Now, on the short trip to the mailbox, he felt abruptly transformed to a previous state: all that had befallen him in his later life, all that had changed him, suddenly seemed unreal, a way of life forced upon him by whim or by chance, for which there was no real inward reason. Now he was every bit the half-stupefied figure from back then, hastening onwards, coattails flying, beneath the wind-rattled lamps. He hurried through their circles of orange light that scattered, shifting across the pavement. In many places this pavement was uneven, bulging and split as though something pressed on it from underneath. And he often thought these places changed overnight, and kept tripping him unexpectedly; and each time his feet caught on the crooked slabs, a strange sentence came into his mind: I don’t need to know what’s down there beneath me!
He remembered: he’d already had a restless spell yesterday. Just after four, before the need for sleep came over him, the long-familiar emptiness gaped within, as it regularly did; if he hadn’t yet been to the mailbox, he’d pull on his coat over the faded old sweat suit he wore in the house, slip on his shoes, usually without socks, and run outside with his shoelaces untied. The street was usually deserted; it would have been awkward for him to run into someone he knew in his slipshod get-up. Only a few cars would pass him, headlights on full beam, and for a few seconds he’d jog along in their light; doubtless no one recognized him, he’d left town long ago.
They raced down the street as though hopelessly late. — Those who still had work, and that wasn’t many these days, might have driven off an hour ago already; it seemed they commuted to jobs in Bavaria, in Hof or even Nuremberg, driving hundreds of kilometers, spending up to fifteen hours away from home each day. Of course, they earned twice what they could have at the few jobs here. And here they paid much less rent. But they were hardly ever home; despite the money, their marriages broke up one by one.
He sometimes had half a mind to mention these things in the letters he sent. He had this urge each time he got a letter from West Germany sharing someone’s evident gratification at how the East German towns were finally being refurbished.
There you have it, he thought, now they’re replastering the façades, and bit by bit the former Zone’s houses will cease to offend West German eyes.
In actual fact, he wrote nothing of the sort; generally, when people adopted such a tone, he let the correspondence lapse quite quickly. The messages he sent consisted of just a few inconsequential lines, often addressed to people he barely knew even in passing. — He’d write to them that he had to remember, or at least thought he had to, because the town he came from, where he’d grown up, essentially no longer existed, and his memories of this place had turned porous, with more and more holes gaping in them.
It sounded like an attempt to justify his frequent visits to the small town where his mother still lived. No one whosoever had asked. And yet he volunteered replies; his letters and postcards were composed of evasive, overcautious replies to questions no one had asked, making the whole thing even more mysterious: it seemed he was merely answering his own questions. It astonished him that he couldn’t find a self-evident reason to visit the house where he was born, that coming to town to see his mother wasn’t reason enough.
What am I actually trying to remember? he’d ask himself, back from the mailbox. — In the old days I’d have had to get up an hour ago to report punctually for the life I barely recall now. — His mother had had to wake him each morning, and by the time he appeared in the as-yet unheated kitchen, which still smelled of his cigarettes from the night before, she would have the coffee ready. — Then we sat facing each other in silence; I drank my two cups of coffee while she waited for me to make it out the door. For years, at that ungodly hour, we were this taciturn, tight-lipped couple, sunk in our separate worlds. And shut away within, we probably held the knowledge of all the nameless generations before us that had sat just like this in the dark winter mornings, man and woman, waiting mute and servile for the urgent start of the workday to part them: my grandfather had occupied this place, and then she’d sat this way with her husband, my father, and after that it was the same thing with me; it seemed an inescapable fate. — C. asked himself at times how many memories were sealed within her, in the withered, forbidding old woman’s body from which nothing emerged to the outside.
He’d feel warmth again only once he passed the watchman, when he’d crossed the dark yard of frozen grass behind the administrative building and reported to the boiler room, which was located beneath the showers and changing rooms. Only after taking over from the night shift would the frost leave his limbs and warmth return to his unfeeling face. — The night shift was a scrawny, somber individual who answered to the name of Gunsch; his first name was unknown, forgotten because it couldn’t be pronounced, and as no one called him by it, perhaps he himself had long since forgotten it. Even his time card bore only the handwritten name Gunsch. He came from a town the other way down the railroad tracks, an old Pole who, it was claimed, had been pensioned off some unknown number of years ago and pursued his job in the boiler room for no reason but avarice. But these claims ignored the fact that at the start of each winter the factory had to talk him into postponing his retirement for one more heating period. It was nearly impossible to find workers to man this old, outlying factory wing; most of the people working here were indisputably in banishment. Production Area 6 was the official name of the steep bluff that jutted, a spit of earth seemingly spared by chance, into the foggy void of the mine pits. . on whose tip, next to a disused, derelict, red-brick briquette plant, a new production hall had been constructed, painted green, with glass walls that made it nearly impossible to heat. . This factory wing, this last loose fang in the lost dentures of the workers’ and peasants’ state, was the workplace of the delinquents, the alcoholics, and those who had rebelled against the factory hierarchy, people, in other words, who had to be sent out of sight.
When C. came to relieve him, Gunsch was ready and waiting in his street clothes; their color and cut differed little from his work clothes, but now his neck and head were muffled with scarves and a military-looking leather cap with earflaps. His little face showed shadows of coal dust and ash that the water of the shower could not dispel, and the color of the coal had eaten its way into his chapped hands. He pointed his stubby black finger around the boiler room, mumbling incomprehensible explanations; C. nodded pro forma agreement to everything, and at last the old man vanished. C. climbed back up the stairs from the boiler room to stamp his colleague’s time card in the factory hall; his card had been marked by Gunsch half an hour ago with the wrong arrival time. As day broke, one saw the old man riding his ramshackle bicycle into the fog and the ice. On barely detectable paths along the railroad tracks, he pedaled away between the chasms of the mine pits; each time one wondered when the ground in front of him would peter out into nothingness and this strange black bird, forced to flap up from the treacherous terrain, would rise into the air.
When Gunsch spoke, no one could understand a word, but that was all right, for he rarely said anything of a communicative nature. No one knew exactly how and where he lived, what he did with his money, whether he even kept human company outside working hours. There was a persistent legend that he dwelled in the midst of the mine pits, in a house without electricity, cut off from the outside world, his farmstead all that remained of a tiny village that had been bulldozed because it stood atop the coal. In the middle of his garden the ground broke off into the depths, said those who claimed to have seen it; of course most of the stories told in Factory Wing 6, the raving drunkards’ wing, were wildly exaggerated. He bought his necessities at the factory’s little store, wrapped them up in burlap and transported them on his bicycle rack out into the no man’s land from which he hadn’t set foot since the end of the war. At some point in the unfathomable years of his life he had come here from the East—the direction alone seemed to convey enough about that blurrily bounded region from which C.’s grandfather had also immigrated at the turn of the century. At any rate, the German Gunsch spoke was laid waste in a way C. knew from his grandfather. Due to these putatively shared origins, he had begun to take an interest in the old Pole. Gunsch regarded all attempts at understanding as pointless from the outset. When he opened his mouth, he seemed to spout only curses, and no one in the boiler room knew the exact object of this abuse.