A haze of writing, I repeat, that’s probably quite well put.
It could’ve come from you. Maybe it really did come from you, and I just . . . what’s the literary term . . . appropriated it?
You read it somewhere. Still, I don’t doubt that you really felt these things.
Yes, well, I was a real bloodhound. I even found out the woman you were writing those lovely cards and letters to. I don’t know if you remember her, it’s ten years ago now. Ten years ago or longer, first the cards came from the east, then suddenly from the west. I mean that little woman from Leipzig, who wanted to be a writer too . . . nothing like you, of course! Marie A. was her name, I think, just like in Brecht. A name for a Madonna, eh . . .?
He breaks off; with his keen instincts he noticed quite well how I flinched. I’d flung the half-smoked cigarette in the gutter and immediately lit another one. The name’s been said . . . I feel I’ve been expecting it the whole time. I don’t know how to describe my feeling: rage or horror; at any rate, I feel exposed . . . a feeling they still manage to provoke, with the same ease as ten years ago.
Ah, you’re seeing red, he says. Take it easy, we’re men of the world, after all!
Her name was Marie H., not Marie A., I say. But I’d rather we stayed on the subject of literature. You know the poem by Brecht . . . could you explain that to me, so I can be impressed?
No, no! he replies with a laugh; it seems to hold something like relief. No, it’s nothing, really. . .
I say nothing, taking hasty drags from my cigarette; without my noticing, we’ve already passed the mailbox and are heading around the block for the second time. — He’s got a hold on me, I think, just the way he meant to! With an effort I remind myself that I must have an edge on him as far as my relationship with Marie goes; he can’t know how things stand now; he’s speaking of a state that’s passed, washing the dirty linen of his memory. . . all the same, it’s a nightmare.
I don’t have to let you shock me anymore, I mumble, not anymore, you’re harmless!
Oh, that Brecht poem, he says. The little cloud! You see, we do have more in common than you’d think.
Had, I say, we had more in common! Enemies always have something they share, that’s a truism. But we have nothing in common now.
You weren’t my enemy, he says with that grin on his mug again. When he sticks in the next cigarette, I’ll hold up the lighter flame to his filthy three-day beard, and when he staggers back, I’ll beat him to the ground.
No, you weren’t my enemy, he repeats; he’s observing me now, walking a stride behind me, and I wait for him with my head turned to the side, on my guard. He speaks as though under some kind of pressure:
I was forced into it, simply forced by the situation, I had nothing at all against you personally. I know, they all say that these days, and it’s not something you need to hear. I just want to confess that sometimes all I wanted was to erase your signature from the cards you wrote Marie A. and add my own there instead . . . My little cloud! Didn’t you write her that?
Hardly, I say, that’s a figment of your imagination! But did you do it, did you add your signature? Whatever happened to the cards you read, anyway?
Of course I didn’t do it, and it would have been tough anyway, since you wrote in ink . . . though we had ways of dealing with that too. But it would have been too risky, with people breathing down my neck. What happened to them? They were read and passed on, as a rule.
Passed on where? And what wasn’t the rule?
If there was nothing relevant in them, they continued on the normal postal route, quite simple. Of course, copies would sometimes be made of certain things, but that wasn’t the rule with you.
And you can’t recall there ever being something relevant?
Not that I know of. Unlike you, I can remember quite well. I was the only one who was personally interested in you . . . that was what I lacked, you see, a little cloud like that.
Could you stop with that goddamned cloud already! She wasn’t a cloud for me . . . and she still isn’t. Another thing, can you remember making copies of my letters too?
Goodness me, I couldn’t do that, we kept scrupulous lists of every copy we had to make. But you’re probably asking because you’re still fond of her? Or you’re actually involved with her—I always wished that for you. Though I envied you. I even went to see Marie A., made a special trip out to her part of Leipzig, trespassed on someone else’s beat, and questions were asked, very embarrassing questions. And then I envied you all the more . . . how can I manage to write little A. those kinds of letters and postcards, with such lovely photos from Amsterdam? I pored over those cards of yours. But building on what was in the postcards, I would have started expressing myself more clearly, I wouldn’t have left it all in this lovely haze. For me, she wouldn’t have stayed a cloud, or a Madonna up there in the clouds . . .
And after a while he said: I wonder if it’s this haze that’s still so appealing to you. Times have changed, no one has to read between the lines anymore. You don’t need to be left out in the cold, as you once put it so nicely. Did you just make that up too? No, you don’t need to do that anymore, you’re successful enough now, now you can reach out and take what you like . . . and I’ve helped out a little there, I’ll have you know.
What did you help out with?
That doesn’t matter; I don’t want to brag in front of you. You . . . you can go looking for life now, after all it does exist . . .
Behind the haze of words! I say, leaning exhausted against the mailbox, where we’ve arrived again. I’ve had enough, I’m not looking for life now, I’m looking for an escape. I won’t come along for a third time.
I’ve talked myself blue in the face, haven’t I? Shall we have one last smoke? Don’t tell me it wasn’t interesting for you!
We light up again; it’s my last cigarette, and I put the empty pack in my pocket, there being no wastebasket nearby. — Interesting or not, I still don’t understand what you actually want, I say. Surely we have less in common than you think. By the way, I’m sure there were other men who were interested in Marie A., and who . . .
Oh! he shakes his head. Don’t speak ill of her, no one has that right. I’ll always defend her!
Where she is now, she can do without your defense, believe me.
Sure, he says, I’ll have to take your word for that. But one more thing . . . I’ve got to finally come out with it, the reason I had to see you. I’ve still got one long letter and a few of the cards you wrote her. I wanted to give them to you.
I was barely surprised, as I recall. — Come on, I snarled, hand them over, they’re my letters! What took you so long?
I wanted to get an idea of you first . . .
And is the idea such that you can finally give me the letters? How many do you have, anyway?
Quite a nice big stack. But I don’t have them here, I didn’t know for sure if I would see you. I can’t go carrying everything around with me all the time. Where I’m living now, one of my superiors might crop up, you never even know them all yourself. I hid the stuff . . . I’ll bring it tomorrow. Same time tomorrow, right here, and we’ll take another stroll around the block, eh?
I returned to the flat in indescribable agitation. — Could I believe what I’d just been through, or had it been a figment of my imagination? I’d turned around when I was halfway home: he’d already vanished; I hadn’t seen the direction he’d gone off in. Or had he not been there in the first place . . . had I gone mad? In this town there was a person who knew more about me than I about him . . . which might not be unusual. The only unusual thing was the way in which he had acquired his knowledge: it was almost as though he’d appropriated my life, or at least a part of it, a part—I suddenly knew—which had meant a great deal to me.
I tried to remember how he looked, his face, his build . . . and strangely, as I did so, I looked into the mirror, as though I could remember his face only with the help of my own. — Why hadn’t I taken at
least one good look at him? He had seen me, but I hadn’t seen him . . .
His face . . . I thought. It was unshaven, I was unshaven too; the nicotine of many cigarettes had left a yellow-brown rim in the stubble on his upper lip; on my upper lip I saw the same yellow-brown shadow. He was about my size and stature; he wore a jumpsuit of dark, glossy material, dark-blue or black: a jogging suit, that was what they called it these days . . . it was the uniform of the early retirees and the jobless who loitered at the kiosk hour after hour with their canned beer. . . It was a catastrophe: the collapse of the system had even robbed people’s resolve to dress themselves at their own discretion.
I felt there had been many more similarities between us . . . when I thought of my wife, the image she had of me— and never wearied of confronting me with—perhaps it was really an image of him. His character, I thought, had that mixture of self-loathing and calculation that employs truth and lies indiscriminately. . . for years my wife had offered therapy for a comparable sickness in me. My hopeless submission to every authority—or everything I regarded as an authority—had enmeshed me in an inextricable snarl of half-truths, evasions, and subterfuges, she claimed. Every official letter I received transformed me at once into a charlatan, and unable to believe in my true feelings, I hid behind pretended sensitivities. I did try, over and over, to tear through my web of lies—when I myself lost my way in them, that is—but I seemed to think this could be done only with one big, decisive lie . . . And perhaps, she said, and this was the final straw, that decisive lie is all that stuff you write! — You’ve been leading a double life for ages! she cried. And she could never forgive herself for feeling attracted, at first, by this of all things . . . by your dark existence! It was a mistake, she said, weeping . . . and her weeping, for me, had unimpeachable authority. . . it was a mistake, all attempts to shed light on your darkness are doomed to failure!
I hadn’t asked what she meant by that stuff you write: did she mean only my secret correspondence, or everything I wrote, that is, my literary work as well? — If it was the latter, this gave me an argument for a counterstrike when the time was ripe.
When my mother got up, between seven and eight, it was time for me to go to bed; first Mother invited me to drink a cup of coffee with her, which I did; I knew I’d have trouble falling asleep anyway. Furtively I swallowed half a sleeping pill . . . this too was a habit I kept hidden to avoid reproaches . . . here the two women were in agreement: Mother thought all these chemicals wouldn’t really help, I’d do better to live healthy and not overtax my nerves; in my wife’s view I had to sedate my guilty conscience before I could relax in bed. — And in fact my wife was right to accuse me of a guilty conscience, for I took the pills from one of her bottles, secretly, every time she was prescribed a new ration by a doctor she was friends with . . . I regularly stole two or three when the bottle was still too full for her to notice; I stole them, as it were, for the long term, stocking up a supply I needed when my reading tours got too grueling. My wife took sleeping pills for granted; she needed them for the phobias that often gave her writer’s block . . . as I never had writer’s block, in my wife’s view I had no need for sleeping pills.
The dose was too small, I realized soon after lying down; I snuck back into the bathroom to take the other half of the pill. Then, as I lay in bed, a sort of sleepless twilight descended on my brain, a haze of exhaustion and unrest behind which the film of my thoughts went on restlessly unspooling. My ears were defenseless against the onslaught of traffic noise from the street; even on Saturday mornings it was twice as loud as it had been on weekdays before the changing of the system, back when the town’s industrial plants were still operating. For the first time in years and years I thought of going out again to buy alcohol, but I lay where I was, immobilized, beads of sweat on my brow, unable even to fetch another half sleeping pill from the bathroom. At some point I sat on the edge of the bed, smoking; my mother had already left the flat to run some errands . . . What was he after, the guy who’d ambushed me by the mailbox early that morning?
Could he want money for the letters and cards to Marie he’d pocketed, could he want to sell them to me? Hard to believe . . . All he sought, it seemed, was the gratification of a crude, voyeuristic urge; he wanted to carry on what he’d begun ten years before in the back room of some bleak, poorly lit post office. But how did he plan to continue . . . with my consent, evidently? Had he discovered in my letters to Marie that character trait that so resembled his . . . didn’t the word see, which he used so obtrusively, actually come from me, from a letter of mine, or even several of these letters? Hadn’t my letters, too, displayed a certain voyeurism?
I fetched the half sleeping pill from the bathroom and flung myself down on the bed again: a memory surfaced in the haze of my consciousness, though I couldn’t say whether it was the memory of an actual scene, or merely the memory of a fantasy of that scene, the memory of a haze of words in my imagination that I then described in a letter, probably a longer letter to Marie . . . she hadn’t answered it, as often happened she said not a word about it; and I remembered that in her silence I’d been seized by a lasting sense of shame, the suspicion that that letter had simply been too lascivious, too tasteless. Now it occurred to me that the letter might not have been tasteless at all, at least not in Marie’s eyes. And I thought of the ironic smile with which, often enough, she had requited my failure to act . . .
It was a luminous letter, by no means shadowed by the darkness in which I was so often said to deal. — Marie had once called me a verbal eroticist, evidently, so I threatened to ravish her. . . and I described the incident to her so vividly that I’d come to doubt it was just a figment of my imagination. — One day, I claimed, I’d gone to her without announcing myself . . . I believe that in the letter I even asked if she too could recall that sunlit afternoon . . . I never asked her in an actual conversation, which is why I doubt that afternoon’s reality. . . she opened the door, and after barely exchanging three sentences with her, I went into the next room, the bedroom, and said, without any transition, that she should undress and lie down on the bed . . . completely naked, I said. She did so, unquestioning, still dazed by the unexpected onslaught, which I carried out in an odd, commanding tone. I stripped as well, down to my undershorts, and knelt on the floor at the foot of her bed. I don’t know whether I told her to part her legs; after a time, at any rate, she spread her thighs and bent her knees: her sex was delivered up defenseless to the sunlight that flooded the broad window through the gaps of the yew hedge and over its straight-cropped edge, iridescing in the weave of the curtains. I said not a word, entranced by the sight of what faced me, female, alien, mocking all appellations: no, I had no idea whether I was entranced or ensnared, or possibly dismissed . . . I could reach out and plunge in, but some mysterious mental malfunction prevented me; I was hypnotized by the expression of a mouth drawn slightly crooked, filled with covert irony, offering itself to me and yet in some unfathomable way refusing itself. Marie, too, said nothing, not moving, except that her legs barely perceptibly slid further and further apart; after a long time she asked what I wanted . . . What are you doing down there, she said softly, out in the cold . . .
I could think of no reply, still staring at the curving cleft, which extended down a hand’s breath from a little mound until it closed to a seam at whose end, hidden between swells, another opening appeared. My searching eyes returned to the slit that was like a sleeping mouth; its lips were closed, adhering as in breathless dryness. Only in time, in a patch of light, it seemed, that struck them from the window, did the lips grow suppler, an invisible melting that came from within, and parted by a few millimeters. Then the light illuminating Marie’s body from the window grew cooler; barely visible, merely imaginable tremors skimmed her skin. All that remained was one bright reflection, the tip of an arrow of light that pierced the hedge and clung to her body, fragile still, nothingness made visible, and as she moved a bit, growing restless, it darted across he
r lightning-quick and grazed her sex, now open, beginning to gleam in naked hues. — When this light is gone, then I’ll go, I thought . . .
The image lingered before me when I woke in the evening: it was growing dark; the streetlamp across from the bedroom window had gone on; it was past mid-September, the days growing noticeably shorter; for a few moments I didn’t know where I was, then I heard the television, volume muted, in my mother’s living room. I went into the kitchen, took from my bag a postcard with a picture by Egon Schiele showing a woman with legs spread wide, put it in an envelope and addressed it to Marie in Leipzig; I didn’t write a word on the postcard. — In the morning between four and five, I brought the card to the mailbox; all night I had clicked my way through the countless television programs and kept falling asleep in my armchair. . . not an image on the screen had the least thing to do with the truth or the reality of life. My mother, who kept nodding off in front of the TV as well, had soon gone to bed . . . we were two sleepers from a past time; time’s tide had caught up with us and overtaken us; the hours of sleep were the only time we still struggled to hold . . .
Should I give you a light? I asked when, as though out of thin air, he appeared before me in the darkness by the mailbox.
No . . . he gave his soft, strained laugh, immediately stifled by a coughing fit, no, today I’ve got my own lighter. But you’re right, let’s have a smoke before we take our little stroll. — With the cigarette ready in the corner of his mouth, he let the lighter burn longer than necessary; he was still unshaven, we were both unshaven. — Did you recognize me? he asked. And then: Come on, he said, let’s walk a ways. That same old way. . .
I don’t have much time, I returned, not stirring from the spot. Actually, I don’t have any time at all . . . did you bring the letters?
I thought you’d be in a hurry, you want to catch the early bus to Leipzig, right?
How could you know that . . .?
I figured it. You know, we’ve got plenty of time to think now, we’ve got much too much time, we don’t even know what to do with our time. We spend the whole time thinking, and for me it makes sense that you’d go to Leipzig to visit our little lady friend. But you’ve got more than two hours left.
The Sleep of the Righteous Page 11