Free Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker

sleep.”
    Mischa didn’t let him go to sleep. He explained to Fayngold that the point was not whether Fayngold agreed but whether Rosa agreed. Also that he hadn’t mentioned Fayngold to her, he hardly dared to, and if they didn’t come up with a solution, presumably nothing would come of the whole idea. Fayngold switched on the light and stared at him for a long time.
    “You’re not serious!” he said in a shocked whisper. “You can’t expect me to hang around in the street until you’re finished. Have you forgotten the regulations?”
    Mischa didn’t expect any such thing, and he hadn’t forgotten the regulations either. He was simply looking for a solution, which was nowhere in sight. Fayngold switched off the light and soon fell asleep: it’s not we who must come up with something, but Mischa, all by himself.
    After an hour or two Mischa woke Fayngold, patiently put up with his abuse, and then told him his idea. As Mischa has said, Rosa will never spend the night with him if she finds out that there is another man in the room, regardless of whether he’s twenty or a hundred. If Mischa doesn’t tell her, maybe she will come, then she’ll see Fayngold, so she’ll leave again and never forgive Mischa. No matter which way you look at it, the only solution is for Fayngold to remain in the room and yet be as good as not there.
    “You want me to hide?” was Fayngold’s weary response. “You want me to spend night after night under my bed or in the wardrobe?”
    “I’ll tell her you’re deaf and dumb,” Mischa announced.
    Fayngold protested; for days he bitterly resisted the idea, but eventually Mischa managed to convince him of the urgency. At night a person can’t see much anyway, and if she is also sure that you can’t hear anything, we should be able to manage. So with distinctly mixed feelings Fayngold gave his consent: If it means so much to you. And ever since then, for Rosa he has been as deaf and dumb as a clam.
    For Mischa, though, there was another worry: from a few hints dropped by Fayngold he became aware that Fayngold had once been listening. True, Rosa hadn’t noticed anything and Fayngold had kept his mouth shut, but he must have heard a thing or two not intended for his ears. After all, when two people lie in each other’s arms, quite a few words are spoken that are not meant for other ears, and it was very embarrassing for Mischa. Since then he has been studying Fayngold’s sleep, often deliberately lying awake to listen to the pitch of his breathing and snoring. No one has ever heard himself sleep; no one can imitate his own sleep. A person can imitate sleeping as such but cannot know anything about his own sleep. And Mischa knows what Fayngold’s sleep sounds like: he could swear, he says, that he knows it in every detail. And during the rare nights when Rosa is with him, Mischa always first listens intently as he lies beside her, and only when he is quite sure that Fayngold is asleep behind the screen does he begin to caress her and kiss her, and Rosa forgets her disappointment and stops wondering why he has kept her waiting so long.
    On one occasion something terrible happened: while deeply asleep, in the midst of a confused dream, Fayngold suddenly began to speak, clearly audible individual words, ignoring the fact that deaf mutes must be deaf and dumb in their sleep too. This woke Mischa, whose heart almost stopped beating; he looked anxiously at Rosa, who lay asleep in the moonlight and merely turned her head from one side to the other. He couldn’t call out, Fayngold, shut up! He could only lie there motionless and hope, and luckily Fayngold stopped his fantasizing before there was a disaster. Dreams last for only a few seconds, people say, and it never happened again.
    So much for the miniature comedy. All in all, we see that some bold paths have led Rosa to this room, right beneath these covers, not merely straight down one street, then a turn to the left and a turn to the