The Sleep of the Righteous Page 3

  When I reached the other side and crawled onto the bank, exhausted, but with an expression as though nothing special had happened, I saw little Will in front of me, stretched out on a plaid blanket in the grass; next to him, almost leaning on his shoulder, sat a female in a bathing suit, one of her hands on little Will’s stomach; she removed it as soon as she saw me. Little Will was the brother of big Will, and they were the biggest, strongest boys on our street, both equally big and strong, only the little one was a good year younger than the bigger; both were redheads, and regarded as invincible. It was rare to see them apart, and when they weren’t at loggerheads themselves, they put everyone else to flight. Just one by himself was intimidating, and when they made common cause there was no one, even an adult, who could stop them.

  So what’s the story with the old man’s gun, little Will asked me, where is it, when are you finally going to bring it? — I’ll bring it, I said, I’ll bring it as soon as I can. — On my way back to the beach, circling the mine pit on foot, I knew I’d stumbled into a trap that could have dire consequences for me.

  2

  In the gateman’s lodge we were safe. The gateman, or one of them, the silent, one-armed man, always let us in when he had the day shift. Sometimes, when we got caught in a thunderstorm on the way to the mine pits, he practically urged us to come inside.

  You needn’t be afraid of the Wills, he said to us, I’ve got them over a barrel. I know they go out at night stealing coal from the coal trains, I could report them any time I like. Can you picture the hell that’ll break loose when the Russian officers find out they’re getting coal stolen from their trains? Off to Siberia, they’ll say, off to Vorkuta, they’ve got coal there too!

  As Grandfather sat in front of his summerhouse one afternoon with his gun across his knees, motionless, pipe in his mouth, staring ahead with the corners of his mouth turned down resolutely—he was waiting for a marten that had been threatening the chickens in their shed by the house . . . and the chickens were huddled together in a dense mass in the corner, their anxious behavior showing that the marten still lurked somewhere in the tangle of the garden—the police came and took him away. They confiscated the gun . . . it was just an ordinary air rifle, a so-called break barrel, but all the same a pre-war model with considerable punch; grandfather cast the pellets for it himself. He was reprimanded for “possessing an illegal firearm”. . . an air rifle! — In the evening, after his release, he sat in the kitchen with the same devil-may-care expression . . . as though still waiting for the marten . . . unresponsive, he expelled huge clouds of smoke from his spark-spitting pipe. His ancient Polish hatred of the “Russians,” easily awoken—he often told us how he’d known Russian occupation troops as a child in southeast Poland—had erupted once again; what had happened to him, he never tired of repeating, was possible only in a “Russki-run state.” — Occupying a foreign country always spelled the next war! Stalin himself had said that, he added . . .

  One afternoon I was turned back on my way out to the mine pits: the road was blocked. A crowd of people had gathered outside the house where the Will brothers lived, but, as I saw at once, they kept a respectful distance from what was taking place. The two brothers stood in the blazing heat with their faces to the wall, behind them a Russian soldier with a machine gun, pacing up and down; another, evidently a sergeant, sat on a chair smoking cigarette after cigarette. On an empty chair on the sidewalk I saw two glittering objects: clock detonators, as the gateman later told me, time fuses for explosives; the two Wills had stolen them, no one knew quite where, and half the street was feverishly hunting for a third clock detonator whose hiding place the Wills had not clearly specified. The Russians were drinking, water or maybe vodka, while the Wills got not a drop to drink; hours later the third detonator cropped up, and the crowd dispersed.

  That evening I sat alone on the curb, the town transformed in my eyes into one gigantic explosive device. What quantities of munitions might still lie in the ruins past the railroad crossing, in the bombed-out factories where they’d once been produced . . . and couldn’t they blow up at any moment in this heat? — The summer brooded red above the roofs; in the east, where the mine pits lay, it was already growing dark, too soon, it seemed to me. The air that wafted from there through the street bore the leaden smell of smoking ash and smoldering rags. The heat was trapped between the houses, and the vapors seemed to cook. Inaudible tension built up at the street corners; from the side street I thought I heard the crackle of the chestnuts’ big leaves drying. Thunderclouds massed over the woods beyond the mine pits, and soon the first lightning lit the sky, followed a moment later by a ricocheting rumble, splitting into intervals of thunder, like mighty metal vats being tossed down from the heights. — But the storms over there, I knew from experience, would never reach the town; they passed the town by when they came from the east . . . and I believed I knew it was the women who suffered most when the rain failed to pass over town.

  Mother forbade me to swim in a thunderstorm, saying that the water attracted the lightning; she was afraid even to go near the kitchen faucet in a storm. — But I had no desire to go to the strip mines by myself anyway; all my friends had been summoned to the police station and aggressively interrogated: Did they know who on our street possessed found ordnance, and where it was hidden?. . . Strangely enough, I had been left alone. And now they were home, listening to their parents’ accusations, and wouldn’t be let outside for several days. — Shortly after the incident with the clock detonators the two Wills vanished from town. But they hadn’t been sent to Siberia; the gateman told me they’d defected to West Berlin.

  As every year, a week before the summer break ended Mother bought me five or six new exercise books, ten pfennigs apiece, which I’d need when school started. This time, though, I filled the notebooks before the start of the new school year, my fifth. Now I was faced with the problem of buying new notebooks myself, which I could only do if I pocketed small amounts of the change I got when sent on errands, or I would have to drum up deposit bottles to redeem at the grocery on the corner; or I could often find a few coins beneath the layer of tobacco crumbs in my grandfather’s jacket pockets. The last week before school began was routinely the dullest week of the whole year; I was all alone on the street, my friends busy, kept home by the obligation to prepare themselves for school; the water of the marsh had nearly dried up, only the beaches of the large mine pit were still bustling. I hung about in the gateman’s lodge and had him tell me stories; strictly speaking he was the most taciturn person in town, but in my presence he turned talkative. — He let me crank down the gates when a train approached, I just had to make sure the crank wasn’t wrenched from my hands . . . I went outside and sounded the death knell that severed our street from the outside world. After that, as the prodigiously long coal trains passed, drawn by two locomotives yet moving no faster than a crawl, I sat at his table again, drinking grain coffee and listening to his voice, soft and hesitant as though he needed a long time to mull each sentence. He was a slim man missing his left arm; the empty sleeve was tucked into the pocket of his uniform jacket as neatly as though ironed to his body. He had lost his arm in the war to an exploding grenade, he said, and mark his words, he’d cheated death by a hair’s breadth. And those sorts, he pointed at the ruins past the railroad crossing, that lot that kept rummaging in the cellars for munitions and the like, they’d meet the same fate one day if he didn’t report them all. — What do you suppose it’s like out there? he said, though I hadn’t asked. Steppe, nothing but steppe, a hundred miles of steppe before you set eyes on a house or a village, out there in Russia. And all dried up in the heat. And then they set the steppe on fire, and the wind drives the flames toward you, you don’t know which way to run . . .

  For me, the Russian steppe merged with the prairie I’d read of, and the heat that hung over them was more or less the same. — And forests, I’m telling you, forests . . . blunder into one, and you’ll never find your way out again.
No comparison with that little copse back there! And he pointed across the strip mines, where the thunder of stagnant storms went on and on. — Everything will wither up on us if we don’t get a storm soon . . .

  Alone in the flat in the afternoons, I tried to write about what I’d heard . . . all I managed were images with a prodigious heat looming over them. The flicker and blaze, each new daily circuit of fire through a terrain I’d dreamed up, this was almost my only subject, and I couldn’t find my way out of it. — Writing resembled swimming in this sense: once you’d gotten your head above water, once you’d started to swim, it was impossible to stop until at last you felt the sand of the far shore. In similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over the surface of a mine pit smelling of coal and rot . . . only that there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words you had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words themselves went under. But swimming in the words was safe, you couldn’t drown in them, you could start over with them the next day. . . each afternoon, alone while the heat loomed on the street outside, while the heat on the street burned off each last little shadow, when the narrow sidewalks turned hot as stove plates for bare feet.

  Men, I thought, without knowing why, could take the heat, they swam through its thoughts as through the shimmers in the air, while the women had spent half the summer lamenting the absence of storms. They were right; this August, oh, ever since mid-July, all the storms had breathed their death rattles over the woods. But women needed the rain, it seemed, only the rain, torrential showers, cloudbursts could fill them with new life. — When I lay in bed at night, sweating even beneath the single sheet, I saw them pass before me, lamenting and wringing their hands on the streets, whole processions of women with their imploring eyes turned skywards, where not the tiniest little cloud showed in the flawless blue. And only over the woods in the east did the dry thunder resound, refusing to approach the town. Before falling asleep I saw it was suddenly they who dominated the street, women no longer young, growing older and older, in their purple or black petticoats: with sunburned shoulders and upper arms they sat on the stoops and waited . . . Cigarettes glowed between their fingers, and smoke rose from them, it rose in the heat that abated not even at night. I heard them murmur, sleepless beneath my window, a sleepless singsong, a sound of long-forgotten heathen incantations sent up to the sky, where the full moon hung, turning a deaf ear, white-red and immobile.

  On the first of September I had to go back to school; the heavens seemed to have heard the women’s prayers, for rain clouds hung over the town. It was all the same to me; until late in afternoon I was forced to listen to my teachers’ baffling garrulity: history, chemistry, physics . . . in that last subject there was something about the origins of storms: it interested me not in the slightest.

  THE BOTTLES IN THE CELLAR

  The memories pass through old rooms where the furnishings of several generations touch. Things were never thrown away, nothing was replaced, nothing even seemed to become truly unserviceable from wear. The old contraptions, survivors of two wars, held and held . . . no one generation gained the upper hand, and finally I accepted the fact that I did not belong to them.

  But the true calamity was the bottles in the cellar, there were bottles upon bottles . . . entering the unlit cellar unprepared, one stumbled just inside the door upon a mound thrown up like a pyramid, seeming, surprisingly, to be formed of earth or mud. Yet when brushed accidentally, thick layers of dust sank to the ground, and an eerily dull dark-green glitter met the eye: the pyramid was a pile of empty wine bottles stacked with the greatest of care, reaching almost as high as one’s head, covered over the years by thick coats of coal and potato dust that blackened cobwebs kept from sliding off. And suddenly still more bottles loomed in the semidarkness of the cellar; suddenly, when one dared to look, there were many more bottles still, still more of these pyramids had been started, but foundered, they had collapsed upon themselves, dark green glass had poured out beneath the shelves, it seemed the shelves themselves, crammed full of bottles, had been washed up by glassy waves to freeze, unstable and askew, upon a glassy gelid flood that had rushed shrilly singing to fill every corner. Tables and chairs in the cellar, bristling with bottles, seemed to drift weightless in breakers that in an inexplicable moment had turned into a glassy inlet consisting down to the bottom of shapely yet stillborn and completely soiled bottles: the bottles were empty, it was as though a sea of liquid had in fact evaporated from their necks. But on leaving the cellar one feared one had succumbed to an unreality and would indeed find a sea . . . or, worse still, a sea rolling up insurmountable in the form of full bottles.

  Oh, the bottles spilled from the ruptured drawers; if, when seeking an object of deliverance such as a hammer or some other tool, one opened one of the still-shut drawers, one again found bottles, arranged in oddly obscene rows and layers: they lay neck to belly, belly to neck, seeming to copulate in a peculiarly inflexible fashion which was lustful all the same and appeared not to fatigue them in the slightest. And indeed, it seemed as though their permanent unions at once gave rise to the progeny which had slipped behind the tables into the Beyond of now-impassible corners where the bottles had long since entered a state of anarchy and rose in randomly scattered heaps: as if baskets full of bottles had been dumped out, from overhead and at a proper distance, in an attempt to bury the other bottles and finally make them invisible. But the bottles could not be beaten at their own game: there existed ever-new bottles, old bottles, unbreakable bottles of green or brown glass, all of them mute, lapsed into menacing silence beneath the dust of years that swathed and muffled them more effectively than cotton wadding. — The thought of the bottles, of their clearly limitless power, of their unflagging procreation, was the shrillest voice of my sleepless nights. It was not only that I was perpetually waiting for them to pipe up unexpectedly, to cry out in unison . . . my thoughts were so full of their ugly, glassy shrieking that in my head, as in the cellar, there was no room for any other object. I plotted escape, for I lived with an iron verdict: one day I would have to clear them away, one day I would have to free the cellar from them . . . in other words, some day I would have to free myself and all around me from what had become, clear and simple, one main pillar of my existence. It grew unmistakably clear that I, once I had ceased to be a child, would be the only serviceable male in the household: it was a divine verdict, and every day I was relieved to find that I was a child still . . . but time was passing, and in a week, in two weeks, next winter or the following spring it could happen, I would be grown up. I saw that even my threats were losing their effect: the bottles existed on undeterred beneath the grisly symbols on the cellar ceiling, beneath the outlines of the big skulls and crossbones I had drawn on the vaults with the sooty candle flame.

  The empty bottles, at least the first of their gigantic assemblages, had been the prerequisites for an ambitious cider production launched in the household at one time. One day my mother brought home what seemed to me a capacious receptacle of brand-new white-gleaming aluminum for juicing fruits, intended to help cope with the garden’s yield, which in the late summers began to overfill long rows of huge zinc tubs. That seemed sensible; we were swamped with fruit, even though half the street partook of it. But the garden was stronger: in spring the white- and pink-hued mountains, the sweet-smelling clouds of innocence in which the trees had wrapped themselves as in the aftermath of flowery explosions, showed what we would reap in late summer and fall. Disapprovingly we watched the May thunderstorms, the snow that beset us as late as early June, every year we cursed and insisted that storms had destroyed the bloom—to my secret relief—but even if rain, storms, and hail did damage a tree or two, these severe weather conditions, as they were ominously known in the agricultural section of the newspaper, seemed to have a positively beneficial effect on the remaining trees. And at harvest time they astonished us with an abundance whose approach each sum
mer ought to have alarmed me in the extreme: it failed to do so only because I was effectively not present in the household, I was permanently absent and ready anyhow to definitively abandon domestic conditions at any moment. — The white aluminum receptacle proved an inadequate weapon: each fall it smothered us all over again in the clouds and fountains of a brew that transformed the kitchen into a simmering steam bath, and after nights we spent dancing around it with scalded fingers, trying vainly to penetrate its workings, it collapsed over and over in a mash of brown applesauce, until at last amidst melted sugar, spuming water, and boiling apple scraps it gave up the ghost and had to be taken to pieces and put back together differently. And even as the glowing, crackling bottles on all the tables and windowsills vibrated until they burst, the next invasion of fruit seemed to surge up the front steps; it had long since become impossible to walk anywhere in the house, in the soap-slick pulp on the floorboards pears and apples rolled to trip the feet, and the fleets of fruit-filled handcarts, tubs, and clothes baskets taking up the yard had grown to vast dimensions. I hatched out wild schemes . . . at night I dreamed desperately of seas across which I fled beneath the fluttering pirate flag, on and on, to regions that knew neither household appliances nor small-town gardens . . . . Oh, it was in vain that I stole downstairs, in my nightshirt spattered through by sticky juice, to join forces with the goats and pigs against the hostile power: by opening the gate and loosing them upon the freight of fruit . . . when I was punished for it, it was not because I had imperiled the harvest, but because I had nearly wiped out the domestic animals with diarrhea. — By day, in the still-blazing sun, the fruits finished ripening in the yard . . . forgotten conveyances filled with early pears were long since rotting in the remote shadow of the washhouse by the time the middle and late varieties occupied the front of the yard . . . the pavement turned into a swamp of yellow sweetness, honey and syrup oozed out between the disintegrating wagon slats and sank into the gutters in sluggish streams. The buckets rusted, and the baskets seemed to float in one great pond of glistening molasses that made the yard impassible. The invincible fruit, having made a laughingstock of the juicer and its inventor, suddenly began to flow of its own accord, for its own pleasure the mead of the fruit juices flowed and seemed to set even the containers to melting; the fruit washed the yard with a glaze reflecting gigantic swarms of wasps and flies that alone knew no fear of earthly sweetness and whose hordes did not retreat until the juices had turned to vinegar. When the blue vinegar flood transformed the moonlit yard into a tract of hell, when out of false sweetness was fermented the true sourness in which one could hold back one’s tears no longer, in which all human skin began desperately to pucker and to crawl, then suddenly it was as though youth were over and done with. — When mold shading from green to black finally gained the upper hand, we had long since gone under. . . profound fatigue crouched in our hearts, and we were hard put to keep it from breaking loose; we sat about, and our corroded shoes stuck to the floors as seamlessly as madness stuck to the hypocritical calm of our speech; we were too enfeebled to move a finger, and nothing now could dilute the torpor in our veins. — By this time it was already turning cold, the last juices in the yard gleamed like black ice; soon snow would fall on mold and putrefaction. The garden used this time to recuperate its powers, the garden breathed on in its superiority, its denuded, tangled branches reared into the treacherous glitter of the starry sky. . . and up above, as if to mock us, on the highest branch at the unreachable top of the tallest of the trees winked one single frozen candy-red apple that had resisted all attempts to pick it.