Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

Mother was delighted when I told her I’d stay a day longer. I pleaded a headache as my excuse. . I’m not feeling so great, I said, it must be the weather. — Yes, what kind of weather is this, so hot and humid, she said. We aren’t getting a proper autumn. But tonight it’ll rain for sure, I can feel it in every joint. — I’ll fetch you some coal from the cellar just in case, I said.

Mother’s rheumatism had not deceived her; when I got up — with the help of two sleeping pills, I’d slept like a stone — it was windy and rainy; well past midnight, when the old woman had long since gone to bed, the showers seemed to let up. As I left the house at last, the pavement gleamed in the light of the few streetlights as though it had been washed. — It was quite easy to find a suitable conveyance in the bakery’s spacious yard; I didn’t even need the flashlight, with the moonlight that broke now and then through the tattered clouds. Several so-called sack trucks — used in the old days to transport flour sacks — were lying or standing in a corner. I picked out the best one: it would have to move almost silently; the rubber tires of the two small wheels still had to be well inflated. Outside the administrative entrance I laid the sack truck flat on the ground and arranged his body on it, upside-down, his head on the bottom steel ledge; I bent his knees over the truck’s upper crossbar, lodging his feet under the two steel struts that formed an X extending to the lower crossbar, then I stuffed his hands under the waistband of his jogging pants, which seemed tight enough. In his pants pockets I found an ID — not bothering to read the name in the darkness, with the moon behind the clouds once more — a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a key ring with two safety keys; I stuffed the things back into the pants pockets, which could be zipped shut. Finally, I covered his face — his eyes, I saw in the beam of the flashlight, were still open wide, but the pupils were now sightless — and part of his torso with several tattered pieces of plastic sheeting the wind had blown across the yard. Instead of carting him down the main street, I took a detour, which cost me a good quarter of an hour, but here, years after the changing of the system, there were still no streetlights to speak of. I reached the wall that separated a sprawling factory complex from the streets at the edge of town: I knew all the tricks for getting through sections of fence that slid open and shut, back doors in the depths of the factory halls that no one ever locked because no one knew about them, through junk rooms, through never-used showers, through twisting passageways in a wing that had last been used before the war, until I reached the old boiler house where I had once worked as a stoker. We used to smuggle alcohol onto the premises through this labyrinth; I was probably the only person in town who still knew the secret route. It wasn’t easy to steer the sack truck down the winding passages, across thresholds, over rubble heaps, upstairs and downstairs all the way to the boiler room, as the load seemed heavier and heavier; it was especially difficult, with the flashlight between my teeth, to climb the narrow iron stairs to the top deck of the three boilers, where the coal chutes were. Having reached the top, I had good reason to take a breather; I smoked a cigarette and looked around in the light of the flashlight: except that everything was rotted, rusted, begrimed, and hung with cobwebs, that the table and chairs lay broken in the dust at the foot of the boilers, nothing here had changed. . As I opened the chute of the middle boiler — I had to force it — I saw that the fire grates and the ash channels hadn’t been cleaned. — How could I describe the strange feeling that seized me at this moment? — Here I’d put in part of my so-called youth; here, somehow, I’d been at home. Indeed, it was a sense of home that came to me here, for in this place — and nowhere else, it seemed — I had once been needed. .

I tossed his body into the feed chute of the middle boiler; due to the fuel chamber’s sharply tapering inner walls, he got stuck just over the fire grate, and using a poker that lay nearby I moved him to a horizontal position; I could no longer see his face, which had slid through the crack of the internal walls, his brow bedded in the ancient cinders. Then I dragged the coal hopper over the chute; the hopper, shaped like the stump of an upside-down pyramid, hung from a slide rail mounted on the ceiling, and could be moved back and forth over the three boilers by means of a chain hoist; the strength this took told me that the hopper was still filled with coal. I wrenched open the hopper’s slide gate; rumbling and hissing, spreading a tremendous cloud of dust, the moldered, dried-out, raw lignite, that once-valuable, now utterly deteriorated substance, poured into the boiler and filled it more than halfway full. . the corpse could no longer be seen. All the things he had known about me — while all I knew of him was that we had been very similar — had suddenly vanished; I closed the openings of the coal hopper and the boiler chute, tossed the sack truck behind the boiler, where a tangle of steam and water pipes rusted, and crept back out through the labyrinth of passages and courtyards.

Outside it was pouring rain; all at once, autumn had come. I hung my clothes in the bathroom to drip dry, toweled my hair, and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I was in bed even before Mother got up, and slept more deeply than I had in ages, as deeply as after an arduous night shift back then. . and without a single sleeping pill.

When I arrived a day late in Rhineland-Palatinate, my wife asked whether I’d managed to see Marie. — I wanted to, I said, but. . The question, her first words, had taken me by surprise, and immediately I’d floundered. — My wife said: I’m surprised to hear that; a young woman called, a painter. She asked me to tell you that Marie died the night of your visit. — Yes. . I said, yes, I thought as much. — I lit a cigarette and coughed; when my wife finally went upstairs to her room, I was still sitting at the table, smoking. In one flash, or so it seemed, I’d seen Marie before me again: the ironic smile in her eyes was no longer meant for me, it had frozen fast.