Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

On the first of September I had to go back to school; the heavens seemed to have heard the women’s prayers, for rain clouds hung over the town. It was all the same to me; until late in afternoon I was forced to listen to my teachers’ baffling garrulity: history, chemistry, physics. . in that last subject there was something about the origins of storms: it interested me not in the slightest.

The memories pass through old rooms where the furnishings of several generations touch. Things were never thrown away, nothing was replaced, nothing even seemed to become truly unserviceable from wear. The old contraptions, survivors of two wars, held and held. . no one generation gained the upper hand, and finally I accepted the fact that I did not belong to them.

But the true calamity was the bottles in the cellar, there were bottles upon bottles. . entering the unlit cellar unprepared, one stumbled just inside the door upon a mound thrown up like a pyramid, seeming, surprisingly, to be formed of earth or mud. Yet when brushed accidentally, thick layers of dust sank to the ground, and an eerily dull dark-green glitter met the eye: the pyramid was a pile of empty wine bottles stacked with the greatest of care, reaching almost as high as one’s head, covered over the years by thick coats of coal and potato dust that blackened cobwebs kept from sliding off. And suddenly still more bottles loomed in the semidarkness of the cellar; suddenly, when one dared to look, there were many more bottles still, still more of these pyramids had been started, but foundered, they had collapsed upon themselves, dark green glass had poured out beneath the shelves, it seemed the shelves themselves, crammed full of bottles, had been washed up by glassy waves to freeze, unstable and askew, upon a glassy gelid flood that had rushed shrilly singing to fill every corner. Tables and chairs in the cellar, bristling with bottles, seemed to drift weightless in breakers that in an inexplicable moment had turned into a glassy inlet consisting down to the bottom of shapely yet stillborn and completely soiled bottles: the bottles were empty, it was as though a sea of liquid had in fact evaporated from their necks. But on leaving the cellar one feared one had succumbed to an unreality and would indeed find a sea. . or, worse still, a sea rolling up insurmountable in the form of full bottles.

Oh, the bottles spilled from the ruptured drawers; if, when seeking an object of deliverance such as a hammer or some other tool, one opened one of the still-shut drawers, one again found bottles, arranged in oddly obscene rows and layers: they lay neck to belly, belly to neck, seeming to copulate in a peculiarly inflexible fashion which was lustful all the same and appeared not to fatigue them in the slightest. And indeed, it seemed as though their permanent unions at once gave rise to the progeny which had slipped behind the tables into the Beyond of now-impassible corners where the bottles had long since entered a state of anarchy and rose in randomly scattered heaps: as if baskets full of bottles had been dumped out, from overhead and at a proper distance, in an attempt to bury the other bottles and finally make them invisible. But the bottles could not be beaten at their own game: there existed ever-new bottles, old bottles, unbreakable bottles of green or brown glass, all of them mute, lapsed into menacing silence beneath the dust of years that swathed and muffled them more effectively than cotton wadding. — The thought of the bottles, of their clearly limitless power, of their unflagging procreation, was the shrillest voice of my sleepless nights. It was not only that I was perpetually waiting for them to pipe up unexpectedly, to cry out in unison. . my thoughts were so full of their ugly, glassy shrieking that in my head, as in the cellar, there was no room for any other object. I plotted escape, for I lived with an iron verdict: one day I would have to clear them away, one day I would have to free the cellar from them. . in other words, some day I would have to free myself and all around me from what had become, clear and simple, one main pillar of my existence. It grew unmistakably clear that I, once I had ceased to be a child, would be the only serviceable male in the household: it was a divine verdict, and every day I was relieved to find that I was a child still. . but time was passing, and in a week, in two weeks, next winter or the following spring it could happen, I would be grown up. I saw that even my threats were losing their effect: the bottles existed on undeterred beneath the grisly symbols on the cellar ceiling, beneath the outlines of the big skulls and crossbones I had drawn on the vaults with the sooty candle flame.

The empty bottles, at least the first of their gigantic assemblages, had been the prerequisites for an ambitious cider production launched in the household at one time. One day my mother brought home what seemed to me a capacious receptacle of brand-new white-gleaming aluminum for juicing fruits, intended to help cope with the garden’s yield, which in the late summers began to overfill long rows of huge zinc tubs. That seemed sensible; we were swamped with fruit, even though half the street partook of it. But the garden was stronger: in spring the white- and pink-hued mountains, the sweet-smelling clouds of innocence in which the trees had wrapped themselves as in the aftermath of flowery explosions, showed what we would reap in late summer and fall. Disapprovingly we watched the May thunderstorms, the snow that beset us as late as early June, every year we cursed and insisted that storms had destroyed the bloom — to my secret relief — but even if rain, storms, and hail did damage a tree or two, these severe weather conditions, as they were ominously known in the agricultural section of the newspaper, seemed to have a positively beneficial effect on the remaining trees. And at harvest time they astonished us with an abundance whose approach each summer ought to have alarmed me in the extreme: it failed to do so only because I was effectively not present in the household, I was permanently absent and ready anyhow to definitively abandon domestic conditions at any moment. — The white aluminum receptacle proved an inadequate weapon: each fall it smothered us all over again in the clouds and fountains of a brew that transformed the kitchen into a simmering steam bath, and after nights we spent dancing around it with scalded fingers, trying vainly to penetrate its workings, it collapsed over and over in a mash of brown applesauce, until at last amidst melted sugar, spuming water, and boiling apple scraps it gave up the ghost and had to be taken to pieces and put back together differently. And even as the glowing, crackling bottles on all the tables and windowsills vibrated until they burst, the next invasion of fruit seemed to surge up the front steps; it had long since become impossible to walk anywhere in the house, in the soap-slick pulp on the floorboards pears and apples rolled to trip the feet, and the fleets of fruit-filled handcarts, tubs, and clothes baskets taking up the yard had grown to vast dimensions. I hatched out wild schemes. . at night I dreamed desperately of seas across which I fled beneath the fluttering pirate flag, on and on, to regions that knew neither household appliances nor small-town gardens. . Oh, it was in vain that I stole downstairs, in my nightshirt spattered through by sticky juice, to join forces with the goats and pigs against the hostile power: by opening the gate and loosing them upon the freight of fruit. . when I was punished for it, it was not because I had imperiled the harvest, but because I had nearly wiped out the domestic animals with diarrhea. — By day, in the still-blazing sun, the fruits finished ripening in the yard. . forgotten conveyances filled with early pears were long since rotting in the remote shadow of the washhouse by the time the middle and late varieties occupied the front of the yard. . the pavement turned into a swamp of yellow sweetness, honey and syrup oozed out between the disintegrating wagon slats and sank into the gutters in sluggish streams. The buckets rusted, and the baskets seemed to float in one great pond of glistening molasses that made the yard impassible. The invincible fruit, having made a laughingstock of the juicer and its inventor, suddenly began to flow of its own accord, for its own pleasure the mead of the fruit juices flowed and seemed to set even the containers to melting; the fruit washed the yard with a glaze reflecting gigantic swarms of wasps and flies that alone knew no fear of earthly sweetness and whose hordes did not retreat until the juices had turned to vinegar. When the blue vinegar flood transformed the moonlit yard into a tract of hell, when out of false sweetness was fermented the true sourness in which one could hold back one’s tears no longer, in which all human skin began desperately to pucker and to crawl, then suddenly it was as though youth were over and done with. — When mold shading from green to black finally gained the upper hand, we had long since gone under. . profound fatigue crouched in our hearts, and we were hard put to keep it from breaking loose; we sat about, and our corroded shoes stuck to the floors as seamlessly as madness stuck to the hypocritical calm of our speech; we were too enfeebled to move a finger, and nothing now could dilute the torpor in our veins. — By this time it was already turning cold, the last juices in the yard gleamed like black ice; soon snow would fall on mold and putrefaction. The garden used this time to recuperate its powers, the garden breathed on in its superiority, its denuded, tangled branches reared into the treacherous glitter of the starry sky. . and up above, as if to mock us, on the highest branch at the unreachable top of the tallest of the trees winked one single frozen candy-red apple that had resisted all attempts to pick it.