The Sleep of the Righteous (11 page)

And I recalled one day when I'd tried to ask my colleague Gunsch about his background. One Sunday, the day after Christmas, the watchman had brought down a letter from the section head assigning me to the night shift in a different boiler room on Monday, December 27, because someone had called in sick. I didn't mind, it considerably shortened my way to work, but I immediately asked myself whether Gunsch had complained about my fit of rage two days before. I watched him as we worked and concluded that there was some dark thing in his obtuse skull that no light could be shed on. — No, he certainly hadn't complained, he had no interest whatsoever in demanding any rights. He might not even have been able to formulate a complaint; his capacity to
express himself was so stunted that he no longer even understood what he was subjected to, short of pure physical pain. Moreover, he didn't even seem to believe in the necessity of disputing things. And when I thought about it, a similar reluctance or inability had arisen in me as well. — And so we're two creatures of the dark, used to keeping silent, I thought, and there are probably few things left in our minds whose expression would give another person any pleasure.

Perhaps it's that we're unable to love the world enough anymore. Why should we tell ourselves things about a world that matters less and less to us?

In other eras you'd set your memories before the world, convinced they'd find listeners or readers in coming times. But no one believes in coming times now, at least not here, in the class we belong to.

At the end of the shift, while we waited to be relieved, I did try to strike up a conversation with him. It was rather one-sided: Did you hear? Tomorrow I'll be sent off again to a different boiler room, tomorrow evening . . .

There was no sign that I'd been heard. The old man had returned from the showers and sat in the common room in his coat, wet hair plastered to his skull, audibly slurping the last of his coffee from his thermos cup.

Starting tomorrow you'll be on your own again, Gunsch! Too bad for you, it'll be quite a slog. But I have the feeling you don't care one bit . . .

He seemed to nod. Or did he merely sink his black watery gaze still deeper into the coffee cup, turning it in the black fingers of both hands?

Say, what neck of the woods are you from, Gunsch? My
grandfather was Polish too . . . we might even have been countrymen if certain things had happened differently. But then we'd probably just be shoveling coal in Poland or the Ukraine . . .

For a moment he showed a strip of pink gums with scattered yellow teeth in them; he seemed to grin. He'd jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the common room's coal-dust-smeared skylight; it seemed to me he'd mumbled a few words. If you followed the motion of his thumb, Gunsch had pointed across the mine pits, the direction indeterminate; perhaps he'd pointed in all directions, perhaps he'd described a circle whose trajectory lay in infinity. That afternoon the leaden hue of the sky merged on all sides with the vapors that rose from the freezing sheets of water at the bottoms of the mine pits; ever since morning an opaque atmosphere had ringed the whole horizon. When you came up the stairs from the boiler room, there was a smell of snow and glowing ash.

Maybe you don't have any family, Gunsch? No relatives . . . no relatives left? — I'd lost my confidence, my talk about “countrymen” seemed foolish; what nonsense, when speaking of regions that seemed to have no fixed borders. — I hadn't even been able to find my grandfather's hometown on the map. And it had never seemed to interest him which country he belonged to. When I thought of the mix of peoples in the chaos of regions Gunsch came from, of course he was no one's “countryman” in the strict sense. If you came from there, you were a leftover person, remembered by no one.

He grinned again and pointed his thumb at the floor, averting his eyes; there was a dull dog's look in them: They're all under the ground . . .

Those were perhaps the only words he'd ever really directed at me. And I asked myself whether I'd even understood him right. It didn't matter exactly what he'd said, at any rate he must have meant more or less what I had heard. — Walking back from the mailbox, it surprised me that I'd forgotten the words so quickly:
They're all under the ground . . .

All at once I wondered if most people on this street weren't living with similar sentiments . . . Quite possibly that was the case! — Weren't they all, in some peculiar fashion, strangers? Of course they lived together, often harmoniously in their way, within their families they shared the quandaries and paltry pleasures of their existence, but they knew at all times how quickly they could lapse into oblivion . . . weren't they all forgotten the moment they stopped going to work? — They have a view of life focused on the bare present, thought C., on bare survival, on scraping by. — That's how they put it, you hear them say it often enough.

There was something disquieting in that: a feeling he only came to know once he'd already escaped from this existence. Ever since he'd begun to call himself a writer, he was gnawed by the suspicion that it was the lack of memories that thwarted him as a writer, that brought him to the verge of failure: the gaps in his memory, the incoherencies, the impossibility of reconciling spaces and times . . .

How many times he'd returned to the flat from his trip to the mailbox and first listened for a while at the door to the small back room where his mother slept. — Was she still breathing? — Dread filled him when he couldn't instantly hear her noisy struggle to breathe, when her restless tossing and turning on the mattress was not immediately detectable.
It was a noise as though the decrepit springs were slackening beneath the old woman's ever-lighter body and softly beginning to sing. — It's true, he thought, her body seems to be dwindling. And one day these fatigued springs of steel, these untuned strings, will cease to sing.

For a long while he sat in the kitchen with the door open and listened for noises from the back room. Sometimes it seemed, however hard he concentrated, that not another sound emerged. Muteness slipped under the door, flowed soundlessly down the narrow corridor, and began to spread like a cool breath of air in the kitchen. There, beyond the corridor, was a hermetic chamber filled with memories that pressed dumb and dark against the closed door; now speechlessness engulfed him even in the kitchen. And muteness reigned too on the floors below and above him; nowhere in this building, inhabited mainly by the aged, was there a sound, even on the street outside nothing more could be heard. He felt he could barely breathe now in this stillness, in the impalpable substance of the stillness. It was the hour when the town seemed utterly extinct . . . always around the time when he jotted down a few inconsequential lines. On letter paper or a postcard: apologetic lines, sounding as though the writer's sole intent were to give just one more sign of life . . . lines that would arrive in Berlin at some point, whose blue, shaky, dwindling script was the only proof that he existed. And that he then took to the mailbox, and sometimes this outlying part of town was so still that he feared his scurrying steps made too much noise. And then, almost aimlessly, he walked past the mailbox and on another hundred yards to the intersection beyond which the center of town lay.
It was as still as though the memory of his steps, of his stumbling, had been the last possible sound in this town. But soon, perhaps in another quarter-hour—you could already hear them from afar—it would be time for the first long-distance trucks to thunder from the left down the street that cut off his little neighborhood from the town proper. Now, at this still-nocturnal morning hour, the huge freight trains heading northward to Leipzig hurtled past the residential district at a reckless speed. Gusts of wind filled with ice shards and filth lashed into him. Though he stood on the sidewalk behind the guardrail, he felt a force that nearly made him reel back into the muddy grass behind him. When the deafening monsters passed through the town's periphery, they blew a warning with their horns; the long drawn-out howl, the blaring din of their passage, penetrated deep into the district to which, his hearing nearly obliterated, he now turned back.

He pictured his former colleague Gunsch again and wondered whether he wasn't under the ground as well by now. What a strange grin that was, over fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, at the end of the shift when he'd seen Gunsch for the last time. Hadn't that grin been like his grandfather's?. . . that grimace with a curse behind it:
choléra!
— He'd meant his clan; the coal; the darkness; he himself, a stranger to himself, ignorant of his forbears.

It began to snow again now, in late February or early March, as though winter were unable to have done with itself, and the wind blew stronger and stronger from in front. Once again C. felt on his face the icy breath he could not contend with; he saw light flare up behind a few windows in the houses, for just a few seconds, quickly extinguished.
The din of the long-distance traffic entered people's sleep and made them restless; like aimless ghosts they wandered their rooms, roused but not really awake, until they realized that it was still quiet on the street. But the traffic noise had come up against the wind, which seemed to turn stormy, so that C. had trouble making progress against it. And now it sounded as though imaginary thunderheads of din and ruin were surging through the sky above the roofs. Sometimes C. turned around to let the gusts spend themselves against his back . . . he thought of the waves of ash, blazing hot, that had descended on his bent back twenty years before. But no, on the street it was freezing cold!

He gazed up at the rows of buildings: perhaps it was true that most people who lived here belonged to a lost class. — That sounded histrionic, but wasn't it true that most of them had long since lost their work . . . and thus lived without their ordained purpose? Up there, behind the black windows in the ash-gray walls, dwelled the members of a refugee class among whom he had once counted himself.

Hardly any of them knew quite where they'd once come from, and no one pondered the question. And still less did they know where they were heading. And they didn't ask who would carry on the life and the work in which they'd had their share; that they had never asked. It had always been ordained by others. Those others derived this privilege from their ancestry. . . they'd inherited this ancestry and passed it on down; by ancestry they had the power to ordain how, where, and when the factories that exhausted the land would be built, maintained, and perpetuated: by those living behind the ash-gray walls of the buildings with the dark
windows. For these people had no ancestry, they didn't think about their ancestry, they'd forgotten it, they'd forgotten their memories, their memories were all under the ground.

And though a forty-year-long attempt had been made to convince them that they themselves were to ordain the work in which they had their share, they hadn't understood it. Their purpose permitted no such understanding, for their purpose was so much older than they.

Perhaps it was as though an old dark deity governed them, a deity of the underground. It was a black god from endless past times who had altered them; he had altered their bodies and their minds, their hearts, their tongues, and their organs of procreation, he had altered the blood in their veins, in them it flowed a distinct touch more darkly and slowly, as though they all descended from that dark deity they no longer recalled . . .

They dwelled on above in the stifling air of their rental tombs, the damned who couldn't wake up after nights in which idleness kept them from sleeping. They had failed, they had little love for the world; when they gazed back, there were their fathers, their forefathers, but they were barely discernable—they had lived in the same shadow. The factories were closed, keys rusting in distant safes in Munich or Dortmund until they were sold to a demolition firm. If they were lucky, and not yet too old, they might find a job driving one of the long-distance freight trains transporting rolls of pink toilet paper or tins of condensed milk from Munich to Leipzig. — And looking ahead, they shuddered to think of their sons who went about with shaved heads, in combat boots and black bomber jackets, staring with
alcohol in their eyes into a future that was none . . .

C. sat in the kitchen and listened to the wind, which made a soft, often polyphonic howling sound in the old building's flues. The fire in the heating stove had gone out; the cold could be felt, barely held back by ill-fitting windows. A murmur seemed to come from the neighboring apartments, the few of them with young people, cars started on the street, but the stillness of the kitchen went untouched. — Once, too, there were steps in the stairwell; they padded through his half-sleep, and he raised his head. He wondered if he'd heard the sound of the front door closing . . . just once, before the cars started up on the street; the sound was so familiar that he might easily have missed it. Or perhaps he'd only imagined the soft, shuffling steps in the stairwell. And then another door clicking into place, the door of the flat, just as familiar a sound. It seemed he hadn't fastened the safety chain to the doorframe, he'd forgotten . . .

And he'd left the door unlocked when he went to the mailbox. Afterward, he'd returned to the apartment with the absurd suspicion that someone had been there in the meantime. The smell of a stranger hung in the chilly air. There was quite clearly, almost too clearly, a muteness in the silence that was not his own muteness. Once again, for several minutes, he'd listened at the door of the little back room: not a sound had emerged. — Dark and bowed he stood holding his ear to the gray-yellow wood: in the room behind the door it was still.

What memories are sleeping, sleeping on behind that door. . . for how much longer? And after that I fell asleep at the table myself, deciding to postpone my trip to the mailbox
until the next day, he thought. Or I only thought I did. And I only thought up the steps in the stairwell, they padded solely through my imagination. And then I thought I saw a shadow, dark and bowed, in the kitchen doorway, making a grotesque attempt to grin and saying: