Night Work

10

Jonas blinked. The bedside light was dazzling him. He groped for the switch, turned it out and opened his eyes. Twenty to twelve. The other duvet was lying on the floor with the overturned tripod and camera beneath it. He had no particular wish to speculate on the significance of this, so he left everything lying there and made himself some breakfast.

Before going into the bathroom he put a blank audio tape into the tape recorder and pressed the record button. He turned the machine so that it faced away from the bathroom. Then he showered, cleaned his teeth and shaved with care.

He got dressed in the living room. The display on the microwave said 12.30. The tape had been running for twenty minutes.

Standing right in front of the tape recorder’s built-in microphone, he said:

‘Hello, Jonas.’

He counted up to five with his eyes shut.

‘Good to speak with you. How are you?’

Three, four, five.

‘Feeling rested? Tense?’

He spoke for nearly three-quarters of an hour, doing his best to forget what he’d just said. A click indicated that the tape had run out. He rewound it. Meantime, he finished getting dressed.

He dialled his mobile number on the landline. It rang, and he answered it. Placing the land-line receiver on the floor with the tape recorder just in front of it, he pressed the play button. Then he put a second tape recorder beside it, put in a tape and pressed the record button. With the gun over his right shoulder and the mobile in his other hand, he left the flat.

He cruised through Döbling, driving along streets he’d never visited before. He kept the mobile pressed to his ear for fear of missing something. He steered and changed gear with his other hand. It occurred to him that he was violating a road traffic regulation. At first this idea merely amused him. But it set him thinking about a more fundamental point.

If he really was all on his own, he was free to lay down a new penal code. Laws remained in force until new ones were agreed upon by the majority. If he constituted the majority, he could discard an entire social system. Being sovereign, he could theoretically exempt theft and murder from prosecution, or, on the other hand, prohibit painting. In Austria, the disparagement of religious doctrines was punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment. He could annul that law or increase its severity. Aggravated theft rendered a person liable to up to three years’ imprisonment, in contrast to non-aggravated theft, the relevant sum being 2000 euros or more. He could change that.

He could even decree that everyone had to go for one hour’s walk a day while listening to folk music on a Walk-man. He could invest stupidities of all kinds with constitutional status. He could choose another form of government. Indeed, devise a new one. Although the system in which he lived was really anarchy, democracy and dictatorship all in one.

‘Hello, Jonas.’

He nearly collided with a dustbin standing beside the road.

‘Good to speak with you. How are you?’

‘As well as can be expected, thanks.’

‘Feeling rested? Tense?’

It was himself he was hearing. He had spoken those words an hour ago, and now they were happening, happening again. At this moment they were becoming something that was happening, that was having an actual effect on the present.

‘Rested, not tense,’ he muttered.

He was struck by the difference between the voice in his ear and the one he heard inside himself. The one in his ear sounded higher-pitched and less agreeable.

‘It’s twelve thirty-two by my watch. What time do you have?’

‘Thirteen fifty-five,’ he replied, glancing at the dashboard.

He remembered how he’d knelt in front of the tape recorder in his living room and spoken those words into the microphone. He saw himself fiddling with the ring on his finger, studying the pattern on his coffee cup, turning up his trouser leg. He recalled what he’d been thinking when he’d spoken those words. That was then, this was now. And yet one was connected with the other.

‘Turn left at the next intersection, then sharp right. Then take the second turning on the left. Stop outside the second building on the right-hand side of the street.’

The instructions took him to a small street in Oberdöbling. His taskmaster had underestimated his speed, so Jonas spent a minute drumming on the steering wheel and shuffling around on his seat.

‘Now get out, taking the gun with you, and lock the car. Go to the building. If there are several floors, your objective is the ground-floor apartment. You won’t need your crowbar, get in through a window. If it means a bit of a climb, so be it. Be athletic!’

He was standing outside a suburban house. A notice on the gate warned intruders of a savage dog. It was locked. He climbed over it and went up to the house. An Audi was parked outside the garage. The house was adorned with window boxes. The stretches of grass flanking the gravel path had been mown quite recently.

The nameplate beside the door read: Councillor Bosch.

‘Mind the broken glass! Now go into the kitchen.’

‘Easy!’

He peered through the window but couldn’t spot an alarm system. He smashed the pane with the butt of the shotgun. Glass rained down on the floor. There really wasn’t a burglar alarm. Having quickly knocked out the remaining glass, he climbed in.

‘Open the fridge. If you find an unopened bottle of mineral water in there, drink it!’

‘Don’t badger me!’

One door led to the bathroom, another to a boxroom, the third to the basement stairs. The fourth was the right one. Breathlessly, he opened the fridge, which was encased in beechwood. He really did find a bottle of mineral water, and it was unopened. He drank it.

While awaiting fresh instructions he surveyed his surroundings. The furniture was bulky and traditional. On the wall was a poster of Dalí’s Soft Watches, already affected by heat and steam from the stove.

He found the combination puzzling. The nature and quality of the decor suggested elderly occupants, whereas the poster belonged in a student’s digs. The owners’ offspring had probably insisted on this stylistic clash.

Beside the poster was a tear-off calendar. The top sheet said 3 July. Beneath the date was the motto of the day:

The truth knows its own value. (Herbert Rosendorfer)

He tore off the sheet and pocketed it.

‘Now look for a ballpoint and a piece of paper.’

‘Will a pencil do?’

He found a ballpoint in one of the drawers. There was a notepad on the kitchen table. The top sheet had a shopping list written on it. He folded it over and shut his eyes, humming a tune and trying to think of nothing.

‘Write down the first word that comes into your head.’

Fruit, he wrote.

Great, he thought. I’m sitting in some stranger’s kitchen, writing ‘Fruit’.

‘Put the piece of paper in your pocket. Now look round the place. Keep your eyes open. It’s better to look twice than miss something.’

Jonas marvelled at the banality of his taskmaster’s pearls of wisdom. He’d spent the whole time trying to remain on his own side of the line. Trying to avoid thinking of what he’d recorded on tape so as not to anticipate what was coming. Now he briefly stepped across the line. He thought hard, but he couldn’t recall having spoken the last sentence. He returned to his own side. Made his mind as much of a blank as possible.

In the living room he came across a sort of ancient Egyptian statue. He didn’t know much about the history of art, so he couldn’t say exactly what it was. It appeared to be the figure of a woman, possibly a life-sized effigy of Nefertiti. The face was expressionless and rather forbidding. With its massive head and voluminous, veil-like hairstyle, it reminded him more of a black rap singer on MTV. He wondered who could have installed such a thing in their living room. He’d never had any clients with taste like that.

He toured all the rooms, talking into his mobile as he went. He reported on the decor of the master bedroom, the rugs in the hallway, the empty birdcage, the aquarium in whose softly gurgling water no fish swam. He described the contents of the wardrobes. He counted the files in the study, fingered a heavy ashtray made of some unfamiliar material. He rummaged in drawers. He went down into the basement and paid a visit to the garage, which reeked overpoweringly of petrol.

Just as he was leaving a girl’s bedroom, which wasn’t particularly clean and tidy, the voice in his ear said:

‘Did you see that?’

He came to a halt and looked back over his shoulder.

‘There was something there, did you notice? You caught a glimpse of it.’

He hadn’t seen a thing.

‘It was there for a moment.’

An inner voice warned him not to go back into the room. The voice in his ear urged him to do so. He hesitated. Shut his eyes, rested his hand on the handle and slowly pushed it down. The pressure of his hand eased a little, so little that although he knew it was happening he didn’t feel it. He pushed the handle ever more slowly.

He was gripped by a sensation that time was freezing beneath his hand. The brass handle felt soft. It seemed to be melting into its surroundings. Neither hot nor cold, it had no temperature at all. Without hearing a sound, he felt he was being subjected to a thunderous din that had material substance and emanated from no particular direction. At the same time, he became aware that he consisted of nothing more than the movement his hand was performing at that moment.

He let go, breathing heavily and staring at the door.

‘But don’t bring it home with you,’ said the voice in his ear.

*

He spent the rest of the day packing boxes like an automaton. Apart from one short break, during which he grilled some sausages in the pub as he had the day before, he worked until early evening.

It wasn’t the incident in the house that disturbed him. What weighed on his mind was the potential significance of the overturned video camera. Did it have some connection with the Sleeper’s odd behaviour? Would it be worth investigating that wall? Should he break it open?

Having taped up the last box, he surveyed the empty cupboards and shelves. There weren’t as many as there had been. Where were the possessions they’d lived with in Hollandstrasse? Had they all been thrown away? Where was the picture that had so engrossed him as a child whenever he passed it in the hall?

Now that he came to think of it, there were other things he missed. The red photo album. The ship in the bottle. The linocut. The chessboard.

He either carried or dragged the boxes out into the street, depending on how heavy they were. When they were all loaded, he sat down wearily on the tailboard. Leaning back on his hands, he looked up. Windows were open here and there. The statues projecting from the walls stared forbiddingly over his head. The sky was a flawless, merciless blue.

*

The cellar stairs were narrow. Cobwebs clung to every nook and cranny, dusty skeins dangled from the ceiling. The plaster on the grimy walls was flaking off. Jonas shivered. Although he descended the stairs at a crouch, he hit his head twice. In a panic, he ran a hand over his face and forehead in case something nasty had stuck to them.

Pinned to the cellar door was an old damaged sign vividly illustrating the dangers of rat poison. There were four panes of glass in the upper part of the door, one of them broken. The passage beyond lay in darkness. Jonas’s nose was assailed by a smell of mildewed wood.

He raised his shotgun and kicked the door open. Singing at the top of his voice, he quickly turned the light on.

It was a communal cellar divided into separate sections by timber partitions a hand’s-breadth clear of the floor and ceiling. There were no floorboards, just hard-packed earth studded with stones the size of a man’s fist.

Although Jonas had never been down here before, he identified his father’s compartment at once. He recognised, protruding into the passage from between two wooden slats, the hand-carved walking stick his father had used when walking in the woods at Kanzelstein. He hadn’t carved it himself. It was the work of a toothless old peasant who was versed in that craft. Jonas had fetched fresh cow’s milk from his farmstead every morning. He’d been scared of him, but one day the old man had called him over and presented him with a little carved walking stick of his own. Jonas could still remember what it looked like after all these years. He had proudly strutted around with it and worshipped the taciturn old peasant from then on.

He made sure that he was alone, and that the dimly lit compartments around him held no unpleasant surprises. Coming from one of them was a smell of paraffin so strong that he buried his nose in his shirtsleeve. One of the tanks in which the occupants stored paraffin for their stoves must have sprung a leak. But there was no danger as long as he didn’t strike a light.

He took his father’s bunch of keys from his pocket. The second key fitted. Jonas paused and listened before entering the compartment. The muffled, intermittent dripping of a tap could be heard. The dusty electric bulb on the wall was flickering. It was chilly.

With a cry of encouragement, he opened the door. And recoiled.

Most of his father’s compartment was filled with the boxes he’d just loaded into the truck.

He turned on the spot with his gun at the ready. The barrel knocked some bowls and saucepans off a shelf and sent them crashing to the floor. He cowered down, peered into the passage through the slats and strained his ears. Nothing to be heard but the defective tap.

Turning back to the boxes, he stared wide-eyed at the firm’s imprint.

Until he realised that they were different. Similar, but not identical. The longer he looked, the more clearly he saw that the two batches of boxes bore only a vague resemblance in shape and colour.

He tore one open and took out a bunch of photographs. He opened another. Nothing but photographs. A third. Documents and more photographs. The fourth contained books. So did the next three, which were the only ones he could get at without having to do a lot of rearranging.

He came across familiar objects everywhere. Rolled up and leaning against the wall in one corner was the map of the world from his parents’ bedroom, which had so often sent his thoughts on their travels. The globe perched on top of a stack of boxes had served him as a desk lamp when he was a boy. His father’s binoculars were lying on a rickety shelf with his hiking boots beside them. As a child Jonas had marvelled at their huge size.

He must have been blind. He had stowed and packed and arranged things without noticing that half of their household effects were missing.

It was surprising, nonetheless, that his father had kept these objects in the cellar. He could understand it in the case of the walking stick, and the globe needn’t have stood around in the living room. But he couldn’t fathom why his father had left the books and photographs to moulder away in the cellar.

The light went out.

He counted up to thirty, breathing deeply.

Gripping the shotgun in both hands, he groped his way back to the exit. A penetrating smell of grain filled his nostrils. Presumably, one of the compartments contained a small batch of the stuff with which older folk still, in spite of everything, liked to insulate their windows in winter.

*

He replaced the receiver and rewound the tapes. On one he wrote ‘EMPTY’, on the other ‘Bosch residence, 23 July’.

With an apple in one hand, he searched the stack of camera boxes, which he’d been too lazy to dispose of, for the relevant documents. He wasn’t methodical enough. Chewing hurriedly, he finished the apple and threw the core out of the window. He wiped his fingers on his trouser leg. They felt sticky, so he rinsed them under the tap and went on searching the empty boxes. Then it occurred to him that he’d thrown the instructions into the wastepaper basket.

His assumption was correct: the cameras were equipped with timers, like coffee machines or electric heaters. As long as you put in a powerful enough battery, you could programme them to start recording up to seventy-two hours ahead.

He found a portion of fish in the deep-freeze compartment. He heated it up and ate it with some mixed-bean salad straight from the jar, which wasn’t a good combination. He washed up, then watched the sun go down with the mobile in his hand.

You are terrible. * hic *:-) I love love love love you.

Where was she at this moment? In England? Was she looking at the sun too?

This sun?

Perhaps he wasn’t the only person going through this nightmare. Perhaps everyone had suddenly found themselves alone. Perhaps they, too, were stumbling through a deserted world, and the spell would be broken if two people who belonged together turned up at the same spot simultaneously. That would mean he must go looking for Marie and run the risk of missing her because she, in her world, would be doing her utmost to get to him. It would be wiser to wait here.

Besides, this theory was utter nonsense. So, probably, was every idea he’d so far entertained about the events that had overtaken him.

He picked up the duvet and tossed it onto the bed. He righted the tripod with the camera on it. Removing the tape, he put it in the camera connected to the TV in the living room. Then he ran himself a bath.

The water was hot. Floating in front of him was a mound of foam resembling a kneeling elephant. He could clearly make out its rump, legs, ears and trunk. He blew. The elephant drifted away a little. He blew again. A hole appeared in the elephant’s cheek.

He recalled a story told him as a child by his mother, who had a liking for moral tales.

A little girl sits weeping in a forest. A fairy appears and asks why. The girl explains that she has smashed her father’s collection of china and is afraid he’ll punish her. The fairy gives her a reel of thread. If she tugs at it, time will pass more quickly. A few centimetres equals a few days, so she must be careful. If she wants to avoid being scolded and beaten, however, she should make use of the reel of thread.

Although dubious at first, the little girl decides she has nothing to lose and gives the reel of thread a tug. The next moment she’s on her way home from school for the summer holidays, which are still several weeks ahead. ‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘I’ve escaped a beating.’

The little girl finds a scar on her knee whose origin mystifies her. She also sees some slowly fading weals on her backside when looking at her reflection in the mirror.

From then on she often gives the reel of thread a tug. So often that she’s old before she knows it. She sits sobbing beneath a weeping willow in the forest where it all began. The fairy reappears, whereupon the old maid bemoans the fact that she has frittered her life away by using up too much thread. She should still be young, but she’s already old.

The fairy raises an admonitory finger — and reverses the whole process. The girl finds herself sitting in the forest, young once more but no longer afraid of being punished. She walks home singing and accepts her beating gladly.

To Jonas’s mother the moral of the story was beyond dispute: you must face up to everything, misfortune included. Misfortune, above all, makes people what they are. To Jonas himself the story’s inherent truth was nothing like as clear-cut. If his mother’s argument held good, everyone would undergo operations without an anaesthetic. As for the girl’s premature ageing, he couldn’t see that as a miscalculation on her part. What a terrible life the poor little thing must have led, to have tugged at her reel of thread so often!

His mother, his father and his schoolteacher, who also told the story on one occasion, all seemed to find the little girl’s conduct plain stupid. Fancy throwing away her life just to avoid a few minutes’ unpleasantness! It never occurred to anyone that she might, after all, have done the right thing. Jonas found it quite understandable. Having been through hell on earth, she had every right to tug at her thread. Now, in old age, she was simply viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, like all old people. She would have been in for a nasty surprise if she’d begun again from the beginning.

His mother had never understood that line of thought.

The bathwater was lukewarm, the elephant had dissolved.

Jonas pulled on his bathrobe without rinsing himself off. In the fridge he found three bananas whose skins were already dark brown. He peeled them, mashed them up in a bowl and added a pinch of brown sugar. Sat down in front of the TV. Ate.

*

The Sleeper walked past the camera, got into bed and pulled up the covers.

He started snoring.

Jonas remembered how often Marie had complained of his snoring. He rasped away half the night, she said. She could hardly sleep a wink. He disputed this. Everybody denied snoring. Although they couldn’t possibly know what they did while asleep.

The Sleeper turned over. Went on snoring.

Jonas peered through the blinds. The window in the flat he’d visited some weeks ago was still illuminated. He took a swig of orange juice and raised his glass to it. Massaged his face.

The Sleeper sat up. Without opening his eyes, he grabbed the other duvet and flung it at the camera. The screen went dark.

*

Jonas rewound and pressed ‘Play’.

The tape had been running for an hour and fifty-one minutes when the Sleeper crawled out from under the bedclothes. His eyes remained shut. His features were relaxed. But Jonas couldn’t shake off the feeling that he knew exactly what he was doing. That the Sleeper was constantly aware of his actions, and that he himself was seeing something without seeing what mattered. Watching an occurrence he didn’t understand, but which possessed some underlying significance.

Three, four, five times the Sleeper sat up, took hold of the duvet, put his right foot on the floor and threw it.

Jonas went into the next room. He looked at the bed, got into it. Sat up, took hold of the duvet and threw it.

He felt nothing. He might have been doing it for the first time. No sense of anything strange. A duvet. He threw it. But why?

He went over to the wall and inspected the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against. He rapped it with his knuckles. A dull sound. No cavity.

He leant against the wall and deliberated, his hands buried in the sleeves of the towelling bathrobe and his arms folded on his chest.

The Sleeper’s behaviour was odd. Was there something behind it? Hadn’t he often walked in his sleep as a child? Wasn’t it understandable that he should have reverted to that habit in this exceptional situation? Perhaps his sleeping self had occasionally undertaken similar strange excursions earlier on, unnoticed by Marie.

Someone in the living room uttered a cry.

He froze, convulsed less with terror than with astonishment and disbelief. With a feeling of impotence in the face of a new law of nature, one he didn’t understand and had no defence against.

Another cry rang out.

Jonas went into the next room.

At first he couldn’t work out where the cries were coming from.

From the TV. The screen was dark.

Shrill cries suggestive of fear and pain, as if coming from someone who was being tortured. As if that someone’s body were being briefly stuck with pins and then allowed a few seconds’ respite.

Another cry. It was loud and piercing. There was no humour in it. Just the sound of terrible happenings.

He fast-forwarded. Cries. He wound the tape on some more. Cries. He fast-forwarded to the end of the tape. Hoarse breathing, groans, occasional cries.

He rewound the tape to where the Sleeper got up and hurled the duvet at the camera. He studied his face, trying to discover some clue to what lay ahead. Nothing to be seen. The Sleeper hurled the duvet, the camera fell over, the screen went dark.

Dark, not black. He noticed that now. The tape had wound on, but blindly. Having seen the screen go dark, he’d automatically dismissed the possibility that recording had continued.

The first cry rang out ten minutes after the camera fell over. No sounds of any kind could be heard before that. No footsteps. No knocking. No strange voices.

Then, after ten minutes, that first cry. The scream of someone being skewered with an iron spike. It was a sudden cry, more of terror than of pain.

Jonas dashed into the bedroom and stripped off his bathrobe. He turned in front of the mirror, contorted his body, lifted his feet and inspected the soles. His joints creaked. He couldn’t see a thing. No cuts, no stitches, no burns. Not even a bruise.

He went right up to the glass and stuck out his tongue. It wasn’t furred. No visible injuries. He pulled his lower lids down. His eyes were bloodshot.

*

He sat down on the sofa and treated himself to a few minutes of the Love Parade’s silent cavortings. He ate some ice cream. Poured himself a whisky. Only a small one, though. He had to remain sober, clear-headed.

He got the camera ready for the night. In his agitation he’d forgotten how to set the timer. He was too tired to reread the instructions. He contented himself with a normal three-hour recording.

He tried the front door. It was locked.