The Sleep of the Righteous Read Free Page A

that the street was fouled by the acrid smell of sodden ash, mingled with the vapors from rotten vegetable scraps and fallen, liquescing fruit; unprecedented populations of bluebottles and wasps appeared out of nowhere to take over the street; and more and more run-over rats were left lying in the space between the sidewalks and had to be disposed of. The scourge ended only when policemen began to patrol the street by twos in dark blue uniforms, one member of each pair armed with a revolver.
    The rubbish disappeared, but the police patrols remained, pacing the street not just by night; soon they were seen in the daytime as well, and if the bluebottles and the vinegar stink of the trash hadn’t already driven us from the street, the gaze of those policemen did. They eyed us suspiciously, and it was impossible to smoke in front of them. We decamped past the city limits to the strip mines, suddenly finding ourselves in the big kids’ midst, though we were far from belonging there.This incurred the disapproval of my mother, who regarded the whole area past the railroad crossing as one great danger zone.
    Child, she said to me, you’re not big enough to go to the strip mines by yourself. You don’t know your way around there, and you can’t swim yet! — By the way, she never neglected to mention, when I was your age I’d been swimming for ages. — Go to the swimming pool instead, she said. I’d know you’re in good hands there. — And she gave me the twenty pfennigs to pay the cashier. There was a wading pool for small children where no one could possibly sink; I was decidedly not a small child anymore, but you were inevitably shooed away by a pool attendant if you came anywhere near the big pool with its diving platform.
    I saved up the admission fees for other purposes: by day I was out of reach for my mother, who worked in the cooperative store at the other end of our street, and along with the others, as unsupervised as I, I kept on going to the strip mines. — There we found ourselves amid the groups of big kids, where girls and boys already mingled, and all at once talk turned back to my grandfather’s gun. They approached us—we were lying, still dressed, in a grassy area apart from the noisy bathers—and I noticed, not without gratification, that I was the chief focus of their attention . . . my mother wouldn’t have liked that either.
    Suddenly they’d lend me their dog-eared books—this had sometimes happened before, one being the story of Ahab the one-legged whale hunter, missing a good many pages, which was why, apart from the book’s heft, I quickly lost interest in it; those thin, cheap paperbacks printed in double columns, all from West Berlin, were much more enthralling.They generally related the adventures . . . or rather the ceaseless shoot-outs of a recurring, invincible character whose name was emblazoned on the lurid covers: Buffalo Bill or Tom Brack the Border Rider or Coyote, Rider of the Black Mask . . . I devoured the books by the kilo, and I needed to read quickly, as they always had to be returned a day or two later or passed on to someone else who was desperately awaiting them. My mother watched with extreme disapproval, believing this reading material would forever corrupt me to the core. — Suddenly the big kids bestowed their cigarettes on me alone and left the others out . . . after all, I was the oldest of the little kids, and, I sensed, was gradually growing to catch up with the big kids.
    But all they cared about, more and more disappointingly, was the mysterious gun, which Grandfather refused to let me see. — When we hunkered in the grass cross-legged like Indians, the shadows of the bigger boys would loom behind us—at once I felt the suspicious gazes of the adults, a few of whom always mingled with the beach crowd—and, darkening the sun, they leaned over and whispered: Is it a carbine? A hunting rifle,