So Schicht Leseprobe/en
So Schicht — reading sample
English translation by Indira, AI assistant, from the German text. Solche particularly thanks Galja Widrich for the Russian translations on the original page.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Out of the Shadows
Menzel woke all at once and felt compelled to do something. He was not quite sure what, or where to begin, but he knew it was almost too late already, and that the beginning lay in this very moment.
He got up and dressed. Today the clothes he found in his wardrobe seemed conspicuously dull and boring, and he admitted to himself that he had spent far too long thinking about other people's looks. Grey suits, white shirts, plain ties. Menzel had only a state of affairs in his wardrobe. His life hung there as it had looked two years ago, when he started his office job as the newcomer, as it had been a year ago and still yesterday.
Standing there, looking into his wardrobe, Menzel suddenly knew that his future hung there too: grey and simple, with no possibility of escape. He dimly remembered someone who had been different. He had arrived as the newcomer in the office, but dressed differently and spoke differently. Menzel had stood with the others then and made jokes about the new man. He was not surprised when the man soon lost his job again. Menzel was only surprised that this was no catastrophe for him.
Menzel felt an exceedingly unpleasant sense of responsibility. It attacked him like hunger or thirst; he was flooded with the foreboding that the clothes in his wardrobe would not be the end, and that their greyness did not release him from responsibility. The responsibility he owed himself: to be himself. He imagined what it would be like if, on the way to work, he simply bought the skirt with the large roses he had seen in a shop window yesterday and put it on at once. Such a skirt would be pleasant in this warm season, a thousand times more comfortable than any trousers, and the colours somehow made him happy.
He laughed at the thought of entering the office: his upper body in the usual grey and white, then the mid-length skirt with its large red roses, a few centimetres of white, hairy legs, and finally black socks in grey slip-on shoes. Everyone would greet him personally within a few minutes, he was certain; after all, he was openly showing that something was different about him, at least today. After the handshake, however, each person would retreat as quickly as possible into the crowd of grey office people, doubtless to whisper unnoticed or prepare their first jokes. Without knowing exactly why, Menzel had grown slightly melancholy, but ultimately glad to be able to hide in his familiar suit, become almost invisible, so the others would not see him and perhaps even time would overlook him. It would pass him by, and everything could remain as it was. Menzel looked at the clock; it was time to go.
Once more he tried to awaken the strong feeling that had filled him only moments earlier, but it was already entirely memory. He set out.
Set Yourself Alight!
Menzel had returned to his office and was unbelievably bored. Much had lost its appeal, so that he felt almost chilled through. He did not quite know whether this was because the cases in the files he had to process had the coldest caseworkers, or because the stories in them pretended to contain no life at all. Menzel simply could not describe exactly what he lacked. Perhaps there was a spark of hope, perhaps something interesting, perhaps nothing. He wondered whether it might be his own doing. Perhaps it was his fault, which he resisted acknowledging. Perhaps he only needed to rush into the ring and, through the orchestra's fanfares, bring the whole thing to a halt. Menzel smiled and imagined what it might look like if he grabbed some caseworker by the collar to make clear that the file notes really concerned people, real people who might expect respect and inspiration in the handling of their cases. They would probably not even hear him; they were too passionless. They did their part without finding it good or bad, without any relationship to it; they treated each other like strangers, and all the more so what they had to process. They had earned their name: handlers of matters.
Menzel considered whether it might be possible to inspire the people who supplied him with files, to interest them in what they did all day. Then he looked at the clock and realised with alarm that it was almost noon and he was already a fair way behind his daily quota. Menzel picked up the next file, read the first sentences and was immediately disgusted. He put it back and decided not to concern himself with these things for the time being.
He surprised himself with the clarity with which he formulated this idea to himself. On the other hand, he felt very clearly that he had to carry on. This was his work, and it simply had to be done. Listlessly and without interest he picked up the file again to check it. He worked through it step by step, as he had learned. While the first went haltingly and slowly, the second already worked faster, and the larger the stack of processed files grew, the more this seemed to him the only correct way to compile files. Precisely this way, without fire: pure, objective accounts of connections and processes.
It seemed to Menzel that this way of looking at other people's lives without being drawn into them was an ingenious way of approaching life. He wondered whether this cold manner of looking, the continuous extinction of every fire, could also be applied to what troubled him in his own life. Perhaps it was not fire he missed and wished he could sometimes carry into others, into books and letters; perhaps what he lacked was the ability to extinguish this fire in himself, to suffocate the desire for it. Menzel tried. In his mind he pushed a block of ice onto the things that troubled him: his loneliness, the ignorance in the office, the cold. He did not feel it. Suddenly he was quite certain he was simply unable to put this distance between himself and the world.
Before the Law
A powerful tremor tore Menzel from his work, and he immediately felt that something very terrible must have happened. He sat wide-eyed in his chair and listened intently to the slowly fading thunder that echoed throughout the building. His eyes searched the room for damage. The cabinet was intact; he could see that if he turned his head slightly left. Although moving more than his head seemed a mistake, he propped himself on his elbows and raised his upper body to see over the edge of the desk. Menzel was afraid to turn around and look out of the window. He observed all the folders on the shelf and could detect no change there or on his desk. A cold draught quickly made him aware that his office window was open. He wanted to close it — he was cold, after all — but he could not turn around. He had a dark suspicion that he must not turn around, that he would see something he did not like...
He was very agitated, for he could not suppress the thought that sometime, even if he fled, he would have to return, enter his office and look out of the window; then it would be impossible to look past the great wall of windows. He was thoroughly distraught and knew he would not soon be rid of this feeling.
What had actually happened? The earth had shaken a little. Why should that be so important? He did not know. All he felt was the certainty that something absolutely terrible must have happened. He slowly turned around. Looking outside, he first thought he was dreaming. The neighbouring building, which had always blocked his view of the city and stared at him with its sadly dark window-eyes, had vanished. Instead, an immense desert spread before his eyes. In the foreground, the outlines of individual stones were clearly visible, but their shadows merged in the distance into an even plain, a skin of stone laid like a shroud over the city with its hills and hollows. Menzel stood at the window and could not understand the image before him. He tried to find a pattern in the destruction, desperately directing his eyes towards irregularities in the almost perfect desert, always hoping to discover a point, a point that moved. Suddenly he painfully realised what he was seeking. He was trying to find people, survivors, anyone among the city's many inhabitants. He opened the ajar window wide, leaned out as far as he could and saw several employees of his company beginning to clear away rubble and stones. The lawn in front of the building had been buried under the avalanche of stone, except for half a metre of green that the employees had already uncovered. He pinched his arm until he cried out. He looked out at his colleagues' busy activity and thought about the tasks awaiting him in the office, the files he had to order and collect, and the impossibility of communicating with a fellow employee.
Menzel startled awake and was glad to be freed from his momentary dream. Somehow he was happy not to have been spared, because there was only a dream and no punishment from which he could have been acquitted. He returned to his work...
Cassandra Complex
Menzel simply wanted to walk on, but the man asked whether he was satisfied with his life. Menzel shrugged and willingly took the leaflet the man pressed into his hand very quickly and skilfully. Menzel nodded and quickened his pace again: he had finished with the day and really wanted only to go to the pub, and later to bed. Nevertheless, he could not help taking the now-folded leaflet out of his pocket and, once out of the man's sight, reading what it said:
Manifesto.
There may be war. Not a war as we know it from newspapers and television and have learned to switch off. It will be a war of words and deeds. The armies take their positions on a battlefield made of everything we know.
On one side are those who ask simple questions and receive simple answers. These are then imposed, not only in Iraq or Iran, but also in government offices and staffrooms, police stations and representative assemblies, concert halls and libraries. The human being, whose lot is to have a destiny in the open, is drilled beyond recognition, to the point of existence as a machine. In this existence they fulfil only their function. It is the rulers of this world who throw themselves and everything functional into the struggle.
On the other side is a fairy tale, a fiction, an overly complex, vague something. It is the unassailable thing burning in the human soul: the difference between existence and the function intended for it. An army on the battlefield that cannot be touched, whose only weapon seems to be the presence of its certainty. It stands on its hills, waiting to be overrun politically, economically and logically. This web has only faith in the word and in insight. It cannot fail as long as the human being is human, and must perish in confrontation with function and everything that submits to it.
Yet there is hope. Simple answers are simply wrong. There is still spirit able to circle this web in its important insignificance and also grasp how danger and the world encounter each other. That only by sublating oneself can the human being prevent their disappearance. The third army on a third path, taking the side of a diffuse human existence without grounds, yet entirely world and function, and obliged to be so.
Menzel swallowed. He looked at the sheet as though it were written in another language. He briefly tried to concentrate, then gave up. After this day it was simply too much.
From afar he could already see the large illuminated sign of his regular pub, and recognised his destination. He folded the sheet neatly again and threw it into the street. He walked faster.
Five Past Twelve Is Five to Ten Past Twelve
Menzel looked at the time and had to smile. It was exactly five minutes past twelve, and for him that was the sign. It had been a strange day, and several times today he had sent a greeting to his feeling that he was too late. Menzel had no idea why, but suddenly he began laughing loudly and resoundingly. He could hardly draw breath; his bursts of laughter were drowned out only by his convulsive inhalations when the laughing briefly eased. He laughed until tears came, sitting on his bed and laughing at everything: himself, his work, his thoughts. He was unleashed, and only calmed somewhat when his alarm clock showed ten past twelve. Menzel stopped laughing and felt magnificent. Suddenly he wanted more. He rose and went to the large mirror. His cheeks were still wet with tears, and he strutted back and forth before the mirror, smiling.
Menzel had not always been as tall as he now seemed. Only moments earlier he had looked, as he himself had noticed, small and stunted. When he drew his shoulders forward and up, he looked as though he had never possessed a neck. His normal posture virtually shouted a kind of submission out into the world. That had now changed, for a few moments.
Menzel stretched himself and felt that tomorrow — or rather today — the whole world would belong to him. He positively looked forward to the new day, which might bring him some peace, when at any rate nobody would get too close. Tomorrow would decide that. He breathed in deeply the fresh night air coming through the open window and, after stretching a few times, lay down in bed. He looked at the ceiling and let the day pass before him once more. Occasionally shaken by a little fit of laughter, he realised that life was so meaningless that it had wit.
Was it not like a clown's invention that Menzel kept returning to the treadmill where he had success at work and a roof over his head, yet basically loathed precisely that? He was a caricature of an image, and the real punchline of his story was that he felt the colourful beads would one day be enough for him.
Menzel thought of his promotion, the woman on the bus, the path through life he had taken, and felt so small before it that every thought resisting it must be ridiculous. Menzel sensed he had no escape plan, but a beautiful window with sun in the morning, freshly sifted through a thick grille. Menzel turned onto his side and had grown serious. There was no new beginning. Things continued as always, and when he eventually fell asleep, the day ended with a tear too small to leave his eye, glittering in his lashes for a few minutes more. Menzel was already dreaming his first dream.
