And what does that have to do with me? asked W.
Well, she said, they’re all intellectuals there at Security, my husband talked about that sometimes, he said, we’re all at Security because we can’t get anywhere with women. Because we can’t get anywhere with people at all. All we can ever do is investigate people. Yes, I could really see that with my husband. Then he said: But I’m not like that, and I’m leaving Security now. Of course they wouldn’t let him go. .
And what did he do then, then he went West?
Yes, it was before August ’61 still, we’d only been together two years. . I didn’t think about all that until later. I could tell he was like that after all, he always wanted to try everything out with his hands.
W. wanted to hear what her husband had tried out.
It seems like they do everything with their brains there, she said, and really letting go, that’s also something they can only do with their brains. Foreplay, my husband once said to me, that’s the real thing for me, that’s just like my work. We only ever do foreplay there, that’s much more exciting. Then he wanted me to kneel down in front of him, on all fours, he wanted to see everything, for example. He always wanted to see everything. . Watching, he said, that’s the thing. . Or he wanted us to play with ourselves and watch each other.
Back down in his room, W.’s fantasies about the student kept going through his mind. . and it was as though Frau Falbe had given him the cues. Was this because of Frau Falbe’s eternal formal ‘you’, with which she involuntarily created a distance between them?
(As in a conversation with that young woman from West Berlin, he thought. For C., the reserved manners she displayed placed her in a certain lofty class of human beings. The student had erected a virtually insurmountable barrier in front of the informal ‘you’; could it be that she came from high society? At any rate from different, more sophisticated spheres, or so it seemed to him. . C. had observed only one person who had surmounted the barrier to her informal ‘you’: the writer S. R., in his eternal pastoral black. All the other denizens of this primitive, vulgar territory, for which the oddly uptight term ‘domestic’ was used when trying to avoid long-winded explanations or politically conformist abbreviations, all the rest held to the formal ‘you’ and regarded her as rather fey. And of course that was exactly what made C. want to jump her bones. .)
On the way to the tram, and during the three stops to the S-Bahn station, he thought about Thomas Mann, of whom he’d read in a magazine — a Western magazine; now that he was active in the Scene, such things came his way now and then — that he too had been a man of foreplay. And for this reason the writer of the essay described Thomas Mann as a true artist; Thomas Mann too had always been concerned with the interplay of approach and withdrawal. These thoughts had a comforting effect on W.; he owed them to his landlady.
But soon his anxiety seized him back: about to cross the station hall, he saw, in the crowd spilling from a just-arrived train, a figure who towered more than a head above all the others. He let the crowd wash him to the edge and the lanky guy pass him with the main flow, then followed him out onto the square in front of the station; he saw him lingering by the tram, evidently undecided whether to walk the three stops.—C. circled the longlegs and planted himself in front of him; it took a moment for the tall man to lower his eyes, his face showing neither surprise nor even a hint that he had recognized C., frozen in unchanging displeasure, or rather irreversible resignation.
So you don’t even know me? asked C.; and when the other made no attempt to answer: Where do you think you’re going, what do you think you’re looking for here in Berlin? You wouldn’t be heading to my landlady, by any chance, or who are you supposed to snoop after, you goddamn crooked question mark? Say something already!
Indeed the lanky guy was oddly hunched, but still said not a word, his resigned expression intensifying.
No doubt you’re after a certain Harry Falbe! said C., unconsciously striking a tone Feuerbach sometimes used.
I said right from the start that we’d get caught here! The lanky guy finally found his voice.
What did you say, who did you say that to?
The boss, who else. . it’s the boss I said it to. In Berlin we’re guaranteed to get caught some day. .
So: Who is it you’re looking for, now? C. repeated his question; they moved apparently unthinkingly towards a little park where a few benches stood under trees that still looked bare, their bursting buds just beginning to show.
I’m not looking for Harry, explained the lanky guy, we know we’re not going to find him here. . we can’t find him at all, it’s like in the movies, he just went to ground.
How can anyone go to ground here, said C., if you want to go to ground here in this country, you’ve got to burrow like a mole.
You’ll laugh when I tell you. It was in that old industrial site out of town, you know the place. That’s where he suddenly went to ground, simply vanished, we’d surrounded everything, a whole police unit, and the criminal investigation department, they worked with military precision, I can tell you, and suddenly, I didn’t see it myself, but the boss was there. . it was like he’d dissolved into thin air.
That can’t be hard for Harry Falbe, said C.
The lanky guy was relieved to see that C. was taking it all in good humour. — Yeah, he said, that was one skinny son of a bitch, you could blow him through a window shutter, the boss always used to say, that’s how airy-fairy he is. . but not airy-fairy enough to blow through that cordon of cops. .
And what’s with you, don’t you fit through the window shutter? asked C., How come you were looking for him, anyway?
We always suspected that he wanted to bail out. Anyway that’s what the boss thought, Harry was always just about to flip. Then suddenly he was back again 100 per cent, with the wildest stories up his sleeve. . he always had contacts in Berlin, you see. If you want I can even tap into the intelligence service over there, those were the kinds of big ideas he got. Or he wanted to join Sect. 20, he was always saying. But he just wasn’t reliable, he wasn’t consistent. The boss said, Sometimes you really do think all he wants is to go West, and for that he’ll do anything. That’s probably what got him down, constantly having to run around with the legend about wanting to defect, and then not being allowed to do it. . and so then he overdid it, and people thought, hey, he really does want to bail out. No, he wasn’t reliable, he had too many shady connections to people in custody, no surprise with him. You really couldn’t always tell what side he was actually on. .
The lanky guy had suddenly turned talkative; they were sitting side by side now on a bench under the trees on the station square, and they must have been a strange sight to see; the cool dusk came, but they seemed determined to talk on into the night.
You for example, the lanky guy went on, we knew everything about you from Harry, every word. . only the most important thing, that we didn’t know. .
What was the most important thing? C. asked.
Well, that this kid wasn’t even yours, we didn’t know that, the lanky guy said with a touch of surprise in his voice. It was his kid instead, we didn’t know that.
Since when does the Firm lack access to these sorts of documents?
His girlfriend put you down as the father, back when she was in prison. .
What an honour! said C.
But then it came out, suddenly she claimed not to know any more, or she said she’d made a mistake. And now. . you really don’t know why Harry was a wanted man?
Just say it already!
Because the kid has vanished. . vanished without a trace.