I had applied for access to my own files as soon as I had grounds to suspect there were dossiers on me as welclass="underline" so far my files had not been found. I registered that fact almost with relief, for the scant excerpts from other files I’d been shown — because my name cropped up in them — had exuded a boredom so paralyzing that I’d broken out in sweat. I literally feared these files — not that I’d learn they’d secretly made me out as an informer or a denunciator, something everyone who undertook to read their files had to reckon with, for the Stasi’s mind worked in mysterious ways — I feared the gruel of language, these files’ distinguishing feature, I feared the nausea, these paper monsters’ brain-rotting stink, I feared the gray type, so like that of my own typewriter, I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages.
When at last I’d finished packing my bag and managed to turn off the TV — my wife had long since gone to bed — I sat at the table and smoked about five cigarettes in a row. My breath rattled, I panted as though I’d run a marathon or shoveled a ton of coal; I drank a whole bottle of mineral water and felt as though the greater part of the fluid immediately reemerged from my brow and my temples. And yet all I’d done was take a short walk, one of my routine walks up a narrow, steep street to a mailbox into which I dropped a hastily written postcard. — In the cool night air the whole situation had become quite clear to me: the mysterious call several hours ago and those endless panel discussions on the opening of the Stasi files— those two things were directly related.
A few hours later, early in the morning, as I started my trip — first in the taxi to the station, then in the various trains that brought me to the Frankfurt Airport — I had almost entirely suppressed the thought of that night’s phone conversation. For several hours I’d tossed and turned, half asleep, getting up a few times to smoke, not daring to take a sleeping pill, which I would have had to steal from my wife, for fear of sleeping through the arrival of the taxi I’d ordered the day before. For some time my wife had refused to wake me when I had to get up early. — I’m not your mother! she hissed when I asked such things of her: I should finally learn to cope with the chaos of my life by myself. — My objection that she also lived from the money I earned with readings and events of that kind counted for nothing with her. Her voice lingered in my ear, asking from the bedroom on the upper floor if I’d been sure to mail all the letters to my bimbos, if I hadn’t forgotten any; I’d made no reply. She had two rooms on the upper floor, a study and a bedroom; I had only one, on the ground floor, which served me both for working and sleeping. . I paid the rent for this tiny house on the edge of town where the vineyards began, I paid the electric bills, I covered the rising costs of the heating oil we used in winter, but I hadn’t the slightest interest in confronting her with these things; I had my back to the wall and said not a word, I’d had as much as I could take of our constant quarrels. But my silence wounded her all the more; she took it as an affront. . I was hurt by her silence as well, but eventually felt almost grateful I didn’t have to hear her voice, in which I seemed to hear nothing but aggression. I no longer touched my wife, I avoided her, I shut myself in my study, filled with dense cigarette smoke, where late at night or early in the morning I tried to fall asleep amid coughing fits and nausea. And my coughing fits would disturb my wife’s sleep, and there’d be new grounds for a quarrel. In fact I did correspond irregularly with several “bimbos,” as my wife put it; when I was away she searched my desk, and naturally found stowed in the drawers the letters I’d received from the “bimbos,” and systematically spotted the erotic or sexual components — how to put it? — which the letters contained; she spotted them even in the phrases where they weren’t. Of course my wife wasn’t entirely in the wrong; a long time ago I’d brought back a stack of postcards from Holland that, if you really wanted to, you could describe as pornographic. When my wife noticed the stack of these postcards growing smaller and smaller, she told me to my face that she understood perfectly what kind of correspondence I was conducting; and she called this correspondence nothing less than “swinish.” I couldn’t even shake my head at that.
There was one case, though, for which my wife made an exception: Marie, who lived in Leipzig. I had known her a good deal longer than my wife, and with Marie I really had had a short-lived love affair. When it came to Marie my wife held off, Marie never came up in the tangled mass of her reproaches; evidently, in the manner of feline predators, she granted her a certain prior claim, or it was simply that, in Marie’s case, I’d been honest to my wife for once and told her about it. — I’d never told her a thing about the other so-called affairs: in those there had never been any opportunity for physical contact, nothing of the kind, and that was probably why I was ashamed; it was the shame of failure, and my wife, however mistakenly, managed to goad it within me again and again. — I noticed that now and then she talked to Marie herself: the last time was just a few days ago; and then my wife had handed me the receiver and indicated that Marie wanted to talk to me.
I was alarmed by the voice that emerged, a mere wisp, from the telephone. Marie said she wasn’t well, no, not at all, kept alive by a constant haze of morphine, but it would all be over soon now. The end was near, that she knew, it would only be a matter of days or weeks. — Marie’s voice barely breathed into my ear, as absent as though it came from another universe; the long pauses between words were filled with labored breaths that seemed deafening after her voice. — Following her last cancer operation, just as unsuccessful as all the previous ones, she was lying, her body slit, in her tiny room in Leipzig, dependent on the care of a friend, a painter who’d come to stay a few days ago, though the apartment barely fit two people. — You’ve got to see her one more time, my wife said after I hung up. If she’s even still there, you can be sure it’s the last time you’ll see her. And you’ve planned enough time on your crazy trip to Dresden and your mother. .