The Sleep of the Righteous (10 page)

When C. came to relieve him, Gunsch was ready and waiting in his street clothes; their color and cut differed little from his work clothes, but now his neck and head were muffled with scarves and a military-looking leather cap with earflaps. His little face showed shadows of coal dust and ash that the water of the shower could not dispel, and the color of the coal had eaten its way into his chapped hands. He pointed his stubby black finger around the boiler room, mumbling incomprehensible explanations; C. nodded pro forma agreement to everything, and at last the old man vanished. C. climbed back up the stairs from the boiler room to stamp his colleague's time card in the factory hall; his card had been marked by Gunsch half an hour ago with the wrong arrival time. As day broke, one saw the old man riding his ramshackle bicycle into the fog and the ice. On barely detectable paths along the railroad tracks, he pedaled away between the chasms of the mine pits; each time one wondered when the ground in front of him would peter out into nothingness and this strange black bird, forced to flap up from the treacherous terrain, would rise into the air.

When Gunsch spoke, no one could understand a word, but that was all right, for he rarely said anything of a communicative nature. No one knew exactly how and where he
lived, what he did with his money, whether he even kept human company outside working hours. There was a persistent legend that he dwelled in the midst of the mine pits, in a house without electricity, cut off from the outside world, his farmstead all that remained of a tiny village that had been bulldozed because it stood atop the coal. In the middle of his garden the ground broke off into the depths, said those who claimed to have seen it; of course most of the stories told in Factory Wing 6, the raving drunkards' wing, were wildly exaggerated. He bought his necessities at the factory's little store, wrapped them up in burlap and transported them on his bicycle rack out into the no man's land from which he hadn't set foot since the end of the war. At some point in the unfathomable years of his life he had come here from the
East
—the direction alone seemed to convey enough about that blurrily bounded region from which C.'s grandfather had also immigrated at the turn of the century. At any rate, the German Gunsch spoke was laid waste in a way C. knew from his grandfather. Due to these putatively shared origins, he had begun to take an interest in the old Pole. Gunsch regarded all attempts at understanding as pointless from the outset. When he opened his mouth, he seemed to spout only curses, and no one in the boiler room knew the exact object of this abuse.

Of course, proper German was no requirement for the backbreaking work of the boiler room. It sufficed that he could fill the iron coal wagon, which loomed taller than his alarmingly narrow shoulders, about eight or nine times every four hours, quickly enough that pressure would build up in all four boilers at once, sending the steam all the way
back into the new factory hall. A bag of bones like Gunsch, the stokers claimed, actually had an easier time of it in the cramped coal bunker than a person of normal—that is, halfway brawny—stature, who'd tear his clothes and scrape his skin on the roughly plastered bunker walls.

And he leaped much more nimbly out of the cloud when the tippers full of ash were emptied outside on the dump. He'd stand off to the side with a pitying look, or rather a pitiless grin, while we sought cover under the tipper or waited with turned-up collars, bent backs braced against the exploding cloud, breathless, eyes closed, until the onslaught had passed. It was always blustery in the mine pits, and just as quickly as the ash flowed from the overturned tipper, it was beaten back as a scorching hot wave. Practice was required, and if you failed to anticipate the direction of the wind, you'd leap straight into an inferno meters high.

And finally, twice a month, Gunsch had to scribble something resembling his name in the proper column of the payroll when the secretary showed up in the boiler room with a little steel box full of money. — This, too, was one of the things that could just as well have been done by a deaf-mute.

I recalled a time I'd been able to observe the old man over the space of several days. It was a Christmas weekend, and then on past the New Year, when the holidays were canceled for Production Area 6 because of a special order. That of all times was when the temperature sank to minus ten Celsius; it was decided that a cold snap like that called for staffing the boiler room with two people, as the fifth boiler, regarded as the final reserve, had to be heated as well. No one wanted to work with Gunsch, and so I agreed to
play the second man on his shift. — He doesn't talk much anyway, I thought, and besides, I probably have the fewest problems with his German.

I was quite mistaken; Gunsch talked the entire time, but only, it seemed, to himself. The old man muttered and snarled, he groused and griped without cease; from between the thin red lips, the only mobile part of his soot-smeared face, a relentless flood of words poured forth, now softer, now louder again and almost menacing. There was scarcely a word of German in it, and in moments of great difficulty I thought I caught the sort of Polish or Russian slurs I'd heard from my grandfather when he vented his rage at the world, the German-speaking world in particular.

After I'd spent half the shift ignoring them, his curses slowly but surely began to have an unpleasant effect on me. They weren't aimed at me, at least I couldn't imagine they were, but I was still part of the boiler room conditions which seemed to incur the old man's rage. I felt a long-familiar ferment begin within me. When we returned to the boiler room after our silent lunch break, and I instantly broke into a sweat in the scalding air over the boiler's iron cover plate, I noticed to my dismay that the old man was jabbering on.

Once and for all, would you shut up? I blurted out.

Gunsch paid no mind and cursed still louder, as though to drown out some sort of objections that barraged him from the past, from the filth and soot and barely breathable air of the present, or even from the future, which could never be anything but miserable. By chance, my gloved fist was clutching the red-hot iron hook used to open and shut the sliding doors to the boiler's feed chute; for a few seconds I was at the
point of ramming the heavy thing into the old man's belly.

Shut up . . . just shut up! I bellowed. The old man faltered and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. Astonished, he didn't even seem to realize he'd been speaking. I saw that Gunsch dwelled in another reality; he was mad, constantly chattering with his ancestors or with ghosts of some kind . . .

For a long time after that C. was bothered by his fit of temper. It was one more thing that he'd probably inherited from his grandfather, or learned by watching him. And it was not without its hazards: there you go knocking out someone's teeth, or even knocking him dead, and then you've got to pay for it! No one will believe that you can't help this rage, that it's in your flesh and blood. And that this rage is made of memories that may not even be your own, premonitions or memories that were sunk within you without your really knowing them. Without your knowing it, a time bomb rests within you, ticking inside for years, for decades, and you never feel it. But someday it'll explode and kill an innocent person! thought C. And you're lucky if all you get is ten or twelve years in the slammer. . . and maybe you'll have to keep stoking in there, with a still older and lousier boiler, because those are your qualifications . . .

Among his most unpleasant memories were certain scenes that had transpired between him and his grandfather; he had never spoken of them. They always brought bouts of perspiration; the mere thought almost inevitably made him break into a sweat . . . when his grandfather worked up a sweat and his temper howled from within him, C. began sweating as well; in the blink of an eye he was speechless, choked by rage. Later, he told himself he'd merely wanted his
grandfather's rage-twisted face to assume a different, pitiful expression, but that was an excuse. He'd grabbed the old man—in his eighty-year-old madness reduced to little but railing and ranting—by the throat, with fists long used to the crushing weight of iron and steel. Some lucky angel must have intervened, not a moment too soon; of their own accord his fists released the old man's neck.

When he thought about it, he was relieved that the old man was no longer alive; toward the end he'd persisted for days, indeed for weeks, in his rage, probably irked by nothing other than his own increasing infirmity. When it occurred to C. that the image of his grandfather's last years might presage his own future he was overwhelmed with dread. — Russian or Polish curses had always played a role in the altercations C. recalled. In these tongues, he felt, they sounded especially irate or even hate-filled. And then he'd seemed to hear them again from Gunsch's lips, and his temper, which he really felt was homicidal, had immediately flared up again.

In this host of curses there was one word that began with a guttural sound and escalated to a virtual eruption . . . almost a spewing of flame, thought C. — He recalled that it sounded like:
Holéra . . . holéra!
His grandfather had uttered it quite frequently, invariably during the most explosive rows in their tortuous family history; now it had shot from Gunsch's gorge in just the same way, lobbed into some random distance, though you couldn't tell for sure. It sounded malevolent; the word seemed to distill the sort of loathing that could mount only in the souls of eternally oppressed peoples or races. — C. had no idea what it meant, for he had always refused—and in this he resembled his mother—to
learn even a few words of Polish or Russian. At some point he'd hit on the thought that it had to do with the name of a half-forgotten disease:
cholera
. And perhaps they used the word so often, my grandfather and Gunsch, because it resembled the German word
Kohle
, the term, that is, for the stuff at which they slaved each day, which filled their lungs with black deposits and forced black sweat from their pores. And then the ghastly name of the disease had become, for them, the quintessence of the clan that surrounded them: the clan was an insatiable plague sucking away their strength, wearing down their bones, transforming their hands into calloused paws that could never again be cleaned, drenching their gullets with tar and smoke so that nothing could free them up but floods of alcohol—and all that for the clan that ate them out of house and home . . .

When he was in town, visiting his mother, all these things came back to mind. That at least served to justify—at least in his own eyes—the visits of his, which had recently grown more frequent. When he returned to Berlin afterward, the tumult of the city slid like a screen in front of the thoughts from which he felt he was compounded. — What ought he to write about, if not
cholera
. . . he, C., who called himself a writer, albeit with a discomfort of which he seemed unable to rid himself? Ought he to write about Berlin, the city everyone else wrote about incessantly? Or should he write about his years navigating between East and West Germany, which had felt like a constant shifting back and forth between plague and cholera? He didn't know, and he refused to know. He'd come from cholera, and he seemed to have survived it, and perhaps he could write about that . . .

In Berlin, very rarely, he'd suddenly picture his mother, vegetating in the junk-stuffed, barely functioning flat he called a
slum
, to use a modern English expression for once. Growing older and older there, regularly falling asleep in the afternoon in front of the flickering, babbling television, as though no longer equal to the unwieldy mass of the consciousness hidden within her. And he knew that from the neighboring flats too, through the thin walls, the televisions could be heard: the breathless smarm of a host, the sycophantic applause of the audience, the perpetual, witless ooh-ooh of the mob, feigning enthusiasm over the sums of money or preposterous products flogged off on the never-abating game shows.

Amid that drivel she lay there on the red-brown couch, a thing that belonged on the junk heap, while in the yellow-tiled heating stove the spent coal crumbled to ash and cold seeped in through the crooked windows. She appeared to him then as a vessel of moldering memories that were undealt with, unspoken, that no one asked for, no one wanted to know about, and that began like unused coal to decompose.

Oh, how long these memories had led a life of their own, suicidal and shading into insanity. — What was left of the old woman, thought C., had long since been seized by a ferment of madness and little by little was being ravaged. — In some way, he thought, he was bound up with those memories that lay there swathed in thick, worn clothing, buried beneath woolen, coal-smelling blankets. — In some strange, barely explicable way, I am bound up with these memories, and no doubt I dread the moment in which they'll descend into utter confusion, flickering and vanishing into the void.

I only need to stumble on my way to the mailbox, and
already everything comes back to me. My foot only needs to catch on the uneven pavement, and at once I feel cast back into that time made up of never-ending winters. Of black winters covering other winters, black and long-decayed. And I ask myself over and over what I never asked myself then: What is it that lies beneath us? Bygone clans lie there beneath us. Long-forgotten clans lie down there, clans no one now asks about, clans long fermented to coal, clumped together blackly, clans rising up at night against the life that lives on above them. Rising up like the ferment of memories, like endless tribes of memories no one knows of now. And I am, yet again, the uncounted member of a clan surnamed
Choléra
that once set out early in the morning, at an inhuman hour, into the cold and the darkness that lay over the coal and over the ash. Ash lay over the coal, and coal lay over the ash. And my past lies down there, I thought, down beneath the coal, beneath the ash.