Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

I recalled the sinful sense of well-being that came over me when I stripped off my clothes to stretch out in the thick black mud that filled the bottom of the hollow. It was a grainy slurry of coal slack and sand in burnt-smelling water, whose surface, when smooth, showed yellow striations of sulfur. In this puddle I lay every afternoon of the endless summer, when the mud was very warm, sometimes almost hot; the oblong hole held the whole of my body, I ceased to move and waited until at last stillness came over me. Eyes nearly shut, I stared up into a sky whose rim was ablaze, and where the sun, straight above me, was an indistinct circle of white heat from which, now and then, a drop seemed to fall. . and a yellow cloud, nearly white, seemed to draw near this sun, touching the edge of its glaring gorge and beginning to melt.

Raindrops fell, a steaming yellow rain from the sun-hot sky, moisture that burned in the eyes. The sun-rain increased, the liquid in the mud puddle rose, the slurry that penetrated all my folds, all my pores, closed smoothly over my thighs; it rained harder, seething floods poured from a sky almost fully blue, the mud rose higher, hot and sucking it closed over my protruding sex, crept oppressively up my belly and my chest, and I waited tensely for it to reach my neck; already my arms were firmly embedded in the tenacious black tide that forced its relentless way up to my armpits, pressing my shoulders to the bottom, so that I seemed to merge inseparably with the peaty soil. Already I felt a terrifying tickle beneath my chin, and sensed my hair growing into the swamp below me, as though to root my body in the earth. And I seemed to have utterly dissolved in a black heat, the light of the sky still blinding me behind closed lids, as the rain splashed in the mud on my chest and boiled all about on the water of the lake, as dried stubs of plants softened and began to steam foully, as the rain crackled and rustled in the reeds as though to break them down or erect them. . and under the weight of the seething vapors all around something shot out from my body, something like a dull pain, something hard within me that had dissolved and turned liquid, departing me with monstrous ease, only my loins had flared and faded once more, only a brief rearing and stretching of my trapped spine, and I was still again, suddenly soft and unfeeling, nothing now but rot and water, indistinguishable from the elements around me and above me with which I had mingled myself.

In that moment the shrill song in my ears broke off. From then on the scolding and the threats fell still; there was a silence within me, as though the cries wished to be mere memory; gradually I began to forget them. — Into the lake. . into the lake , the women’s venting utterance seemed suddenly to have gone mute. And at once I began to miss it; a moment later I felt that, from this time on, I would have to seek the voices of the women.

In secret I eyed their closed mouths, which seemed pinched and gray, oddly blurred and colorless; they wasted no more words on my unseemly behavior: on my coming too late, not coming at all. . oh, my coming had ceased to matter to them. And so they no longer promised to go, go throw themselves into the lake. . they ceased to threaten me with it, and stayed where they were. There was a dully flowing, yellow-green veil between us, made of rain, made of mist, and all words and retorts were lost in it. We no longer reached the surface; a chill prevailed between us, inevitably seeping inside if we offered even the tiniest opening.

It was pointless now to avow how I loved them, pointless to concede what they had once extorted, the irrefutable proof of my love, the liquid proof of my love that would encompass them all. . and that I no longer had the strength to mobilize in myself. In all the years that had sunk from my reach I had sought to hoard the names of love within me, a river of names, a deluge of words, a swell of endearments frothing and mounting. . I couldn’t find them, or the words failed to find me . They, the women they were meant for, were too old for them, I had missed the right moment. The names of love had bailed out somewhere, crossed over to an unknown shore, they were on the far edge of a bleak river, out of my reach, scattered and barren like dim stars above my smoking nights.

But one last time I resolved to follow them: the words of the women, or my words, or their silence, or mine. I set out in search of what seemed lost to me. Again I left the house in the middle of the night and wandered for a long time, breathing heavily I strayed through the liquid moonlight: I recalled the mudhole from my childhood. . Perhaps it was there, I thought, that I lost everything! — I hastened through woods where wafts of mist fooled my eyes, like nightgowns fleeing, then over an open field, across the endless rubbish heaps where the empty bottles and flickering snakes of tinfoil echoed the unearthly gleam of the sickle moon, and where deep in the night came a dark red glow as from subterranean fires. At last I found the peninsula, the omega: already I saw myself from afar, running across amid the thickets to the center of the island. . the birches had grown tall, the underbrush thin, but the trees were bare, they had died and rotted, their crumbling trunks soaked with water. I reached the shore and saw the lake stretched between the dark ruined trees, the causeway lay under water; it was impossible now to cross to the island, looming from the waves before the fiery glow like the fragment of a skull whose hair stood on end. And at a distance drifted clumps of foam — or were they clots of fog? — some of them erect, twisting upward like rising spirals, or like ghosts circling the island in wobbling boats. .

Not yet, ferryman, I said, I’m not ready to board your boat. Cast off once more without me, old friend; I must find my way back first. I must know those names first, that myriad of names. . then I’ll follow you.

For one day I will find them. . and then, to show you all, I’ll hurl it after you, my love, and the names for it, and the thoughts I have. — Into the lake! The lake! I cried, and, inflamed by a dull bolt of lightning in my body, I stepped close to the shore, where I tore my trousers open. Panting I began to empty myself, as though to form a bond between myself and the earth, I pissed steaming into the water, painfully I poured myself and emptied myself utterly into the dark water on which the swelling white gowns floated.

The dark divests us of our qualities. — Though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness. . it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten. . it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of his breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. And we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling each other, still and hostile. By day we keep silent, we know too much about ourselves, and our resolve to skirt or ignore this knowledge of ourselves is unshakeable. For years no contention has arisen between us, it seems settled that we respect both our lives, that we grant ourselves our existence. His existence is that of the father of his daughter, mine that of the son of my mother, no more and no less; the woman we mean, descendant of a dead woman, sleeps in more distant back rooms. One of our qualities, common to both of us, must be an arduously hidden fear: never mentioned in the light, it exhausts us in night sweats, swallowed by the dark, which we put down to the hot summer nights. We rest sweating side by side in an old marriage bed, and the square weight of the gloom lies upon us, clasps us, it presses us together, we lie with bodies completing each other, like two conspirators exchanging signs with their breaths.