasts, which stood out distinctly against the thin fabric of the T-shirt. — Oh no, that’s practically a striptease! Some such exclamation would have been called for from the first lieutenant; W. had dozens of these quotes filed away. Oh dear, that’ll have them drooling! We can’t possibly inflict this on our venerable comrades up there, their pacemakers aren’t the newest, they won’t be able to take it.
From your prose style it’s obvious you don’t think much of Hemingway, Feuerbach commented on the reports in which W. hadn’t remained completely level-headed. Now and then that sort of thing slipped through again. . though by now he thought he had a handle on it; he’d written hundreds of reports (up until last April), and he knew how they had to look: dry and matter-of-fact!
Amid coughing fits, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth (like a screenwriter in a Hollywood movie), he pecked them straight into the typewriter, so absent-minded that he felt guilty when Feuerbach exclaimed admiringly: You’re made for this work! — He typed so quickly and unthinkingly that the pages teemed with typos; Feuerbach described this as authentic grassroots work. . for instance, in his haste he frequently wrote the word night instead of right, and the other way around; Feuerbach was enchanted by the phrases that resulted. He said W. sometimes dissolved language’s semiotic character in a way that was practically analytical. . you’d just have to watch out that the venerable comrades didn’t have a heart attack at having so much darkness foisted on them, when he wrote that the Party is always night.—W. had noticed, however, that his case officer secretly changed back the switched letters.
Now that W. was focusing on Operation: Reader, this dissatisfaction persisted; his powers of observation were impaired by the student’s presence, his relapses into sentimental prose increased, and it was found unacceptable when his reports gave too free rein to his literary verdicts. . A creative thinker doesn’t theorize, he composes! said Feuerbach.
There were occasions, though, on which theory produced quite astounding effects, W. said to himself, and he had experienced these occasions himself. — When Frau Falbe managed, for instance, to entice him into her double bed (still banking on the wisdom of the formal ‘you’), he had suddenly found it astoundingly easy to achieve arousal by imagining himself in a comparable situation with the student rather than with his landlady. When, in other words, he felt theoretically embraced by the student, while practically his landlady was clamping him tight in her bed. . and Frau Falbe seemed quite inclined to see the advantages. She had even started a conversation with him on the subject, impressing him with her theoretical insights. As she often did, she had proceeded from her ex-husband. . All he’d ever had on the brain, she said, was other women, and always several at once. Ever since then she could tell exactly when a man wasn’t all there, when his mind was somewhere else. Who knows, she said, maybe I never really appealed to him that much.
How do you know all that, W. asked, did he tell you?
He practically pieced me together out of those other women, she said, and one time, yes, he told me. But it didn’t bother me that much, I’d mostly figured it out already anyway. You ought to have the body of such-and-such a woman, and your head on top, and then the other way around, he said once, and I slapped him. But then I thought to myself, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. . and then I was supposed to have a different bust, smaller, and then I was supposed to have a different waist, so-and-so’s bust and so-and-so’s waist, that’s what he wanted. But your bottom, he said, is always just right. . Her voice had that rough, slightly hoarse tone again which he knew by now and which goaded him. And of course he wanted to know what had happened after her husband told her this. .
I know, she said, it’s just the same thing with you. . And after a while she turned on the light so he could see her. . You’re an intellectual, and you need fantasies, it was just the same thing with my husband.
How, just the same thing? asked W.
There were plenty of men who couldn’t perform with a woman, young men too, she said. Desire and capability were two different things. But these men weren’t bad sorts. It was easy for women to talk, they didn’t have to perform. She’d been married, after all, and a few times after that someone had tried to marry her, that didn’t mean she was experienced, but she knew the ropes a bit. It had been just the same thing with her husband. . Didn’t I tell you he also worked for Security?
What’s that supposed to mean, also worked for Security?
It’s almost always like that with the guys from Security, yeah, that’s probably why they go into Security in the first place.