Free The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig Page B

the state apparatus. It was all the same to him. — I knocked on the pane; nothing stirred, so I went into the building and hammered on the door of his flat: no one answered; his name plate had been removed from the front door.
    Revenge! Revenge, I thought, it could only be revenge that they’d wanted. — But revenge for what? — I still sought an explanation for the story, but there was no chance for an explanation. At any rate, there were always enough people to put together a posse! There were policemen and secret policemen, and any number of overzealous little snitches who would have given anything to play Inspector Maigret. Who even did it free of charge, just to show how much they cared about law and order in this town. How many humble citizens with windows on the street took up their posts behind the curtains at the least unusual noise? I couldn’t imagine that, of all their traits, this one might have changed.
    And yet my friend wasn’t even a homosexual or a Jew, he wore his hair only moderately long, and he had no car to commit a parking violation. He was only a humble chemist who’d quit his job at the factory because he was over-qualified, and since then stayed afloat by repairing TV sets; word had gotten out that he did a better job than the official service company. He spent his spare time in his tiny apartment, hunched over inscrutable chemical formulas, painting abstract pictures, or developing his own amateur photos. Now and then he’d drink a drop too much. The anonymous letters about him received by a certain section of the municipal council described nocturnal gatherings in his apartment that went on into the morning. I had attended several ofthose gatherings; the way they talked about literature and music put me in a foul mood, and I went home early.
    Now, when I walked past his former apartment, I looked back wistfully on those discussions; my arrogance has long since fled. The little discussion groups had scattered soon after his expulsion. And they had never come back together again, not even now. . . even less so now, in the time after the system’s collapse, when it actually would have been possible: today there seemed not a person left in town who talked voluntarily about literature. Only the others, literature’s adversaries, had remained. They hunkered behind the haze of their curtains and kept the street under surveillance. But there was no one down there who was not of their ilk.
    I had never succeeded in describing the town. Neither from up close nor from afar; I simply hadn’t found a way to look at it, I saw that more and more clearly. — It was he who could have pulled off this description, and in his own way, though quite unintentionally, he had pulled it off. This was what I thought when I passed by his window, behind which he was often seen puttering around; now curtains hung against the polished panes, and inside a TV flickered murkily. My friend had merely released the shutter of his camera one cold fall Sunday, and the snapshot produced at that moment had unmasked the town. Three o’clock: at precisely that second the town had frozen to an image of black and white lifelessness. And they had been after him ever since. — Maybe they’re only after the photo, I thought. If they got it, would they leave him in peace? — But I never really believed that.
    I knew what awaited me in M.; I’d given up all hopefor change. When I got off the rickety suburban train and crossed the station hall, already seeing several odd, loitering figures who took a striking interest in the bare walls when I passed, and when I walked down Bahnhofstrasse and turned further down onto the main street, not without looking about to see whether I was being followed in due form, then I knew that nothing had changed here. By the marketplace, at the latest, I ceased to care whether they were following me; I knew I was now in the past, in a time that