The Sleep of the Righteous (17 page)

I tossed his body into the feed chute of the middle boiler; due to the fuel chamber's sharply tapering inner walls, he got stuck just over the fire grate, and using a poker that lay nearby I moved him to a horizontal position; I could no longer see his face, which had slid through the crack of the internal walls, his brow bedded in the ancient cinders. Then I dragged the coal hopper over the chute; the hopper, shaped like the stump of an upside-down pyramid, hung from a slide rail mounted on the ceiling, and could be moved back and forth over the three boilers by means of a chain hoist; the strength this took told me that the hopper was still filled with coal. I wrenched open the hopper's slide gate; rumbling and hissing, spreading a tremendous cloud of dust, the moldered, dried-out, raw lignite, that once-valuable, now utterly deteriorated substance, poured into the boiler and filled it more than halfway full . . . the corpse could no longer be seen. All the things he had known about me—while all I knew of him was that we had been very similar—had suddenly vanished; I closed the openings of the coal hopper
and the boiler chute, tossed the sack truck behind the boiler, where a tangle of steam and water pipes rusted, and crept back out through the labyrinth of passages and courtyards.

Outside it was pouring rain; all at once, autumn had come. I hung my clothes in the bathroom to drip dry, toweled my hair, and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I was in bed even before Mother got up, and slept more deeply than I had in ages, as deeply as after an arduous night shift back then . . . and without a single sleeping pill.

When I arrived a day late in Rhineland-Palatinate, my wife asked whether I'd managed to see Marie. — I wanted to, I said, but . . . The question, her first words, had taken me by surprise, and immediately I'd floundered. — My wife said: I'm surprised to hear that; a young woman called, a painter. She asked me to tell you that Marie died the night of your visit. — Yes . . . I said, yes, I thought as much. — I lit a cigarette and coughed; when my wife finally went upstairs to her room, I was still sitting at the table, smoking. In one flash, or so it seemed, I'd seen Marie before me again: the ironic smile in her eyes was no longer meant for me, it had frozen fast.