Free The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig Page A

wouldn’t burn; I climbed onto the table, lighting my way with the cigarette lighter, and jiggled the cable until the two fluorescent tubes shone once more. The whole thing repeated until my thoughts were in tatters: that crackling and flaring, and then again the slackening steps, once it had grown still.
    Sometimes it ceased, but the hunt in the streets was far from over. He had managed to shake them only temporarily.It seemed he’d hidden himself in a dark corner; my yard served in a pinch to let his pursuers pass by. But all he got was a breathing spell; soon they tracked him down again. They were long since wise to all his ruses, they’d been after him for years; I would have had to count back to say when this story had begun. There was no reason for it . . . no one out there knew any reason. — And often enough they caught him, presumably they could catch him at their whim. At any time they could corner him and let him run into a trap: he was one man, there were always more of them, they took turns, they could increase their force at will.
    I recall all too well how once, in the very beginning, when their malice was still boundless—a few weeks, in other words, after setting their sights on him—they had snatched him off the street and beaten him horribly. It was a winter night, between three and four in the morning, when I heard a voice calling softly outside the kitchen windows and thought I could make out my name. With the last of his strength he’d dragged himself into my yard, where he collapsed in the slush. I had to help him up the stairs; evidently he could hardly see. I helped him lie down on the sofa in the kitchen and administered several shots of liquor. His lips were split, blood dripped from his nose. Both eyes had swelled nearly shut, and shards from his glasses were embedded in his lacerated brows, clearly due to a blow from a truncheon. I tried to get some explanation out of him, but he merely hissed out profanities and curses; he murmured on even after falling asleep.
    Not long after this scene he was sent to prison for a year; on his release his papers bore a stamp authorizing himto cross the border. He had three days to leave the country; together we went around to the authorities, whom neither of us cared to visit, to gather the signatures he needed, attesting, among other things, that he’d paid his electric bills, had no outstanding library books, and had taken care of the fee for clearing out his cellar. An hour before his departure we packed his belongings, filling barely half of an olive canvas duffel bag. In the afternoon I accompanied him to the last bus to the district capital, which he had to take to catch the interzonal train to Frankfurt am Main that would bring him across the border before midnight. I refused to believe that he was glad to go. We were silent for most of the way to the bus station, or at least we didn’t speak of how he was leaving the country with no real conviction, and no precise notion what his destination was. He was limping, but insisted on carrying the bag himself; though it weighed nearly nothing, it pulled his slender shoulders askew. Before boarding the bus, he turned his face to me, now pale, and said he’d never set foot in this country again. — You’ve got no other choice, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud; I saw him sitting behind the grimed bus window, staring stoically straight ahead. There was no point in waving again, for as the bus drove off, I saw that his eyes were closed behind his thick lenses; an inscrutable smile played about his lips.
    Just a few days later I could have sworn I saw his duffle bag again. I happened to walk down the street where he’d lived, and saw it lying on the sill of the ground floor window, which had never had curtains. I’d often worked myself up about that: he offered an unobstructed view through hiswindow to every sewer rat and every belly-worm employed by