Perhaps it was as though an old dark deity governed them, a deity of the underground. It was a black god from endless past times who had altered them; he had altered their bodies and their minds, their hearts, their tongues, and their organs of procreation, he had altered the blood in their veins, in them it flowed a distinct touch more darkly and slowly, as though they all descended from that dark deity they no longer recalled. .
They dwelled on above in the stifling air of their rental tombs, the damned who couldn’t wake up after nights in which idleness kept them from sleeping. They had failed, they had little love for the world; when they gazed back, there were their fathers, their forefathers, but they were barely discernable — they had lived in the same shadow. The factories were closed, keys rusting in distant safes in Munich or Dortmund until they were sold to a demolition firm. If they were lucky, and not yet too old, they might find a job driving one of the long-distance freight trains transporting rolls of pink toilet paper or tins of condensed milk from Munich to Leipzig. — And looking ahead, they shuddered to think of their sons who went about with shaved heads, in combat boots and black bomber jackets, staring with alcohol in their eyes into a future that was none. .
C. sat in the kitchen and listened to the wind, which made a soft, often polyphonic howling sound in the old building’s flues. The fire in the heating stove had gone out; the cold could be felt, barely held back by ill-fitting windows. A murmur seemed to come from the neighboring apartments, the few of them with young people, cars started on the street, but the stillness of the kitchen went untouched. — Once, too, there were steps in the stairwell; they padded through his half-sleep, and he raised his head. He wondered if he’d heard the sound of the front door closing. . just once, before the cars started up on the street; the sound was so familiar that he might easily have missed it. Or perhaps he’d only imagined the soft, shuffling steps in the stairwell. And then another door clicking into place, the door of the flat, just as familiar a sound. It seemed he hadn’t fastened the safety chain to the doorframe, he’d forgotten. .
And he’d left the door unlocked when he went to the mailbox. Afterward, he’d returned to the apartment with the absurd suspicion that someone had been there in the meantime. The smell of a stranger hung in the chilly air. There was quite clearly, almost too clearly, a muteness in the silence that was not his own muteness. Once again, for several minutes, he’d listened at the door of the little back room: not a sound had emerged. — Dark and bowed he stood holding his ear to the gray-yellow wood: in the room behind the door it was still.
What memories are sleeping, sleeping on behind that door. . for how much longer? And after that I fell asleep at the table myself, deciding to postpone my trip to the mailbox until the next day, he thought. Or I only thought I did. And I only thought up the steps in the stairwell, they padded solely through my imagination. And then I thought I saw a shadow, dark and bowed, in the kitchen doorway, making a grotesque attempt to grin and saying:
They’re all under the ground. .
The words were hard to understand, like a noise I’d left far behind me, and they were swallowed by the stillness. Or drowned out by the town as it awoke at last.
THE DARK MAN
Best of all I seemed to remember the phone call with which the story began. The voice came from a pub, around ten in the evening, I heard the unmistakable background noises: a babble of voices, laughter, clinking glasses. I was not in the mood for a phone conversation; I was packing my suitcase with the TV on, and my relationship with my wife had reached rock bottom more than a week before. At first I thought it was a wrong number, I even hoped it was.
I’d like to see you, the voice declared, won’t you come over? — It was a deep voice, if not exactly a bass, and might have been described as melodious had it not spoken so execrable a dialect, made still more distasteful by the evident effort to speak High German.
Where am I supposed to come. . and who wants to see me?
To the pub Zum Doktor, you must know the place. I’ll be waiting for you at the bar.
Who wants to see me, is what I asked. And why, who am I dealing with here?
He didn’t want to tell me on the telephone: Come on, you’ll find everything out soon enough, half an hour might even do the trick. .
When I said nothing, he grew more insistent: I have to see you, it’s imperative. . come on, do me a favor!
But I don’t have to do anything. . what’s the matter, anyway, what’s this all about? — It struck me that he avoided the word “meet,” using only the word “see”; I felt there was impatience in his voice, just a few shades away from a tone of command.
Can’t you tell me what this is about already! If you don’t tell me who I’m dealing with, what the matter is, I won’t come!
That’s a shame. . that’s a real shame! Nothing’s the matter, I’d like us to have a few beers, it’s on me.
I don’t drink beer, I don’t drink alcohol at all. .
Oh! Then you’ve changed quite a bit, back then things were very different. .
This was dragging on and on; at intervals we both fell stubbornly silent. — You won’t tell me who you are. . what this is about. — I sensed that all my questions were pointless.
If you have a beer with me here at the pub, I’ll tell you.
Would I recognize you? I asked.
No, I should hope not. — Again he hesitated; by now I was shifting from foot to foot.
But it’s sure to interest you, he went on, very much indeed. You are that writer, aren’t you?
Don’t act like you don’t know exactly who you’re dealing with. How about you tell me who I’m dealing with?. .
You don’t want to see me! he said, not sounding too disappointed, more contemptuous.
No, I can’t, I don’t have time. I’m flying to Dresden tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to get ready.
You really aren’t coming?
No, goddammit. .
Then I’m sorry to hear that, said the voice, a shade deeper. He didn’t hang up at once, clearly waiting for me to change my mind. For half a minute I heard nothing but pub noise; the place must have been packed. He coughed into the phone — a heavy smoker — but didn’t say a word. I heard him breathe laboriously, as though following physical exertion. I said nothing more either, finding the silence almost menacing. He cleared his throat, fastidiously, it seemed to me, and hung up.
Who was that? my wife asked. I was astonished; she hadn’t said a word to me for days. Sitting in the kitchen behind the open door, she’d heard the entire thing.
Some crazy guy, I said. A nutcase who wanted to ask me to some pub. I don’t know him. .
Maybe you’ll figure out who it was. Didn’t you recognize his voice?
No, that’s the thing, the voice didn’t sound familiar at all. He was going to tell me who he was in the pub.
He definitely wasn’t crazy, she said. He wasn’t going to reveal himself except in public. Didn’t that strike you? — That was an intelligent remark on her part; incidentally, I called her “my wife” only for simplicity’s sake. We’d been living together for several years, for better and for worse, for some time now much worse, and thus far I’d refused to be chained down by marriage.
That evening it was taking me especially long to pack my suitcase, and it was straining my nerves still more than usual — for fear of forgetting what I needed most, I regularly packed much too much unnecessary stuff — because I was constantly distracted by the inescapable jabber of the television, which had driven my wife into the kitchen. I felt a vague obligation to watch or hear what had been playing out on screen for more than an hour; it was one of those panel discussions — a so-called talk show — where people tirelessly, exhaustively, with exhausting repetitions and barely comprehensible fervor, debated a topic that for years, at least three years, I thought, had refused to go out of fashion: it was that the government had opened the archives of the defunct GDR’s demised state security service. — How long the list had grown of the prominent figures, or self-appointed prominent figures, who were suddenly exposed as informers for that security service, or who, preempting the publicity, exposed themselves, which of course made them still more prominent. It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurring torrents of verbiage; no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television. The writers talking on screen about the opening of several tons of Stasi files, talking it up and down — I knew several of them well, was even friends with them — seemed bent on making it the central theme of their literary lives. . Ah! I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! — And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives! And I wondered if they got fees for talking on television about Stasi files and Stasi informers. . I didn’t know, so far I hadn’t taken part in any of these discussions. . and I wondered whether the exposed Stasi informers who occasionally took part in the discussions received their fees as well. — No, they wasted not a word on what was happening with the earth, they didn’t mention the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer. Not a word on global climate change, the now-undeniable melting of the ice caps, the contamination of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect that would inevitably bring undreamed-of catastrophes: their sole topic was the Stasi files. . And no doubt they’re perfectly justified, I thought.