The Sleep of the Righteous (13 page)

After that quarrel we gave each other the silent treatment for more than a week. In secret I had to admit she was right; just to save some time for a certain piece I wanted to work on—which, I persuaded myself, I could best do at my mother's . . . because the manuscript was set in the town south of Leipzig where I was born and where my mother lived on in the same apartment, now almost utterly dilapidated—just for that I had dreamed up this idiotic itinerary: the best part was that I was planning to jettison the return flight from Dresden, since the train from Leipzig to Frankfurt am Main was actually quicker. — But now I'd lose the time I had gained: on the postcard I'd taken to the mailbox the night before my departure, I'd told Marie I planned to visit her in Leipzig . . . just for a few hours, a single afternoon, due to time constraints, but I hoped, or so I'd written, that she'd look forward to seeing me again. — If I spent days hanging
around at my mother's first, my wife had declared, it might be too late to visit Marie . . .

Maybe, the thought crossed my mind, before taking the train back from Leipzig I could pay Marie a second visit . . . a farewell visit! I thought.

Nervous and bleary-eyed, I sat on the suburban train to Mannheim, where I had to change for the so-called airport shuttle to Frankfurt Airport, and kept running through the stops of my trip in my mind. I was passing through the vast wine-growing region that lay below the Palatinate Forest: vineyards, nothing but vineyards, and the sun rising over them. I was traveling through a landscape of pure cultivation; it was, in my view, one of the most beautiful regions in Germany, and so far it had not appeared in a single work I'd written. Though I'd lived here for several years, I wrote on and on about the moonscapes south of Leipzig, stretching to the horizon, on and on about the industrial town of my birth, surrounded by pits from whose fathomless depths lignite had once been mined. Now there was nothing but dead, shut-down mine pits, and those tracts of land seemed to have lapsed into an irreversible futility, a uselessness that dragged each of my thoughts into the depths to shut it down and make it useless. — Or I wrote on and on about journeys, confused and haphazard, more like evasive actions, flights without cause, without aim, a perpetual flight in the wake of a crime committed only in a dream . . .

Here, all the way to the horizon, across the whole Rhine Plain, the stuff of human pleasure was coaxed forth from the earth, here there was nothing but vineyards. And when it grew light and a beautiful day dawned, hosts of birds
swooped down into the vines, whose grapes were nearly ready for the harvest. And at the edges of the plots, sometimes still lapped by mist, the field wardens came to life, appearing out of nowhere and firing their shotguns wildly into the air to scare off the raucous flocks of birds.

Before reaching Dresden—that city so ravaged during the war, then ravaged once again by the so-called reconstruction the GDR had indulged in . . . and now perhaps for the third time, I thought, by the mass of exhaust fumes that found no escape from the Elbe valley where Saxony's new capital nestled—and two days later, on the express train from Dresden to Leipzig, I had plenty of time to think. Again and again the newspaper slipped from my fingers as I tried to read, my head fell back against my seat in the compartment where I was the sole passenger, and the twilight of half-sleep engulfed me, more restful, I found, than the mindless non-place deep sleep plunged me into when, rarely enough, I achieved it. You could sleep and yet you could think, quite lucidly even—a surprisingly satisfactory state! Oddly, I thought less about what might await me in Leipzig; I couldn't get my mother out of my head, who over the years had grown very quiet and old, meekly fulfilling my every wish . . . and for my wife this very meekness constituted an offense whose magnitude unsettled me, for increasingly she traced my behavior—my lack of character!—back to my mother's. There were no such frictions in my mother's home: when I needed peace and quiet, I was left in peace; Mother asked me no questions and expected none from me; she let me sit alone in the kitchen, bent over some draft; she made herself invisible in the next room and even turned off the
television if it bothered me . . . and she'd make me more tea when she saw that the pot on the kitchen table was empty.

It occurred to me to simply stay with my mother as long as I wanted, to work there on my manuscript as long as I wanted. My mother had no telephone, my wife couldn't reach me . . . the idea of vanishing from her horizon for a while, leaving her in the dark, suddenly filled me with the calm that made me nod off in the train. I knew it was a lust for revenge, however modest . . . but at least it was the opposite of the panic I fell into whenever my wife threatened to throw me out or go her own way.

Excruciating tensions had arisen nearly every time my wife and mother met . . . which could happen only in our house in Rhineland-Palatinate, for my wife refused to travel to the east. It was, admittedly, my wife's house; she had found it, leased it, and furnished it as she saw fit, for here, I had to admit as well, I had proven completely incompetent . . . and it remained my wife's house, even if I paid the rent each month. Every time my mother visited us, which she did once or twice a year for little more than a week, the same thing happened: my wife felt ousted from her house, seeking refuge in a village with one of her girlfriends, where, I could feel it in the air, she waited as though on a bed of nails. During this time my mother was charged with watering the countless plants that stood about everywhere, a task my wife wouldn't entrust me with, regarding me as completely unreliable . . . and my mother overlooked a ten-inch-high orange tree that stood all by itself in a clay pot on a windowsill: the tree had dried up and couldn't be revived . . . it was my wife's favorite plant. From that point onward, open hatred erupted; the next
day I tried to persuade my mother to leave because we were busy and had no more time for her. My wife refused to drive Mother to the train station in her car; I called a taxi and took her to the little station, which would have been a good forty-five-minute walk with an old woman like Mother. I stood mute, close to tears, on the platform next to my mother, who had no idea what had just spun out of control.

What had spun out of control was my wife's rage; she regarded us both, my mother and me, as people who were devoid of independence, eternally anxious to do everything right, and who for that very reason—because they were constantly trying to hide, to avoid reproaches . . . because they had no desires and no questions . . . because they skulked about the house as though under some tyranny from which a devastating verdict might come at any moment—for that very reason did every possible thing wrong. — You people show no initiative, my wife said, all you've learned is how to wait for orders, you have no sense of self, and that's why you can't enjoy life in this little house of mine . . .

One time, I defended myself and accused my wife of acting like a Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany. When we were on her territory, we had damn well better be happy and show it. If we didn't, we were an unacceptable proposition for the country that had just annexed its brothers and sisters from the other side. — You let yourselves be annexed with the greatest of pleasure, she said, things couldn't move quickly enough for you. But lead independent lives—that you can't do! — And she added that Marie was the only person she knew who'd at least tried to live independently. . .

My wife was not entirely wrong. But she was unaware that Marie had lived
too
independently, that ever since the reunification we were constantly discussing she'd been unable to find her way to the welfare office, that she avoided going to the doctor because she was uninsured. And that was probably why her cancer had been diagnosed far too late. Marie lived more or less from handouts, but no one was allowed to mention it. I, too, had occasionally slipped a hundred-mark note into the purse that hung from her doorframe, secretly, knowing it would have humiliated her. . .

Over time my messages to Marie, sent on postcards, had grown sparser, arid, monosyllabic; it struck me that she virtually never replied to my mail. She gave no more response than to the bills I slipped her. When I had a chance to phone I'd ask if she'd received my letters or cards . . . and she would ask in return which letters and cards I meant. She probably would have responded the same way to a question I didn't ask: Which hundred-mark bills do you mean? — This behavior was typical of Marie: if you sent something her way, she simply didn't seem to notice. And she seemed not to notice when someone desired her; if you ended up in bed with her, she merely seemed to follow some sort of imaginary instructions . . . though I put this down to my inability to show my desire, much less articulate it, which I felt was one of my innermost weaknesses . . .

Filled with thoughts of this kind, I arrived in Leipzig: I saw at once that it was too late for all my questions. Marie's bed had been moved into the tiny kitchen, close to the gas stove, as though now, in mid-September, heat was already needed . . . often, as I recalled, Marie had heated with the
flames of the oven, because coal was too expensive. And often enough I'd told her it was dangerous. By the bed stood a narrow table with the telephone, dirty dishes, and a quantity of open vials containing various morphine preparations. Next to them, in a torn-open envelope, I saw the card I'd written her a few days before. — It had arrived that morning, Marie said. — The painter who had let me in, a girlish creature with short blond hair, sat sketching in the next room, keeping an eye on things in the kitchen through the open door. Marie lay in bed in a white nightgown, speaking in a voice as soft as a breath, barely a whisper now, the words slipping, incorporeal, from lips that barely moved. Between words she caught her breath, smiling as though to apologize for the long pauses. — Could she show me her stomach, she asked; gingerly she pushed aside the blanket and lifted up her nightgown. Her abdomen was crisscrossed by bluish-red, barely-healed scars. Next to the alarmingly thin body a plastic bag collected her urine drop by drop.

Later, on the bus on the way to my mother, I remembered glimpsing for a few moments, barely covered by the white nightgown, her breasts, which alone were still completely unscathed. Marie seemed to know full well that I was staring much less at her wounds than at those breasts, those still-smooth, soft hemispheres, bared halfway up the brownish nipples . . . those breasts were still firm and their beauty was flawless. Smiling, eyes alert, she had acknowledged my gaze; there was irony in her eyes as she pushed the nightgown down again. I knew this irony; it had been in her gaze whenever I said goodbye to her, when, late at night, I went out her door and she shut it softly behind me.

Why hadn't I given in to impulse and laid my hands on her breasts? As ever, the target of Marie's irony had been my suppressed desire . . . as ever, when I left late at night, irked that I couldn't make up my mind to spend the whole night with her. . .

But perhaps, I thought, there would be another chance to visit . . .

Around eight in the evening, in a turmoil, I arrived at my mother's; she seemed pleasantly surprised. — I almost wasn't home, she said. You know I often go to the theater on Fridays. But today they're showing something I've seen twice before. — You know I've still got a key, I said. And I always have it with me when I come without telling you. — That's right, she said, I almost forgot that . . . did you write me that you were coming? — I don't think so. — My mother forgot many things, now that she was going on eighty. What she never lost was her gentleness and solicitude toward her son, having forgotten all the old rancor over my unreliability, and especially my frequent drinking. — I ate almost nothing that evening, wouldn't let my mother make me tea, making it myself instead; I'd already put my notebooks on the kitchen table, a sign that I wasn't up for conversation . . . several years ago my mother had begun taking my writing seriously, and accepted my silence. — I immediately began another card to Marie, telling her I meant to visit again on Monday, because, as I said, I'd been annoyed with myself for not staying a little longer today. Or not spending the whole night with her. — When she read the card on Monday, I knew, she'd have that ironic smile in her eyes again. — However—I added this qualifier at the end of the card—she
shouldn't hold it against me if I didn't come, because I had to catch my flight from Dresden to Frankfurt early Monday evening, and I might have trouble making the connections. — On Monday, yes, if Marie was to have the card on Monday, I had to put it in the mailbox that night, at any rate by nine the next morning. It was always the same thing with me, the last act of my day's twenty-four hours before I tried to find sleep was a five-hundred-meter trip to the mailbox.

After Mother had gone, I sat in the kitchen, thinking back on the afternoon. Outside, salutary darkness shrouded the small industrial town, which, following the so-called
change
, had swiftly metamorphosed into a sociopolitical rubble heap of vacant houses, empty shops with dusty windows, and defunct factories. The town didn't even have a policeman now; that was perhaps the clearest benefit of the change so far. But a benefit for whom? If there was a chicken thief on the loose, you'd have to phone the riot squad in the district capital, a difficult matter, there being no phone booths here.

The sad jokes that came to my mind: I thought back on my life, on afternoons, countless overlong afternoons I'd draw out into the first light of dawn . . . indeed, my life, what I called
my life
, had unfolded in the afternoons, in idle afternoons—and a few of them I had spent with Marie. I had always gone again in the evening, at least at a time when I could catch the last train from Leipzig.

That afternoon in Leipzig, as I sat on the edge of her bed, I had sensed that this thin body was now subject to doubt, already in the process of dissipating. More and more it seemed to take on the color of the bedclothes, barely standing out against them. I had tried to encompass this body with
my gaze, as though compelled to imprint it on my brain . . . How much longer would it be possible to
see
her? — Below her navel, where the surgical scars made a star shape on her skin, a small wispy patch of light appeared, seeming to circle the wounds, atremble; the afternoon sun cast it through the ground floor window across from her bed. In the next room too, the bedroom where the painter now lived, these flecks of light had often come in the late afternoons. When the sun sank toward the west, its rays broke here and there through the tall dense yew hedge that bordered the yard outside the windows, and for a brief time aimed their vibrating spears at the glass and the curtains. — When this light disappears, so I'd thought, then I'll go. . .