For the entire rest of that week, Simon carried on this otiose social intercourse with the nurse, with whom he’d get into arguments and then make up again. He played cards like someone who’d been doing so for years, and rolled billiard balls around in the middle of the warm day while everyone possessed of hands was working. He saw streets filled with sunlight and alleyways in rainy weather, but always through a windowpane, with a glass of beer in his hand; made long, useless, wild speeches morning, noon and night among all manner of strangers, until finally he saw he had nothing more to live on. And one morning he didn’t go to visit Heinrich but instead made his way to a room where any number of young and old men sat at desks writing. This was the Copyists Office for the Unemployed, where people came who, owing to their particular life circumstances, found themselves in such a position that securing employment in a regular place of business was out of the question. Individuals of this sort worked for meager day-wages here, copying out addresses with hasty fingers beneath the strict supervision of a supervisor or secretary — business addresses for the most part, in lots of one thousand, for which large firms contracted with the office. Writers brought in their scribbled manuscripts, and female students their all but illegible dissertations so as to have them either typed out on the typewriter or copied in a smooth clean hand. People who didn’t know how to write but had something they needed written down brought their documents here, where the work was quickly seen to. Cake-counter ladies, waitresses, laundresses and chambermaids had their letters of recommendation copied out tidily before proffering them for examination. Benevolent associations turned in thousands of yearly reports that had to be addressed and disseminated. The Association for Natural Healing had multiple copies made of the invitations to their folksy lectures, and professors had no end of work for the copyists, who in turn were happy to have the work. This entire copying enterprise was supported by yearly subventions from the local government and headed by an administrator — himself formerly unemployed — for whom the post had been created to give him a suitable occupation for his old days. He was the scion, so to speak, of an old patrician family and had wealthy relatives on the city council who didn’t want to sit back and watch one of their family members go to ruin under shameful circumstances. And so this man became the king and protector of all the vagabonds, lost souls and hard-luck cases, and he discharged these duties with a casual dignity, as if he’d never in all his wild days, some of which he’d spent on the road in America, tasted the bitterness of deprivation.
Simon made a bow before the administrator of the Copyists Office.
“What do you want?”
“Work!”
“Today there’s nothing. Come back tomorrow morning, perhaps we’ll have something suitable for you then. For now, write down your name, permanent residence, place of birth, profession and age along with your current address on this sheet of paper, and then come back tomorrow at eight on the dot, otherwise there won’t be any work left,” the administrator said.
He was in the habit of smiling as he spoke, and speaking through his nose. What’s more, he always assumed an almost scornfully mild-mannered tone in his dealings with the unemployed — not intentionally, that’s just how it happened to come out. His face, sunken and ravaged, was the color of cold white lime and terminated in a ragged gray beard with a point to it, as though the beard itself were a pointy scrap of his face hanging down. His eyes lay deep in their sockets, and the man’s hands bore witness to ill health and physical ruin.