The Sleep of the Righteous (7 page)

In that moment the shrill song in my ears broke off. From then on the scolding and the threats fell still; there was a silence within me, as though the cries wished to be mere memory; gradually I began to forget them. —
Into the lake . . . into the lake
, the women's venting utterance seemed suddenly to have gone mute. And at once I began to miss it; a moment later I felt that, from this time on, I would have to seek the voices of the women.

In secret I eyed their closed mouths, which seemed pinched and gray, oddly blurred and colorless; they wasted no more words on my unseemly behavior: on my coming too late, not coming at all . . . oh, my coming had ceased to matter to them. And so they no longer promised to go, go throw themselves into the lake . . . they ceased to threaten me with it, and stayed where they were. There was a dully flowing, yellow-green veil between us, made of rain, made of mist, and all words and retorts were lost in it. We no longer reached the surface; a chill prevailed between us, inevitably seeping inside if we offered even the tiniest opening.

It was pointless now to avow how I loved them, pointless to concede what they had once extorted, the irrefutable proof of my love, the liquid proof of my love that would encompass them all . . . and that I no longer had the strength to mobilize in myself. In all the years that had sunk from my reach I had sought to hoard the names of love within me, a river of
names, a deluge of words, a swell of endearments frothing and mounting . . . I couldn't find them, or the words failed to find
me
. They, the women they were meant for, were too old for them, I had missed the right moment. The names of love had bailed out somewhere, crossed over to an unknown shore, they were on the far edge of a bleak river, out of my reach, scattered and barren like dim stars above my smoking nights.

But one last time I resolved to follow them: the words of the women, or my words, or their silence, or mine. I set out in search of what seemed lost to me. Again I left the house in the middle of the night and wandered for a long time, breathing heavily I strayed through the liquid moonlight: I recalled the mudhole from my childhood . . . Perhaps it was there, I thought, that I lost everything! — I hastened through woods where wafts of mist fooled my eyes, like nightgowns fleeing, then over an open field, across the endless rubbish heaps where the empty bottles and flickering snakes of tinfoil echoed the unearthly gleam of the sickle moon, and where deep in the night came a dark red glow as from subterranean fires. At last I found the peninsula, the omega: already I saw myself from afar, running across amid the thickets to the center of the island . . . the birches had grown tall, the underbrush thin, but the trees were bare, they had died and rotted, their crumbling trunks soaked with water. I reached the shore and saw the lake stretched between the dark ruined trees, the causeway lay under water; it was impossible now to cross to the island, looming from the waves before the fiery glow like the fragment of a skull whose hair stood on end. And at a distance drifted clumps of foam—or were they clots of fog?—some of them erect, twisting upward like rising
spirals, or like ghosts circling the island in wobbling boats . . .

Not yet, ferryman, I said, I'm not ready to board your boat. Cast off once more without me, old friend; I must find my way back first. I must know those names first, that myriad of names . . . then I'll follow you.

For one day I will find them . . . and then, to show you all, I'll hurl it after you, my love, and the names for it, and the thoughts I have. — Into the lake! The lake! I cried, and, inflamed by a dull bolt of lightning in my body, I stepped close to the shore, where I tore my trousers open. Panting I began to empty myself, as though to form a bond between myself and the earth, I pissed steaming into the water, painfully I poured myself and emptied myself utterly into the dark water on which the swelling white gowns floated.

The dark divests us of our qualities. — Though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness . . . it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten . . . it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of his breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. And we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling each other, still and hostile. By day we keep silent, we know too much about ourselves, and our resolve to skirt or ignore this knowledge of ourselves is unshakeable. For years no contention has arisen between us, it seems settled that we respect both our lives, that we grant ourselves our existence. His existence is that of the father of his daughter, mine that of the son of my mother, no more and no less; the woman we mean, descendant of a dead woman, sleeps in more distant back rooms. One of our qualities, common to both of us, must be an arduously hidden fear: never mentioned in the light, it exhausts us in
night sweats, swallowed by the dark, which we put down to the hot summer nights. We rest sweating side by side in an old marriage bed, and the square weight of the gloom lies upon us, clasps us, it presses us together, we lie with bodies completing each other, like two conspirators exchanging signs with their breaths.

When Grandmother died, it was decided without discussion that I, still a child, would move that same day to her vacated bed, next to my grandfather, so as to banish for good all clarity as to who had killed the old woman. And he, the old man, parted that day from his daughter. . . she retired to the back, into my former room.

It was one of us two, that much is for sure: it was a blow from the cast-iron poker, descending with a thud to strike her on the hip, right between kidney and spine, a blow to which, after weeks of hunched shuffling and vomiting of black blood, she ultimately succumbed. How absurd that her end was ascribed to several prunes, soaked in cold water, which she was said to have eaten too greedily; it was the farcical justification that we had all agreed to believe, and no one dared call it a cowardly fiction.

He who goes to bed first is the innocent one, for he can fall asleep. If the old man goes first, if he's asleep already when I come, the strained, sustained groaning and snoring that rises from his rib cage won't let me fall asleep, not until I grasp at last, hours later perhaps, its irregular rhythm, and am able in the pauses in which he seems to have died, so long and so stunned are they, to chime in with my own groans and snores, so that our two voices begin to prowl about each other. They seek to wear each other down in a continual game of
questions and answers that suddenly breaks free of its confusion and becomes a game in which at synchronized intervals we accuse each other again and again. —
Who? Whoo
. . . is the ever-repeated question concealed within one of these chest tones; and:
You! Youu
. . . is the response that just as inevitably follows.

Sometimes I awaken with a start, bathed with sweat in a darkness that admits no concept of time, and even before I completely come to, the last of his emphatic replies enters my still-feeble consciousness so fiercely that I turn rigid with dread. For a moment, he seems to listen, but my wheezing question doesn't come; he tosses with sinister force onto his other side, turning toward me, I can't tell if his eyes are open, and before I can place the horror of that insistent
you
in my vaguely straying thoughts, I've fallen asleep again; he turns back onto the old side, I feel his back at my breast again, again we lie like the nested forms of two soup spoons, my hand once more touching his. And I feel how, full of fury, he awaits the judgment from my howling throat; over and over, with the tirelessness of a torturer, he'll ask me the terrible question:
Whoo. . .?
—
Youu . . .!
I'll reply.
Whooo. . .
—
Youuu . . .
— And so on, and it seems that sleep is assured to me till morning. It seems we both believe firmly in the reciprocal truth of our testimony.

But in reality we've both forgotten the true course of events, and we both think ourselves the murderer. Or both of us doubt that the murderer was the other. It's a circling about a common guilt, it's two ellipses of a double guilt no longer to be teased apart; night after night it grows menacingly into the dark and drives the viruses of the gloom
into a frenzy. No doubt the survivor will be the murderer. . . whichever of us two dies first will sink redeemed into his grave . . . no doubt that's why we hold our breath so often and so long. — The survivor, suddenly isolated, suddenly lacking his consort, lacking his accuser by his side, will fully grasp his guilt: while the innocent one sleeps forever, the guilty one shall never taste sleep again. Long, grinding thoughts will keep him awake . . . the initiate with the power to keep silent is dead. The powerless one is left behind; fear will torment him, mistrust of all the neighbors whose unrest he senses more keenly in the short summer nights, when his voice can be heard through the open window on the street: how much longer can the preposterous tale of the prunes be maintained? There is no one left who knows when the plum trees in the garden were felled; when might someone ask whether that wasn't before the old woman's death?

Bad dreams will visit the survivor's doze; at one point he'll think his grandfather has come in; while he feigns sleep, the old man will turn his back, drop his trousers to his knees, seat the lean, unsightly bareness of his buttocks on the bed, shed his trousers all the way, and lie beside him with a groan, hands folded on his breast in the innocent hope of sleep . . . meanwhile the one left behind will wrench his eyes open all the way and see that he's alone. — Never again will they nestle against each other by turns, one's back pressed to the other's front, filling all the bends of the sideways position, hands clawed together, dealing out each other's breaths, rhythmic in heat and gloom. — Again and again the survivor will dream the first day of solitude, dreaming every night anew the horror with which, waking, he grasps that his last
question has gone without a reply. . . until he hears the reply from the depths of his own breast: none but he can be meant, beside him the bed is abandoned.

Now the summer nights grow shorter and fiercer, his groaning and snoring hectic and ever louder, increasingly perturbed that the whole street, and the side streets as well, hear him circle himself with his indictments, hear him talk in his sleep, struggling for life and yet cursing himself, unable as he is to follow the old man into innocence.

The woman in her distant room knows nothing of all this . . . and is my initiate all the same; she bore me and abandoned me to this hideously long life. She slumbers for me, all the deeper since I've grown up out of childhood. She's oblivious of the cycle of the viruses, oblivious that close at hand the world's guilt dreams of vengeance—one day I'll move the block of night, one day I must roll it over her body.

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word
arrival
, though, I've already said too much: there's something so familiar in the soapy taste of the air that I wouldn't dream of describing my walk into town as a return—I don't think of myself coming back; I've never been away. No, I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that's all: in truth it was the town that never really left me. The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval. I always had this impression, long before the whole country's upheaval, and it lingered after the country's authorities had surrendered and fled, after the government and its closest vassals had been replaced: this town seemed in no way to confirm the changing of the system. In a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis, and that collapse had survived the regime change.