When he was in town, visiting his mother, all these things came back to mind. That at least served to justify — at least in his own eyes — the visits of his, which had recently grown more frequent. When he returned to Berlin afterward, the tumult of the city slid like a screen in front of the thoughts from which he felt he was compounded. — What ought he to write about, if not cholera. . he, C., who called himself a writer, albeit with a discomfort of which he seemed unable to rid himself? Ought he to write about Berlin, the city everyone else wrote about incessantly? Or should he write about his years navigating between East and West Germany, which had felt like a constant shifting back and forth between plague and cholera? He didn’t know, and he refused to know. He’d come from cholera, and he seemed to have survived it, and perhaps he could write about that. .
In Berlin, very rarely, he’d suddenly picture his mother, vegetating in the junk-stuffed, barely functioning flat he called a slum, to use a modern English expression for once. Growing older and older there, regularly falling asleep in the afternoon in front of the flickering, babbling television, as though no longer equal to the unwieldy mass of the consciousness hidden within her. And he knew that from the neighboring flats too, through the thin walls, the televisions could be heard: the breathless smarm of a host, the sycophantic applause of the audience, the perpetual, witless ooh-ooh of the mob, feigning enthusiasm over the sums of money or preposterous products flogged off on the never-abating game shows.
Amid that drivel she lay there on the red-brown couch, a thing that belonged on the junk heap, while in the yellow-tiled heating stove the spent coal crumbled to ash and cold seeped in through the crooked windows. She appeared to him then as a vessel of moldering memories that were undealt with, unspoken, that no one asked for, no one wanted to know about, and that began like unused coal to decompose.
Oh, how long these memories had led a life of their own, suicidal and shading into insanity. — What was left of the old woman, thought C., had long since been seized by a ferment of madness and little by little was being ravaged. — In some way, he thought, he was bound up with those memories that lay there swathed in thick, worn clothing, buried beneath woolen, coal-smelling blankets. — In some strange, barely explicable way, I am bound up with these memories, and no doubt I dread the moment in which they’ll descend into utter confusion, flickering and vanishing into the void.
I only need to stumble on my way to the mailbox, and already everything comes back to me. My foot only needs to catch on the uneven pavement, and at once I feel cast back into that time made up of never-ending winters. Of black winters covering other winters, black and long-decayed. And I ask myself over and over what I never asked myself then: What is it that lies beneath us? Bygone clans lie there beneath us. Long-forgotten clans lie down there, clans no one now asks about, clans long fermented to coal, clumped together blackly, clans rising up at night against the life that lives on above them. Rising up like the ferment of memories, like endless tribes of memories no one knows of now. And I am, yet again, the uncounted member of a clan surnamed Choléra that once set out early in the morning, at an inhuman hour, into the cold and the darkness that lay over the coal and over the ash. Ash lay over the coal, and coal lay over the ash. And my past lies down there, I thought, down beneath the coal, beneath the ash.
And I recalled one day when I’d tried to ask my colleague Gunsch about his background. One Sunday, the day after Christmas, the watchman had brought down a letter from the section head assigning me to the night shift in a different boiler room on Monday, December 27, because someone had called in sick. I didn’t mind, it considerably shortened my way to work, but I immediately asked myself whether Gunsch had complained about my fit of rage two days before. I watched him as we worked and concluded that there was some dark thing in his obtuse skull that no light could be shed on. — No, he certainly hadn’t complained, he had no interest whatsoever in demanding any rights. He might not even have been able to formulate a complaint; his capacity to express himself was so stunted that he no longer even understood what he was subjected to, short of pure physical pain. Moreover, he didn’t even seem to believe in the necessity of disputing things. And when I thought about it, a similar reluctance or inability had arisen in me as well. — And so we’re two creatures of the dark, used to keeping silent, I thought, and there are probably few things left in our minds whose expression would give another person any pleasure.
Perhaps it’s that we’re unable to love the world enough anymore. Why should we tell ourselves things about a world that matters less and less to us?
In other eras you’d set your memories before the world, convinced they’d find listeners or readers in coming times. But no one believes in coming times now, at least not here, in the class we belong to.
At the end of the shift, while we waited to be relieved, I did try to strike up a conversation with him. It was rather one-sided: Did you hear? Tomorrow I’ll be sent off again to a different boiler room, tomorrow evening. .
There was no sign that I’d been heard. The old man had returned from the showers and sat in the common room in his coat, wet hair plastered to his skull, audibly slurping the last of his coffee from his thermos cup.
Starting tomorrow you’ll be on your own again, Gunsch! Too bad for you, it’ll be quite a slog. But I have the feeling you don’t care one bit. .
He seemed to nod. Or did he merely sink his black watery gaze still deeper into the coffee cup, turning it in the black fingers of both hands?
Say, what neck of the woods are you from, Gunsch? My grandfather was Polish too. . we might even have been countrymen if certain things had happened differently. But then we’d probably just be shoveling coal in Poland or the Ukraine. .
For a moment he showed a strip of pink gums with scattered yellow teeth in them; he seemed to grin. He’d jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the common room’s coal-dust-smeared skylight; it seemed to me he’d mumbled a few words. If you followed the motion of his thumb, Gunsch had pointed across the mine pits, the direction indeterminate; perhaps he’d pointed in all directions, perhaps he’d described a circle whose trajectory lay in infinity. That afternoon the leaden hue of the sky merged on all sides with the vapors that rose from the freezing sheets of water at the bottoms of the mine pits; ever since morning an opaque atmosphere had ringed the whole horizon. When you came up the stairs from the boiler room, there was a smell of snow and glowing ash.
Maybe you don’t have any family, Gunsch? No relatives. . no relatives left? — I’d lost my confidence, my talk about “countrymen” seemed foolish; what nonsense, when speaking of regions that seemed to have no fixed borders. — I hadn’t even been able to find my grandfather’s hometown on the map. And it had never seemed to interest him which country he belonged to. When I thought of the mix of peoples in the chaos of regions Gunsch came from, of course he was no one’s “countryman” in the strict sense. If you came from there, you were a leftover person, remembered by no one.