He grinned again and pointed his thumb at the floor, averting his eyes; there was a dull dog’s look in them: They’re all under the ground. .
Those were perhaps the only words he’d ever really directed at me. And I asked myself whether I’d even understood him right. It didn’t matter exactly what he’d said, at any rate he must have meant more or less what I had heard. — Walking back from the mailbox, it surprised me that I’d forgotten the words so quickly: They’re all under the ground. .
All at once I wondered if most people on this street weren’t living with similar sentiments. . Quite possibly that was the case! — Weren’t they all, in some peculiar fashion, strangers? Of course they lived together, often harmoniously in their way, within their families they shared the quandaries and paltry pleasures of their existence, but they knew at all times how quickly they could lapse into oblivion. . weren’t they all forgotten the moment they stopped going to work? — They have a view of life focused on the bare present, thought C., on bare survival, on scraping by. — That’s how they put it, you hear them say it often enough.
There was something disquieting in that: a feeling he only came to know once he’d already escaped from this existence. Ever since he’d begun to call himself a writer, he was gnawed by the suspicion that it was the lack of memories that thwarted him as a writer, that brought him to the verge of failure: the gaps in his memory, the incoherencies, the impossibility of reconciling spaces and times. .
How many times he’d returned to the flat from his trip to the mailbox and first listened for a while at the door to the small back room where his mother slept. — Was she still breathing? — Dread filled him when he couldn’t instantly hear her noisy struggle to breathe, when her restless tossing and turning on the mattress was not immediately detectable. It was a noise as though the decrepit springs were slackening beneath the old woman’s ever-lighter body and softly beginning to sing. — It’s true, he thought, her body seems to be dwindling. And one day these fatigued springs of steel, these untuned strings, will cease to sing.
For a long while he sat in the kitchen with the door open and listened for noises from the back room. Sometimes it seemed, however hard he concentrated, that not another sound emerged. Muteness slipped under the door, flowed soundlessly down the narrow corridor, and began to spread like a cool breath of air in the kitchen. There, beyond the corridor, was a hermetic chamber filled with memories that pressed dumb and dark against the closed door; now speechlessness engulfed him even in the kitchen. And muteness reigned too on the floors below and above him; nowhere in this building, inhabited mainly by the aged, was there a sound, even on the street outside nothing more could be heard. He felt he could barely breathe now in this stillness, in the impalpable substance of the stillness. It was the hour when the town seemed utterly extinct. . always around the time when he jotted down a few inconsequential lines. On letter paper or a postcard: apologetic lines, sounding as though the writer’s sole intent were to give just one more sign of life. . lines that would arrive in Berlin at some point, whose blue, shaky, dwindling script was the only proof that he existed. And that he then took to the mailbox, and sometimes this outlying part of town was so still that he feared his scurrying steps made too much noise. And then, almost aimlessly, he walked past the mailbox and on another hundred yards to the intersection beyond which the center of town lay. It was as still as though the memory of his steps, of his stumbling, had been the last possible sound in this town. But soon, perhaps in another quarter-hour — you could already hear them from afar — it would be time for the first long-distance trucks to thunder from the left down the street that cut off his little neighborhood from the town proper. Now, at this still-nocturnal morning hour, the huge freight trains heading northward to Leipzig hurtled past the residential district at a reckless speed. Gusts of wind filled with ice shards and filth lashed into him. Though he stood on the sidewalk behind the guardrail, he felt a force that nearly made him reel back into the muddy grass behind him. When the deafening monsters passed through the town’s periphery, they blew a warning with their horns; the long drawn-out howl, the blaring din of their passage, penetrated deep into the district to which, his hearing nearly obliterated, he now turned back.
He pictured his former colleague Gunsch again and wondered whether he wasn’t under the ground as well by now. What a strange grin that was, over fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, at the end of the shift when he’d seen Gunsch for the last time. Hadn’t that grin been like his grandfather’s?. . that grimace with a curse behind it: choléra! — He’d meant his clan; the coal; the darkness; he himself, a stranger to himself, ignorant of his forbears.
It began to snow again now, in late February or early March, as though winter were unable to have done with itself, and the wind blew stronger and stronger from in front. Once again C. felt on his face the icy breath he could not contend with; he saw light flare up behind a few windows in the houses, for just a few seconds, quickly extinguished. The din of the long-distance traffic entered people’s sleep and made them restless; like aimless ghosts they wandered their rooms, roused but not really awake, until they realized that it was still quiet on the street. But the traffic noise had come up against the wind, which seemed to turn stormy, so that C. had trouble making progress against it. And now it sounded as though imaginary thunderheads of din and ruin were surging through the sky above the roofs. Sometimes C. turned around to let the gusts spend themselves against his back. . he thought of the waves of ash, blazing hot, that had descended on his bent back twenty years before. But no, on the street it was freezing cold!
He gazed up at the rows of buildings: perhaps it was true that most people who lived here belonged to a lost class. — That sounded histrionic, but wasn’t it true that most of them had long since lost their work. . and thus lived without their ordained purpose? Up there, behind the black windows in the ash-gray walls, dwelled the members of a refugee class among whom he had once counted himself.
Hardly any of them knew quite where they’d once come from, and no one pondered the question. And still less did they know where they were heading. And they didn’t ask who would carry on the life and the work in which they’d had their share; that they had never asked. It had always been ordained by others. Those others derived this privilege from their ancestry. . they’d inherited this ancestry and passed it on down; by ancestry they had the power to ordain how, where, and when the factories that exhausted the land would be built, maintained, and perpetuated: by those living behind the ash-gray walls of the buildings with the dark windows. For these people had no ancestry, they didn’t think about their ancestry, they’d forgotten it, they’d forgotten their memories, their memories were all under the ground.
And though a forty-year-long attempt had been made to convince them that they themselves were to ordain the work in which they had their share, they hadn’t understood it. Their purpose permitted no such understanding, for their purpose was so much older than they.