Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

Some few bottles had been filled, and as there was no one who cared to drink the cider, they had outlasted the years. At the very front they sat enthroned atop the first shelves in the cellar. The juice in them, once viscous and brown, had turned into a solid, white-shimmering substance, into crystal, into a petrified mold that had forced off the rubber caps. The mold rose inches above the bottlenecks: these appendages — like the senseless pride of arrogated masculinity — blackened in the fusty air, made these bottles isolated; unable to prove themselves, they could not take part in the festival of procreation at their feet. And so they led the shadowy existence of deposed tribunes, while below them, in the outskirts of their territory, chaos and revolt fermented: the desperate and demoralizing apostasy of the empty-bellied bottles as yet unsullied by nonalcoholic liquids.

I was appalled at first by the desolate petrifaction of the upper bottles; later it was a complex bond with the existence of the mass below that increasingly perturbed me. In the nights when, aided by the contents of new bottles, I attempted to force myself into a murky doze, the incriminating fact of these bottles’ emptiness, which in many ways had come about and become irrevocable through my fault, began to horrify me. I had not filled them, the bottles, I had not yet disposed of them; on the contrary, I had bolstered their superior might with more and more treacherous fringe groups. . it was I who emptied the full bottles to swell their number, a recurring cause of strife, and to establish an inextricable chain of causation: the emptier the bottles became, the more unfillable, and the more numerous the emptied bottles became, the more new bottles I had to procure to be emptied. The more bottles I emptied, the more intense was my desire to do so. . in my body there was a curse like the very being of bottles: for a fullness in me did not lead to satiety, but flung open ever greedier maws within. — I knew of several bottles, filled with the contents that most revolted me — liqueurs and cloying red wines — hidden away in my aged mother’s bedside cabinet. There, in a nook by the head of her bed, behind a hideously clicking door, they awaited guests who never came. There were extremely demeaning nights in which I crept into my mother’s bedroom, crawling on all fours along the edge of her bed, inch by inch, trying to reach the cabinet as noiselessly as possible. I opened it, despite my caution causing a metallic snap at which my mother stopped snoring and seemed to listen; for minutes I waited for the noise of her regular breathing to return, the drops of my sweat falling on the floor sounding to me like detonations. . then I took one or two bottles from the bedside cabinet, let the door snap shut, again I waited, lying flat on my belly the whole time, until at last I could crawl out of the room with my booty. The way back seemed barely surmountable: I felt as though I had to crawl over endless heaps of empty bottles that sent up no frightful clinking and jingling only because beneath them was deposited the quagmire of several wagonloads of potatoes rotted to mush, combined with cobwebs and soot, as down in the cellar where there was no more room for the winter provisions. This was the morass through which I seemed to worm in nights like that. . Darkness, sweat, and thirst were the foundations of my now-adult existence: and in this belly-crawling life my fists trembled with too-heavy bottles which, from sheer weakness, I could barely transport without noise. However evil and stupefying the contents of the stolen bottles, they had to vanish into the cellar as empty bottles that very same night, and the way downstairs, which I staggered rather than walked, the way down to the plane of the bottles, was an ordeal, tormenting me for a long time afterward until sleep finally felled me. It was a feeble sleep in which all dreams turned my stomach: a hundred times I must have seen myself vomit into the toilet bowl, I saw my herbal-bitter heart, my syrup-filled veins, my candied entrails tumble out until there was nothing left in me but dust-black crystal that had to be dissolved in liquids. Droughts laid waste to my throat, my stomach walls burned like desert sands. . in my body no desire ever could have been appeased: in reality I never could vomit, and there wasn’t a drop of alcohol that didn’t have its proper place in me. It was something else I wanted to vomit, something imaginary: perhaps it was an ocean, frozen to glass to the very bottom, perhaps it was an earth, plummeting through the night like an overripe apple. Or I wanted to vomit a sleep that brought me no satisfaction because it always had to end again. The sleep that gave me no rest in the nights when, thirsting, half-asleep, half-awake, I listened to the howling of the bottles in the cellar.

It’s as though all through childhood my ears rang from the cries of the women. For a long time I failed to hear them; only later did they reach me distinctly, rising far away, faint, then louder and louder, as through a warren of alleys down which I gradually approached the one street completely filled by them, as by strident songs, a ghastly composition. . In my dreams I approach this disharmony of cries; they swell, and when I’m in their midst, when I hear them from all sides, I awaken with a start; alarmed, I strain my ears into the night, which though utterly still I know holds a cry, inaudible only by chance.

The cries ring out through my memory of the years when I was ten or twelve, when I had given up all hegemonic claims within the family and ceased to respond to the cries of the women. Only then did I guess the exact words they spoke, did I think I understood when they gasped out the seeming non sequitur: The lake! The lake! I’m going to throw myself into the lake!

And often it seemed to sound like: We’re going to throw ourselves into the lake! — But that couldn’t be; the term we , in this random lot of people cooped up in a tiny flat and forced into a group, had fallen completely out of use.

All women uttered this threat, at every opportunity that arose, it was the most devastating declaration of a ruptured, ever-unraveling communal life; these were words that could come only from the women, whose numbers in the house were incontestably superior: for one of us there were three, sometimes four of them, counting all who fluttered in and out our doors, and the worst thing that could happen was when they sought to unite their voices in a chorus, though they failed, all screaming over one another. — The lake! they screamed, I’m going to throw myself into the lake! I’ll throw myself into the lake right this minute! You had to take it with a grain of salt.

These threats were always preceded by muffled sobs — then you still had time to flee — and in the end the words were underlined by loud weeping, quite unmusical, swelling all the louder the longer one delayed one’s disappearance. Grandmother, Mother, all the aunts sashaying about our flat, the presumably divorced sisters-in-law who sought refuge with us, the female friends from the neighborhood, all made abundant use of this weapon, and the cousins too, and at last, or so it seemed, even some of my female acquaintances when they dropped by, which astonished me. They had come solely to lend support to the women of the family, I thought, seeing that I immediately forfeited their sympathy, that they chimed in with the others’ woeful wails if I left the room even for a moment. . What pained them so was my apathy, which I took almost to the point of invisibility: I hunched speechless in some seat in the flat’s periphery, and my contours grew fainter and fainter.