The Sleep of the Righteous (2 page)

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We could claim but a small part of the street: our street, as we called it, stretched townward to the point where the pavement began—uneven and jolting, made of square granite cobbles—and out the other way to the railroad crossing, where the town, at least its inhabited part, really had already ended. The sedate, brassy clanging when the red and white gates were cranked down—a sour note made by a tiny hammer striking the inside wall of a shallow, bowl-like mold—was, in a way, the town's death knell, for past the railroad crossing, at least on the right side, lay vast fields of rubble with looming black beams and ruined walls: the remains of munitions factories where concentration camp inmates had labored in wartime.

Our part of the street had not been paved yet, except for the narrow sidewalks outside the two rows of apartment blocks. Between the sidewalks was but a straight track of sand, perhaps once light, now since times unknown black-gray, as though in proof that a mix of many colors ultimately
yields darkness. Coal dust and ash had blackened it to the pith, and then had come the reddish mass of crushed brick, the rubble from bombed-out houses that was used to even the surface. After each rain you gazed into a bed of murky, viscous mud; in the dry spells of summer the street was an endless reservoir of dust that advanced all the way into the stairwells and seemed to glow in the midday sun; it covered barefoot boys' skin up to the thighs with the black bloom of inviolability.

We little kids, bored in the long days of summer, sat on the curb, our feet in the dust of the gutter, puffing on cigarettes, their smoke barely visible in the sun's glare between the façades. And we sat on the steps outside front doors that were always shut against the dust; from a distance we seemed a visibly degenerate mob unlikely to lift its siege of the sidewalk without a fight. Passers-by crossed the street when they saw us, or turned onto a side street beforehand, seeking the shelter of the large trees, the chestnuts or the lindens; our street lacked trees and saw hardly a shadow.

At that time there was a dearth of men in town; most of the children were fatherless, and many remained so forever. Time refused to pass, bearing down on them like a weight that stunted their growth. And the sole liberation from boredom lay in growth, in the adulthood that all the others had achieved some incalculable time ago and no longer wasted a word on. And the books we read, the stories we made up and told, as a rule featured only adults, and for the most part only men. — The mere thought that you were still
small
made you sick, you sickened with boredom. . . There were no fathers to take pride in your growing up after them. Or they were
mayors, policemen, pharmacists, teachers . . . or miners, waiting for their pensions, so tired in the evenings that they never spoke a word. — For the mothers, it seemed, you always stayed a child, they seemed to forget you had a name, all your life you were
the child
for them, eternally neuter. . . and I heard my mother calling me, in the rooms, in the hallway, across the yard, through all the floors her clear voice rang. . . Child, she called, where are you? Where've you been all this time? — And when we crossed the railroad tracks to reach the strip mines, or entered the woods that began beyond the expanse of ruins, when we vanished all day from our street, out of reach of the town and adults, in the evening she cried: Just look what the child's been up to again, just look at the child, what a sight! — She cried these words even though I'd returned intact, almost entirely unscathed, giving no cause for concern whatsoever. . .

It was an affront: for a time whose end seemed out of sight you were condemned to the life of little kids for whom the months, the years passed only in arid theory, in the form of a convention the adults were set upon; any actual passage of time would occur only in the intangible future. It was a stuffy, stubbornly opaque doom that hung over the whole town, but over our street with special vividness: there were no fathers there to make still littler children.

Little kids
was our collective name, rarely heard without a touch of scorn, which seemed to vanish only when the big kids on our street wanted something from us. They'd say, for instance, “here, have a smoke”; we ignored the condescension, put on finicky expressions, and helped ourselves. Pensively we'd roll the cigarette between thumb and forefingers until
someone offered us a light. We'd have loved to strike a match on our boot heel, something we'd never seen done. But we'd eavesdropped on grown-ups who'd seen it in movies in the American zone of Berlin, for us an utterly unreachable continent. We'd never been to the movies, not even to one of the town's two movie theaters; besides, we lacked the boots for the purpose. The big kids struck matches on the glass of shop windows; we'd seen that and tried it ourselves when we could get our hands on a matchbox—in kindergarten and later at school the possession of matches was seen almost as an act of sabotage—but our matches wouldn't light, or rarely lit, on the glass panes, and usually the indignant shopkeepers chased us off.

Once we'd lit the cigarettes, the big kids came out with what they wanted: it would seem to be some risky matter. When they had a ticklish task for us, they avoided the word
kid
. But since such jobs required someone who looked particularly harmless, an indirect disparagement remained. — Apparently I never really looked harmless, and so the jobs regularly went to those who were even smaller, or a half to a full year younger than me, with my eccentric birth date. — We'd off-handedly promise to look into the matter; in reality we rarely did a thing, and had to spend a while on the run from the big kids. But they swiftly forgot what they'd needed, or it would prove superfluous; after a time we sat on the curb once again, bored and unmolested, awaiting our maturity.

And this waiting was contradictory: on the one hand our goal was to grow older, to rise at last from the state of useless, unfinished, in-between beings; on the other hand, perhaps still worse than the alternative, that would thwart
any permanent alliance with the power of the summer in our street. — For we saw how the adults suffered from the heat; we nodded understandingly, even chimed in with their laments, we cursed along with them when a yearned-for storm refused to come and the thunder bogged down above the woods in the east. In reality, though, we took in the incandescent air as though every trickle of sentimentality had to be parched from our innards. We breathed the smoke that rose from the furrows and faults in the street dust, we took in the afternoons' paralyzing stillness like the golden-yellow vapors of alchemistic smelters, which made us younger, yet lent our faces the ancient grins of African demon masks. — If it ever did rain at night or in the morning, the midday sun leeched all the moisture from the furrows of the road, from that one lane of deep ruts that led across the railroad tracks and all the way out to the strip mines . . . and after a thunderstorm had indeed come, when the sky was white-blue again, the ruts were transformed into two channels of water that reached to the calves, and on the surface floated a fine film of reddish ash.

In winter the street was frozen rock-solid, with the menacing glitter of frost in the petrified mud's recesses. Every day now, with torturous slowness, the cumbersome ash carts passed, so broad that on our stretch of the street there was room for just one at a time. They were welded together from strong, rusty steel plate, and the remnants of paint not yet burned away were rust-red as well. With bodies that tapered toward the bottom to ease the dumping of the ash, they resembled armored battleships; swaying slightly, grinding and groaning, they crept out of town in a cloud of exhaust;
the fat, black, rubber tires clearly found little traction in the sometimes iced-over ruts of the street. The ash carts left a lingering wave of salty fumes between the buildings; you tasted it, felt its sting in your throat and your lungs, and long after the carts had passed the air seemed roiled by invisible, burnt-smelling waves. The trapezoidal monsters hauled the fuel waste from all the households and the rebuilt industrial plants out of town and dumped it in the first of the mine pits . . . the first mine pit had once been the largest, though only the deepest half contained water; in the meantime it had been filled by ash, rubble, and rubbish to become the smallest of the so-called “final voids.” — The wagons were drawn by prodigious brewery horses, just as rust-red as the ash carts, steaming and grinding away just like them. High on a wooden bench sat a driver swathed in black and dusted with brown ash, clicking his tongue constantly and puffing on a charred, crooked pipe. With their shoes slipping on the frozen mud crests, now and then the utterly phlegmatic beasts would stop; the coachman's long, arcing whip, tip flicked out, sank from the white sky onto the horses' huge rumps, darting there artfully until the mighty animals, making reluctant fluttery sounds with their nostrils, resumed their trot once more; fine wisps of ash rose from their coats as the man on the wooden seat administered those tiny, well-aimed rapier jabs that sometimes cracked like distant gunshots.

One day, two of the poor beasts had fallen into the ash just as the wagon was unloading, and dragged the entire vehicle along with them. — We were told this by the railroad gateman; he hardly spoke a word otherwise, but the accident had horrified him too deeply to pass over it in silence. The pit's
crumbling rim—only the frost, he said, had lent it a deceptive stability—had given way beneath the weight of the wagon and team; the driver was standing alongside, and only a quick-witted backward leap saved his life. But the horses, snarled in their harnesses' tangle, slid with the wagon down the steep slope to the bottom of the mine, where they sank into the subterranean embers covered only by thin layers of cooled ash. The beasts' bellowing whinnies . . . no, their shrieks, said the signalman, must have been heard all the way to town; the whole area was filled by the rank smell of burned hair and flesh. — My grandfather, said to love horses more than people, had come running to the ash pit from his nearby allotment garden, clutching a shotgun, but before he could reach the site of the accident the horses had already fallen silent; death had seized them. All the same, the men shot from above to make the heaps of flesh stop twitching, but it was no use. And in the end, the weeping driver hurled his tobacco pipe down into the depths of the mine pit!

Much later, I recalled reading of a similar scene in a long book I'd never finished: a captain by the name of Ahab had likewise flung his pipe, his last remaining pleasure, over the bulwarks into the ocean's rolling waves, disconsolate at his failure to chase down a huge white whale he'd been hunting for nameless ages across the seas.

In any case, the accident spelled immediate ruin for the horses' owner, Bodling the carter, a friend of my grandfather's. It seems he then took to delivering beer, driving the beer and soda crates to the shops and picking up the empties with a rickety little three-wheeler. As the town's other carter was unable to cope with all the ash by himself, the
town government eventually drummed up a new motorized garbage truck, but it took the rest of the winter and nearly all the next year. In the meantime, people carted their ash out of town themselves in wheelbarrows; after dark they emptied the bins right into the ruins beyond the railroad crossing. . . to the gateman's chagrin, but he said nothing, he kept his silence. And when things got really bad, people began to fill the ruts in the middle of our stretch of street with ash, which transformed it altogether into a hilly, barely negotiable waste, in the spring thaws emitting a medley of noisome smells that burned off and vanished only in summer.

My grandfather's gun had become a kind of legend in town, at least in the part of town within our ken and control. It suddenly made me an object of interest for the bigger boys on the street who had consciously experienced the war. For them the war had been decidedly more exciting than the peace, the post-war period that increasingly metamorphosed into a regimented existence full of inevitable demands that could not be escaped, with time gradually divided into fixed units that had to be faced, the main thing being punctuality and reliability. Peace, this much seemed clear, was governed by the clocks, time by the clock had taken power, and quite quickly one realized there was no more escape from the power of the ordered time blocks. It was no coincidence that everyone told how the Russian soldiers who had chased away the war and brought the peace—it seemed, unfortunately, that they'd chased war away for good—were especially keen on the watches the vanquished Germans wore. When the Americans were still in town, no one had cared about German watches, nor had the Americans cared about time
and order. They had left that to the Russians who replaced them soon after the peace began—and you could tell from the Americans' grinning faces, it was said, how little credit they gave the Russians with regard to order and time management. They were mistaken; the Russians installed town administrators who were downright obsessed with cleaning up. Cleaning up and rebuilding . . . order and cleanliness; these, one sensed, were especially tenacious German virtues, and the Russians were well aware of it. But the Germans—at least some of them, even adults—weren't so keen to play along, and went on dumping their ash and their rubbish in the ruts of our street by night; only those, of course, who didn't live on our street themselves. Thus, peace meant for a time that the street was fouled by the acrid smell of sodden ash, mingled with the vapors from rotten vegetable scraps and fallen, liquescing fruit; unprecedented populations of bluebottles and wasps appeared out of nowhere to take over the street; and more and more run-over rats were left lying in the space between the sidewalks and had to be disposed of. The scourge ended only when policemen began to patrol the street by twos in dark blue uniforms, one member of each pair armed with a revolver.