Revenge! Revenge, I thought, it could only be revenge that they’d wanted. — But revenge for what? — I still sought an explanation for the story, but there was no chance for an explanation. At any rate, there were always enough people to put together a posse! There were policemen and secret policemen, and any number of overzealous little snitches who would have given anything to play Inspector Maigret. Who even did it free of charge, just to show how much they cared about law and order in this town. How many humble citizens with windows on the street took up their posts behind the curtains at the least unusual noise? I couldn’t imagine that, of all their traits, this one might have changed.
And yet my friend wasn’t even a homosexual or a Jew, he wore his hair only moderately long, and he had no car to commit a parking violation. He was only a humble chemist who’d quit his job at the factory because he was over-qualified, and since then stayed afloat by repairing TV sets; word had gotten out that he did a better job than the official service company. He spent his spare time in his tiny apartment, hunched over inscrutable chemical formulas, painting abstract pictures, or developing his own amateur photos. Now and then he’d drink a drop too much. The anonymous letters about him received by a certain section of the municipal council described nocturnal gatherings in his apartment that went on into the morning. I had attended several of those gatherings; the way they talked about literature and music put me in a foul mood, and I went home early.
Now, when I walked past his former apartment, I looked back wistfully on those discussions; my arrogance has long since fled. The little discussion groups had scattered soon after his expulsion. And they had never come back together again, not even now. . even less so now, in the time after the system’s collapse, when it actually would have been possible: today there seemed not a person left in town who talked voluntarily about literature. Only the others, literature’s adversaries, had remained. They hunkered behind the haze of their curtains and kept the street under surveillance. But there was no one down there who was not of their ilk.
I had never succeeded in describing the town. Neither from up close nor from afar; I simply hadn’t found a way to look at it, I saw that more and more clearly. — It was he who could have pulled off this description, and in his own way, though quite unintentionally, he had pulled it off. This was what I thought when I passed by his window, behind which he was often seen puttering around; now curtains hung against the polished panes, and inside a TV flickered murkily. My friend had merely released the shutter of his camera one cold fall Sunday, and the snapshot produced at that moment had unmasked the town. Three o’clock: at precisely that second the town had frozen to an image of black and white lifelessness. And they had been after him ever since. — Maybe they’re only after the photo, I thought. If they got it, would they leave him in peace? — But I never really believed that.
I knew what awaited me in M.; I’d given up all hope for change. When I got off the rickety suburban train and crossed the station hall, already seeing several odd, loitering figures who took a striking interest in the bare walls when I passed, and when I walked down Bahnhofstrasse and turned further down onto the main street, not without looking about to see whether I was being followed in due form, then I knew that nothing had changed here. By the marketplace, at the latest, I ceased to care whether they were following me; I knew I was now in the past, in a time that hadn’t moved from the spot. I’d been unable to make out the station clock, but I was convinced that its hands hadn’t moved an iota. Fog, drizzle, and snow sank unchanged through the islands of reddish streetlights, as though even the weather were a mere expression of stagnation and the past. When I arrived in my kitchen at last, when the fluorescent tubes burned over the table, when the stove was heated, I spread out my papers in front of me. And as my perplexity grew, I began listening to the night outside.
Now and then I thought I heard steps down in the street: he, he alone could describe the town, but he didn’t, at least not as I would have done. — He was the restless spirit of this town, his presence spectral and indisputable. And when he thought about the town, it was in phrases that came ever faster, ever shorter; short-winded phrases; meanwhile he passed without pausing. They were after him, as they were every night. He fled, began to limp, I could hear it clearly; he was already flagging. He didn’t stop, he went on to the end of the street. There he disappeared, but only for a moment. He could think the town’s story only in fits and starts, without patience, without beginning and end. More and more often he stopped to catch his breath, pressing himself into an entryway, listening into the darkness. He knew they were there somewhere, listening as well. A little further. At the next corner he set down the olive-drab bag and asked a chance passerby for a light. The cigarette glowed in his cupped hand, and he walked on. After just a few steps he threw away the cigarette and ran. He came past the train station, skirting it, straight through the wet shrubs, then slid down a railroad embankment and returned to town via muddy side streets, as he’d often done before. But he couldn’t shake them off; they were always somewhere in the darkness behind him. At some point the church clock on the market square struck, like the reverberation of a second that had slipped into a coma. I counted the strokes, he did not; he ran on.
The photo he had taken years before was in my possession, and really it was I they should have hunted.
THE MEMORIES
It was an odd thing: in the night, the dark morning, he’d feel driven out onto the street again. — How should he call it: a habit, a restlessness from former times that had grown old with him? He wanted no more part of it! — For instance, he’d walk up the street to the mailbox at this ungodly hour, as he’d taken to calling it. And he knew that he was trying to avoid meeting any of the people who set out this early, between four and five, on their daily way to work. It was long since C. had been one of them, more than fifteen years, but down on the dark street, on the maybe five hundred yards to the mailbox, it was clear to him that a disquiet from that time still lay deep within. This disquiet was otherwise silent, he was quite immune to the thought of it, but at that particular hour something within him responded. . Quite automatically! he said to himself.
A single stumble, and that old feeling resurfaced: he was driven by the duty to set out into the world, and yet he didn’t want to. He wasn’t even able yet to let himself be driven. In a daze he watched himself charge onward, coughing, sucking at a cigarette; the cold made his eyes water, he felt the icy runnels on his cheeks. The frosty air blew every bit of sleep from his brain, but his thoughts refused to clear, nothing but numbness was left in his skull. The frozen block behind his brow held but one aspiration: to reach the station in time, to drop onto the red-brown plastic upholstery of the dimly lit railcar, and there, for precisely eight minutes, amidst relative warmth, to collapse.
He had to get out at the very next station. There was another stretch of road before him, still more unpleasant, as it led through the open terrain of the mine pits. The wind howled here, raising sharp, icy dust from the road’s concrete slabs and flinging it into his face. But somehow he always seemed to have soaked up warmth in the suburban train, making the stretch to the factory entrance easier to cover.