Night Work

17

He could hardly believe it when he checked the time on his mobile. It was after ten. He’d slept for eleven hours, but he didn’t feel refreshed in the least.

In the kitchen he realised he’d forgotten to get any bread from the Egyptian’s shop the night before. He heated up another tin. There was some coffee, but it was a sort he disliked. He made do with mineral water.

After breakfast he tidied up. He opened all the windows to ventilate the stuffy rooms and shook the bedclothes. He rewound the tapes, filling the air with their threefold hum, and put the dirty crockery in the dishwasher. While engaged in these activities and without admitting it to himself, he kept a constant watch. For changes. For pointers to something he hadn’t noticed the day before.

He had a cold shower without shutting his eyes, belting out a sea shanty in which pirates were keelhauled and made to walk the plank. While he was drying himself in the living room his eye lighted on a bar of chocolate. He hesitated for a moment, then reached for it.

Within an hour he’d emptied the entire truck. Everything was inside the flat. All the chairs, all the bookcases, all the cupboards, all the boxes. Not sorted out yet, of course, but he didn’t have to leave the building from now on. He could watch last night’s tapes while working.

It took him just under three hours to dust all the furniture, check it for damage and shift it into position. While the Sleeper slept on the screen beside him, Jonas dusted lampshades, mended a hole in an armchair and buffed off the scratches on a cupboard, watching the TV at every opportunity.

The Sleeper seemed to have had a quiet night. He turned over now and then, but most of the time he lay still. Jonas even thought he heard an occasional snore. He wondered why he was so tired.

Between the first and second tapes he took a break. He found a ready-to-serve meal in a kitchen drawer and heated it up in a little wok. It was inedible. He added some soy sauce and other seasoning. No use. Grimly, he plunged the opener into yet another tin of bean soup.

The second tape began the way the first had ended. He fast-forwarded it. Meanwhile, he tidied things away. When he was working in the kitchen and out of sight of the TV, he switched to normal play and turned the volume up full. He also darted into the living room every couple of minutes to see if the Sleeper was still buried beneath the bedclothes. On the right stood the bed. Facing it on the left was its miniature reflection on the TV screen. He himself was lying asleep in that reflection.

The Kästner family’s crockery and kitchen utensils ended up on the rubbish dump in the backyard. All he kept were some frying pans and saucepans, because he’d noticed that his father’s kitchen equipment was less than ideal. He couldn’t find the mug with the bear on it, the one he’d drunk from as a child. Only three of the old glasses were there. As for kitchen gadgets that required some skill, such as a pressure cooker or a coffee machine, his father appeared to have got rid of them.

He switched to fast-forward again. Whatever might eventually happen to him, it was impossible to make complete recordings of himself while asleep and watch those recordings conscientiously during the day. That would mean doing nothing but sleeping and watching himself sleeping. He wouldn’t be able to do a thing, he would be tied to the cameras.

Towards the end of the second tape, when the Sleeper was still lying motionless under the bedclothes, Jonas felt he’d been taken for a fool. His movements became more sluggish. He slammed cupboard doors and stuffed clothes into drawers regardless of whether or not he was creasing them. Until, among a pile of books, he discovered some old comics that had escaped his notice while packing.

Jonas liked comics. Even as an adult he had bought the occasional Mort & Phil comic without blushing. There was even one in the toilet at his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment. But these were special. He leafed through them as if they were much sought-after rarities, examining every dog-eared, jam-stained page. He must have been twelve, or fourteen at most, the last time he’d held this comic in his hand. Twenty years had gone by since he’d cut the slice of bread whose butter and jam had smeared this page. This comic had languished unopened on a shelf for two whole decades. He’d finished reading it one day, put it away and forgotten all about it. And he hadn’t had a clue how long it would be before he saw this picture, this speech balloon, again. He was seeing them again only now.

A marginal note scrawled in a childish hand: Funny!

He had written that. He didn’t know why, only that he’d written it, that it was twenty years ago, and that he’d still known so little at the time. That this ‘Funny!’ had been written by a boy who knew nothing about girls, who would later study physics and aspire to become a teacher or academic, who was interested in football and may have had some maths homework to do. And that the person who had rediscovered this comic was wondering why he hadn’t come across it before. The comic. And the memory.

He glanced at the screen. The Sleeper wasn’t stirring.

The characters on one page had been given glasses drawn with a ballpoint pen. He couldn’t remember doing that.

Jonas started to read the comic in his hand. Even the first page made him grin. He read on with increasing enjoyment, casting only an occasional, mechanical glance at the TV. The absurdity of the plot, the characters, the drawings delighted him. The next time he looked at the screen it was blue. At once, he put in the third tape. The Sleeper was still asleep. He pressed the fast-forward button.

He finished the comic, laughing aloud more than once. Having read the last page he skimmed the rest of it again in a happy mood. He couldn’t remember this issue. He might have been seeing and reading it for the first time. This surprised him. Once read, his children’s books had always imprinted their stories and characters on his memory.

The Sleeper was sleeping. So soundly that Jonas checked to see if he’d pressed the freeze-frame button by mistake.

He arranged the books on the shelves, browsing from time to time when one aroused his interest. He glanced at the screen, looked around to see if he’d done enough to justify taking a break, then read on until his curiosity was satisfied.

Box after flattened box went sailing out into the backyard. Pressing the freeze-frame button, he went into the bathroom to connect the washing machine and hang some hand towels on the hook beside the washbasin. Back in the living room he pressed ‘Play’ and set about sorting out his father’s personal possessions. A few rings. His medals. His passport. Some minor souvenirs. These he put in the drawer they’d been kept in for decades. Only the knife was missing. It was stuck in the wall. He also couldn’t find some photos, which might turn up in the cellar at Rüdigergasse.

The thought of the knife being irretrievable distressed him. His mood had brightened for the first time for weeks and he didn’t want to sour it. He picked up another comic.

Jonas surveyed the room. He’d finished, really. A few things might benefit from a more thorough clean, but that he could do another day.

He stretched out on the bed and helped himself to some peanuts. The tape was fast-forwarding, the display registered 2.30. He switched to normal play. With his head facing the TV, he turned over on his stomach and started reading. He crunched a peanut with relish.

*

Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement on the screen.

The tape had been running for two hours fifty-seven minutes. The Sleeper extricated himself from the bedclothes and sat up on the edge of the bed, a metre from where Jonas was lying. The Sleeper turned to face the camera. He looked wide awake.

Jonas sat up too. Turned up the volume. Looked at the Sleeper.

The Sleeper cocked an eyebrow.

The corner of his mouth twitched.

He shook his head.

And burst out laughing.

Louder and louder he laughed. The Sleeper’s hilarity wasn’t feigned. He seemed to be genuinely amused by something. He laughed and laughed, fighting for breath and trying to pull himself together, only to bellow with laughter once more. Just before the tape ran out he regained his composure and stared straight at the camera.

Jonas had never seen anyone stare so fixedly, least of all himself. It was a look of such determination that he found it overwhelming.

The screen went blue.

*

Jonas stretched out his arms and legs. He stared up at the ceiling.

The ceiling he’d stared at twenty years ago. And three weeks ago.

He had lain here as a child and thought about himself. About the self that was synonymous with the life in which each individual was imprisoned. If you were born with a club foot you retained it all your life. If your hair fell out you could wear a wig, but you were well aware you were bald and couldn’t escape that fate. If all your teeth had been pulled out you would never again be able to chew with your own teeth for the rest of your days. If you suffered from a disability you had to resign yourself to it. You had to come to terms with anything you couldn’t change, and most things couldn’t be changed. A weak heart, a sensitive stomach, a deformed spine — they formed the individual, they were yourself, a part of life. And you were trapped in that life and would never know what it was like or what it meant to be someone else. Nothing could convey to you what another person felt on waking up or eating or making love. You could never know what life felt like without a backache or without belching after meals. Your life was a cage.

He had lain there and yearned to be a comic book character. He didn’t want to be the Jonas he was in the body he inhabited. He wanted to be the Jonas who was also Mort or Phil, or both of them, or at least a friend of theirs. He wanted to live in their reality, under the rules and natural laws that governed their world. They were forever being beaten up, having accidents, jumping off skyscrapers, getting burnt, dismembered or devoured, exploding or being hurled through space to distant planets. But explosions didn’t kill them and severed hands could be sewn on again. They got hurt, admittedly, but the pain had gone in the next picture. They had a whale of a time. Being them must be fun.

They didn’t die, either.

The ceiling. To be that, not Jonas. To be suspended, year after year, above a room in which people came and went. Some would disappear and others take their place, but he would remain suspended up there. Time would trickle on. He wouldn’t care.

To be a pebble by the sea. To hear the roar of the waves. Or not to hear it. To lie on the shore for centuries and then be tossed into the sea by some little girl, only to be washed up again after hundreds more years have gone by. Washed up on the shore. On seashells ground to sand.

To be a tree. When it was planted, Henry I, or IV, or VI ruled, and then came a Leopold or a Charles. The tree had stood in a field with the sun shining down on it. It had bidden the sun farewell at dusk, when the dew started to fall. Reunited in the morning, the tree and the sun couldn’t have cared less whether someone named Shakespeare was alive or some queen was beheaded 1,000 kilometres away. A peasant had come and lopped off some branches, and the peasant had a son, and the son had a son of his own, but the tree continued to stand there. It was still young, pain-free, fearless. Napoleon became emperor, but the tree didn’t budge. Napoleon came past and bivouacked in its shade, but the tree didn’t care. Kaiser Wilhelm had come and touched the tree later on, unaware that Napoleon had done the same, but the tree cared as little about Napoleon and Wilhelm as it did about the great-grandson of the great-grandson of the first peasant who had come and pruned its shoots.

To be a tree like that one, a tree that had stood in the field at the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, in the sixties, eighties and nineties. One that was standing there now, caressed by the wind.

*

The sun was twinkling through the blinds. Jonas locked the door behind him and searched the flat, leaving his shotgun beside the hall cupboard. No one appeared to have been there. The knife was still embedded in the wall. He tugged at it without success.

He made himself something to eat and drank a grappa. Leaning out of the window, he savoured the sun’s rays with his eyes shut.

Eight o’clock. He felt tired but couldn’t afford to go to sleep, there was so much to do.

He removed the tapes from the cameras in the flat next door and numbered them. Clasping tapes 1–26 to his chest, he returned to his own flat, pushed a blank video into the recorder and put tape 1 in the camera.

The Spider came into shot, travelling at full speed. It raced along the Brigittenauer embankment, heading straight for the camera. The roar of the engine was so deafening as it drove past he turned the volume down.

The din subsided to a distant hum. Moments later silence fell.

The screen showed the deserted embankment.

No sign of movement anywhere.

He wound the tape on. Three, eight, twelve minutes. Then pressed the play button. Again he saw the deserted embankment. He waited. Another few minutes, and the sound of a rapidly approaching car could be heard. The Spider came into shot once more. It raced towards the camera, its battered bonnet clearly visible. And roared past.

The street lay there, deserted once more. The branches of the trees lining the embankment stirred gently in the wind.

Jonas rewound the tape. He pressed the play button on the camera and the record button on the recorder. Just as the car sped out of shot, he stopped recording. He removed tape 1 and put in tape 2, which showed the route from the balcony. He pressed the red button. Again he stopped recording just as the Spider went out of shot.

The third tape, which came from the other balcony camera, had filmed the Heiligenstädter Brücke. He had to rewind it twice to catch the precise moment when the car came into shot. The Spider crossed the canal and disappeared. Jonas stopped recording and left the tape in the camera running.

He looked at the deserted bridge.

No one had ever seen what he was seeing. The bridge railings, the waters of the Danube Canal. The street, the winking traffic lights. At just after 3 p.m. on that particular day. It had been recorded with no one nearby. This recording had been made by a machine with no human witnesses around. Any enjoyment to be derived from the process had been confined to the machine itself and its subjects. The deserted street. The traffic lights. The bushes. Otherwise: no one.

But these images proved that those minutes had elapsed. They had come and gone. If he went there now, he would encounter a different bridge at a different time from the one he was seeing. Yet it had existed, even though he hadn’t been present.

He put in tape 4, followed by 5, 6 and 7. He made rapid progress. From time to time he got up to refill his glass, make a snack or simply stretch his legs. He never took long, but it was dark outside by the time he played the tape showing Gaussplatz.

The Spider grazed a parked car and went into a skid. It rammed a car on the opposite side of the street, then skidded back across the roadway and collided with a van. The impact was so violent, Jonas stared at the screen transfixed. The Spider cannoned off the van and out onto the roundabout, where it spun several times on its own axis and finally came to rest.

For a minute nothing happened. Another minute went by. And another. Then the driver got out, went round to the back of the car and opened the boot. After looking for something, he sat behind the wheel again.

Three minutes later the car drove on.

Jonas still hadn’t transferred this sequence to the video recorder. He rewound the tape, but he didn’t press the record button even then. He watched the accident in disbelief, saw the driver get out and look around to see if he was being observed, then go to the back of the car. Why had he done that? What was he looking for in the boot?

And why couldn’t he, Jonas, remember all this?

The tape came to an end at half past eleven. He still hadn’t watched the second circuit. Maybe he would catch up with it another time. One circuit would suffice for the present. He would watch it when he got a chance.

Jonas roamed the flat, glass in hand, thinking how many years he’d lived there. He made sure the front door was locked. Read Marie’s text messages on his mobile. Flexed his stiff shoulders. Contemplated the knife in the bedroom wall.

Catching sight of his eyes in the mirror as he cleaned his teeth, he gave a start and looked down while the humming electric toothbrush whipped the toothpaste into foam. He spat it out and rinsed his mouth.

Back in the bedroom once more, he gripped the hilt of the knife and tugged with all his might. It didn’t move a single millimetre.

He examined the carpet on his knees. It seemed to him that the carpet beneath the knife was a little cleaner than the surrounding area.

He took the vacuum cleaner from the bedroom cupboard, where the unwieldy contraption was kept for lack of space. Removing the bag, he went into the bathroom and emptied its contents into the bathtub. A cloud of dust went up. He coughed, one hand shielding his face and the other probing the wad of compressed fluff. He soon came across some white powder.

Plaster dust.