Wolfgang Hilbig - The Sleep of the Righteous

Though the first cause of these cries was Grandfather’s smoking and drinking, soon that seemed forgotten, and they focused all their vocal force on me. The occasions were arbitrary: my silence was as good as my speech, I heard the cutting words whenever I lied or stole money, when I brought home bad grades, when it came out that I’d cut school, roaming the rubbish dumps outside town or near the lakes in the woods. . but most of all when, muddy and matted, I came home an hour before midnight, and when I seemed kindled by filthy secrets, burning all the way to my hair’s sticky ends, and all the more when I didn’t come at all; everything was cause enough for the threat: The lake. . I’m going to throw myself into the lake!

Come now. . am I your darling? Come on, tell me! one of the aunts urged, purring, as she oversaw my bedtime washing ritual. — No, I replied coldly, and immediately sensed the sobs rise in her throat; in a moment it would end in the cries I knew so well. — What’s he done this time, the little bugger! my grandmother’s voice rang out from the next room. He’ll send me into the lake yet, that golden boy of yours! — Those last words were directed at my mother, who defended herself, weeping: No, it’s me. . it’s me he’s going to send into the lake! I’m going to throw myself in, oh yes I am! Dear God, he’s just never there when you need him, and it’s not like you’re asking too much of him! He just never comes when you tell him. And I’m constantly telling him! He’s making me miserable, driving me to despair. Every time I tell him: come. . come home by six p.m. or, fine, by seven, that’s when he doesn’t come. No, no, I’ll throw myself into the lake yet!

When I lay in bed — secretly reading, under the covers with a flashlight, pulp novels my mother termed smut that would only incite me to brutality and wickedness — I was really only waiting for the flat to quiet down so that I could sneak outside. Silently I shut the doors behind me, groped down the dark stairwell, and opened the rough wooden door to the yard leading to the street with a duplicate key I’d filed to shape myself and hidden in the crack of my mattress. The key was my true secret, and I hid it with a certain pride, having produced it from directions I’d found in my pulp novels.

But my flight might also be noticed immediately, and through the second-story windows, open to the summer night, the sirens of their screams burst out onto the street, so fiercely that the neighborhood dogs began to bark. — He’s off again. . like a thief, like a criminal! He gets it from that wretched trash he reads. Oh, he’ll be the death of me yet, oh, he never listens to me. . one of these days I’m going to throw myself into the lake! — Come, come, we’ve got to look for him, came the reply; but they never followed me, for Grandfather would intervene, slamming his fist on the table: Quiet! He’ll come back sure enough. .

But in my mind’s eye they searched the entire flat for me, as though I might still be hidden somewhere. They searched the closets, under the beds and in the toilet cubicle. . they must have read too many trashy novels themselves. And their stirred-up scolding rang out onto the street, above me, before me, and behind me; I was at the center of a musical piece in which all instruments were aimed at me. But I didn’t hear it; I’d developed a form of deafness, a mystery even to myself, which I rarely neglected to make use of. When I switched it off now and then to verify that the world still existed, I heard the voices of the women, waging their war against the summer in the street: He doesn’t hear, no, he simply doesn’t hear. . oh, I could just throw myself into the lake! And their voices made the sickle moon tremble, thin as a thread, a symbol of remote, unearthly elegance floating in the east above the black woods.

As by day, my nightly path took me to a small peninsula that jutted omega-shaped into a secluded forest lake. The narrow causeway leading out to the head of the formation — a dam that regularly vanished, inundated, in the spring; only a line of trees rose from the water to show where it lay, and the reed-edged circle of marsh in the middle of the lake was a true island — this path leading out was so densely flanked by brush and birch saplings that you vanished from sight the moment you set foot on it. At night the gleaming birch leaves caught the moonlight, and when they stirred in a breeze, a flutter or flicker passed down the edge of the causeway, an iridescent glitter like crinkled tinfoil, coming from beyond, from the rubbish heaps that loomed nearby forbiddingly with the blood-red light of fires, hellfires, shooting up between them: the red luminescence and the moon’s silver dazzle were echoed in the ripples of the bay, shifting out and back again, until the glimmer was swallowed by a cloud’s shadow-flight. . and the shadow-form groping its way through birch thickets out onto the lake had not failed to note the cloud. Directly above the circular island, straight up from the head of the omega, the cloud stopped, so it seemed, to cast down its darkness: the sharp shadow of the cloud beneath the moon fell upon the marshy isle and shrouded it completely; the inner circle of the reed girdle immediately went dark. . blotted out, lightless beneath the cloud, a place of utter invisibility: here you could learn unbeing through sheer being, here you could wait out the night. It was virtually shut out, the night that lay upon the lake, resting and yet restlessly at work, perpetually processing secrets like a ruminant beast; there was always some stir in the tall, impenetrable reeds that girded the peninsula: a constant moan and sigh in the growing of the reeds, as though night sought an answer there. . some word from the invisible things that kept hidden in the dark.

No! I said. No, they could be glad if I came back before dawn, if they found me in bed in the morning. They could be content if I held my tongue in the face of their remonstrances. If I made no comment, positive or negative, on their suspicion that I’d been gone all night; they could be happy if my reaction to their reproaches — my renewed disappearance — was possible only once the day was done, when they themselves might already be sleeping. Earlier, when I was just eight or ten, I’d known how to confront them, I’d raised my own voice, screaming too: I’m not coming, no, no! I’ll never come. . not back here! I won’t stay, I don’t want to, I don’t have to, I don’t want to have to anymore! — And their reply was the shrieked-out announcement that they’d throw themselves into the lake. It had its effect, I fled, I escaped out to the rubbish dumps, to the lake, and again and again my path led across to the peninsula, by sun or by rain; even when I heard their voices grow fainter, more broken, spoken half to the floor, toward some pale specter crouched in a forlorn corner; they called to me so voicelessly that I could forego protest.

Yet I continued to seek the stillness I found on the peninsula: perhaps they murmured on when I was out there, perhaps the words rose quite unthinking from their lips, like the barely-visible thread of smoke that falls from a snuffed candle’s wick. Or only they themselves now heard what they had once said, like an incomprehensible echo, resounding back from the dungeon of the last years, and they themselves could no longer understand their own words.

For me, however, their cries were always present, ushering me and goading me on; they’d lodged in my ear, perhaps forever, intolerable music, either hastening or choking my breath. At night they could be heard from afar — as though the neighbors’ sons were beating their wives — and from town the moaning drew an arc through the sky; I huddled behind the reeds and watched the wisps of mist drifting over the lake, and they too seemed to listen; I thought I saw a glimmering white, flimsy form among them, pausing on a boat washed by the black waves. . a form that held intently still, as though the half-faded lament strove forth from my brain, its locus, to entrust itself to the ears of the mist — they reared up straight so as not to miss what lay behind the sound of the waves splashing into the reeds. — And suddenly I recalled a great mudhole, right in the center of the island, where we had sunned ourselves as children.