The Sleep of the Righteous (8 page)

For years I fled from the town, years that have sped from my grasp as though chased by the furies, and yet never passed quickly enough for me. These are all the years I can recall
with ease, quite in contrast to those I spent here in this town. It's as though in those other cities, the bigger, more attractive ones I chose to live in, I never really settled down. Those cities' easily summoned images were dimmed by a sense of loss, a sentimental feeling originating in this town to which I return from time to time. It's here that this barely explicable sense of absence grew on me, one I only really felt once I had settled down elsewhere with the more or less firm resolution to stay. It made itself felt as a kind of living without a background, it was a state of severance, a state without a past, and yet I'd learned to feel severed from the past in the small town afternoons.

Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog banks that merged beneath an earth-colored sky appeared unlikely to pass for decades to come. And more and more smoke seemed to spill from the sodden lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal.

Nothing new in the town of M., then. — Bahnhofstrasse, the station road, is still rutted by construction pits, as it was months before, the last time I came here: in the same darkness in which gusts of wind seem to snatch the faint light from the trembling lamps that mark, at irregular intervals, the edge of what was once the sidewalk. Cold fog with wind and rain knotted in it; now snow seems to mingle there as well. The way ahead of me has metamorphosed into a causeway of shadow, beginning to glitter treacherously. Ahead of me hurry a few bundled-up people who got off the train along with me; the street seems barely negotiable, on both sides the invisible looms. I look about for a better path: the alternative route is also broken up and blocked by railings
behind which, in the yellow-red flicker of lamps, listing construction vehicles seem to sink into the sand. Every route has been torn up; evidently, after digging up half the town, all work was ceased; I've never known it to be otherwise.

For one fleeting moment—an eddy of wind parts the mix of rain and snow—I can see the clock on the station façade: it shows three! — There's no mistake, it always told this time, its hands always formed this exact right angle in the upper part of the dial: three o'clock, as long as I can remember. I have a photograph a friend took of me at the lower end of Bahnhofstrasse, twenty or more years ago. Our intention was to record the strange sight of a bulky pipeline: along the side façades of the factory buildings by the road, the pipe, more than a yard in diameter with its insulation, ran straight across the factory windows, blocking both the view and the daylight, so that the lights in the factory halls had to be left on perpetually. The spectacle of this disconcerting stopgap constituted the charm of the photograph for us; it recalled some absurd technological fantasy. — The station stood at the street's upper end: on the clearly discernable clock above its entrance it was precisely three o'clock!

Eternal afternoon prevails in the town. The photo shows not a soul on the sharply lit street; the trees, evidently sycamores, still in existence then, are bare. Beneath the white-gray autumn sky, the town has been struck by some blow of mysterious origin. At exactly three o'clock on an ice-cold Sunday, when none of the inhabitants were on the street, the town had been transformed into a phantasm. It had frozen to a motionless backdrop; no one noticed, not even that harmless hobby photographer, himself observed only from behind
grimy curtains by several perpetually lurking informers. — Ever since then you were excluded, upon entering the city, from a fundamental law of human existence: since then you were excluded from the soft, relentless onward flow of time, which the trigger of an old-fashioned camera had brought to a standstill. There was only one copy of this black and white photo; the negative had vanished in the dusty back rooms of a photo lab whose owner retired long ago.

And ever since then you were transformed into a shadow upon entering this town, this sinister, bleakly motley heap of houses. And if someone had walked the streets at night, only years later might you hear his steps echoing up the walls.

Those were my thoughts when I'd walked across town and sat at last in my little upstairs kitchen. I thought of these steps, scuffing, hasty, sometimes dragging with weariness, and I thought that they had never ceased . . . they were the only movement in the town. — Outside, human life and living voices still existed! Beyond the bounds of this obliterated town I sensed language still at work, and I believed that with its help certain things could be achieved. New generations will partake of it, I told myself; I'd long been waiting for the moment when young people would at last take on the language. And at last seize the ideas buried in the language, and put them on the line. Perhaps I myself had grown unable to guess at these ideas; for far too long now, words have seemed to give out on me. But in some obscure future perhaps the words will reemerge, I thought. Like lights that flicker and stutter at first, as when long-forgotten wires and connections are suddenly flooded with electricity.

I've always spoken of the wrong things, presumably! At
least that was my perpetual suspicion . . . and despite my change of scenery, I increasingly felt I was governed by inertia. Inertia kept me captive, lying constantly in wait, prepared to take full possession of me, to fix me like a botched statue to the spot where I happened to be. — The cause lies here in M., I said to myself. Here, in this town, annihilation planted its foot on me. — And how long ago was it that I began to dissect the doom I called M. into words and phrases in order to achieve clarity about it: how many years ago that I failed in the attempt and gave up again . . .

When I visited the town of M., all I wanted was to return as soon as possible to a burning lamp over a kitchen table in a tiny, smoke-filled, eat-in kitchen familiar from my childhood. It had two windows facing the yard, and, on the other walls, peeling, blistered, yellow wallpaper displaying a peculiar pattern under the shadow of its discolorations: at first glance one had the impression that lines of dark brown vermin were marching straight up the walls. When I'd heated the coal stove, the wallpaper seemed to sweat, emitting the nicotine lodged in its pores since the beginning of eternity. The windows had warped in the damp; I'd used old towels to block the cold that seeped in at their edges. If possible, I left the lamp over the table burning all the time; its wires were heavily oxidized, porous. Dating back before the war, they refused to conduct electricity when switched on and off too often, and only protracted manipulation of the contacts could start the current flowing again. — In this old cave—in this relic from the early twentieth century—I sat and turned my pages, covered with crossed-out or not yet crossed-out lines. Instead of writing, I smoked cigarette after cigarette
and listened to the darkness that hung inert outside the windows. There was nothing to be heard . . . I couldn't hear a thing, all sounds were swallowed by the enervating whine of the ancient refrigerator, whose unstable power unit kept starting up at far-too-brief intervals.

My reflections on this town had likely begun at a time now lost in mythic twilight. Indeed I had tried, again and again, to form a picture of the town which, if I was not mistaken, was still out there, which probably still clustered around my lighted interior, frozen and stony and hollow. I had even persuaded myself that this was my sole purpose . . . and perhaps for that very reason it had become for me a senseless, useless undertaking. Often I believed that first I had to invent the town by describing it . . . perhaps it could come into existence in no other way. The fact that I had been born in it was not sufficient to prove its existence . . .

How can one demand of a shadow that he describe the image of a shadow town? — It was absurd questions like that I grappled with. And a long-familiar effect had taken hold: my goal, the image of the town, seemed to recede still further from me each time I believed, thanks to blind chance, that I'd come closer for a moment . . . the goal sought to evade me! I was accordingly ill-disposed toward my endeavor. — But perhaps there did exist, somewhere in the streets, a certain shadow for whom such an image was possible . . . weren't there footsteps in the depths of town, padding steps I strained my ears after? First they had receded, but now they returned again. Weren't those steps down on the pavement the proof I was seeking? I listened a long time, hour after hour, but there was not much to hear, due to the
refrigerator noise—a central, recurring motif brought to me by the run-down things of the twentieth century—which constantly drowned everything out. And the light began to flicker, for seconds at a time, each time the refrigerator switched itself on.

How can you sit calmly at a table and write, I said to myself, and set down the impression of a completely inert town, when you're constantly tormented by the knowledge that someone out there in the dark is being hunted, and may this very moment be running for his life?

However frightful the deluge of refrigerator noise: I seemed to keep hearing those hasty steps out on the street. From the moment I arrived in M. I was unable to escape the thought. The door to the next room, with the street window, stood ajar, and I heard the clatter and shuffle of well-worn shoes on the crooked stones of the sidewalk. First it was a single person's steps; soon I thought several others were following him. After a while the single steps returned, and sometimes they strayed into the yard, sometimes coming right beneath the two kitchen windows between which I sat, listening in horror. In a moment I could expect him to call my name . . . I stood up and extinguished the light. Once I felt safe, I turned the lamp on again: of course it wouldn't burn; I climbed onto the table, lighting my way with the cigarette lighter, and jiggled the cable until the two fluorescent tubes shone once more. The whole thing repeated until my thoughts were in tatters: that crackling and flaring, and then again the slackening steps, once it had grown still.

Sometimes it ceased, but the hunt in the streets was far from over. He had managed to shake them only temporarily.
It seemed he'd hidden himself in a dark corner; my yard served in a pinch to let his pursuers pass by. But all he got was a breathing spell; soon they tracked him down again. They were long since wise to all his ruses, they'd been after him for years; I would have had to count back to say when this story had begun. There was no reason for it . . . no one out there knew any reason. — And often enough they caught him, presumably they could catch him at their whim. At any time they could corner him and let him run into a trap: he was one man, there were always more of them, they took turns, they could increase their force at will.

I recall all too well how once, in the very beginning, when their malice was still boundless—a few weeks, in other words, after setting their sights on him—they had snatched him off the street and beaten him horribly. It was a winter night, between three and four in the morning, when I heard a voice calling softly outside the kitchen windows and thought I could make out my name. With the last of his strength he'd dragged himself into my yard, where he collapsed in the slush. I had to help him up the stairs; evidently he could hardly see. I helped him lie down on the sofa in the kitchen and administered several shots of liquor. His lips were split, blood dripped from his nose. Both eyes had swelled nearly shut, and shards from his glasses were embedded in his lacerated brows, clearly due to a blow from a truncheon. I tried to get some explanation out of him, but he merely hissed out profanities and curses; he murmured on even after falling asleep.

Not long after this scene he was sent to prison for a year; on his release his papers bore a stamp authorizing him
to cross the border. He had three days to leave the country; together we went around to the authorities, whom neither of us cared to visit, to gather the signatures he needed, attesting, among other things, that he'd paid his electric bills, had no outstanding library books, and had taken care of the fee for clearing out his cellar. An hour before his departure we packed his belongings, filling barely half of an olive canvas duffel bag. In the afternoon I accompanied him to the last bus to the district capital, which he had to take to catch the interzonal train to Frankfurt am Main that would bring him across the border before midnight. I refused to believe that he was glad to go. We were silent for most of the way to the bus station, or at least we didn't speak of how he was leaving the country with no real conviction, and no precise notion what his destination was. He was limping, but insisted on carrying the bag himself; though it weighed nearly nothing, it pulled his slender shoulders askew. Before boarding the bus, he turned his face to me, now pale, and said he'd never set foot in this country again. — You've got no other choice, I thought, but didn't say it out loud; I saw him sitting behind the grimed bus window, staring stoically straight ahead. There was no point in waving again, for as the bus drove off, I saw that his eyes were closed behind his thick lenses; an inscrutable smile played about his lips.

Just a few days later I could have sworn I saw his duffle bag again. I happened to walk down the street where he'd lived, and saw it lying on the sill of the ground floor window, which had never had curtains. I'd often worked myself up about that: he offered an unobstructed view through his
window to every sewer rat and every belly-worm employed by the state apparatus. It was all the same to him. — I knocked on the pane; nothing stirred, so I went into the building and hammered on the door of his flat: no one answered; his name plate had been removed from the front door.

Revenge! Revenge, I thought, it could only be revenge that they'd wanted. — But revenge for what? — I still sought an explanation for the story, but there was no chance for an explanation. At any rate, there were always enough people to put together a posse! There were policemen and secret policemen, and any number of overzealous little snitches who would have given anything to play Inspector Maigret. Who even did it free of charge, just to show how much they cared about law and order in this town. How many humble citizens with windows on the street took up their posts behind the curtains at the least unusual noise? I couldn't imagine that, of all their traits, this one might have changed.