Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

There was one case, though, for which my wife made an exception: Marie, who lived in Leipzig. I had known her a good deal longer than my wife, and with Marie I really had had a short-lived love affair. When it came to Marie my wife held off, Marie never came up in the tangled mass of her reproaches; evidently, in the manner of feline predators, she granted her a certain prior claim, or it was simply that, in Marie’s case, I’d been honest to my wife for once and told her about it. — I’d never told her a thing about the other so-called affairs: in those there had never been any opportunity for physical contact, nothing of the kind, and that was probably why I was ashamed; it was the shame of failure, and my wife, however mistakenly, managed to goad it within me again and again. — I noticed that now and then she talked to Marie herself: the last time was just a few days ago; and then my wife had handed me the receiver and indicated that Marie wanted to talk to me.

I was alarmed by the voice that emerged, a mere wisp, from the telephone. Marie said she wasn’t well, no, not at all, kept alive by a constant haze of morphine, but it would all be over soon now. The end was near, that she knew, it would only be a matter of days or weeks. — Marie’s voice barely breathed into my ear, as absent as though it came from another universe; the long pauses between words were filled with labored breaths that seemed deafening after her voice. — Following her last cancer operation, just as unsuccessful as all the previous ones, she was lying, her body slit, in her tiny room in Leipzig, dependent on the care of a friend, a painter who’d come to stay a few days ago, though the apartment barely fit two people. — You’ve got to see her one more time, my wife said after I hung up. If she’s even still there, you can be sure it’s the last time you’ll see her. And you’ve planned enough time on your crazy trip to Dresden and your mother. .

For flying to Dresden, my wife had declared me certifiably insane. A new academy had been founded there — in the East new academies were springing up like mushrooms— and I had been invited, along with several other poets, to read fifteen minutes of poetry at the inaugural event. The reading fee was negligible; besides, I’d booked a flight, albeit one of the cheap flights you could get if you reserved in time, and the trip included a weekend. The academy could only reimburse train trips, and so I had wound up with a losing proposition that vexed me quite enough without my wife’s derision. — She told me I was acting like a whore. All they had to do was wave, and there I was. — Whores generally get paid pretty well, I retorted. — True, she said. But not the old, beat-up whores.

After that quarrel we gave each other the silent treatment for more than a week. In secret I had to admit she was right; just to save some time for a certain piece I wanted to work on — which, I persuaded myself, I could best do at my mother’s. . because the manuscript was set in the town south of Leipzig where I was born and where my mother lived on in the same apartment, now almost utterly dilapidated — just for that I had dreamed up this idiotic itinerary: the best part was that I was planning to jettison the return flight from Dresden, since the train from Leipzig to Frankfurt am Main was actually quicker. — But now I’d lose the time I had gained: on the postcard I’d taken to the mailbox the night before my departure, I’d told Marie I planned to visit her in Leipzig. . just for a few hours, a single afternoon, due to time constraints, but I hoped, or so I’d written, that she’d look forward to seeing me again. — If I spent days hanging around at my mother’s first, my wife had declared, it might be too late to visit Marie. .

Maybe, the thought crossed my mind, before taking the train back from Leipzig I could pay Marie a second visit. . a farewell visit! I thought.

Nervous and bleary-eyed, I sat on the suburban train to Mannheim, where I had to change for the so-called airport shuttle to Frankfurt Airport, and kept running through the stops of my trip in my mind. I was passing through the vast wine-growing region that lay below the Palatinate Forest: vineyards, nothing but vineyards, and the sun rising over them. I was traveling through a landscape of pure cultivation; it was, in my view, one of the most beautiful regions in Germany, and so far it had not appeared in a single work I’d written. Though I’d lived here for several years, I wrote on and on about the moonscapes south of Leipzig, stretching to the horizon, on and on about the industrial town of my birth, surrounded by pits from whose fathomless depths lignite had once been mined. Now there was nothing but dead, shut-down mine pits, and those tracts of land seemed to have lapsed into an irreversible futility, a uselessness that dragged each of my thoughts into the depths to shut it down and make it useless. — Or I wrote on and on about journeys, confused and haphazard, more like evasive actions, flights without cause, without aim, a perpetual flight in the wake of a crime committed only in a dream. .

Here, all the way to the horizon, across the whole Rhine Plain, the stuff of human pleasure was coaxed forth from the earth, here there was nothing but vineyards. And when it grew light and a beautiful day dawned, hosts of birds swooped down into the vines, whose grapes were nearly ready for the harvest. And at the edges of the plots, sometimes still lapped by mist, the field wardens came to life, appearing out of nowhere and firing their shotguns wildly into the air to scare off the raucous flocks of birds.

Before reaching Dresden — that city so ravaged during the war, then ravaged once again by the so-called reconstruction the GDR had indulged in. . and now perhaps for the third time, I thought, by the mass of exhaust fumes that found no escape from the Elbe valley where Saxony’s new capital nestled — and two days later, on the express train from Dresden to Leipzig, I had plenty of time to think. Again and again the newspaper slipped from my fingers as I tried to read, my head fell back against my seat in the compartment where I was the sole passenger, and the twilight of half-sleep engulfed me, more restful, I found, than the mindless non-place deep sleep plunged me into when, rarely enough, I achieved it. You could sleep and yet you could think, quite lucidly even — a surprisingly satisfactory state! Oddly, I thought less about what might await me in Leipzig; I couldn’t get my mother out of my head, who over the years had grown very quiet and old, meekly fulfilling my every wish. . and for my wife this very meekness constituted an offense whose magnitude unsettled me, for increasingly she traced my behavior — my lack of character! — back to my mother’s. There were no such frictions in my mother’s home: when I needed peace and quiet, I was left in peace; Mother asked me no questions and expected none from me; she let me sit alone in the kitchen, bent over some draft; she made herself invisible in the next room and even turned off the television if it bothered me. . and she’d make me more tea when she saw that the pot on the kitchen table was empty.

It occurred to me to simply stay with my mother as long as I wanted, to work there on my manuscript as long as I wanted. My mother had no telephone, my wife couldn’t reach me. . the idea of vanishing from her horizon for a while, leaving her in the dark, suddenly filled me with the calm that made me nod off in the train. I knew it was a lust for revenge, however modest. . but at least it was the opposite of the panic I fell into whenever my wife threatened to throw me out or go her own way.

Excruciating tensions had arisen nearly every time my wife and mother met. . which could happen only in our house in Rhineland-Palatinate, for my wife refused to travel to the east. It was, admittedly, my wife’s house; she had found it, leased it, and furnished it as she saw fit, for here, I had to admit as well, I had proven completely incompetent. . and it remained my wife’s house, even if I paid the rent each month. Every time my mother visited us, which she did once or twice a year for little more than a week, the same thing happened: my wife felt ousted from her house, seeking refuge in a village with one of her girlfriends, where, I could feel it in the air, she waited as though on a bed of nails. During this time my mother was charged with watering the countless plants that stood about everywhere, a task my wife wouldn’t entrust me with, regarding me as completely unreliable. . and my mother overlooked a ten-inch-high orange tree that stood all by itself in a clay pot on a windowsill: the tree had dried up and couldn’t be revived. . it was my wife’s favorite plant. From that point onward, open hatred erupted; the next day I tried to persuade my mother to leave because we were busy and had no more time for her. My wife refused to drive Mother to the train station in her car; I called a taxi and took her to the little station, which would have been a good forty-five-minute walk with an old woman like Mother. I stood mute, close to tears, on the platform next to my mother, who had no idea what had just spun out of control.