In reality what happened was this: As soon as the starter pistol was fired and I leaped forward with my rivals, I became aware of something that at first presented itself as a kind of abstract sense of obstruction. Normally when I ran this race I would have the pleasurable sensation that it was somehow tailor-made for my own particular combination of skills, stamina and ambitions. But now I felt unexpectedly at sea. My body didn’t seem to know what to do. Instead of obediently turning itself into an instrument for the expression of speed, it seemed to want to express some new idea of doubt or faltering. I felt that I wasn’t so much running as flailing. After a moment I realised that among the shouts coming from the spectators lining the track were cries of unmistakably hostile intent. ‘Five metres per hour,’ I heard, ‘There’s mould growing on your fur,’ and ‘You’re decomposing, Vogel.’ It was these cries that were thickening the air about me. If ever I wanted proof of the communist idea of the individual as a social unit, even to his physiological functions, I had it here: the sense of my comrades actively willing me not to win the race was indeed slowing me down, their words dragging on my limbs like lead weights. I caught sight of Katje up ahead of me, thronged by her companions. As I drew level with her, I heard her cry out, her delicate-featured head tilted back in an attitude of ecstatic contempt, ‘Here comes the three-toed sloth.’ The space about me felt almost viscous, the sour-ochre smell of burnt malt and coal dust mingling and merging with the hatred radiating towards me, each somehow amplifying the other, until I felt suffocated and nauseous. As I moved slowly across the finishing line, several metres behind the slowest of my rivals, I found myself panting for air and strangely dizzy. Suddenly the ground swung up towards my face and I blacked out.
When I came round (I had fainted, apparently from heat exhaustion), I understood that my long quarantine was over. The worst had been confirmed and I was now officially unpopular.
From this time forth I was referred to as ‘Sloth’ or ‘Threetoed Sloth’, and I was considered fair game for all the ambient spite and aggression that gusted about the school to vent itself on. My life became highly unpredictable. For days on end I might be totally ignored. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a storm of the most violent hostility would erupt about me. I would find myself being shoved and kicked, my books being torn from me and thrown all over the place, my nickname being chanted with the peculiar gleeful derisiveness (like the ecstasy I had noted on Katje’s face) that appeared to be one of the distinguishing features of my persecution. After a few weeks, as though the virulence of my case weren’t sufficiently expressed by these manifestations, there was a further development. It took the form of a sign: an oval paw shape, with three clawlike protruberances. It appeared first on the toilet doors, then spread rapidly throughout the school, showing up on chalkboards, official notice boards, desktops, even the classroom walls themselves. At first I attempted to erase these sloth paws whenever I saw them, but for every one I removed, another dozen would appear, and I realised this was futile. Besides, there was a sense in which I regarded them as having emanated from myself, rather than my comrades. They were the proliferant, bitter fruit of a tree that had its roots in my own being. For not only was it I who had delivered into my comrades’ hands the fateful image of the sloth in the first place, but it was also my own compromised condition as a human being that had made them so ready to seize on it and use it as a weapon against me.
At that time of collective sexual burgeoning, it was clear to me that I had allowed something poisonous to enter into this most sensitive part of myself, and in doing so to canker it. I awoke from my wet dreams feeling more anxious than gratified, my head suffused with a sickly afterglow left behind by apparitions whose superficial femininity could never quite conceal some underlying nuance or redolence of Herr Brandt. In those unenlightened times, the obtrusion of such a figure into one’s erotic dream life was alarming, to say the least.
My daytime fantasies were similarly contaminated. At first these invariably featured Katje, with whom I continued to imagine, pathetically but ardently, situations in which a ‘secret connection’ would suddenly be revealed between us. In absolute silence we would withdraw from the outer world where she was obliged to keep up the appearance of my tormentor, into a private realm of sharply enhanced intimacy in which her true feelings for me spilled out in waves of intense, radiant warmth. There, we would hold hands, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes. I would kiss her lips, feel her small mouth yield beneath mine, and taste the sweetness of her tongue. Drawing back a moment, she would look at me almost pleadingly, as though begging my forgiveness for all the spitefulness she was obliged to heap on me in the outer world. Shyly she would remove her blouse, offering me her girlish breasts with their budlike nipples. As I kissed them, I would reach a pitch of arousal. And then suddenly Brandt would appear in my mind, a ponderously scoffing presence, his face wearing that old knowing sneer, as though to say, Who do you think you’re fooling? And with an inward slump, I would feel the burden of my contagion, my brokenness, reassert itself inside me, and my brief, celestial vision would dissolve.
Given its physical effects, it was not surprising that this burden should assume a physical form in my imagination. The image that would come into my mind was Brandt’s scar. I began to feel as though that snail trail of glistening scarlet tissue had migrated from him to me, and that although it might not be visible to the eye, its presence upon me was nevertheless clear as day. This was why people had begun to recoil from me, and it seemed to me entirely natural that they should do so. I remember that whenever I was attacked, whether verbally or physically, a part of me was always firmly on the side of my attackers. If it had been possible to divide myself in two, I would probably have joined them in their assaults on me.
I had already tasted the paralysing effects of this antagonism during my two-hundred-metre semifinal. What happened to me over the next few years, as my unpopularity ran its course, was essentially an enormously drawn-out version of precisely that experience.
A deep lethargy settled on my spirit. My mind grew dull and my body felt permanently torpid. I began to see the requirements of my life in terms of immeasurable distances that had to be crossed, but never could be, so infinitely slow had I become, so that it was better not to embark on them at all. At home I spent hours at a time horizontal on my bed. I would like to say that I became self-scrutinising and studious, that I read copiously, read ‘everything’, but in truth I spent most of the time staring at the ceiling. If I did develop any form of connoisseurship, it was a connoisseurship of vacancy. I retain from that period the sense of a mysterious relationship between rooms and time. At a certain depth of immobility one forgets the ostensible function of a room as a shelter or area boxed off for some specific activity, and begins to experience it in its purer nature, as a ship transporting one across the ocean of time. The more motionless I became, the more apparent was this function. At times it seemed to me I could almost feel the slight swell and surge of that invisible element beneath me, and this was a strangely pleasurable sensation – a feeling of naked contact with a mighty power intent on annihilating everything and fully capable of doing so. I told myself that I need only lie there and let myself be carried forward for every vexing thing that surrounded me to fall away and crumble into dust. That I myself would be a part of this slow-motion Armageddon was merely an added bonus.