That evening it was taking me especially long to pack my suitcase, and it was straining my nerves still more than usual—for fear of forgetting what I needed most, I regularly packed much too much unnecessary stuff—because I was constantly distracted by the inescapable jabber of the television, which had driven my wife into the kitchen. I felt a vague obligation to watch or hear what had been playing out on screen for more than an hour; it was one of those panel discussions—a so-called talk show—where people tirelessly, exhaustively, with exhausting repetitions and barely comprehensible fervor, debated a topic that for years, at least three years, I thought, had refused to go out of fashion: it was that the government had opened the archives of the defunct GDR’s demised state security service. — How long the list had grown of the prominent figures, or self-appointed prominent figures, who were suddenly exposed as informers for that security service, or who, preempting the publicity, exposed themselves, which of course made them still more prominent. It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurring torrents of verbiage; no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television. The writers talking on screen about the opening of several tons of Stasi files, talking it up and down—I knew several of them well, was even friends with them—seemed bent on making it the central theme of their literary lives . . . Ah! I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! — And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives! And I wondered if they got fees for talking on television about Stasi files and Stasi informers . . . I didn’t know, so far I hadn’t taken part in any of these discussions . . . and I wondered whether the exposed Stasi informers who occasionally took part in the discussions received their fees as well. — No, they wasted not a word on what was happening with the earth, they didn’t mention the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer. Not a word on global climate change, the now-undeniable melting of the ice caps, the contamination of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect that would inevitably bring undreamed-of catastrophes: their sole topic was the Stasi files . . . And no doubt they’re perfectly justified, I thought.
I had applied for access to my own files as soon as I had grounds to suspect there were dossiers on me as well: so far my files had not been found. I registered that fact almost with relief, for the scant excerpts from other files I’d been shown—because my name cropped up in them—had exuded a boredom so paralyzing that I’d broken out in sweat. I literally feared these files—not that I’d learn they’d secretly made me out as an informer or a denunciator, something everyone who undertook to read their files had to reckon with, for the Stasi’s mind worked in mysterious ways—I feared the gruel of language, these files’ distinguishing feature, I feared the nausea, these paper monsters’ brain-rotting stink, I feared the gray type, so like that of my own typewriter, I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages.
When at last I’d finished packing my bag and managed to turn off the TV—my wife had long since gone to bed—I sat at the table and smoked about five cigarettes in a row. My breath rattled, I panted as though I’d run a marathon or shoveled a ton of coal; I drank a whole bottle of mineral water and felt as though the greater part of the fluid immediately reemerged from my brow and my temples. And yet all I’d done was take a short walk, one of my routine walks up a narrow, steep street to a mailbox into which I dropped a hastily written postcard. — In the cool night air the whole situation had become quite clear to me: the mysterious call several hours ago and those endless panel discussions on the opening of the Stasi files— those two things were directly related.
A few hours later, early in the morning, as I started my trip—first in the taxi to the station, then in the various trains that brought me to the Frankfurt Airport—I had almost entirely suppressed the thought of that night’s phone conversation. For several hours I’d tossed and turned, half asleep, getting up a few times to smoke, not daring to take a sleeping pill, which I would have had to steal from my wife, for fear of sleeping through the arrival of the taxi I’d ordered the day before. For some time my wife had refused to wake me when I had to get up early. — I’m not your mother! she hissed when I asked such things of her: I should finally learn to cope with the chaos of my life by myself. — My objection that she also lived from the money I earned with readings and events of that kind counted for nothing with her. Her voice lingered in my ear, asking from the bedroom on the upper floor if I’d been sure to mail all the letters to my bimbos, if I hadn’t forgotten any; I’d made no reply. She had two rooms on the upper floor, a study and a bedroom; I had only one, on the ground floor, which served me both for working and sleeping . . . I paid the rent for this tiny house on the edge of town where the vineyards began, I paid the electric bills, I covered the rising costs of the heating oil we used in winter, but I hadn’t the slightest interest in confronting her with these things; I had my back to the wall and said not a word, I’d had as much as I could take of our constant quarrels. But my silence wounded her all the more; she took it as an affront . . . I was hurt by her silence as well, but eventually felt almost grateful I didn’t have to hear her voice, in which I seemed to hear nothing but aggression. I no longer touched my wife, I avoided her, I shut myself in my study, filled with dense cigarette smoke, where late at night or early in the morning I tried to fall asleep amid coughing fits and nausea. And my coughing fits would disturb my wife’s sleep, and there’d be new grounds for a quarrel. In fact I did correspond irregularly with several “bimbos,” as my wife put it; when I was away she searched my desk, and naturally found stowed in the drawers the letters I’d received from the “bimbos,” and systematically spotted the erotic or sexual components—how to put it?—which the letters contained; she spotted them even in the phrases where they weren’t. Of course my wife wasn’t entirely in the wrong; a long time ago I’d brought back a stack of postcards from Holland that, if you really wanted to, you could describe as pornographic. When my wife noticed the stack of these postcards growing smaller and smaller, she told me to my face that she understood perfectly what kind of correspondence I was conducting; and she called this correspondence nothing less than “swinish.” I couldn’t even shake my head at that.
There was one case, though, for which my wife made an exception: Marie, who lived in Leipzig. I had known her a good deal longer than my wife, and with Marie I really had had a short-lived love affair. When it came to Marie my wife held off, Marie never came up in the tangled mass of her reproaches; evidently, in the manner of feline predators, she granted her a certain prior claim, or it was simply that, in Marie’s case, I’d been honest to my wife for once and told her about it. — I’d never told her a thing about the other so-called affairs: in those there had never been any opportunity for physical contact, nothing of the kind, and that was probably why I was ashamed; it was the shame of failure, and my wife, however mistakenly, managed to goad it within me again and again. — I noticed that now and then she talked to Marie herself: the last time was just a few days ago; and then my wife had handed me the receiver and indicated that Marie wanted to talk to me.
I was alarmed by the voice that emerged, a mere wisp, from the telephone. Marie said she wasn’t well, no, not at all, kept alive by a constant haze of morphine, but it would all be over soon now. The end was near, that she knew, it would only be a matter of days or weeks. — Marie’s voice barely breathed into my ear, as absent as though it came from another universe; the long pauses between words were filled with labored breaths that seemed deafening after her voice. — Following her last cancer operation, just as unsuccessful as all the previous ones, she was lying, her body slit, in her tiny room in Leipzig, dependent on the care of a friend, a painter who’d come to stay a few days ago, though the apartment barely fit two people. — You’ve got to see her one more time, my wife said after I
hung up. If she’s even still there, you can be sure it’s the last time you’ll see her. And you’ve planned enough time on your crazy trip to Dresden and your mother. . .
For flying to Dresden, my wife had declared me certifiably insane. A new academy had been founded there—in the East new academies were springing up like mushrooms— and I had been invited, along with several other poets, to read fifteen minutes of poetry at the inaugural event. The reading fee was negligible; besides, I’d booked a flight, albeit one of the cheap flights you could get if you reserved in time, and the trip included a weekend. The academy could only reimburse train trips, and so I had wound up with a losing proposition that vexed me quite enough without my wife’s derision. — She told me I was acting like a whore. All they had to do was wave, and there I was. — Whores generally get paid pretty well, I retorted. — True, she said. But not the old, beat-up whores.
After that quarrel we gave each other the silent treatment for more than a week. In secret I had to admit she was right; just to save some time for a certain piece I wanted to work on—which, I persuaded myself, I could best do at my mother’s . . . because the manuscript was set in the town south of Leipzig where I was born and where my mother lived on in the same apartment, now almost utterly dilapidated—just for that I had dreamed up this idiotic itinerary: the best part was that I was planning to jettison the return flight from Dresden, since the train from Leipzig to Frankfurt am Main was actually quicker. — But now I’d lose the time I had gained: on the postcard I’d taken to the mailbox the night before my departure, I’d told Marie I planned to visit her in Leipzig . . . just for a few hours, a single afternoon, due to time constraints, but I hoped, or so I’d written, that she’d look forward to seeing me again. — If I spent days hanging around at my mother’s first, my wife had declared, it might be too late to visit Marie . . .
Maybe, the thought crossed my mind, before taking the train back from Leipzig I could pay Marie a second visit . . . a farewell visit! I thought.
Nervous and bleary-eyed, I sat on the suburban train to Mannheim, where I had to change for the so-called airport shuttle to Frankfurt Airport, and kept running through the stops of my trip in my mind. I was passing through the vast wine-growing region that lay below the Palatinate Forest: vineyards, nothing but vineyards, and the sun rising over them. I was traveling through a landscape of pure cultivation; it was, in my view, one of the most beautiful regions in Germany, and so far it had not appeared in a single work I’d written. Though I’d lived here for several years, I wrote on and on about the moonscapes south of Leipzig, stretching to the horizon, on and on about the industrial town of my birth, surrounded by pits from whose fathomless depths lignite had once been mined. Now there was nothing but dead, shut-down mine pits, and those tracts of land seemed to have lapsed into an irreversible futility, a uselessness that dragged each of my thoughts into the depths to shut it down and make it useless. — Or I wrote on and on about journeys, confused and haphazard, more like evasive actions, flights without cause, without aim, a perpetual flight in the wake of a crime committed only in a dream . . .
Here, all the way to the horizon, across the whole Rhine Plain, the stuff of human pleasure was coaxed forth from the earth, here there was nothing but vineyards. And when it grew light and a beautiful day dawned, hosts of birds swooped down into the vines, whose grapes were nearly ready for the harvest. And at the edges of the plots, sometimes still lapped by mist, the field wardens came to life, appearing out of nowhere and firing their shotguns wildly into the air to scare off the raucous flocks of birds.
Before reaching Dresden—that city so ravaged during the war, then ravaged once again by the so-called reconstruction the GDR had indulged in . . . and now perhaps for the third time, I thought, by the mass of exhaust fumes that found no escape from the Elbe valley where Saxony’s new capital nestled—and two days later, on the express train from Dresden to Leipzig, I had plenty of time to think. Again and again the newspaper slipped from my fingers as I tried to read, my head fell back against my seat in the compartment where I was the sole passenger, and the twilight of half-sleep engulfed me, more restful, I found, than the mindless non-place deep sleep plunged me into when, rarely enough, I achieved it. You could sleep and yet you could think, quite lucidly even—a surprisingly satisfactory state! Oddly, I thought less about what might await me in Leipzig; I couldn’t get my mother out of my head, who over the years had grown very quiet and old, meekly fulfilling my every wish . . . and for my wife this very meekness constituted an offense whose magnitude unsettled me, for increasingly she traced my behavior—my lack of character!—back to my mother’s. There were no such frictions in my mother’s home: when I needed peace and quiet, I was left in peace; Mother asked me no questions and expected none from me; she let me sit alone in the kitchen, bent over some draft; she made herself invisible in the next room and even turned off the television if it bothered me . . . and she’d make me more tea when she saw that the pot on the kitchen table was empty.
It occurred to me to simply stay with my mother as long as I wanted, to work there on my manuscript as long as I wanted. My mother had no telephone, my wife couldn’t reach me . . . the idea of vanishing from her horizon for a while, leaving her in the dark, suddenly filled me with the calm that made me nod off in the train. I knew it was a lust for revenge, however modest . . . but at least it was the opposite of the panic I fell into whenever my wife threatened to throw me out or go her own way.
Excruciating tensions had arisen nearly every time my wife and mother met . . . which could happen only in our house in Rhineland-Palatinate, for my wife refused to travel to the east. It was, admittedly, my wife’s house; she had found it, leased it, and furnished it as she saw fit, for here, I had to admit as well, I had proven completely incompetent . . . and it remained my wife’s house, even if I paid the rent each month. Every time my mother visited us, which she did once or twice a year for little more than a week, the same thing happened: my wife felt ousted from her house, seeking refuge in a village with one of her girlfriends, where, I could feel it in the air, she waited as though on a bed of nails. During this time my mother was charged with watering the countless plants that stood about everywhere, a task my wife wouldn’t entrust me with, regarding me as completely unreliable . . . and my mother overlooked a ten-inch-high orange tree that stood all by itself in a clay pot on a windowsill: the tree had dried up and couldn’t be revived . . . it was my wife’s favorite plant. From that point onward, open hatred erupted; the next day I tried to persuade my mother to leave because we were busy and had no more time for her. My wife refused to drive Mother to the train station in her car; I called a taxi and took her to the little station, which would have been a good forty-five-minute walk with an old woman like Mother. I stood mute, close to tears, on the platform next to my mother, who had no idea what had just spun out of control.
What had spun out of control was my wife’s rage; she regarded us both, my mother and me, as people who were devoid of independence, eternally anxious to do everything right, and who for that very reason—because they were constantly trying to hide, to avoid reproaches . . . because they had no desires and no questions . . . because they skulked about the house as though under some tyranny from which a devastating verdict might come at any moment—for that very reason did every possible thing wrong. — You people show no initiative, my wife said, all you’ve learned is how to wait for orders, you have no sense of self, and that’s why you can’t enjoy life in this little house of mine . . .
One time, I defended myself and accused my wife of acting like a Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany. When we were on her territory, we had damn well better be happy and show it. If we didn’t, we were an unacceptable proposition for the country that had just annexed its brothers and sisters from the other side. — You let yourselves be annexed with the greatest of pleasure, she said, things couldn’t move quickly enough for you. But lead independent lives—that you can’
t do! — And she added that Marie was the only person she knew who’d at least tried to live independently. . .
My wife was not entirely wrong. But she was unaware that Marie had lived too independently, that ever since the reunification we were constantly discussing she’d been unable to find her way to the welfare office, that she avoided going to the doctor because she was uninsured. And that was probably why her cancer had been diagnosed far too late. Marie lived more or less from handouts, but no one was allowed to mention it. I, too, had occasionally slipped a hundred-mark note into the purse that hung from her doorframe, secretly, knowing it would have humiliated her. . .
Over time my messages to Marie, sent on postcards, had grown sparser, arid, monosyllabic; it struck me that she virtually never replied to my mail. She gave no more response than to the bills I slipped her. When I had a chance to phone I’d ask if she’d received my letters or cards . . . and she would ask in return which letters and cards I meant. She probably would have responded the same way to a question I didn’t ask: Which hundred-mark bills do you mean? — This behavior was typical of Marie: if you sent something her way, she simply didn’t seem to notice. And she seemed not to notice when someone desired her; if you ended up in bed with her, she merely seemed to follow some sort of imaginary instructions . . . though I put this down to my inability to show my desire, much less articulate it, which I felt was one of my innermost weaknesses . . .
Filled with thoughts of this kind, I arrived in Leipzig: I saw at once that it was too late for all my questions. Marie’s bed had been moved into the tiny kitchen, close to the gas stove, as though now, in mid-September, heat was already needed . . . often, as I recalled, Marie had heated with the flames of the oven, because coal was too expensive. And often enough I’d told her it was dangerous. By the bed stood a narrow table with the telephone, dirty dishes, and a quantity of open vials containing various morphine preparations. Next to them, in a torn-open envelope, I saw the card I’d written her a few days before. — It had arrived that morning, Marie said. — The painter who had let me in, a girlish creature with short blond hair, sat sketching in the next room, keeping an eye on things in the kitchen through the open door. Marie lay in bed in a white nightgown, speaking in a voice as soft as a breath, barely a whisper now, the words slipping, incorporeal, from lips that barely moved. Between words she caught her breath, smiling as though to apologize for the long pauses. — Could she show me her stomach, she asked; gingerly she pushed aside the blanket and lifted up her nightgown. Her abdomen was crisscrossed by bluish-red, barely-healed scars. Next to the alarmingly thin body a plastic bag collected her urine drop by drop.
The Sleep of the Righteous Page 9