The Sleep of the Righteous Read Free

embers covered only by thin layers of cooled ash. The beasts’ bellowing whinnies . . . no, their shrieks, said the signalman, must have been heard all the way to town; the whole area was filled by the rank smell of burned hair and flesh. — My grandfather, said to love horses more than people, had come running to the ash pit from his nearby allotment garden, clutching a shotgun, but before he could reach the site of the accident the horses had already fallen silent; death had seized them. All the same, the men shot from above to make the heaps of flesh stop twitching, but it was no use. And in the end, the weeping driver hurled his tobacco pipe down into the depths of the mine pit!
    Much later, I recalled reading of a similar scene in a long book I’d never finished: a captain by the name of Ahab had likewise flung his pipe, his last remaining pleasure, over the bulwarks into the ocean’s rolling waves, disconsolate at his failure to chase down a huge white whale he’d been hunting for nameless ages across the seas.
    In any case, the accident spelled immediate ruin for the horses’ owner, Bodling the carter, a friend of my grandfather’s. It seems he then took to delivering beer, driving the beer and soda crates to the shops and picking up the empties with a rickety little three-wheeler. As the town’s other carter was unable to cope with all the ash by himself, thetown government eventually drummed up a new motorized garbage truck, but it took the rest of the winter and nearly all the next year. In the meantime, people carted their ash out of town themselves in wheelbarrows; after dark they emptied the bins right into the ruins beyond the railroad crossing. . . to the gateman’s chagrin, but he said nothing, he kept his silence. And when things got really bad, people began to fill the ruts in the middle of our stretch of street with ash, which transformed it altogether into a hilly, barely negotiable waste, in the spring thaws emitting a medley of noisome smells that burned off and vanished only in summer.
    My grandfather’s gun had become a kind of legend in town, at least in the part of town within our ken and control. It suddenly made me an object of interest for the bigger boys on the street who had consciously experienced the war. For them the war had been decidedly more exciting than the peace, the post-war period that increasingly metamorphosed into a regimented existence full of inevitable demands that could not be escaped, with time gradually divided into fixed units that had to be faced, the main thing being punctuality and reliability. Peace, this much seemed clear, was governed by the clocks, time by the clock had taken power, and quite quickly one realized there was no more escape from the power of the ordered time blocks. It was no coincidence that everyone told how the Russian soldiers who had chased away the war and brought the peace—it seemed, unfortunately, that they’d chased war away for good—were especially keen on the watches the vanquished Germans wore. When the Americans were still in town, no one had cared about German watches, nor had the Americans cared about timeand order. They had left that to the Russians who replaced them soon after the peace began—and you could tell from the Americans’ grinning faces, it was said, how little credit they gave the Russians with regard to order and time management. They were mistaken; the Russians installed town administrators who were downright obsessed with cleaning up. Cleaning up and rebuilding . . . order and cleanliness; these, one sensed, were especially tenacious German virtues, and the Russians were well aware of it. But the Germans—at least some of them, even adults—weren’t so keen to play along, and went on dumping their ash and their rubbish in the ruts of our street by night; only those, of course, who didn’t live on our street themselves. Thus, peace meant for a time