If you open your mouth, you must go on.
If you’ve opened your mouth, you can repeat.
Helmut Heißenbüttel
Filled with anxiety, on the 20th of February, the stoker H., his night shift just finished, boarded the factory bus waiting at the entrance to the small, outlying unit of the operation where he worked; behind him the driver instantly closed the doors with that familiar hiss and, before the stoker could find a seat, launched into his habitual maneuvers, backing and swiveling on the narrow, barely lit road between the railway embankment and slopes plunging deep into old lignite strip mines with a nonchalant routine that made a mockery of safety precautions. The heat inside the bus, saturated with the conglomerated effluvia of the work gang that it had spat out at the factory entrance, made the stoker momentarily forget his destination; touched with wonder by these smells—left intact by a smidgen of soap—of featherbeds wrestled with all night, he sat cushioned by his seat, tracing the top notes of the fragrance, perfumes shed by the three or four secretaries or coffee ladies who arrived at this early hour; usually those scents were like stray hints of phosphorescent rouge vanishing in a mass of dark, blurred faces, but today they seemed to float above the bed smell with special vigor and variety; this was a moment when the craving for a cigarette always overcame him, making him flout the no-smoking signs; behind the back of the driver, whose silence in the face of this daily transgression suggested tacit consent, he started one of those expensive filtered cigarettes he saved especially for such moments.
Heading home after the night shift, the stoker was generally the sole passenger as the bus made its trip back to town, since his unit worked on the single-shift system; each morning, enclosed in the vehicle’s warm interior, he felt liberated as he left the small complex, the one located farthest from operation headquarters, where he passed the night alone but for an ancient porter who rarely ventured from his gatehouse, the loneliest imaginable graveyard shift worker in surroundings he described with the antiquated word spectral. It didn’t bother the stoker at all, the way the driver took the bus at breakneck speed over enormous potholes, so deep and wide that the bus seemed to lift off for moments at a time—fortunately, it was an extremely robust Russian model, but with its snub, tall body atop the spring-loaded chassis, it lurched all the more madly—while the poplars along the dropoff into the mining pit flew past like fog and the headlights glared into the darkness, there being no streetlights out in this wasteland; the stoker was used to this morning race against the vigilance of the railroad crossing guard, knowing that just minutes after the workers got off the bus and he got on, the boom gates of the railroad crossing where the road ended—next to an abandoned train station that years ago had served a village since fallen prey to the strip mines—would close to let several trains pass in succession; already the old station’s blind windows were gleaming in the headlights, the bus swerved with dizzying speed around the building; too late; as so often, it stopped with a jolt at the lowered boom gates.
The driver let out a curse, loud but resigned, turning on the radio just as the 5:30 news began; too late; at 5:30 sharp the gates had to be closed. Now, as so often, he’d be twenty minutes late delivering the next load of passengers, the newly built foundry’s office staff, to their workplace. Turning his head halfway around he asked: Anyone have a cigarette for me. — The stoker went up and offered the driver a filtered cigarette, reason enough to treat himself to another one. — Can you take me as far as the foundry, he asked as he gave the driver a light, I want to pick up my year-end bonus. — Oh, the year-end bonus… the stoker couldn’t fail to hear the driver’s spiteful sarcasm. I get it. But today I’ve got to make a little detour, he added, well, let’s get a move on, then… — He was practically yelling; at that very moment the first freight train was thundering past. — A detour… the stoker echoed; taking his seat again, he hoped the detour would mean that he wouldn’t have to greet his superiors, who got on at the entrance to the main factory, that today they’d take a different bus to the foundry, sparing him from sitting next to the factory’s chief heating engineer whose pleasant small talk would make it virtually impossible to dispute the year-end bonus with the friendly old man once they got to the office.
As in years past, the workers in the support divisions were the last to receive their year-end bonuses; the scuttlebutt among the stokers—nothing could persuade them otherwise—was that they had to divvy up whatever was left over; H. perfectly understood the driver’s sarcasm: by the time the stokers were paid their share, the other divisions’ festering dissatisfaction over the amounts received had already filtered through. Over the past two or three years those amounts had continually decreased, though the annual plan targets kept rising and the plans kept being fulfilled: gone were the days when, in February of the new planning year, you’d look back triumphantly at the past year with a pocket full of cash far exceeding a month’s wages, and with a beneficent smile you’d set down the obligatory two percent thereof in the account for the union’s solidarity fund, or even decide to increase your donation. All that was a thing of the past; everyone knew that for the past several years the plans were being fulfilled only by working more and more overtime, that the targets kept being raised by planners apparently unconcerned with how they’d be met, while, for some reason, the year-end bonuses failed to keep pace.
A third, unending freight train trundled through the darkness, gradually picking up speed; the lampposts and buildings outside were enveloped by tatters of vapor descending and whirling back up again; a fine, indistinct rain seemed to dance through the cones of light; at last the boom gates rose and the bus driver coaxed one first, fizzling howl from the switched-off engine. At that very moment the stoker thought he heard an inexplicable grinding crunch behind him; again the engine revved up and died, and the driver, judging by whimpering sounds softer than the pop music on the radio, made cautious attempts to start it up again; right in the pause between two songs the stoker heard another crunch behind him, grinding hideously now, unquestionably behind his back, so loud that later he’d couldn’t have said whether the driver oughtn’t to have heard it as well; just as the bus started up with a roar, the stoker clearly felt a dull, soft impact behind him, noticeable only as a jolt to the bus floor; he looked around in alarm, but saw nothing but the seat backs and aluminum bars of the bus’s empty interior. In the evident absence of any threat, his shudder died away, but in searching for an explanation, he suddenly seemed to realize: it was unmistakable, preternaturally clear, that what he’d heard was the loud—in his ears, deafening—grinding of teeth. That thought made him spin around again, but there was nothing in the empty bus to indicate so awful a noise.
We’ve got to pick someone up, there’s another guy who wants his bonus, the driver shot that belated explanation over his shoulder, and as a huddle of barely familiar farmsteads appeared, the bus, having traveled tortuous, virtually unnegotiable stretches of road between villages and fields, came to a stop at a highway ramp and the front and back doors opened with the familiar hiss of compressed air. The light of a streetlamp struggled through the morning darkness that only seemed to grow denser, the howl of a storm drowned out the idling motor, snowflakes sped through the swaying spaces of light outside the doors of the quivering bus in what seemed a furious attempt to infiltrate the warm interior. To H.’s mind, the driver was waiting far too long for the other passenger who was apparently supposed to show up; damp cold flooded the bus, and H. listened as the storm seemed to grow stronger, possibly portending winter’s late return, a nasty cold snap that would call for working weekends again; he heard the storm whipping at trees and loose fence pickets, the door panels rattling, the groaning and scratching along the sheet-metal exterior that often seemed to mask the infinitely weary work of human strides; at last, with mute abruptness, the driver slammed the doors shut. At that moment, in one plexiglass pane of the folding back door, the stoker saw an old, wrinkled, yellow face with bulging eyes pressed outside against the pane, the cry of a gaping mouth broke off inaudibly; leaping forward, the bus wiped that face away; the stoker thought he’d glimpsed a likewise yellow, scrawny human hand clutching vainly for a hold, but also instantly falling behind.
Later, the stoker could have sworn that he’d leapt up and rushed to the back window, but saw nothing but snow whirling over the road as it vanished into the darkness; that he’d sat back down again and, staring at the driver’s utterly unperturbed back, tried for a long time to shake off his horror. No doubt about it, his sleep-deprived nerves had conjured up hallucinations; fortunately the driver didn’t seem to have noticed the way he’d jumped up like a crazy person…but what if he hadn’t jumped up, what if even that had been a hallucination.
It’s no good, we’re not going to make it, no way, the driver yelled, that damn railroad crossing… — Now, on the level highway surface, he seemed to press the gas pedal down to the floor, and at full tilt the vehicle lapsed into a steady sort of song, alarming the stoker; the headlights of oncoming cars flashed like lightning through the bus’s carapace as it raced toward a bright streak visible at last over smokestacks, the town of M. looming on the horizon. Fear suffused the stoker’s limbs; the recent snow flurries must have left the asphalt damp and slippery, but the driver’s self-confidence seemed to keep growing; once, overtaking a freight train, the bus grazed the branches of the cherry trees on the left-hand shoulder, not with the usual scraping sound but with a lashing crack that the driver acknowledged with a loud laugh. Fortunately, they could already see the outskirts of M., and the hair-raising pace had to be curbed. — Now the stoker realized that he was huddled in his seat dissolved in floods of sweat, as though he’d lost his senses; he barely registered the bus’s erratic journey through M.’s labyrinthine streets or the driver’s curses as detour signs kept looming; he’d barely noticed that they’d stopped for a few seconds by a front garden in the neighborhood of Z., that the bus doors had swung open again, nor could he have said whether anyone had gotten on or off. Later he thought it possible that during that stop he’d heard behind him the shy greeting of a porter, an old man of his acquaintance who, due to his infirmity, had had himself transferred from the stoker’s squalid unit to a different job. Had the old man read some kind of horror in the stoker’s face, was that why his greeting had come out so shyly… The stoker shook his head at himself and sat up straight in his seat; the singed filter of his cigarette lay at his feet and he felt a painful burn-blister on his index finger. Maybe he’d just imagined the old porter’s good morning, due to all the times the frail voice had greeted him when the bus stopped at that garden gate in Z. Could it be that sleep had overcome him on that careening bus ride… The stoker was too exhausted even to glance back and satisfy himself whether anyone was sitting behind him, whether anyone had gotten on or off. At last the bus stopped next to a sullenly waiting crowd outside the gate of the main factory in M., the doors opened, and with a hubbub of voices the stampede for the inadequate number of seats began.
He’d been mistaken, then, in assuming that the managers wouldn’t be taking this bus out to the foundry. The seat beside him was free; in a moment the chief heating engineer, the foreman, would get on, and the stoker could only hope that a younger worker would be quick enough to grab the seat first. He sat up straight again and glanced at the glass pane beside his head, but it was already gray outside, and the window barely showed his reflection, all he could make out, in a patch of sallow yellow, was the black of the deep furrows reaching toward the corners of his mouth; his skin’s yellow hue alarmed him, my God, he thought, that’s a madman’s face leering at me. And what possessed me to go all the way out there just for that bonus. — He knew it was the managers’ duty to bring him his bonus at his work station. But he also knew just why he was going there, and in fact it was customary for the stokers who worked scattered throughout the operation to pick up their bonuses themselves…as if the fastest ones would get the biggest bonuses, H. thought scornfully. Anyway, they’d just have sent a secretary, and what good was a secretary when the point was to use the expected solidarity donation as a way to send a message. — The doors of the packed bus had finally closed, and he was sure that the gray-haired foreman hadn’t gotten on; his face, always cheerful even at that early hour, was nowhere to be seen. The old foreman was unpopular among the younger bosses; secret turf battles were supposedly raging among the leadership of the heating department, but so far the old man had held his ground, though he was regarded as phlegmatic, indeed unreliable, tending to take the stokers’ side in disputes; when there were technical problems and everyone looked in his direction as though expecting a miracle, he’d declare with eyes half-shut: Now listen, you know I actually retired ages ago… but H. knew that appearances were deceptive and the old man with all his experience would be hard for the unit to replace. — Morning—this greeting, both vowels precisely stressed, met him from the side, together with a whiff of stale alcohol that made him flinch. Next to him sat a young, black-haired man, one of the several hundred Arab coworkers who’d been assigned to the factory over a year ago, all reputed to be lazy bums; indeed, so far the operation seemed to have failed miserably at getting the young North Africans to come to work five days a week; they were unable to adapt to starting at the set time of 5:30 AM, and it seemed impossible to convince them that the assigned tasks genuinely needed to be performed. When the stoker’s colleagues had predicted as much, he’d taken it for malicious cliches: They’re all lazy dogs, they’ll never learn to work. When those camel drivers come, we’ll have to do their work on top of our own. — H., who’d defended the North Africans, discovered that it was true, they had no intention of sweeping the control rooms or storerooms several times a shift; he admired the discipline with which, generally right after breakfast, as though by mutual agreement, they vanished without a trace. — It tasted real good last night, that German beer, his black-haired neighbor explained, Germany’s hard to take, lots of work, no hospitality, but beer is good, very good, and that bonus yesterday, year-end bonus, lots of money, lots of beer… — Solidarity, thought the stoker, not much year-end bonus, not much solidarity… — He felt weariness in all his limbs, his anxiety at what awaited him had turned to leaden weariness. — I could have gone to bed ages ago, surely they’d have brought me the damn bonus to my apartment in the afternoon… in the afternoon, when, having just gotten up, he’d still have been tired enough to spinelessly pay the donation they demanded. He sensed that his courage to create a scandal—as he called his plan—had vanished, because he knew it wouldn’t alter his situation. All he wanted to do was call attention to the working conditions in Plant 6, or rather, less sweepingly, to his own problems in that remote unit, but that would require an incident that would communicate his case to the offices with broader remits; he felt that the Energy Department, i.e. his immediate superiors, occupied too low a level within the operation’s management pyramid. The most effective incident would be one with a certain political edge, though of course it mustn’t have legal consequences. For good reason, he was reluctant to consider a venerable method that, given the general labor shortage, had often proven effective. That method consisted of presenting the managers with a choice at the end of the heating season: Either you move me out of the Plant 6 boiler room, or this was my last winter here, you’ll have to face it, I’m quitting. You’ve got time till next fall to find a new man for this unit. — Word had gotten out that the old, officially retired foreman, with whom it had proved possible to negotiate that way, was going to leave the operation that spring; the new foreman, who was already in charge of many things, definitely including staff issues, wouldn’t know the routine: H.’s boiler room is in Plant 6; after spending the summer with a good job in the foundry—almost too much of a good thing, certainly enough to exonerate the guy—in the fall H. goes back to Plant 6, where everyone knows he’s the best man, the one who’s known that boiler room the longest. — After just a few weeks on the job the new foreman was already known for his hard line, risking staff turnover rather than compromising, and taking a formal tone with people: If you don’t want to work in Plant 6, Mr. H., you’re free to give notice… — But H. knew that there were other options in this operation, there were vacancies—necessitating difficult workarounds—at the switching stations in the units supplied with long-distance steam heat from the power plant, clean, quiet workstations where you had an unusual amount of freedom. The thing was to use the tiny remnant of wiggle room and call those vacancies to the old man’s attention, orchestrate the scandal so that the old man would say: Get this guy out of here, he’s gone psycho over in Plant 6, let him recuperate in Long-Distance Steam… Not a bad plan, the way H. figured it, but he knew it would become harder and harder to carry out; the new foreman’s first, major accomplishment would be to finally provide Plant 6 with a stable, reliable stoking crew. — There would be even less point in confronting the new foreman: Listen, sir, I’m speaking to you as the author that I am outside my working hours, as a side job, if you will; I’m requesting support for a project, an artistic project, art is part of life as well. For this project, this book, you can call it a novel, I need two years’ time, the only way I can pull it off is if I’m transferred to Long-Distance Steam; I don’t mind taking a financial loss, I’m not asking for much, and in Long-Distance Steam I can do my work every day, on schedule, I know it’s not much work, but that’s just the thing… — The very first sentences made him feel how inescapably absurd such a speech would be, his request struck him as overblown, indeed utterly over the top, he sensed its out-of-control theatricality, but he knew that as long as he stuck to the language of the operation and the new foreman, the language of submission to the interests of the operation, he’d leave them every option to refuse his request; indeed that he would be showing them the simplest way to deal with the problem, namely with a refusal. But what language should he, the stoker, use to speak to his boss; he was the stoker, any other language, were it even conceivable, would be the implausible language of a nonexistent character, the language of a character in a novel… — Very interesting to hear that you’re active as a People’s artist in your spare time, the new foreman replied, that’s worth encouraging, a type of meaningful leisure activity, and naturally it has our full support—I don’t need to remind you of the ideals of Bitterfeld. The Bitterfeld conference made it clear what talents are emerging from the ranks of the workers, but it’s certainly interesting to see that even in our own ranks we’re reaping the benefits of People’s art…of course we’re aware of the situation in Plant 6, but of course you’re equally aware of it, the Plant 6 staff situation, that is. As you’ve correctly noted, our most pressing task is to solve those problems, and, as always, we expect your cooperation, your total commitment, so naturally no allowances can be made for your…journal, did you call it. As you know, that’s hardly feasible, but on the other hand there’s no question that we’d be interested in a journal documenting problem-solving in our current precarious situation from the perspective of someone on the ground, especially since it could have a stimulating effect when read aloud at meetings… —
Had he been drinking last night too… He was roused by his neighbor’s voice; the North African colleague next to him grinned; he was asking because the stoker was taking such a late bus. — I was working the night shift, the stoker replied. — Oh, right, night shift. Night shift no good, lots of work, not much money. — How late is it, anyway, H. asked, it seemed to be broad daylight already, and the bus was rolling down the ramp to the foundry grounds. The Arab showed him his watch, it was 7:30 AM, which meant that in some mysterious fashion—probably in my sleep, he thought derisively—the stoker had wound up on the first of the buses that ran hourly between the different units of the operation carrying workers who liaised in various ways between the different, widely dispersed plants; in other words, through some complex chain of circumstances he must have missed all the morning shuttle buses, including the last bus for the office workers.
Better late than never, the old foreman greeted him as he entered the brightly lit office of the Energy Department, housed in an almost overheated shed pervaded by the smell of freshly brewed coffee. — He was probably home having breakfast, said the secretary, and now he can join us for a cup of coffee. — The stoker, vulnerable to excesses of friendliness in his sleep-deprived state, wondered whether to refuse. It was the first time he’d been offered coffee here; his year-end bonus wouldn’t amount to much, he knew what his other two coworkers from Plant 6 had gotten, a good hundred marks less than the previous year; he’d never been one for picking a fight, a cup of coffee and he’d be completely mollified. — Why not, said the new foreman, sitting at a nearby desk, this day calls for a bit of a celebration. — Evidently his assent was required for the exceptional occurrence that now ensued. Everyone knew about the bottle of brandy that the old foreman kept in the cabinet, but no one had ever set eyes on it. — You’ve knocked off work already, said the secretary, and as for us, you won’t tell tales. — At a smile from the old foreman, she’d gotten up and set four glasses on the table; the stoker, a coffee already in front of him, heard the dainty tinkle as the brandy filled the glasses. — But first, let’s get down to work, the old foreman said, laying the bonus list on the table, ultimately this is the only day when we get to draw these fine, but essential, distinctions. — At one glance the stoker saw that his bonus came to fifty marks more than his two colleagues at Plant 6 had gotten. In the proper column he signed off on the receipt of a 650-mark bonus, noticed that he was the last to sign the list, and tucked the envelope in his pocket without counting the money. — The secretary, noticing, gave an approving nod, It’s all right, we double-checked. — The stoker, unable to hide his fingers’ trembling from that gaze, had already drunk from his cup (it took just an automatic reflex, a miniscule lapse of the executive function to make his hand reach for the cup and lift it to his lips) and the coffee had corrupted him; the stoker lived in a society where you couldn’t even accept a cup of coffee without being bought and paid for; the coffee was hot and black (the stoker, in one last senseless burst of defiance, had refused cream and sugar) and did him a world of good; inside he was parched and drained from the long night, while outside he felt the unpleasant touch of moisture, finally warming, from clothes soaked by the February rain; he had to reassure himself that it wasn’t sweat, or his unrested body’s foul exhalations, it was rain that had run down the back of his neck, he sat wrapped in its musty mantle. Unprompted, he reached for the brandy glass and drank—seize the chance to act like a lout, the idea came to him like a deliverance—it was a Romanian brandy, a sweet, cough-inducing sort; he’d swallowed too timidly and felt the shock of the drink in his throat, not his stomach; after hawking pathetically he had to take a swig of coffee; the glass he’d set down still held half an inch of liquid that had dribbled back from his feebly parted lips; he was all too keenly aware of a large drop in the stubble on his chin, but didn’t dare to wipe it with the back of his hand, corrupted as he was; he hadn’t shaved in three days and probably looked like a hoodlum, sitting there with damp temples and nostrils. — How’s it taste, asked the secretary, hand already back on the bottle. — Night shift… the stoker gasped in explanation, the word, barely intelligible, merely transformed the burning in his throat into a wheeze. — Have another one, man, the old foreman said calmly; though perhaps without intent, his voice was just as corrupting as the fact that the stoker wasn’t being told to go to hell, H. glanced up at the new foreman’s eyes, keenly observant over his smile, and past them, so as not to see the secretary pour him a fresh brandy. — Yeah, well, thanks for the bonus… he said, cowed, fortunately ignored by the old foreman, who launched in on a speech. — Actually, I’ve already vanished, he said, and the person sitting here with you is nothing but my ghost. Yesterday was my last day on the job, you know I’ve been retired for ages already…heck, actually I’m already dead, and this bonus was my last official piece of business, I’ve risen from the grave for a while to tell you, the last guy, a day late already…to tell you that from this day on the fellow you see there is your new boss, you know the man, from now on he’s in charge of all relevant issues et cetera, as a dead man all that’s left me is the final duty, you know the routine…but first of all, before we forget, we want to drink to this moment. — And indeed, the glasses were raised and met in the middle, the stoker saw his shot glass, held in two fingers that no longer felt like his, join the other glasses with absurd assurance. To everyone’s health, to my retirement, came the old foreman’s voice. Cheers, came his own voice, confident again, human again; his sensation of himself returned only when he felt half the brandy wash over his tongue, tasting better now; he set the half-full glass within reach and finished off the suddenly cold coffee. He couldn’t remember how he’d ended up in this room.
Had it been dark still when he got off the bus at the foundry grounds; toward the end it had turned chilly, as though the driver had switched off the heat too soon; in the chill all the passengers’ limbs had been filled with life, without a trace of death, which alone could have fit intelligibly into the light of that memory; he’d smelled their morning smells, already stale-seeming—the hypertrophied soap and perfume smells of the administrative workers—smelled them so intensely that they sapped his shaky inner life and the alcohol on his neighbor’s breath triggered attacks of nausea, so that he had to tilt his head back and breathe deep, plagued by a ravenous craving for cigarette smoke, as though that alone could kill off the oppressive life of the body. Outside the plant entrance in the dark—definitely: in the dark—on the expanse of concrete lashed by rain and wind, he’d laboriously lit a cigarette, using up multiple matches, left behind all alone as everyone else ran off toward the plant to get out of the storm. He was last, which was cause enough for a thorough check by the policeman guarding the plant entrance: Where was he coming from, was it his shift he was heading for, so late, an hour after work had begun, why didn’t he have a foundry ID to legitimate his presence. — Shed 7, Energy Department, picking up my year-end bonus. — The bulky policeman, taller by two heads, still staring at the stoker’s ID in the light of a lamp as though at some proof of all human filth, didn’t seem to hear a word. After inclining his head through the feeble lamplight, almost to the point of physical contact with the stoker, who, avoiding a collision with difficulty, at last thought he saw a gleam of recognition in the other’s eyes, the officer rasped in a tone of command: Go on. — Despite the inadequate light, the stoker glimpsed a mouth full of half-rotten teeth; he grabbed his ID and, already rain-soaked, unable to suppress his feelings of revulsion, fled into the plant without duly acknowledging the policeman’s plaintive words: What about us, are we the scum of the earth around here, where every deadbeat, every shady specimen gets stuffed to the gills with bonuses, everybody else, just not the likes of us… — You’re the ones who don’t put your cards on the table, moneywise, the stoker wasn’t sure whether he’d actually made that parting shot over his shoulder; for the first time that morning he’d felt corrupted by the policeman’s complaint, which sounded plausible enough; he’d heard that policemen didn’t get year-end bonuses. He couldn’t muster any feeling of triumph in that regard; he put it down to the solidarity problem that he was about to confront. — Smoking, hiding the cigarette in his cupped hand—smoking wasn’t allowed on the factory grounds, and besides, the rain was coming down harder—he’d covered the long distance to Shed 7, and despite the weather there were times when he found himself unable to quicken his pace.
The stoker drained the glass, unable to say whether it mightn’t have been the third brandy already, alarmed at first to feel how even that small dose of alcohol impaired him, but then sensing a slight fuzziness to his thoughts that calmed him, as though it might soon serve him as an excuse; now he scoffed at himself for his hesitation en route to the shed, his notion of seeking refuge in the glass-fronted cafeteria, where light was already burning, and drinking a cup or two of coffee to muster his strength for the scene to follow. Behind the forest of exotic-looking plants that screened off the entire glass façade, in the still-dimmed light of the cafeteria—not open yet, but already serving a certain circle of insiders to whom he’d once belonged—the stoker watched the cleaning girls slip past, sedate and weary. A group of young workers lumbered past him from the changing rooms, dressed in protective quilted clothing and felt boots and making a beeline for the cafeteria entrance; as they strode through the circles of reddish light beneath the lamps their bright plastic helmets gleamed in the rain; it looked like the North Africans, and the stoker soon saw them hammering at the cafeteria door, prearranged knock signals. He felt cold moisture seeping through his shoes, transforming his socks into slimy foreign objects, sloughed off by the skin of his feet and forming bulges that pinched and chafed. For a moment he’d stopped to warm himself with the vivid memory of certain summer mornings—and they’d been cool mornings—when he’d sat at that same early hour in a cafeteria not yet filled with kitchen smells, where he’d sucked up the fragrance of the coffee and the smoke of cigarettes lit despite the smoking ban, hardly taking his eyes off the giggling girls in their short aprons who pushed around the softly humming floor polishers and bore the men’s looks self-assuredly; hidden behind the green of the palms and rubber trees, those morning hours when he breathed in the weary voices of the young men and the giggling of the girls were hours of a forbidden splendor as promised by the thought of an African sun in whose light you return to your senses after a long, dreamlike escape. But behind the African forest of the glass front, the tables were now occupied by young Arab workers, drowning the previous day’s alcohol in watery European coffee, their African sun gilded by solidarity, the dim neon tubes over their heads illuminating the complaisant spectacle of the girls with the polishing machines, transformed before their eyes into dancing houris. The stoker decided to report to the office first and go to the cafeteria afterward; he pictured himself—if everything went well and he managed to disrupt the mawkish ceremony of the bonus payment—striding upright out of the office, leaving a malevolent silence in his wake; if only he could seize back control of the time that had ambushed him and slipped away at some point in his sleep, he might still have enough leeway before his bus left to sit in the cafeteria and fight down the dread over his victory. No doubt about it, he thought it perfectly possible that the impending scandal might release him from all his ties to this factory, that today would be his last time on the premises of this factory that dominated the entire region.
Probably the factory dominated his entire fate, meaning that his arrival at the foundry, that time he’d gotten off the bus in the first light of dawn, might date back to a different day; the first work gangs were already marching into the cafeteria for breakfast, which was why he hadn’t gone there himself. — He recalled that someone, one of the heads of the transport fleet, had gotten into an altercation with the bus driver; he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but he sensed how awkward the situation was, with that argument taking place in front of all the other passengers. The driver vehemently denied responsibility for some delay that his boss characterized as practically spooky, and suddenly the driver invoked the stoker as his witness, claiming, his voice rising to a scream, that the stoker could attest to some circumstance—the stoker hadn’t caught the words describing it, nor could he imagine what it was about—because he himself had been involved, at which point everyone sitting or standing nearby gawked at the startled stoker. His mind was a complete blank, but to back up the driver, feigning quick-wittedness, he shouted to the front of the bus: That’s right, I know all about it. — Which of course was completely wrong, a ridiculous remark, and to straighten things out he shouted: The driver’s right, that’s the way it was, I was there. — Which was probably just as wrong. But at that the driver took one hand from the steering wheel and stretched it out flat in front of his boss, as though the truth lay in the palm of his hand. The boss turned away from the driver with a dismissive wave and shot an ominous glance at the stoker. He was still haunted by that glance, wondering if it had held a threat and if that threat might have repercussions, as the bus arrived and he got off, noticing with alarm that it was already broad daylight, the snow flurries had long since turned to rain, the temperature seemed to be rising again. Before finally hurrying off to Shed 7—how long had he been keeping them waiting already—he gazed after the bus as it drove off, definitely empty now. There was no question, the driver he’d just defended must have been using him for some kind of devilry, no doubt about it, he’d fallen asleep in the bus and ridden the entire circuit, possibly more than once; the bus driver, grasping the situation, had let him sleep on so as to confirm his alibi for some nefarious purpose or other. Those thoughts plagued the stoker all the way to his destination; no doubt about it, you paid a price for working at a factory like this as long as he had. — In contrast to past years, he missed the scent of spring in this February rain, a scent that inspired him afresh at the start of each year to leave the factory forever. February was a good time to clear out, with that year-end bonus in your pocket; each year this was a time to reflect on the near-terror he felt at the prospect of leaving, days before the bonus was paid he’d already harbor the tremor that preceded that terror. — But today, entering Shed 7’s long, practically overheated corridor, pausing for a moment to let the rain drip from his coat, soaked and sleep-deprived, he’d been beaten from the start; he’d entered the office corrupted by the shed’s warm light, incapable of asserting himself in any way whatsoever.
Moving to light a cigarette, the stoker found just one lone match in his matchbox; it occurred to him that he’d used up almost all his matches in the storm outside the plant entrance; at the same time, he recalled the incredible suspicion with which the policeman at the gate had scrutinized him, he could still smell the horrendous stench exuded by the diseased teeth in the fat open-mouthed face that loomed so near, a smell that his nostrils seemed to have retained for an inexplicably long while, making a new, inexorable surge of nausea rise within him. Blanching, he felt sweat on his brow and the misgiving that what seemed to be spreading through the office was his own smell, his own awful taste in his mouth, the putrid smell of his own exhaustion and lack of sleep, he saw with horror that the moist hand holding his last match was trembling, it didn’t seem to be his hand, it refused to obey him, letting the match burn out. At the tip of his cigarette a lighter flared, and the secretary exclaimed: Wrong… — The word pierced his very marrow, as though it transcended the immediate meaning he grasped far too late; the filter of his cigarette was already burning, he’d held it, instead of the tip, to the flame of the lighter offered by the old foreman, and it was spreading a new stench. — Aren’t you feeling well, asked the secretary, clearly he looked too pathetic for anyone to laugh at his mishap. — I need another brandy, he mustered all his strength to gasp out. — I think we need a second man, the old foreman observed, for the boiler in Plant 6, at least for the night shift; this winter’s over, but I’d definitely plan that in for the next heating season. — He didn’t think, he went on to say after a frowning look at the stoker, who’d gone completely pale, that the work had gotten easier there the past few years, there were limits to the strain you could put on people, otherwise they’d start to think about quitting. This remark was aimed at the new foreman, who, the stoker saw through a veil that covered his eyes and cut off his thoughts, promptly made a note with his pencil. — A second man, said the stoker, that’s just what we need… — He was too exhausted for irony, but he could see himself, in the few hours of respite left to him between bouts of shoveling coal—hours he’d spend huddled over his notebooks, despite his aching bones—harassed by the empty blather of some assistant they’d assigned him; to be sure, he’d gain time and energy, but he’d squander it daily in the most pointless possible way, chitchatting with a person who lacked any notion or understanding of the duties of his second life; finally he saw himself going to his boss to reject the assistant, demonstrating by example that the work in Plant 6 could perfectly well be shouldered by one person.
Before this he’d never seen himself in the boiler room of Plant 6, toiling in the catacomb of the old coal bunker…in his present state of mind he was suddenly able to see himself clearly. — His depictions of his life displayed an obvious obsessive streak…the search for justification; the ground on which that depicted life moved was a ground already primed, primed for explosions; in the effluvia and eddies over this ground, and in the hubbub that threatened to seal the stoker’s vocal organs with an earthen coating, every random word he formed became an outcry, random sentences joined to produce expertise for incendiary acts. In the black dust clouds that shot up with each swing of the shovel and poured down again from the low ceiling, the stoker could barely be seen; only the moist spot of his face, mouth open and blood-red, swiveled momentarily with each twist of his torso into the blackened lightbulbs’ red light. The challenge, a race against the dying of the fires in the boilers, was to shovel coal into a chest-high iron trolley in a cramped, poorly lit shaft, hampered by the lignite briquettes that kept sliding down, hampered by that iron wagon crowding your body; in no time the manometer needles fell to zero, and the fan heaters in the drafty factory halls, around whose gigantic free-standing forms the night frost had congealed in the atmosphere, would soon start producing cold air; the thermometer columns, upheld with the utmost effort at their already inadequate level, would instantly start to fall again, no doubt about it, the prescribed temperatures couldn’t be maintained; when the work gangs poured into the factory in the morning their eyes would go straight to the thermometers, too cold, the stokers, those dogs, did they spend the night snoozing, did they spend it stoking their goddamn bodies with brandy, forgetting the factory halls; no one, not the engineers, not the workers, could be persuaded that the old boilers, installed decades ago, no longer sufficed to maintain the required working temperatures in below-freezing weather now that the factory, including this old section, was constantly expanding, now that, as per state decree, a new factory hall for the production of consumer goods had been built in special emergency shifts, ignoring the fact that new production halls called for new supply systems. For years the Energy Department’s engineers had been knocking at the doors of the investment offices waving their calculations, but in vain. Those calculations were dismissed on the grounds that they were planning, they’d been planning for years, to supply this remote unit—standing on a narrow strip of land projecting out into the vastness of the exhausted strip mines and exposed to the iciest, most relentless winter winds—with long-distance steam heat from a nearby power plant, but the construction of the new, super-modern foundry had torpedoed the machine tool operation’s budget. Each summer, after yet another heating season ridden out thanks to great exertions and a relatively mild winter, the grounds above the subterranean boiler rooms swarmed with technicians huddling around a host of measuring instruments and punting invisible but hotly debated coordinates back and forth through the morning sun; once again pipeline bridges and tunnels, as-yet-nonexistent foundations and fantastic steam reduction units were surveyed until, by fall at the latest, when the days had turned chilly and the technicians had disappeared again, there came the annual revelation that funding for the steam connection hadn’t been freed up yet, and apologies were made at tight-lipped meetings: We too are at the mercy of the global market situation, things will have to go on as before for one more year. — Once again, mountains of coal descended on the stokers, coal of the most inferior sort, just barely good enough for the Plant 6 boiler room; once again, with shoulders pressed to the steel frame, the stokers thrust the screeching coal trolley over the boilers’ flame-spewing filling shafts; once again they hurried through the winter cold with sweat-damp bodies to lug tons of stinking, smoking ash to the overflowing waste dumps; once again, every day, as temperatures sank inexorably to the stokers’ horror, the indignant foremen marched from the factory halls to the boiler rooms, and the black, sweating, seething stokers raised their pokers to defend themselves against the incessant demands for heat, steam, heat, steam.
Why was he still putting up with this. Couldn’t he escape the undeniable fascination of that basement with its flicker of embers and filth, couldn’t he at least find easy work for low pay. Every winter, in the hopeless depths of January, when overtime and weekend shifts were the norm, there’d come a point when he’d swear to quit the factory that spring. — That was what he told himself, but then he’d have to leave town, in fact he’d have to leave the country whose small-town policemen had such a foul taste, spoiled by rotten teeth, eyes widening gigantic with suspicion and alarm, staring at the news that the stoker had suddenly refused to stoke and preferred to brood at a hidden writing desk over things impossible to monitor.
A sight he could not look away from, a sight that opened his mouth…though it was just as contrived as his character’s monologues seemed when, from within one of his two lives, he tried to picture his semblance from the other…held him captive, gaping in the lurid light of a labyrinthine boiler room, amid the dance of gigantic blundering shadow-throngs performing senseless actions, he saw himself subject his body to furious Sisyphean labors; it was a body already exhausted and cracking, whose inner devastations erupted in unremitting coughing fits, black snot mingled with sudden nosebleeds, the savage sight of the shaggy, pesky shock of hair, soaked and filled with coal dust, the flushed brow that streamed sweat into eyes nearly blinded by burst veins, eyes that nonetheless saw him, in an attitude approaching frenzy amid a bombardment of sparks spraying from the seams of the soot-clogged boilers…he saw himself, alienated from all humanity, banished to an Industrial Age far removed from progress…he could almost see how the valve handwheels—their spindles overgrown by decades of boiler scale, requiring crowbars to budge them—were adorned by garlands of cast-iron flowers…one time he stood frozen, heedless of the fat yellow-green metastases sprouting as blood-soaked snot from the bronze of his musculature, amid the antiquated beauty of a cultic memorial fit for demolition, in cascades of filth shaken down as steam finally shot in bursts through the bottlenecks of pipes idle for eons to set in motion a forgotten epoch’s driving rods…in a language that he owed to his status, that he’d learned at long last, touched and elevated by the coarsening enjoyment of all the ancient crimes of exploitation, he gasped out phrases of what seemed nineteenth-century caliber: the factory’s situation is the symbol of the country’s economic behavior, a form of progress commensurate with this patchwork of fiefdoms, but the victim is the class that, anticipating that so-called specter, that European specter, grins such a ghastly grin; before we’re worn out and threadbare, let’s flee across the sea again, a proud ship…oh, let us come to you, Africa of all unachieved things.
The stoker, diverted by a long, alarming coughing fit from a lapse into suchlike language, or at least rescued from an utterly inappropriate burst of mocking laughter, listened to the old foreman’s soothing talk: Just one more round, and that’ll be my last official act in this shack here. — When all the shot glasses had been refilled and everyone in the office was smoking: As you know, it’s my duty to ask if you’d like to donate part of your bonus in solidarity, voluntarily of course, you know perfectly well what it’s used for, I don’t need to give you any lectures, the list right here in front of you, that’s where you put your name down, and as you can see, all your colleagues’ two percent obligations have already… — No, said the stoker, amazed at the awakening sound of his voice; the incisive, awful word had been uttered, and it echoed in the stillness of the office, a stillness against which the old foreman’s voice barely stood out, seeming to talk on without paragraph breaks. — Yes, the old man went on, as you know, it’s two percent a year, always paid without objections, my final duty here is to ask you, that’s all, and if you do the math you’ll see that that two percent hardly makes any difference at all. — The stoker uttered his words in an experimental form, as though aiming at a theatrical effect; they were words he’d rehearsed, he was detached from himself again, able to control them from outside. No, he repeated, I’m saying it loud and clear, no. This year there won’t be any solidarity donation from me, because I believe we need to show solidarity toward ourselves first; I’m thinking of the working conditions in the Plant 6 boiler room. — If the stoker thought he could elicit a visible show of emotion from his former boss, he was mistaken. Of course, the foreman said, of course, I didn’t build that boiler room, and I can’t give you a new one, but of course the donation is voluntary, no one’s forcing you. Besides, you don’t have to pay it right away. — As he spoke, he pushed the list of donations, probably without thinking, back in front of the stoker, who, noticing nothing but that movement, declared in a loud voice: I said that I’m hereby refusing the donation, understand, refusing it, for the aforementioned reason I decline to make a donation. — Without looking at the old foreman, he sensed, from the cigarette smoke expelled a touch more emphatically from the man’s nose, that he was smiling. At once the old man removed the list and hid it in a drawer. A pity really, he murmured, one column’s left empty, but those measly twenty-six… — Two percent, the stoker said sharply. — Of course, two percent, the new foreman intervened in a conciliatory tone, albeit with a tremor he seemed unable to suppress, two percent, that’s all. By the way, we’re all aware that the bonuses came out smaller this year, but we ranked you at a higher level, is two percent too much to ask. — The stoker felt his concentration flagging: It’s not about the size of the bonus… — Naturally, said the old foreman, naturally, you’re the last one left, your ranking can’t be changed now. — It’s about the working conditions in that boiler room, a place that’s the lowest level of all possible rankings, once you’ve descended to that level… — Naturally, the old foreman said calmly, if I weren’t already standing with one foot in the grave…I’d say the aggravated conditions in Plant 6 have to be factored in more heavily when determining next year’s bonuses. — It seems I’m being willfully misunderstood, the stoker persisted, I regard the Plant 6 boiler room as a kind of penal institution where you can’t put a man for more than one winter if you don’t want to lose him. I’ve been working there for seven years now, and I’ve got other pursuits. When I started there, I was promised it’d be for one heating season, no more, that’s another thing that needs to be said, not in this office, but hopefully on a higher level. Before I quit my work in this operation I want to call attention to these things… — The stoker felt himself turning more and more unmistakably into a figure of his imagination, a literary figure whose lines slipped further and further into banality, phrases already devoid of value because they’d been calculated too far in advance, long since rendered obsolete by intervening, unexpectedly dramatic upheavals, so that now they diminished the issue at hand, cutting it down to a pathetic size. — Or does anyone have a different suggestion, does anyone see a way to abstain from this admittedly shabby form of protest, he said, already lacking all faith that his words would find a listener. — Penal institution…protest, the new foreman repeated, and right off the bat you’re threatening to resign. You claim to be intellectually active, yet you ignore the fact that these donations may have rescued people from genuine penal institutions, you grew up in this country yet all you see is your boiler room; it’s not hard to educate yourself about working conditions in developing countries that are just gaining their independence, do I have to give you a lecture… — The new foreman, still doubting the use of such exhortations, almost resolving upon a show of wrath, was turning away when the stoker interrupted him: That’s exactly what I’m aware of, and that’s why this question has to be discussed at a higher level. — At that exact point he felt that he’d already lost and conceded that round, but he continued all the same: My request is that if questions are asked, they should be answered in exactly the same spirit; it’s my wish that further reflections on the statements I’ve made here should continue outside these four walls. — As you wish, the old foreman relented, if there’s a single soul in this operation who cares to ask…due to dissatisfaction with his ranking, is that right…due to dissatisfaction with his post the stoker H. has…but I do hope this nonsense won’t get around. — The stoker, having failed, even for a moment, to liberate himself from the lines of the figure whom he, who’d grown up in this country, was portraying, knew that his victory, determined by his own words, was actually a defeat, was a corrupting victory, the only one he could achieve in this country, a victory that, even if he instantly demanded paper and pen to draft my resignation, he’d only diminish; a resignation would merely have wheezed out something empty and unintelligible about the state of the Plant 6 boiler room, something that boiler room didn’t even deserve, but it would have said nothing whatsoever about the state of his mind, which could no longer be brought into play here. — As though to finish things off with a touch of mockery, the new foreman said: What would you say if we told you there’ve been work brigades this year that pledged up to three percent, despite, sad to say, a dwindling payment fund. — From the point of view of my status, said the stoker, which I regard, which I’m forced to regard as a kind of slave status, it’s irrelevant whether all the pros and cons have been considered, so long as it’s possible to rise above the form you’ve grown into and gotten stuck in, above the form of the conflict possible within this status… — Slave status… said the new foreman, evidently seeing a chance to end the conversation by taking genuine offense, you call that a slave status, that’s going way too far, if that’s the way it is, we don’t care to discuss it. Of course, this is something we’ll be forced to reflect on further…but you can be sure: however much you may try to provoke it, there’s no reason for us to advertise this sort of misconduct at a higher level.
The stoker, immediately shunted off into an insignificant supporting role, waited for a word that would cue his exit in the play performed by the actors in this office; the new director picked up a telephone receiver and dialed a number; reluctant to concede that the general silence was a call for him to leave, the stoker hunkered on the chair, slumping as low as though his hands were gripping the seat bottom, waiting for the phone conversation to begin, which took minutes; he was obviously trying to learn the reason for the phone call, and it was becoming embarrassing. Finally someone picked up, and the new director complained that the energy consumption data hadn’t been relayed punctually at 7 AM. From the discussion that took place as the new foreman entered the missing figures onto a form, the stoker gathered that the person summoned to the phone was his colleague from Plant 6, who’d begun the early shift after he’d left that morning. The new director ended the conversation by saying that he regarded leniency toward fellow colleagues as a highly estimable quality: Even in cases like this, Colleague F., but we wouldn’t appreciate your taking advantage of it. And your making a habit of coming late for the early shift. We might have to keep it in mind some day when calculating your wage. — Grinning attentively, the old foreman shook his head and looked at the stoker: So the next shift took over too late again today, it does seem like you guys in Plant 6 are having no end of trouble. — It was true, now the stoker recalled that at the end of his shift, after showering and changing, he’d waited in vain till past 6:30 for his relief; his colleague, who always picked up his bonus a day earlier, had announced that, however much money it turned out to be, he was going to go on a bender that night. With the fire in the boilers still holding out, the stoker had taken the risk and left; in the gray of dawn, filled with wind-driven snowflakes, he’d trooped to the derelict train station to catch one of the infrequently running passenger trains to M. With an uneasy feeling at having left the boilers under steam and unsupervised before the arrival of the next shift…what might happen if his colleague didn’t turn up at all. It was in the hopes of seeing him disembark—he came from a town past M. and had to be on one of the trains whose lines converged here—that the stoker had positioned himself in the train car, nearly empty at that hour. Now he seemed able to recall the morning in every detail; he was sitting in the train, and the oncoming train from M. appeared in the distance as his got underway. As the two trains passed each other, greeting each other with toots, he scanned the row of windows in the cars shooting by on the next track and actually thought he glimpsed his colleague dozing by the window. But it could have been a figment of his imagination; when he got to the office, he’d have to reckon with the extremely awkward question of what he was doing there when they’d just gotten wind that the early shift hadn’t arrived at Plant 6 yet. — The old foreman gave him a pitying smile: The next shift got there too late again. — And he clinked his empty brandy glass against the stoker’s full one: Don’t go forgetting that too, no hard feelings, we won’t be seeing each other any time soon, I’m already a dead man here…don’t forget to count your money, but do it outside… — The stoker, dismissed in conclusive, albeit conciliatory fashion, drained his glass in one swallow and left the office, swaying alarmingly; he felt that by recalling how he’d left his workplace on the train that morning, he’d managed to resolve at least one of that day’s fateful entanglements; as he went, the secretary, who from the start of the argument had followed the scene silent and red-faced, but supporting the new foreman with repeated, unnoticed nods of her head, failed to respond to his goodbye, but that left him unmoved. — As soon as he heard his footsteps on the wooden boards of the shed’s corridor and realized how shaky his footing was, it seemed to him, in a resurgence of awareness, that the entire factory was about to recede a vast distance behind him.
Outside, as the sun spread delicate vapors, brightening the slabs of the footpath between the still-unbulldozed, still-virginal-looking mounds of dirt on the grounds of what for years they’d been calling the new foundry; spring seemed to be coming, and the stoker felt a moment of liberation; the office, which had admitted no hint of the fine day it was turning out to be, lay behind him like the interior space of a dark past. He couldn’t possibly go back to the boiler room; as soon as he got home, he’d draft his resignation…your last day of work will be the day I resign, that’s what you’ve achieved, old foreman, he said. That old guard might be an ugly bunch of fossils, but the cadres of young managers now being installed all over the place were absolutely impossible to work with; you had to be crazy to expect anything from politically schooled careerists, bureaucrats from Day One; a new administration does not mean a new state… — There was still the two-week notice period, but he could handle that in his sleep; by then the winter would nearly be over and his departure would hardly hurt the factory. — He’d been sitting outside the factory entrance for a quarter of an hour on a bench dried by the sun, waiting for the bus to M.—not impatient yet, though the clock at the factory entrance showed ten after ten and the bus was supposed to leave at ten sharp—when one of the stokers from Plant 4, on the other side of the road some distance beyond the foundry, rode past on his bike. H. had known him for a long time and was surprised when the man didn’t deign to glance at him, though he was sitting right there on the bench, the only person far and wide, impossible to overlook. He saw the cyclist take the turn of the path toward Shed 7 and asked himself whether that colleague had gotten word of his argument in the office, and what that word might have been. He began to suspect that the scandal was already common knowledge among his colleagues, the telephone made that easy, and that it was a conscious act on the other stoker’s part to ride past without a greeting…that he was already an outcast, just minutes after his decision to quit.
However improbable it seemed, the new foreman had gotten a handle on the stokers the very first day he officially commenced his duties. They were split up among the separate boiler rooms, and there they remained, without a hint of flexibility; if one of them rebelled against the arrangement, he endangered the others who had better posts. It was a sophisticated strategy; for fear of having to replace a stoker promoted from Plant 6, no one would dare to underperform in front of the new foreman. It was impossible to remain in this operation; the sun that had greeted him on leaving the shed was not a light that would reveal him to himself in his true persona; that would take a sun that was absent here. As so often this morning, he saw himself as a completely thought-up, staged character, staged by a practically flawless system…describable only by external witnesses, now that he’d exited the factory he’d become an unperson named H. whose existence, he felt, all witnesses summoned would refuse to confirm, just as that cyclist could have ridden straight through his form without meeting any resistance.
He took the envelope out of his pocket to count the bonus. At the sight of the contents, he froze. Rather than the 650 marks he’d signed off on, the envelope contained one thousand three hundred marks, exactly twice the amount…a mistake. He counted it again, no doubt about it, 1,300 marks…he jumped up and raced back, and this time the policeman who’d been so suspicious this morning, but hadn’t even looked at him when he left the factory, stopped him: What is it now, did you get your bonus or didn’t you. — A mistake… The stoker shouted, I’ve got to go back right away, to the Energy Department, I forgot something… — What did you forget, the policeman drew out the words, I’ve had enough of this, do you have a pass. — I’ve got to go back…before the bus comes… — The policeman, sensing his advantage, showed his teeth triumphantly. — I’m going to hand in my resignation, the stoker blurted out. — Well, la-di-da, the operation can thank you for it, the policeman said, laughing openly in the stoker’s face. At that moment the delayed bus arrived; the stoker walked over mechanically and got on through the doors that opened at once in front of him…exactly as he had that morning, he saw himself pale faced in the pane spattered from outside, and as though to utterly detach him from reality, the bus drove onward, hardly ever stopping, leaving him the sole passenger. — Bought off, he was a bought man, and the pocketed sum was no mistake; the envelope in his pocket contained double the bonus, precisely counted. All reality was annihilated, there would be no other reality until that evening, when he’d begun the night shift in his old boiler room, his writing utensils in front of him on the small table top roughly cleared of filth…the angrily darkening light would reveal them as the utensils of a nonexistent, vanished reality, or one that had never been; nothing on paper, however neatly written or printed, could have any claim to reality, he saw the sum of 650 marks entered next to his name in the bonus list, he saw that number distinctly, and next to it his signature. Once again he pulled the envelope out of his pocket and counted the money; on the enclosed card, printed with the state emblem and the initials of the operation, that expressed the management’s thanks and congratulations, the dotted line left for the sum was filled with the number 650. Everything was in order; the stoker took seven 100-mark bills from the envelope and put them in his wallet, from which he removed a 50-mark bill to join the other six 100s in the envelope. A glance at the mirror over the driver’s head reassured him that the driver’s eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the road. Thus, all problems were banished from the world.
Are you finished for the day, the bus driver asked over the motor noise. — The stoker gave a start, but answered at once: No, this evening I start my second shift, in Plant 6. — Your second shift, yelled the bus driver. — Right, because we have to start Sunday evening already, by Monday morning the factory halls have to… — I know that, man, the driver yelled. And after a while: Today’s Tuesday, what are these yarns you’re spinning, don’t you know what happened this morning… — And as the stoker racked his brains in silence: You were there, you said so yourself…Heinrich is dead, you’ve got to know who I mean, you knew the guy, your old porter from Plant 6. They found him this morning, but it was too late. — Dead… cried the stoker. — Run over, that’s what they thought, early this morning, but I have a different theory…those Arabs, that rabble, backstabbers, scoundrels, all of them rabble, those savages, the driver ranted. — I don’t know anything about it, said the stoker. — You idiot, yelled the driver, we were supposed to pick them up, from their party, weren’t we. You said… You know perfectly well you said we had to pick those Arabs up in F., and then no one was there. — But Heinrich didn’t even live in F. — You idiot, you’re a total idiot, get out, man, won’t you just get out, said the driver, stopping the bus and turning around, maybe his face has covered in tears, the stoker couldn’t say, his neck straining forward, his gaze, like a snake’s, fixed upon H. — The stoker fled the bus as though it were a room in which—inevitably, due purely to the darkness gathering there—he’d have been forced to commit some unknown crime. The bus station in M. was flooded by sunshine to which he was utterly impervious.
The alcohol put him to sleep at once, but he woke several times that day, his bed rumpled and sweat-drenched, one moist hand palpating his temples, feeling the thrum of a fever coming on. Until evening, however often he woke up, he fell back asleep in a state of strange exhaustion; in the intervals of waking, late in the day, as it grew dark again outside, as the street lamps switched on and filled the room with lunar radiance, he told himself he’d forgotten to draft his resignation. If the fever isn’t gone after tomorrow’s night shift, I’ll take sick leave…resign and use my sick leave for the notice period, the thought calmed him so that he went back to sleep each time. — In a confused but unusually vivid dream that nearly made him late for his shift, he saw himself inside a pyramid, probably in its deepest chamber, amid stone sarcophagi in a hectic motile red light spewed by lamps covered in thick layers of soot; he saw himself working an endless row of boilers, ears filled with the incessant hiss of steam through countless pipes that passed overhead en route to the tip of the pyramid. He had an enormous, undwindling mound of coal to work with—even there the ends of sarcophagi jutted forth, broken from their pedestals, lying obstructively every which way—with unwaning strength he flung shovel after shovel of coal into the nearest boilers’ flaring maws, the hissing in the steam pipes swelled, seeming to rise to the heights of the pyramid, and yet again insatiable flames lashed back from the boilers’ mouths impossible to shut now. In the brief remaining intervals of respite he strained to hear footsteps above him, on the other side of the massive stone ceiling that capped this chamber; no doubt about it, up above there were footsteps everywhere, in all the rooms towering over him there was a pacing to and fro, but it was all drowned out by the noise of the steam. The question was when he would unearth the first corpse amid the shattered sarcophagi, it wouldn’t be long before a yellow, wizened, aged face would stare up at him with broken eyes beneath his shovel blade, and over and over, thrusting the shovel into the coal, he’d meet the soft, tenacious resistance of a body; at last the fire settled into a steady raging, and he sank down trembling upon his dusty chair. — He still hadn’t dared to draft his resignation yet. Or he wasn’t capable of it; the text of his resignation would have the girth of a long book; he’d begun to write, setting down the endless chains of circumstances that text called for, but if he did manage to resolve everything and convey it in his text, to whom should he submit it. It was he himself that he handed the book to, the stoker had come to receive that resignation, with a lordly gesture he handed him, in exchange for the book, a large envelope in which coins and bills jostled, an exchange accompanied by his prodigious laughter, a laughter swallowed utterly by the steam pipes’ deafening howls. He tried to recall his passage through a moonlit African landscape, under a sky dusted with sparkling stars, to descend into this underground room, but it was futile, the memory existed solely in the mind of the other man whom he saw walking away with the book, whom he saw climbing endless stairways, whose body, his spitting image, was still racked by laughter in the glow of the flames before vanishing into the darkness.