It soon became clear that Thea only appeared to be paying attention to me — just as I appeared to be listening only to her — which made me feel as good as if it were real and complete, which flattered me; her body was light and delicate and I felt, not for the first time, that I'd like to press it into myself though I knew that it was the kind of body that mustn't be held too hard, its melting softness with its touch of firmness yielded only if we ourselves remained soft and gentle, if we managed somehow to refine and attenuate our own forcefulness; yet she did sweep me off my feet, as they say, and while giving her proof of my rapt, almost obsequious attention, I was really bent on finding out how she did what she did, how she could produce this perfectly exquisite play of appearances, these irretrievably effective situations, and at the same time always remain outside them; where was she, I wondered, when she had no more gestures under her control; then again, I too was only appearing to be as respectfully, almost lovingly attentive as Frau Kühnert thought I was: but this whole business, which in the end turned into a deadly serious game of pretenses, began at the moment when, about six weeks before this little scene in the corridor, Langerhans first led me to the small director's table and sat me down next to Frau Kühnert in his own empty chair — which he never used because during rehearsals he would pace up and down, scratch his chin, whip off his glasses, then push them back on again, as though he weren't even there and was doing something other than what in fact he was doing — at any rate, from that moment on I had been in a state of continuous excitement.
But exactly how and when she showed up at that table I cannot remember, for as soon as I took my place, a place that as time went on I found more and more unpleasant, she was already there — or could she have been there before and I just hadn't noticed?
It's possible she was there from the beginning, or maybe she came over later; either way, I had the feeling from the start that she was there because of me, and this apparent oversight or lapse of memory is but further proof that the mechanics of emotions, about which we are so curious in this novel, are obscured by the very emotions operating in us, so that we can never say anything meaningful about it; it's almost as if every occurrence were obstructed by our own sharply focused attention; consequently, in retrospect, we recall not what happened but the way we observed what happened, what emotional response we had to the event, which itself became hazy and fragmentary under our observation; we do not perceive a happening as a happening, a change as a change, a turning point as a turning point, even though we expect life to keep producing changes and dramatic reversals, for in each change and reversal, however tragic, we expect redemption itself, the uplifting sensation of "This is what I've been waiting for," yet just as attention obstructs the event, change is obstructed by anticipation, and thus the really momentous changes in our lives occur unnoticed, in the most complete silence, and we become suspicious only when a new state of affairs has already got the better of us, making impossible any return to the disdained, abhorred, but ever so secure and familiar past.
I simply didn't notice that from the moment Thea appeared I wasn't the same person I had been before.
As I say, she was standing there next to the raised platform, leaning her elbow on the table, as if I weren't even present, continuing an earlier conversation that for some reason had been cut short; as I looked at the face I knew from photographs and movies, a scene suddenly flashed through my mind: lifting the covers, she climbs into somebody's bed, her small breasts swinging forward as she does — true, she was ten years younger then, but now her looks were completely unfamiliar, like seeing the face of someone very close to us, a lover or our mother, for the first time; what I sensed was a combination of intimate familiarity and complete unfamiliarity, natural curiosity and natural reserve, feelings so strong and contradictory that I couldn't but yield to them all, at the same time pretending to have yielded to none of them, and from that moment on I paid attention only to her and nothing else, even keeping her smell in my nose, while pretending to pay attention to everything but her; oddly, she too acted in very much this same way, though for different reasons that became clear to me only much later, pretending not to notice that my face was but a few inches from hers, that she felt the heat radiating from my face, that it was really me she was talking to; of course she went on talking to Frau Kühnert, nonchalantly continuing their earlier conversation, but shaping her words, modulating her intonation so that I, having dropped into the middle of the story, would find her telling of it interesting precisely because of its bewildering incomprehensibility.
It seemed she had received some frozen shrimp from the other side, from across the Wall, from the western half of the city — this odd, convoluted reference, uttered in the rehearsal hall noisy with preparations for the day's work, made her announcement sound unreal, like a line from a fairy tale or cheap thriller, forcing one to imagine that as soon as one stepped out the door, one would bump into the wall, The Wall, about which we rarely spoke, and behind which were tank traps, coiled barbed wire, and treacherously concealed mines which a single careless step could set off, and beyond the sealed strip of no-man's-land lay the city, the other city, a fantasy city, a ghost town, for as far as we were concerned it didn't really exist; and yet the little packet of frozen shrimp did make it across a border guarded by machine-gun-toting soldiers and bloodhounds trained to kill; actually, they were brought over by a friend, I didn't catch his name but gathered he was a pretty important person over on the other side, and a great admirer of hers; when she cut open the package and emptied its contents on a plate, the shrimp looked to her like pink caterpillars which, just as the poor critters were about to spin their cocoon, a terrible ice age had descended on; she had seen shrimp before, but for some reason — she didn't know why — she now found them disgusting, they turned her stomach, she thought she was going to throw up, what was she going to do with them anyway? and wasn't it disgusting that we gobbled up everything? wouldn't it be nicer if one was, say, a hippo and ate only crisp, tasty grass? but those taste buds on our tongues were filled with mean little cravings, they wanted to taste sharp things and sour things, sweet and tart things, they were ready to burst, these buds, that's how hungry they were, they hungered for tastes that didn't even exist— she was babbling on, unstoppable; what was really indecent in her view was not people fucking in public but people openly stuffing their faces, and she finally decided, even though she still felt nauseous, to proceed as she usually did before cooking, as Frau Kühnert well knew, laying out all the ingredients on the kitchen table, nice and neat, because this way she could actually see the additional flavors alongside each other, could savor all of them with her eyes as well as her tongue, that's what's called stimulating the palate; to her, cooking was also playing, improvising, and the show must go on, not even a good puke could stop it; anyway, she decided to whip up some potatoes first, but not just some ordinary mashed potatoes, mind you, she enlivened the boring taste of spuds, milk, and butter with grated cheese and sour cream, then spread the hot puree on a big plate, scooped out the middle with a spoon, and filled it with the shrimp she had first sautéed in herb butter, and that's how she served it, with a side dish of boiled carrots seasoned with Jamaica peppers and a bottle of dry white wine, and it was heavenly! simple yet heavenly! ordinary yet quite, quite elegant, "like me!"