What’s he guzzling up there? I asked myself. I believe he’s guzzling dishwater! That’s a fact, he’s guzzling dishwater, he’s feeding on the leftovers rinsed from the dirty plates. . and what he spouts is mixed with solvents and twice- and thrice-used, chemically asepticized drippings. And his excretions are cleansed, and his bodily passages rinsed with ammonia and soap. . just as lukewarm and used as everything he puts to paper, and passes on, and rinses from the paper again and administers, enema-like, to the open ears of his consumers.
It’s right here, I said, pointing up at the vaulted ceiling, that I find myself under Reader’s domicile! And what would he say if one fine day his papers should vanish? I could do it easily; I’d often thought of climbing those stairs. . quietly past the lifeless flats, past those calcified mouldy honeycombs, and opening that inhabited den I knew so well, while he was off reading somewhere; I could easily learn the time of his next reading, break into his flat and grab his manuscripts. Take them down with me into the depths. . for in some unclear way those texts belonged here. I pictured myself running through the basements to whisk my loot to safety. . safety from whom? I could read them down here, in that place of mine where I felt safe, and no doubt find that these texts — read closely, line by line — fell short of the impression they’d made when read aloud.
No — maybe I shouldn’t be maligning these texts! If anything I should fetch them down here to shore me up in my realm beneath the pavement, where I alone lit an occasional circuit of guttering light. . no, I was lost to literature, I had no more business with it, nor it with me, my only business now was with security. . I persevered in this place and thought about Reader, ensconced high above me in an attic flat, whom I might — I no longer quite knew myself — some time at the beginning of this story, have designated as my rivaclass="underline" Oh! I knew all his texts, I was his best audience. . at some point someone had to notice!. . while he knew none of my work, he knew nothing of this competition! The nature of the competition was hidden, deep below him in the labyrinthine storerooms beneath the surface of the city of Berlin, where so many thousand tons of darkness were kept.
Then I lowered my finger and stumbled onward. In the darkness I clambered over piles of rubble, groped my way around twists and turns and crawled through holes in walls which emitted a rushing noise, and I came to grates in the ground through which the suffocating smell of the sewers welled. . after squeezing through a bottleneck where the passages met askew, at last I’d regained the light of several faint bulbs which I myself had once screwed in. If I could trust my experience, I was now directly below the upper end of Normannenstrasse, which opened up here in a small square and led down to the district’s wide, multilane artery where the floods of traffic rolled and the U-Bahn roared beneath the pavement. — Just a bit further west and I’d be at the end of my path: I could turn out the lights behind me, first, though, screwing tight one last light bulb — it belonged to a nearby power line I was unfamiliar with, hanging loosely in its ceramic socket — and letting it shine out.
At this point the concrete of a comparatively recent wall descended. It looked as though it had been driven into the ground in one piece and with prodigious force, abruptly severing all the passages and foundations that extended to this point. One sensed that it reached much deeper into the ground, and was long enough to interrupt the substructure of entire streets; in the light of my bulb I saw its bleak indestructible grey; it had to be reinforced concrete, immune to the dampness of the depths. Evidently it didn’t even stain. . this concrete wall had been poured for eternity.
It was here that the vast new building complexes had been erected at the city’s margins, beginning directly above me in their labyrinthine legions; they were off-limits to almost everyone.1 —Only once, for some reason I couldn’t explain, had I found my way in there. And emerging from a huge, tunnel-like gateway I’d seen but a small part of those bewildering cobbled courtyards surrounded by boxy multistoreyed buildings. I spent just a few minutes waiting for Feuerbach, who had vanished into one of the angular stone blocks. . evening was approaching, most of the countless windows were already dark, and yet I felt observed, and walked up and down at a leisurely pace in an effort to act as innocuously as possible amid these many-eyed walls, or rather as though I were here as a matter of routine. . high above me the sky turned a dusky purple and flocks of crows wheeled screeching, but these cries sank down to me with a considerable lag; it was as though the birds sought to gather in the brighter oblongs of open sky above the courtyards, as though they shied away from the black brinks of the roofs whose long straight lines cut off the light. . I was still staring up — demonstrating my total disinterest in the dark buildings for far too long already — when Feuerbach hurried up with a harried look on his face, grabbed me by the sleeve, steered me through the gateway and onto the street; I failed to notice whether a lightning-quick exchange, wordless and gesticulated, had taken place behind my back between him and a gatekeeper sitting in the dark behind the glass; my last step out onto the pavement almost felt pushed. — The moment you’re in there, you’d ask yourself if you’d ever come out again, I said, if you got. . I broke off, sensing from the quality of his silence that my loquacity annoyed him. A minute passed before he retorted: You’re better off keeping your mouth shut.
I’ll tell you a secret, he went on after we’d walked down the street a minute. Right now they’re talking with a close lady acquaintance of yours in there. Do you know what that means?
A lady acquaintance? I can’t imagine. . what could it mean?
It means we have to spend a hell of a lot of time on things you should have reported to us long ago. And it’s a pretty annoying business, am I right?
An annoying business! I remembered asking whether the matter had anything to do with ‘Operation: Reader’; he gave only a vague reply, everything had to do with the operation, or something like that; I realized I was bothering him when he was trying hard to think, and felt mildly offended. . down on the main thoroughfare he pointed his arm to the left — himself heading to the right — and said: In that little cafe there, you know the one I mean, you can wait for me there. Or did you leave the house without money again? — I could have had money enough for the whole night, and still it would have been pointless to await him; but I knew I could wait for him in the cafe perhaps three days from now.