(a Berlin story draft)
This view
was breathtaking. The office was on the twenty-second floor and had windows
from the ground up to the ceiling; one could overlook the whole newly-built
quarter. Seidel carefully kept one step of a distance, he folded his arms and
looked over to the Sony Center, whose sloping glass-roof was spreading over the
teeming crowd like a spiderweb. All this was somehow unreal, the front of
windows seemed like a huge screen displaying the setting of a contemporary
movie, architectural symbols of a dream of an important metropolis. The
city-train was flickering over the riverbridge like a toxic worm, deep down
blinking toy cars were streaming over the crossing, tiny people were teeming at
the square, not knowing, that their chaotic ways were put together into newly
fromed patterns under his eyes. A smell of plastic and paint was in the air.
Seidel was pleased. The board of management had finally approved an office
for him and two months for the planning stage of the logistics for the new
subsidiary company. He was free of it now, free of this black-and-white sight
of all those chattering future-fanatics and disciples of numbers. Free of those
who took away his air to breathe with their neverendig spohisticated talk about
stock exchanges, computer programs or endless sexual extasy during the last
short trip to the Maledives. All those nerds with their uniform smell of
designer after shave that had been poisening his air day by day. The eternal
silent struggle for the best place at the feeding bowl was over. Up here one
could see much clearer and much further. Unwillingly Seidel moved away from the
spectacular view behind the glass, from the view, that would define his horizon
from now on. With big steps he crossed the room. He took the telephone from its
base and listened to the chirping beep. Then he touched the shiny surface of
the desk and persisted in front of the switched-off computer screens. Softly he
stroked the back of the chair with one fingertip and gave it a punch, so that
the chair spun around for a while. Seidel waited with a smile untill everything
had stopped moving. Then he left the room.
The next
morning he discovered an ant on the desk. Without orientation it was wandering
around on the shiny surface. Lost in thought Seidel rested his head in his
hands and watched the little yellow animal. It was difficult not to loose it
out of sight because it was so small. He asked himself how it could possibly
have come up here. In the morning he had walked from the kitchen into the
garage, with the car he had driven to the inside car park and from there he had
gone up to the twenty-second floor with the elevator. It could not have gotten
here on his shoes. After a while his gaze blurred. He lost the ant out of his
sight.
He
liked the new room, the view, the smell, the work. Only the secretary, who was
approved to him by the board of management, whose appearance seemed somehow
neglected to him, nevertheless there was nothing to complain on first sight.
She was said to have been working for the company since it was founded and she
was already part of the inventory. But for some reason he was disgusted by her
akward make-up, by the bright lipstick-red that always reached above the
natural shape of her lips on the grobporige skin, by her thin and muzy
curles, by her impassive shouted gaze. Of course he avoided talking about
it. With fixed stare she sat in front of her computer screen and did, what he
demanded. He preferred to talk to her by intercom. Every day he was working up
to twelve hours.
A few days
later he discovered a small group of ants under a pile of paper near the
monitor at his glass desk. They were small and black and overstood the hectic
hits, he was giving them with a rolled up paper. Then, against his first
intensions, he called his secretary into the room, for seeing this. She was
willingly staring at the place he showed her for a while, but she could not by
any stretch of the imagination recognise any ant. When Seidel instisted in his
discovery, she referred to her eyes destroyed by the screenlight, she answered
with a shrug of her shoulders. For her a few ants, if there really should be
some, seemed not as a problem, she explained to him with a non-commital smile.
„Our company is constucting the most modern office-builiding in the world“, she
friendly said. „Light, air condition, energy, development plan, everything
sorts itself out. Nobody knows this better than you, Sir. Everybody in this
house is waiting for your ideas with exitetd anticipation.“
Seidel was listening to her folded arms and was
asking himself, wehre this had any conection with the ants. The secretary
seemed to guess his doubts. „It‘s not that easy für you in your new position.“
she said. „Dont let them make you nervous.“
He got used
to find some ants between the papers and monitors from time to time. Up to the
day he discovered a bustled lane of ants in the relief of the fitted carpet.
The treck of ants seemed to start near a not working wall socket at the door,
with a blurred semicircle it leaded under his desk and ended on the other side
in the middle of a wall that went more into the inner of the building. Seidel
started to crawl around on the ground with a magnifying glass in his hand. For
his surprise he had to notice that in this office one could find much more ants
than he or anybody else had regognised up to now. He reported his discovery to
his secretary by intercom system and asked her, to clear away these ants. The
voice on the other side shortly laughed, asking, if he was honest. She recommended
him to call for a pest controller. Seide asked himself annoyed if now was the
right time to tell a few clear words about duty and division of labour, but he
decided to make all this not more important than it was. With short words he
gave order to his secratary to call a pest controller instantly.
The pest
controller arrived exactely in time in a neon yellow overall und with
overdimensional equipment. He assiduous called him Doctor Seidel and closed the office for one day. Seidel sent the
secretary home and worked on in the outer office.
The
new plans took him up more than he had expected. For abround four week
everything was alright. Then they returned. The new street was leading from the
outer office to the windows. This time Seidel did not think about it any
longer, he told the secretary to call, set her free for the afternoon and
entrenched himself at her desk, meanwhile the pest controller assiduous
perfromed his tedious chemical rituals in his office room.
„Ants are no joke...“, the pest controller sympathetically remarked when he had
finished his work. „They are persistent. Let me know, if you discover some of
them again. I work effectivly but philantropically. If you let work the air
condition over night, you can feel yourself in your office again like in garden
Eden tomorrow.“
Seidel thanked and payed the man an generous tip from his own pocket. Up to the
presentation of his plans only less then two weeks had left.
Later
in the evening, when he was going to leave the builing, he surprisingly met the
secretary. While he was on the way down she entered the elevator together with
two men from the board of management and one suitboy from the service
departement intesively smelling of after shave,. „What’s up with the logistic
plannings?“ one of the gentlemen of the management board asked politely without
expecting an answer. „And what about the ants?“ asked the smelling suitboy from
the service departement. The secretary smiled but did not look at him.
„Thanks for asking“, Seidel answered. So the the talk was finished.
Seidel did
not say a word about this incident, as he used to do, and concentrated himself
fully on his work. Not much time left. Tow days later suddenly some ants were
running over his computer screen. When he wantetd to call the pest controller
again but the management board let ask him by phone if the animals did do any
damage. This he had to negate. The money for the pest controller was canceled.
The secretary told this news to him on a sheet of paper.
Once after work Seidel stood down at the square and
looked upwards to the twenty second floor. Around him the people were teeming. Erverything
was as it always was. He looked for the windows of his office. They are up
there, he tought.
At night he
was dreaming of the noise the ants were making on the way through his office.
He thought he heared them laughing. But next morning when he was sitting at the
desk, again listening carefully. He heared nothing, absolutely nothing.
The same day, when he was looking after the mail in
the anteroom, he watched by chance how the secretary smushed a few small
black ants with her fingernail and blew them away from the desk while she was
thinking about a text that was flimmering at the screen in front of her.
„I admire it“,
he said suddenly.
The secretary
hastitated.
„In deed?“ she
finally asked.
„Yes“, said
Seidel. „I‘m afraid, I admire it...“
„I feel
honoured...“ said the secretary and looked strained at her monitor.
„I mean the
ants“, Seidel said disconcerted. „Did you know, that the corridors and arcades
in the hills of soutafrican termites perfectely fit together although the
insects are blind and start to build from completely different points?“ He
shortely looked out of the window and went back to his room.
Later he got
to know that the call of the secretary to ask at the personnel departement for
her transfer happened instantely after this talk. Her application was
istantely accepted.
For Seidel it
was right. He decided not to complain. Untill a substitute was found he owned
the office alone for himself. He had one week yet to the deadline.
„Good
morning!“ he said when he was entering the empty rooms. In former times he
only had nodded silently and waqs hurrying towards his place. „Let’s go to
work!“ he shouted now every day and clapped his hands.
He set down behind his
desk and let his eyes move over the spectacular view behind the glass. Then he
turned on the machines and started to work.
Over the wide carpet ground of the
room three broad lanes of ants were running with silent bustle.
www.stadtsprachen.de 
