Raw Material by Jorg Fauser

Author:Jorg Fauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile

thirty

Bernadette moved in with me. I couldn’t believe it. It was pure coincidence that I was allowed to be part of this, and now I had the most beautiful girl in the house. In the house? Beneath every red flag in the world. I had her every night. During the day Bernadette worked in a bookshop. That was fine by me. I needed the day to recover. I gave up the job at the Bundesbank straightaway. The head of personnel was not at all happy. He didn’t understand me.

‘You ought to think about this long and hard, young man! You’d have had a pay rise soon!’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but do you know what? I really would like to make it as a freelance writer now.’

He shook his head.

‘Freelance writer? What’s the point of being free if you don’t earn anything? You’re twenty-seven. Just don’t go thinking it’ll be easy for you to get a job like this again.’

Later on I often thought about these words.

I told Bernadette. Our nights were quite long, but she didn’t seem to need much sleep. And if we weren’t making love, we talked.

‘Forget your job,’ she said. ‘If they’d found out where you were living they’d have thrown you out anyway.’

‘Don’t say that. The Bundesbank isn’t any old branch of a savings bank. It’s a job for life.’

‘That sounds as if you regret it, chéri.’

‘Nonsense. It’s just that I’ve got to earn something.’

‘There are always jobs.’

‘Not for me. What can I do?’

‘The bookshop is looking for a packer.’

‘Me packing books?’

‘What’s wrong with that? They’re paying six marks an hour.’

‘No way. I’m a writer, not a bookshop dogsbody. I write books, not pack them.’

‘That’s reactionary. Socialism has removed the separation between manual and cerebral labour.’

‘Maybe it has. And I’ve got nothing against factory work. I mean, if it has to be done. But I’m not going to pack books.’

‘Hold on. You say you’re a writer, but you never write anything.’

‘Writers don’t always have to be writing.’

‘But if you’re not writing you can’t earn any money from it.’

‘Bernadette, it’s possible to live without packing books.’

‘Oh là, I was just trying to help. Come, chéri.’

‘Dmitri said his firm’s looking for people.’

‘What sort of work is it?’

‘Oh, you know, it’s sort of … well, Dmitri mainly sits somewhere in a factory and makes sure that nothing happens.’

‘Is it a sort of policeman?’

‘No, no. They call it night watchman, gatekeeper. He says he spends most of the time reading or sleeping.’

‘Night watchman? You mean he works at night?’

‘They don’t need him during the day.’

‘But at night,’ Bernadette said, bringing the discussion to an end in her own way, ‘at night I need you. Like now, you see, chéri?’

Dmitri was right. No sooner had the students moved in than an orderly, regulated life, managed by committees, panels and the Dietz edition of Marx and Engels, took its course. Obviously there were breaking points, but organisationally they were kept to a minimum. This was evident from the allocation of the living spaces.

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