He retained enough curiosity to engage in experiences. But it was no longer the primal curiosity, which would have wanted to know what was happening, but a sort of second-class curiosity, which sought only for confirmation of what it had already accurately surmised. Once, when Friedrich had to negotiate with the executive of an aviation company, he said to himself: ‘He will be a big broad-boned man in a new light-grey suit, with hair cut short and parted on the left, a wedding-ring on his finger, no other jewellery. On his desk stands a photograph of his wife. The telephone will ring every five minutes to intimidate me. The best quality cigars and cigarettes are shut away in the drawer, so-called “smoking material” for guests lies on the table. The functional nature of the office furnishings does not exclude a certain cool leathery comfort. On the arms of soft light-yellow armchairs, squat yellow shiny ashtrays rubbed over with metal polish. The man is conservative, a moderate monarchist. He acts the honest businessman with principles, but readily lets it be recognized that he is not stupid.’
When Friedrich entered he found his conjectures confirmed. The discussion bored him from the first moment. He could have supplied an exact report of it without having taken part. To make a change and to disconcert the executive he suddenly said: ‘Would you disconnect your telephone while we’re talking!’ The great man immediately obeyed. He pressed a button with his foot; his desk was equipped with the latest technical devices and pedals like a piano. Underneath, as if by magic, all the electrical controls came out of the floor. One saw no flex leading to the lamp or the telephone, no bell on the table, no locks on the drawers, the inkwell rested in a depression in the desk and, without the executive having to make the slightest movement, he summoned his secretary by an act of simple lightning-quick volition. Friedrich noticed how the wall suddenly opened and the secretary appeared, as if he had all along been lodged in a cleft between the bricks. ‘Would you just disconnect the circuit?’ said the executive, and the secretary disappeared in a trice and the wall was whole again. ‘We are not as electrified as that in Russia yet!’ said Friedrich, pointing to the mysterious wall. ‘That I can believe!’ answered the executive. ‘We are far ahead in Germany.’ And like a man who, out of pride at the beauty of his country, shows a foreigner the landscape and tells him the names of the mountains, valleys and rivers, the executive began to explain to Friedrich the technical secrets of his office. He said ‘our’ with the same emphasis with which the party leaders spoke of their party and the Fatherland. ‘Our installation,’ he said, ‘was completed only three months ago. All the wiring is in the floor, under the carpet. Here, under the desk, you see three buttons that light up red, green and yellow. The red is an alarm signal, the green is my secretary, and the yellow my lady secretary. If I press the wall here, the picture springs out.’ He pressed, and the portrait, which showed the head of the firm, flew out of its frame like a window pushed open by a gust of wind, and revealed a secret compartment containing banknotes and documents. ‘I need only draw this curtain,’ continued the executive, ‘and I am in the midst of my family circle.’ The curtain opened and Friedrich saw a niche with life-sized coloured pictures showing a woman and two boys in sailor-suits. In the ceiling above the pictures a small lamp burned, so that the niche appeared like an altar. He drew nearer and recognized Hilde’s portrait. It had been painted by the painter with the bushy eyebrows. He immediately resolved to find out where the Director General lived, just in case and not in order to disturb family life. ‘Your wife,’ Friedrich ventured to say, ‘is very beautiful.’ ‘We have been married ten years,’ replied the executive confidingly, ‘but we are no longer deeply in love!’ And he glanced at a shiny steel ruler as if the word ‘deeply’ were a term for a specific measure of love. He stood up again and seemed to reflect. He returned to the smooth wall, touched a yellow flower on the wallpaper, and immediately a small door sprang open and revealed the gilt back of a thick leather volume. This back also opened and now Friedrich perceived that it was not a book, but a small cupboard for glasses and liqueur bottles. ‘One can’t talk properly without a drink!’ said the executive. After one glass, he became loud and exuberant, slapped Friedrich a few times on the knee and made one of the secret drawers in the green desk fly open, revealing to Friedrich pornographic postcards and hygienic objects of an erotic nature. ‘Dear friend,’ said the executive, ‘the sexual department. Sexuality is an important factor.’ And he began to spread out his pictures.
He collected them together and became serious again. ‘Distractions are necessary,’ he said. ‘I work ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day.’ And he raised his arm high and made a few gymnastic movements reminiscent of those music-hall acrobats who give their muscles a work-out before their act, as an indication that the weights they are about to lift are really heavy.
‘The executive Herr von Derschatta,’ Friedrich wrote subsequently in his report, ‘is a good-natured man. His income is large, his family life peaceful, his industry boundless. He is incorruptible. He loves his country, for it is a branch of his firm. The conditions I set out below do not seem to me to be the last word. It would be easier to deal with him if one intimidated him. He is servile by preference.’
Friedrich wrote such reports with great care, although he knew that they had a long and devious route ahead of them and that they availed little. Even as he folded them up and put them in an envelope, he saw the many stages of the journey they had to make and the faces of the men who would be dealing with them. He knew personally some of the members of the new bureaucracy which had spread over the entire country like flocks of crows, left behind by war and revolution. He recalled their subordinate faces, on which the inflexibility of a rigid outlook conferred the traits of a cruel piety. A small envy determined their brave words and their hesitant deeds, a minute and narrow envy, the brother of an early disillusioned ambition. Friedrich recalled how all of them — photographers and minor authors, shady lawyers and small accountants, book-keepers and nervous tradesmen — had dashed for the empty office-stools about which the soldiers of the Revolution did not concern themselves. The soldiers returned to their fields, which could not yet be tilled, to the machines which were still at a halt. The others, who had written and copied manifestoes, ordinances, plans, textbooks and pamphlets during the civil war, kept the pens in their hands, the pens, the thin steel instruments, the strongest tools of power. But it so happened that the men who were at liberty to demonstrate their talents and strength possessed no talents, and only sufficient strength to shove their opposite number away from the desk with their elbows and to reappear at the desk if the other had succeeded in dislodging them. He recalled the triumph afforded him during the war by the awareness of not being a cipher like the others, and not having to disobey sealed orders that were issued somewhere behind thick oppressive walls by anonymous tools of an unknown authority. He had succeeded in cheating the register that had waited, blank and white, for his names and dates, in evading the pointed pens coloured with poisonous green ink which a hundred thousand clerks had aimed at him like lances. He could still see an official at the police station, a mixture of bull and farmhand, to whom he had handed the false registration form with a childish rage. ‘Was it really necessary?’ Parthagener had asked.