Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

Much later, I recalled reading of a similar scene in a long book I’d never finished: a captain by the name of Ahab had likewise flung his pipe, his last remaining pleasure, over the bulwarks into the ocean’s rolling waves, disconsolate at his failure to chase down a huge white whale he’d been hunting for nameless ages across the seas.

In any case, the accident spelled immediate ruin for the horses’ owner, Bodling the carter, a friend of my grandfather’s. It seems he then took to delivering beer, driving the beer and soda crates to the shops and picking up the empties with a rickety little three-wheeler. As the town’s other carter was unable to cope with all the ash by himself, the town government eventually drummed up a new motorized garbage truck, but it took the rest of the winter and nearly all the next year. In the meantime, people carted their ash out of town themselves in wheelbarrows; after dark they emptied the bins right into the ruins beyond the railroad crossing. . to the gateman’s chagrin, but he said nothing, he kept his silence. And when things got really bad, people began to fill the ruts in the middle of our stretch of street with ash, which transformed it altogether into a hilly, barely negotiable waste, in the spring thaws emitting a medley of noisome smells that burned off and vanished only in summer.

My grandfather’s gun had become a kind of legend in town, at least in the part of town within our ken and control. It suddenly made me an object of interest for the bigger boys on the street who had consciously experienced the war. For them the war had been decidedly more exciting than the peace, the post-war period that increasingly metamorphosed into a regimented existence full of inevitable demands that could not be escaped, with time gradually divided into fixed units that had to be faced, the main thing being punctuality and reliability. Peace, this much seemed clear, was governed by the clocks, time by the clock had taken power, and quite quickly one realized there was no more escape from the power of the ordered time blocks. It was no coincidence that everyone told how the Russian soldiers who had chased away the war and brought the peace — it seemed, unfortunately, that they’d chased war away for good — were especially keen on the watches the vanquished Germans wore. When the Americans were still in town, no one had cared about German watches, nor had the Americans cared about time and order. They had left that to the Russians who replaced them soon after the peace began — and you could tell from the Americans’ grinning faces, it was said, how little credit they gave the Russians with regard to order and time management. They were mistaken; the Russians installed town administrators who were downright obsessed with cleaning up. Cleaning up and rebuilding. . order and cleanliness; these, one sensed, were especially tenacious German virtues, and the Russians were well aware of it. But the Germans — at least some of them, even adults — weren’t so keen to play along, and went on dumping their ash and their rubbish in the ruts of our street by night; only those, of course, who didn’t live on our street themselves. Thus, peace meant for a time that the street was fouled by the acrid smell of sodden ash, mingled with the vapors from rotten vegetable scraps and fallen, liquescing fruit; unprecedented populations of bluebottles and wasps appeared out of nowhere to take over the street; and more and more run-over rats were left lying in the space between the sidewalks and had to be disposed of. The scourge ended only when policemen began to patrol the street by twos in dark blue uniforms, one member of each pair armed with a revolver.

The rubbish disappeared, but the police patrols remained, pacing the street not just by night; soon they were seen in the daytime as well, and if the bluebottles and the vinegar stink of the trash hadn’t already driven us from the street, the gaze of those policemen did. They eyed us suspiciously, and it was impossible to smoke in front of them. We decamped past the city limits to the strip mines, suddenly finding ourselves in the big kids’ midst, though we were far from belonging there. This incurred the disapproval of my mother, who regarded the whole area past the railroad crossing as one great danger zone.

Child, she said to me, you’re not big enough to go to the strip mines by yourself. You don’t know your way around there, and you can’t swim yet! — By the way, she never neglected to mention, when I was your age I’d been swimming for ages. — Go to the swimming pool instead, she said. I’d know you’re in good hands there. — And she gave me the twenty pfennigs to pay the cashier. There was a wading pool for small children where no one could possibly sink; I was decidedly not a small child anymore, but you were inevitably shooed away by a pool attendant if you came anywhere near the big pool with its diving platform.

I saved up the admission fees for other purposes: by day I was out of reach for my mother, who worked in the cooperative store at the other end of our street, and along with the others, as unsupervised as I, I kept on going to the strip mines. — There we found ourselves amid the groups of big kids, where girls and boys already mingled, and all at once talk turned back to my grandfather’s gun. They approached us — we were lying, still dressed, in a grassy area apart from the noisy bathers — and I noticed, not without gratification, that I was the chief focus of their attention. . my mother wouldn’t have liked that either.

Suddenly they’d lend me their dog-eared books — this had sometimes happened before, one being the story of Ahab the one-legged whale hunter, missing a good many pages, which was why, apart from the book’s heft, I quickly lost interest in it; those thin, cheap paperbacks printed in double columns, all from West Berlin, were much more enthralling. They generally related the adventures. . or rather the ceaseless shoot-outs of a recurring, invincible character whose name was emblazoned on the lurid covers: Buffalo Bill or Tom Brack the Border Rider or Coyote, Rider of the Black Mask . . I devoured the books by the kilo, and I needed to read quickly, as they always had to be returned a day or two later or passed on to someone else who was desperately awaiting them. My mother watched with extreme disapproval, believing this reading material would forever corrupt me to the core. — Suddenly the big kids bestowed their cigarettes on me alone and left the others out. . after all, I was the oldest of the little kids, and, I sensed, was gradually growing to catch up with the big kids.

But all they cared about, more and more disappointingly, was the mysterious gun, which Grandfather refused to let me see. — When we hunkered in the grass cross-legged like Indians, the shadows of the bigger boys would loom behind us — at once I felt the suspicious gazes of the adults, a few of whom always mingled with the beach crowd — and, darkening the sun, they leaned over and whispered: Is it a carbine? A hunting rifle, double or single? Or is it a small-caliber gun? We’d have the ammunition for it. .

At the center of attention, I would have loved to say: it’s a Winchester! — That was the kind of rifle the pulp novels were always talking about.

Some time when we came, couldn’t we bring the gun along. .? Only then we’d have to go over to the marsh to bathe, where we wouldn’t be disturbed. Or we’d have to fix a meeting place in the forest and bring the gun there!

I never thought of denying the gun’s existence; I had doubted it myself until I heard the gateman’s story, but it brought me incredible prestige. However, I could think of no good excuse for its remaining beyond my reach. So I half agreed and half refused. . This constant talk about the gun would attract way too much attention, I said.