The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig

hadn’t moved from the spot. I’d been unable to make out the station clock, but I was convinced that its hands hadn’t moved an iota. Fog, drizzle, and snow sank unchanged through the islands of reddish streetlights, as though even the weather were a mere expression of stagnation and the past. When I arrived in my kitchen at last, when the fluorescent tubes burned over the table, when the stove was heated, I spread out my papers in front of me. And as my perplexity grew, I began listening to the night outside.
    Now and then I thought I heard steps down in the street: he, he alone could describe the town, but he didn’t, at least not as I would have done. — He was the restless spirit of this town, his presence spectral and indisputable. And when he thought about the town, it was in phrases that came ever faster, ever shorter; short-winded phrases; meanwhile he passed without pausing. They were after him, as they were every night. He fled, began to limp, I could hear it clearly; he was already flagging. He didn’t stop, he went on to the end of the street. There he disappeared, but only for a moment. He could think the town’s story only in fits and starts, without patience, without beginning and end.More and more often he stopped to catch his breath, pressing himself into an entryway, listening into the darkness. He knew they were there somewhere, listening as well. A little further. At the next corner he set down the olive-drab bag and asked a chance passerby for a light. The cigarette glowed in his cupped hand, and he walked on. After just a few steps he threw away the cigarette and ran. He came past the train station, skirting it, straight through the wet shrubs, then slid down a railroad embankment and returned to town via muddy side streets, as he’d often done before. But he couldn’t shake them off; they were always somewhere in the darkness behind him. At some point the church clock on the market square struck, like the reverberation of a second that had slipped into a coma. I counted the strokes, he did not; he ran on.
    The photo he had taken years before was in my possession, and really it was I they should have hunted.

It was an odd thing: in the night, the dark morning, he’d feel driven out onto the street again. — How should he call it: a habit, a restlessness from former times that had grown old with him? He wanted no more part of it! — For instance, he’d walk up the street to the mailbox at this ungodly hour, as he’d taken to calling it. And he knew that he was trying to avoid meeting any of the people who set out this early, between four and five, on their daily way to work. It was long since C. had been one of them, more than fifteen years, but down on the dark street, on the maybe five hundred yards to the mailbox, it was clear to him that a disquiet from that time still lay deep within. This disquiet was otherwise silent, he was quite immune to the thought of it, but at that particular hour something within him responded . . . Quite automatically! he said to himself.
    A single stumble, and that old feeling resurfaced: he was driven by the duty to set out into the world, and yet he didn’t want to. He wasn’t even able yet to let himself be driven. In a daze he watched himself charge onward, coughing, sucking at a cigarette; the cold made his eyes water, he felt the icyrunnels on his cheeks. The frosty air blew every bit of sleep from his brain, but his thoughts refused to clear, nothing but numbness was left in his skull. The frozen block behind his brow held but one aspiration: to reach the station in time, to drop onto the red-brown plastic upholstery of the dimly lit railcar, and there, for precisely eight minutes, amidst relative warmth, to collapse.
    He had to get out at the very next station. There was another stretch of road before him, still more unpleasant, as it led through the open terrain of the mine pits. The wind howled