The Sleep of the Righteous (12 page)

They're all under the ground . . .

The words were hard to understand, like a noise I'd left far behind me, and they were swallowed by the stillness. Or drowned out by the town as it awoke at last.

Best of all I seemed to remember the phone call with which the story began. The voice came from a pub, around ten in the evening, I heard the unmistakable background noises: a babble of voices, laughter, clinking glasses. I was not in the mood for a phone conversation; I was packing my suitcase with the TV on, and my relationship with my wife had reached rock bottom more than a week before. At first I thought it was a wrong number, I even hoped it was.

I'd like to see you, the voice declared, won't you come over? — It was a deep voice, if not exactly a bass, and might have been described as melodious had it not spoken so execrable a dialect, made still more distasteful by the evident effort to speak High German.

Where am I supposed to come . . . and who wants to see me?

To the pub Zum Doktor, you must know the place. I'll be waiting for you at the bar.

Who wants to see me, is what I asked. And why, who am I dealing with here?

He didn't want to tell me on the telephone: Come on,
you'll find everything out soon enough, half an hour might even do the trick . . .

When I said nothing, he grew more insistent: I have to see you, it's imperative . . . come on, do me a favor!

But I don't have to do anything . . . what's the matter, anyway, what's this all about? — It struck me that he avoided the word “meet,” using only the word “see”; I felt there was impatience in his voice, just a few shades away from a tone of command.

Can't you tell me what this is about already! If you don't tell me who I'm dealing with, what the matter is, I won't come!

That's a shame . . . that's a real shame! Nothing's the matter, I'd like us to have a few beers, it's on me.

I don't drink beer, I don't drink alcohol at all . . .

Oh! Then you've changed quite a bit, back then things were very different . . .

This was dragging on and on; at intervals we both fell stubbornly silent. — You won't tell me who you are . . . what this is about. — I sensed that all my questions were pointless.

If you have a beer with me here at the pub, I'll tell you.

Would I recognize you? I asked.

No, I should hope not. — Again he hesitated; by now I was shifting from foot to foot.

But it's sure to interest you, he went on, very much indeed. You are that writer, aren't you?

Don't act like you don't know exactly who you're dealing with. How about you tell me who I'm dealing with?. . .

You don't want to see me! he said, not sounding too disappointed, more contemptuous.

No, I can't, I don't have time. I'm flying to Dresden tomorrow morning, and I've got to get ready.

You really aren't coming?

No, goddammit . . .

Then I'm sorry to hear that, said the voice, a shade deeper. He didn't hang up at once, clearly waiting for me to change my mind. For half a minute I heard nothing but pub noise; the place must have been packed. He coughed into the phone—a heavy smoker—but didn't say a word. I heard him breathe laboriously, as though following physical exertion. I said nothing more either, finding the silence almost menacing. He cleared his throat, fastidiously, it seemed to me, and hung up.

Who was that? my wife asked. I was astonished; she hadn't said a word to me for days. Sitting in the kitchen behind the open door, she'd heard the entire thing.

Some crazy guy, I said. A nutcase who wanted to ask me to some pub. I don't know him . . .

Maybe you'll figure out who it was. Didn't you recognize his voice?

No, that's the thing, the voice didn't sound familiar at all. He was going to tell me who he was in the pub.

He definitely wasn't crazy, she said. He wasn't going to reveal himself except in public. Didn't that strike you? — That was an intelligent remark on her part; incidentally, I called her “my wife” only for simplicity's sake. We'd been living together for several years, for better and for worse, for some time now much worse, and thus far I'd refused to be chained down by marriage.

That evening it was taking me especially long to pack
my suitcase, and it was straining my nerves still more than usual—for fear of forgetting what I needed most, I regularly packed much too much unnecessary stuff—because I was constantly distracted by the inescapable jabber of the television, which had driven my wife into the kitchen. I felt a vague obligation to watch or hear what had been playing out on screen for more than an hour; it was one of those panel discussions—a so-called talk show—where people tirelessly, exhaustively, with exhausting repetitions and barely comprehensible fervor, debated a topic that for years, at least three years, I thought, had refused to go out of fashion: it was that the government had opened the archives of the defunct GDR's demised state security service. — How long the list had grown of the prominent figures, or self-appointed prominent figures, who were suddenly exposed as informers for that security service, or who, preempting the publicity, exposed themselves, which of course made them still more prominent. It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurring torrents of verbiage; no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television. The writers talking on screen about the opening of several tons of Stasi files, talking it up and down—I knew several of them well, was even friends with them—seemed bent on making it the central theme of their literary lives . . . Ah! I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! — And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives! And I wondered if they got fees for talking on television about Stasi files and Stasi
informers . . . I didn't know, so far I hadn't taken part in any of these discussions . . . and I wondered whether the exposed Stasi informers who occasionally took part in the discussions received their fees as well. — No, they wasted not a word on what was happening with the earth, they didn't mention the depletion of the earth's ozone layer. Not a word on global climate change, the now-undeniable melting of the ice caps, the contamination of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect that would inevitably bring undreamed-of catastrophes: their sole topic was the Stasi files . . . And no doubt they're perfectly justified, I thought.

I had applied for access to my own files as soon as I had grounds to suspect there were dossiers on me as well: so far my files had not been found. I registered that fact almost with relief, for the scant excerpts from other files I'd been shown—because my name cropped up in them—had exuded a boredom so paralyzing that I'd broken out in sweat. I literally feared these files—not that I'd learn they'd secretly made me out as an informer or a denunciator, something everyone who undertook to read their files had to reckon with, for the Stasi's mind worked in mysterious ways—I feared the gruel of language, these files' distinguishing feature, I feared the nausea, these paper monsters' brain-rotting stink, I feared the gray type, so like that of my own typewriter, I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages.

When at last I'd finished packing my bag and managed to turn off the TV—my wife had long since gone to bed—I sat at the table and smoked about five cigarettes in a row. My breath rattled, I panted as though I'd run a marathon or shoveled a
ton of coal; I drank a whole bottle of mineral water and felt as though the greater part of the fluid immediately reemerged from my brow and my temples. And yet all I'd done was take a short walk, one of my routine walks up a narrow, steep street to a mailbox into which I dropped a hastily written postcard. — In the cool night air the whole situation had become quite clear to me: the mysterious call several hours ago and those endless panel discussions on the opening of the Stasi files— those two things were directly related.

A few hours later, early in the morning, as I started my trip—first in the taxi to the station, then in the various trains that brought me to the Frankfurt Airport—I had almost entirely suppressed the thought of that night's phone conversation. For several hours I'd tossed and turned, half asleep, getting up a few times to smoke, not daring to take a sleeping pill, which I would have had to steal from my wife, for fear of sleeping through the arrival of the taxi I'd ordered the day before. For some time my wife had refused to wake me when I had to get up early. — I'm not your mother! she hissed when I asked such things of her: I should finally learn to cope with the chaos of my life by myself. — My objection that she also lived from the money I earned with readings and events of that kind counted for nothing with her. Her voice lingered in my ear, asking from the bedroom on the upper floor if I'd been sure to mail all the letters to my bimbos, if I hadn't forgotten any; I'd made no reply. She had two rooms on the upper floor, a study and a bedroom; I had only one, on the ground floor, which served me both for working and sleeping . . . I paid the rent for this tiny house on the edge of town where the vineyards began, I paid the electric bills, I covered
the rising costs of the heating oil we used in winter, but I hadn't the slightest interest in confronting her with these things; I had my back to the wall and said not a word, I'd had as much as I could take of our constant quarrels. But my silence wounded her all the more; she took it as an affront . . . I was hurt by her silence as well, but eventually felt almost grateful I didn't have to hear her voice, in which I seemed to hear nothing but aggression. I no longer touched my wife, I avoided her, I shut myself in my study, filled with dense cigarette smoke, where late at night or early in the morning I tried to fall asleep amid coughing fits and nausea. And my coughing fits would disturb my wife's sleep, and there'd be new grounds for a quarrel. In fact I did correspond irregularly with several “bimbos,” as my wife put it; when I was away she searched my desk, and naturally found stowed in the drawers the letters I'd received from the “bimbos,” and systematically spotted the erotic or sexual components—how to put it?—which the letters contained; she spotted them even in the phrases where they weren't. Of course my wife wasn't entirely in the wrong; a long time ago I'd brought back a stack of postcards from Holland that, if you really wanted to, you could describe as pornographic. When my wife noticed the stack of these postcards growing smaller and smaller, she told me to my face that she understood perfectly what kind of correspondence I was conducting; and she called this correspondence nothing less than “swinish.” I couldn't even shake my head at that.

There was one case, though, for which my wife made an exception: Marie, who lived in Leipzig. I had known her a good deal longer than my wife, and with Marie I really had
had a short-lived love affair. When it came to Marie my wife held off, Marie never came up in the tangled mass of her reproaches; evidently, in the manner of feline predators, she granted her a certain prior claim, or it was simply that, in Marie's case, I'd been honest to my wife for once and told her about it. — I'd never told her a thing about the other so-called affairs: in those there had never been any opportunity for physical contact, nothing of the kind, and that was probably why I was ashamed; it was the shame of failure, and my wife, however mistakenly, managed to goad it within me again and again. — I noticed that now and then she talked to Marie herself: the last time was just a few days ago; and then my wife had handed me the receiver and indicated that Marie wanted to talk to me.

I was alarmed by the voice that emerged, a mere wisp, from the telephone. Marie said she wasn't well, no, not at all, kept alive by a constant haze of morphine, but it would all be over soon now. The end was near, that she knew, it would only be a matter of days or weeks. — Marie's voice barely breathed into my ear, as absent as though it came from another universe; the long pauses between words were filled with labored breaths that seemed deafening after her voice. — Following her last cancer operation, just as unsuccessful as all the previous ones, she was lying, her body slit, in her tiny room in Leipzig, dependent on the care of a friend, a painter who'd come to stay a few days ago, though the apartment barely fit two people. — You've got to see her one more time, my wife said after I hung up. If she's even still there, you can be sure it's the last time you'll see her. And you've planned enough time on your crazy trip to Dresden and your mother. . .

For flying to Dresden, my wife had declared me certifiably insane. A new academy had been founded there—in the East new academies were springing up like mushrooms— and I had been invited, along with several other poets, to read fifteen minutes of poetry at the inaugural event. The reading fee was negligible; besides, I'd booked a flight, albeit one of the cheap flights you could get if you reserved in time, and the trip included a weekend. The academy could only reimburse train trips, and so I had wound up with a losing proposition that vexed me quite enough without my wife's derision. — She told me I was acting like a whore. All they had to do was wave, and there I was. — Whores generally get paid pretty well, I retorted. — True, she said. But not the old, beat-up whores.