Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

I hadn’t asked what she meant by that stuff you write : did she mean only my secret correspondence, or everything I wrote, that is, my literary work as well? — If it was the latter, this gave me an argument for a counterstrike when the time was ripe.

When my mother got up, between seven and eight, it was time for me to go to bed; first Mother invited me to drink a cup of coffee with her, which I did; I knew I’d have trouble falling asleep anyway. Furtively I swallowed half a sleeping pill. . this too was a habit I kept hidden to avoid reproaches. . here the two women were in agreement: Mother thought all these chemicals wouldn’t really help, I’d do better to live healthy and not overtax my nerves; in my wife’s view I had to sedate my guilty conscience before I could relax in bed. — And in fact my wife was right to accuse me of a guilty conscience, for I took the pills from one of her bottles, secretly, every time she was prescribed a new ration by a doctor she was friends with. . I regularly stole two or three when the bottle was still too full for her to notice; I stole them, as it were, for the long term, stocking up a supply I needed when my reading tours got too grueling. My wife took sleeping pills for granted; she needed them for the phobias that often gave her writer’s block. . as I never had writer’s block, in my wife’s view I had no need for sleeping pills.

The dose was too small, I realized soon after lying down; I snuck back into the bathroom to take the other half of the pill. Then, as I lay in bed, a sort of sleepless twilight descended on my brain, a haze of exhaustion and unrest behind which the film of my thoughts went on restlessly unspooling. My ears were defenseless against the onslaught of traffic noise from the street; even on Saturday mornings it was twice as loud as it had been on weekdays before the changing of the system, back when the town’s industrial plants were still operating. For the first time in years and years I thought of going out again to buy alcohol, but I lay where I was, immobilized, beads of sweat on my brow, unable even to fetch another half sleeping pill from the bathroom. At some point I sat on the edge of the bed, smoking; my mother had already left the flat to run some errands. . What was he after, the guy who’d ambushed me by the mailbox early that morning?

Could he want money for the letters and cards to Marie he’d pocketed, could he want to sell them to me? Hard to believe. . All he sought, it seemed, was the gratification of a crude, voyeuristic urge; he wanted to carry on what he’d begun ten years before in the back room of some bleak, poorly lit post office. But how did he plan to continue. . with my consent, evidently? Had he discovered in my letters to Marie that character trait that so resembled his. . didn’t the word see , which he used so obtrusively, actually come from me, from a letter of mine, or even several of these letters? Hadn’t my letters, too, displayed a certain voyeurism?

I fetched the half sleeping pill from the bathroom and flung myself down on the bed again: a memory surfaced in the haze of my consciousness, though I couldn’t say whether it was the memory of an actual scene, or merely the memory of a fantasy of that scene, the memory of a haze of words in my imagination that I then described in a letter, probably a longer letter to Marie. . she hadn’t answered it, as often happened she said not a word about it; and I remembered that in her silence I’d been seized by a lasting sense of shame, the suspicion that that letter had simply been too lascivious, too tasteless. Now it occurred to me that the letter might not have been tasteless at all, at least not in Marie’s eyes. And I thought of the ironic smile with which, often enough, she had requited my failure to act. .

It was a luminous letter, by no means shadowed by the darkness in which I was so often said to deal. — Marie had once called me a verbal eroticist , evidently, so I threatened to ravish her. . and I described the incident to her so vividly that I’d come to doubt it was just a figment of my imagination. — One day, I claimed, I’d gone to her without announcing myself. . I believe that in the letter I even asked if she too could recall that sunlit afternoon. . I never asked her in an actual conversation, which is why I doubt that afternoon’s reality. . she opened the door, and after barely exchanging three sentences with her, I went into the next room, the bedroom, and said, without any transition, that she should undress and lie down on the bed. . completely naked, I said. She did so, unquestioning, still dazed by the unexpected onslaught, which I carried out in an odd, commanding tone. I stripped as well, down to my undershorts, and knelt on the floor at the foot of her bed. I don’t know whether I told her to part her legs; after a time, at any rate, she spread her thighs and bent her knees: her sex was delivered up defenseless to the sunlight that flooded the broad window through the gaps of the yew hedge and over its straight-cropped edge, iridescing in the weave of the curtains. I said not a word, entranced by the sight of what faced me, female, alien, mocking all appellations: no, I had no idea whether I was entranced or ensnared, or possibly dismissed. . I could reach out and plunge in, but some mysterious mental malfunction prevented me; I was hypnotized by the expression of a mouth drawn slightly crooked, filled with covert irony, offering itself to me and yet in some unfathomable way refusing itself. Marie, too, said nothing, not moving, except that her legs barely perceptibly slid further and further apart; after a long time she asked what I wanted. . What are you doing down there, she said softly, out in the cold. .

I could think of no reply, still staring at the curving cleft, which extended down a hand’s breath from a little mound until it closed to a seam at whose end, hidden between swells, another opening appeared. My searching eyes returned to the slit that was like a sleeping mouth; its lips were closed, adhering as in breathless dryness. Only in time, in a patch of light, it seemed, that struck them from the window, did the lips grow suppler, an invisible melting that came from within, and parted by a few millimeters. Then the light illuminating Marie’s body from the window grew cooler; barely visible, merely imaginable tremors skimmed her skin. All that remained was one bright reflection, the tip of an arrow of light that pierced the hedge and clung to her body, fragile still, nothingness made visible, and as she moved a bit, growing restless, it darted across her lightning-quick and grazed her sex, now open, beginning to gleam in naked hues. — When this light is gone, then I’ll go, I thought. .

The image lingered before me when I woke in the evening: it was growing dark; the streetlamp across from the bedroom window had gone on; it was past mid-September, the days growing noticeably shorter; for a few moments I didn’t know where I was, then I heard the television, volume muted, in my mother’s living room. I went into the kitchen, took from my bag a postcard with a picture by Egon Schiele showing a woman with legs spread wide, put it in an envelope and addressed it to Marie in Leipzig; I didn’t write a word on the postcard. — In the morning between four and five, I brought the card to the mailbox; all night I had clicked my way through the countless television programs and kept falling asleep in my armchair. . not an image on the screen had the least thing to do with the truth or the reality of life. My mother, who kept nodding off in front of the TV as well, had soon gone to bed. . we were two sleepers from a past time; time’s tide had caught up with us and overtaken us; the hours of sleep were the only time we still struggled to hold. .

Should I give you a light? I asked when, as though out of thin air, he appeared before me in the darkness by the mailbox.