Free The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig

the shadow of its discolorations: at first glance one had the impression that lines of dark brown vermin were marching straight up the walls. When I’d heated the coal stove, the wallpaper seemed to sweat, emitting the nicotine lodged in its pores since the beginning of eternity. The windows had warped in the damp; I’d used old towels to block the cold that seeped in at their edges. If possible, I left the lamp over the table burning all the time; its wires were heavily oxidized, porous. Dating back before the war, they refused to conduct electricity when switched on and off too often, and only protracted manipulation of the contacts could start the current flowing again. — In this old cave—in this relic from the early twentieth century—I sat and turned my pages, covered with crossed-out or not yet crossed-out lines. Instead of writing, I smoked cigarette after cigaretteand listened to the darkness that hung inert outside the windows. There was nothing to be heard . . . I couldn’t hear a thing, all sounds were swallowed by the enervating whine of the ancient refrigerator, whose unstable power unit kept starting up at far-too-brief intervals.
    My reflections on this town had likely begun at a time now lost in mythic twilight. Indeed I had tried, again and again, to form a picture of the town which, if I was not mistaken, was still out there, which probably still clustered around my lighted interior, frozen and stony and hollow. I had even persuaded myself that this was my sole purpose . . . and perhaps for that very reason it had become for me a senseless, useless undertaking. Often I believed that first I had to invent the town by describing it . . . perhaps it could come into existence in no other way. The fact that I had been born in it was not sufficient to prove its existence . . .
    How can one demand of a shadow that he describe the image of a shadow town? — It was absurd questions like that I grappled with. And a long-familiar effect had taken hold: my goal, the image of the town, seemed to recede still further from me each time I believed, thanks to blind chance, that I’d come closer for a moment . . . the goal sought to evade me! I was accordingly ill-disposed toward my endeavor. — But perhaps there did exist, somewhere in the streets, a certain shadow for whom such an image was possible . . . weren’t there footsteps in the depths of town, padding steps I strained my ears after? First they had receded, but now they returned again. Weren’t those steps down on the pavement the proof I was seeking? I listened a long time, hour after hour, but there was not much to hear, due to therefrigerator noise—a central, recurring motif brought to me by the run-down things of the twentieth century—which constantly drowned everything out. And the light began to flicker, for seconds at a time, each time the refrigerator switched itself on.
    How can you sit calmly at a table and write, I said to myself, and set down the impression of a completely inert town, when you’re constantly tormented by the knowledge that someone out there in the dark is being hunted, and may this very moment be running for his life?
    However frightful the deluge of refrigerator noise: I seemed to keep hearing those hasty steps out on the street. From the moment I arrived in M. I was unable to escape the thought. The door to the next room, with the street window, stood ajar, and I heard the clatter and shuffle of well-worn shoes on the crooked stones of the sidewalk. First it was a single person’s steps; soon I thought several others were following him. After a while the single steps returned, and sometimes they strayed into the yard, sometimes coming right beneath the two kitchen windows between which I sat, listening in horror. In a moment I could expect him to call my name . . . I stood up and extinguished the light. Once I felt safe, I turned the lamp on again: of course it