The Sleep of the Righteous (14 page)

I gazed at her slender white thighs, which were seized now and then by an infinitesimal tremor; Marie said no more, breathing heavily. Her legs were shut, and I saw the small flat pubis, whose hair had always been light and transparent; now it was denuded. — Why hadn't I gotten up, shut the door before the painter's eyes, and lain down beside the white body whose contours slowly slipped into nothingness? — There was some incomprehensible darkness inside that had stopped me, and to the end of my life it would fill me with profound regret.

Here too the trip to the mailbox took little more than five minutes if I walked quickly. It led toward the town center, ultimately just an extension of the main street that cut across town from east to west. We had always lived on this street; behind us, a few hundred yards on, the town expired, petering out into the allotment gardens on one side and the ranks and echelons of garages and the premises of small service
companies on the other; then the street broke off, splitting into a delta and sinking away into the mud and the stillness. A short way further rose the wooded hills climbed by winding, stepped paths. But you could no longer enter the forest: it had been bought up by the architectural offenders who were erecting their single-family homes behind tall chain-link fences or stockades, Tyrolean or Upper Bavarian travesties with stag's antlers over the brown-stained wooden balconies . . . built with the money they'd made at the ramshackle kiosks that filled every empty lot in town, where the jobless fed on fatty, evil-smelling West German bratwurst and cans of beer from Dortmund and Bremen. With the authorities' blessing they sawed up the forest and covered it with concrete, and in the vestiges left standing they drilled their attack dogs. — It was the forest of my childhood, and it loomed behind me when I walked to the mailbox, and in the warm time of year on my way back from the mailbox I saw the sky grow light over the last stands of trees. And more and more often in recent years I felt depression shadow me as I returned.

The mailbox is mounted on the front of the so-called “main co-op,” as many of the town's inhabitants still refer to the building complex. Once it was the largest of the town's stores; today it has become a rather pitiful chain supermarket with small crammed shelves. The upper floor—the former clothing, stationary, tool, and toy departments, and on the other side facing the courtyard, the administrative office for all the cooperative stores in town and the surrounding area—is vacant, apparently impossible to lease out. Behind the sales building . . . in the fifties, before there were self-service shops,
Mother had manned the cash register, whose drawer opened with a jingle at the turn of a crank, surrounded by several sales clerks who served the customers under her supervision . . . on a side street, beside the entrance to the multistory administrative wing . . . whose endless wooden stairs I had to climb to pick up a form to attend the co-op's children's camp on the Baltic . . . across a granite-cobbled yard looms the hulk of the former industrial bakery, its courtyard surrounded by nineteenth-century façades of dark-red brick, with stone steps outside and ramps with guardrails where the delivery trucks used to line up and load the bread . . . so that the whole side street smelled of it, freshly baked, still warm . . . and drove off, fully laden, through a massive cast-iron gate: from here the town, the surrounding villages, and the industrial plants were supplied with this chestnut brown, eternally same-tasting foodstuff—a kilo for fifty-two pfennigs . . . the bread was of incomparable quality, and it never changed. Now the bakery is empty too, cleared out, abandoned to decay.

Pardon me, could you give me a light?

It is this hackneyed code phrase that startles me from my sentimental thoughts, far too trite to convey to me what it stands for: imminent danger!

I give him his light, and the lighter, which I have to click several times, illuminates his face; a face between fifty and sixty, the age at which you try once again to lose weight, because the mellowing effect fat has on the face is gradually wearing off. But you won't look striking again, merely wrinkled, and a stubbly beard, generally gray-white, heightens the impression of something aimless and unformed. Little gray eyes, eternally
on the lookout: Don't worry, we're alone, no one will disturb us . . . I'd rather I could hide in a throng of people—a crowded pub, for instance—all at once the square seems bleak and much too large: like a square in a dream whose edge, however fast you walk, you'll never reach in time, and may never reach again. Dawn is breaking, it grows brighter and brighter; that too is repugnant.

You'll have guessed right off who you're dealing with, eh?

I say nothing at all; off the phone he's still speaking that High German he'll never really learn. But he no longer speaks it with such fastidious reserve; there's an oafish familiarity in his injections of dialect. — What does this bastard want from me, with his bad conscience written all over him? I think. Of course I know this can take a different turn quite quickly; I'm curious how he'll start chipping away at my conscience, they learned that at their so-called
Firm
.

How long will you be staying? he asks me amiably. Getting away from it all for a few days, eh? Visiting the old homeland again . . .

Old homeland, that's reactionary language! That's the sort of thing you always accused the radical Bonn imperialists of, I say.

Oh! Do you suppose I ever dealt with that—language usage? What do you think we were doing the whole time? We didn't have time to kill with language usage. Although . . . sometimes I'd rather have had that to deal with. You'd be surprised how much alike we would have been.

Us . . . alike, okay! Why don't you explain to what I owe this honor. I know, back then you didn't have to, but times have changed. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for you!

True, times have changed . . . He opens his eyes wide as though he's only just realized it . . . What do I want? Well, nothing, there's nothing I can want anymore. But I'd like to take a stroll around the block with you and tell you something. Something about myself, if you're interested. — He lights a new cigarette from the glowing butt; a heavy smoker, as I'd suspected.

I don't want to hear it, I say. I'm not some Father Confessor. Let's go our separate ways, I don't know you and you don't know me. You've done nothing to me, probably not, and I'll do nothing to you.

You don't know I've done nothing to you, he says.

Come on, let's drop the whole thing. As you see, I'm the more successful of us two, I've got academies falling all over themselves. Now you just let me do my thing in peace, I'm not going to give you any absolution. And certainly not a job reference.

Maybe you got a reference like that from me one time, you just don't know it. Could be, eh? — I see him grin in the morning light. — But this isn't getting us anywhere. Come on, join me for a bit!

He noticed I hadn't given him a clear enough dismissal, but that probably wouldn't even be possible. The clearest
no
bounces right off them; if there's anything they've learned, it's how to ignore rejection. I light a cigarette as well:

All right then, let's walk around the block . . .

I wasn't one of those who had to loiter on the street, he begins his story. At least not for long, I didn't do so well there. Pretty soon I stumbled up the ladder, they saw what I was better at, and soon I had a desk job. I liked dealing with
written material, but I wasn't terribly good at writing reports. I handled evaluations: for instance, this and that is perfectly fine, this or that can go through, or that there mustn't get where it's going. In other words, I read the things my poor victims wrote, and believe it or not, I always served them well. . .

That's what they all say!

I know, but still, that's how it was. If there was something in there that was outright embarrassing, I kept my mouth shut. Tighter shut than the people who'd written these things . . . He laughs and chokes on his smoker's cough.

You're trying to tell me that the . . . the victims had no idea what a friend you were to them?

Oh! He's still coughing. That's nice of you, but honestly, it's much too nice . . .

So, if you weren't a stool pigeon on the street, what were you, a kind of case officer?

I don't know exactly, and it doesn't matter anyway. We called ourselves a secret service, you know, so we were secret on every level. As I said, I stumbled up the career ladder quite quickly. If I'd wanted to, I could have asked to get an informer. . . a stool pigeon, we called them that ourselves. And I tried two of them, but they didn't pan out. You'll . . . you'll laugh, but I'd have liked to get you . . .

Very flattering, I say. What was so appealing about me?

Oh, he says, you were difficult, that's all. You were unreliable, always caught up in your own craziness. And that would have been totally convincing. You were always running away from things, completely egotistical, phony, and neurotic, a real artist, in other words. All that stealthiness of theirs was
second nature to you, they wouldn't have had to give you a new image. Officers with charisma, no, we had enough of those. But you . . . you would have been
it
!

Well, and . . . what put you on to me, anyway?

Quite simple, I was responsible for reading the mail.

You'll excuse me for thinking that's a pretty sleazy job. Quite clever, by the way, to wait for me here at the mailbox.

Yeah, that was kind of dumb! He says it with a grin. But we always did call for an ability to free-associate. Besides, you didn't want to go to the pub with me. And incidentally, sometimes I'd wait for you at the mailbox back then, too; there was a vacant apartment nearby, and I could watch when you came, almost always at the same time. But I did that on an extracurricular basis, it was almost a hobby of mine. As I said, I started to take quite an interest in you.

A hobby! I repeat. So that's why you're here. . . you're just keeping up your hobby!

Sensing the anger in my voice, he suppresses his ironic tone effortlessly:

It was more than a hobby! I can tell you—in this case I was more on your side than on my Firm's. It's true, you were an extracurricular pursuit of mine, even after closing shop, so to speak.

But that's how your Firm wanted it. Vigilance by day and night, round the clock, isn't that so?

You know your stuff, he noted dryly, but you misunderstood me. I meant the big closing-shop. . . I meant when everything closed down, the state, the Party, us, the party newspaper, and the whole centralism thing. Don't you think we still had a few people in the post offices afterward who
were quite capable of picking out the things we needed . . .? Oh, give me a light again, would you!

I give us both a light, and we go on walking our common path; I'm silent while he speaks:

You know, your private letters interested me more than your, so to speak, business correspondence. Hey, don't get excited, now. . . by the way, I know that for you everything was private. Even your business dealings with publishers and so on, that was ultimately private as well. That was the thing about you . . .

You call those business dealings!

Well, that was how you made your living . . . sometimes better than I, but that's not what it was about for me, that you can believe. I was more interested in the human side, as they call it. Now you'll yell that we had to be interested in that side, working for the Firm . . . oh yes, I know all that. Let me tell you, more than once I risked a disciplinary transfer for failing to report certain things, practically hushing them up. . .

Heroic! A resistance fighter, that's what you were!

Just as little as you. As heroic as you. When I read your mail, sometimes I'd sit there thinking, what business is this of mine? Here I am, I thought, constantly dealing with all this paperwork, and what am I missing out on in the meantime? Nothing the whole time but letters, letters, words, phrases! And now and then you take notes, and they're in writing too. It's like a blanket of writing covering everything . . . and often enough it's illegible writing! A film you maybe can't see through anymore. A haze of writing . . . and can you even still see the life behind it? Is there actually still flesh
behind the writing? Or just more writing? Does this writing mean just writing now, or did there use to be something else behind it? Is this writing just writing about itself. . . didn't there use to be women there somewhere? But is a woman really still what this guy means? These were the things I thought about.

A haze of writing, I repeat, that's probably quite well put.

It could've come from you. Maybe it really did come from you, and I just . . . what's the literary term . . . appropriated it?

You read it somewhere. Still, I don't doubt that you really felt these things.

Yes, well, I was a real bloodhound. I even found out the woman you were writing those lovely cards and letters to. I don't know if you remember her, it's ten years ago now. Ten years ago or longer, first the cards came from the east, then suddenly from the west. I mean that little woman from Leipzig, who wanted to be a writer too . . . nothing like you, of course! Marie A. was her name, I think, just like in Brecht. A name for a Madonna, eh . . .?

He breaks off; with his keen instincts he noticed quite well how I flinched. I'd flung the half-smoked cigarette in the gutter and immediately lit another one. The name's been said . . . I feel I've been expecting it the whole time. I don't know how to describe my feeling: rage or horror; at any rate, I feel exposed . . . a feeling they still manage to provoke, with the same ease as ten years ago.

Ah, you're seeing red, he says. Take it easy, we're men of the world, after all!

Her name was Marie H., not Marie A., I say. But I'd rather we stayed on the subject of literature. You know the
poem by Brecht . . . could you explain that to me, so I can be impressed?