The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig Page A

here, raising sharp, icy dust from the road’s concrete slabs and flinging it into his face. But somehow he always seemed to have soaked up warmth in the suburban train, making the stretch to the factory entrance easier to cover.
    Now, on the short trip to the mailbox, he felt abruptly transformed to a previous state: all that had befallen him in his later life, all that had changed him, suddenly seemed unreal, a way of life forced upon him by whim or by chance, for which there was no real inward reason. Now he was every bit the half-stupefied figure from back then, hastening onwards, coattails flying, beneath the wind-rattled lamps. He hurried through their circles of orange light that scattered, shifting across the pavement. In many places this pavement was uneven, bulging and split as though something pressed on it from underneath. And he often thought these places changed overnight, and kept tripping him unexpectedly; and each time his feet caught on the crooked slabs, a strange sentence came into his mind: I don’t need to know what’s down there beneath me!
    He remembered: he’d already had a restless spellyesterday. Just after four, before the need for sleep came over him, the long-familiar emptiness gaped within, as it regularly did; if he hadn’t yet been to the mailbox, he’d pull on his coat over the faded old sweat suit he wore in the house, slip on his shoes, usually without socks, and run outside with his shoelaces untied. The street was usually deserted; it would have been awkward for him to run into someone he knew in his slipshod get-up. Only a few cars would pass him, headlights on full beam, and for a few seconds he’d jog along in their light; doubtless no one recognized him, he’d left town long ago.
    They raced down the street as though hopelessly late. — Those who still had work, and that wasn’t many these days, might have driven off an hour ago already; it seemed they commuted to jobs in Bavaria, in Hof or even Nuremberg, driving hundreds of kilometers, spending up to fifteen hours away from home each day. Of course, they earned twice what they could have at the few jobs here. And here they paid much less rent. But they were hardly ever home; despite the money, their marriages broke up one by one.
    He sometimes had half a mind to mention these things in the letters he sent. He had this urge each time he got a letter from West Germany sharing someone’s evident gratification at how the East German towns were finally being refurbished.
    There you have it, he thought, now they’re replastering the façades, and bit by bit the former Zone’s houses will cease to offend West German eyes.
    In actual fact, he wrote nothing of the sort; generally, when people adopted such a tone, he let the correspondencelapse quite quickly. The messages he sent consisted of just a few inconsequential lines, often addressed to people he barely knew even in passing. — He’d write to them that he had to remember, or at least thought he had to, because the town he came from, where he’d grown up, essentially no longer existed, and his memories of this place had turned porous, with more and more holes gaping in them.
    It sounded like an attempt to justify his frequent visits to the small town where his mother still lived. No one whosoever had asked. And yet he volunteered replies; his letters and postcards were composed of evasive, overcautious replies to questions no one had asked, making the whole thing even more mysterious: it seemed he was merely answering his own questions. It astonished him that he couldn’t find a self-evident reason to visit the house where he was born, that coming to town to see his mother wasn’t reason enough.
    What am I actually trying to remember? he’d ask himself, back from the mailbox. — In the old days I’d have had to get up an hour ago to report punctually for the life I barely recall now. — His mother