Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

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:

They’re all under the ground. .

The words were hard to understand, like a noise I’d left far behind me, and they were swallowed by the stillness. Or drowned out by the town as it awoke at last.

Best of all I seemed to remember the phone call with which the story began. The voice came from a pub, around ten in the evening, I heard the unmistakable background noises: a babble of voices, laughter, clinking glasses. I was not in the mood for a phone conversation; I was packing my suitcase with the TV on, and my relationship with my wife had reached rock bottom more than a week before. At first I thought it was a wrong number, I even hoped it was.

I’d like to see you, the voice declared, won’t you come over? — It was a deep voice, if not exactly a bass, and might have been described as melodious had it not spoken so execrable a dialect, made still more distasteful by the evident effort to speak High German.

Where am I supposed to come. . and who wants to see me?

To the pub Zum Doktor, you must know the place. I’ll be waiting for you at the bar.

Who wants to see me, is what I asked. And why, who am I dealing with here?

He didn’t want to tell me on the telephone: Come on, you’ll find everything out soon enough, half an hour might even do the trick. .

When I said nothing, he grew more insistent: I have to see you, it’s imperative. . come on, do me a favor!