Night Work

20

He blinked at the camera. It hadn’t been moved. Nor, it seemed, had anything else.

It was 4 August. A month had gone by. At this hour four weeks ago he’d been waiting in vain for a bus. That was how it had begun.

He opened the shutters. A sunny day. Not a branch or blade of grass was stirring. He got dressed. He felt the notebook in his pocket. He opened it at the first blank page and wrote:

I wonder where you’ll be on 4 September and how you’re doing. And how you’ve been doing in the previous four weeks. Jonas, 4 August, Kanzelstein. Standing at the bedroom table, dressed, tired.

He looked at the picture on the wall. To judge by the battered frame and faded colours, it was quite old. It depicted a lone sheep in a field. The animal was dolled up in jeans and a red sweater. It wore socks on its feet and, on its head, a hat cocked at a rakish angle. This curious sight reminded him of his dream.

He’d been looking out of the window of his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment. A bird landed on the arm of a chair standing on a balcony that his flat didn’t have. He was delighted to see the bird. A living creature at last!

All at once the bird’s head changed, becoming broader and more elongated. Its expression was mean and angry, as if Jonas were to blame for all that was happening to it. Under his intent gaze the bird underwent another transformation. It developed a hedgehog’s head and its body grew bigger. Jonas was now confronted by a hedgehog’s head on the body of a millipede one and a half metres long. The millipede curled up and scratched its face, which metamorphosed into that of a man. The human millipede gasped, its tongue protruding as if it were being throttled. Its countless little legs were flailing madly, and pink foam oozed from its nostrils.

The head changed yet again. It turned into that of an eagle and a dog in quick succession. Neither the eagle nor the dog looked the way they should have looked. All these creatures gazed at him. The look in their eyes told him that they knew him of old. And that he knew them.

*

He breakfasted on pumpernickel and instant coffee. Then he opened all the windows and prowled around the house.

He spent quite a while gazing out over the countryside from the south-facing balcony. Its dimensions puzzled him. Everything looked smaller and more cramped than he remembered. The balcony itself, for instance. It had once been a terrace spacious enough to play football on. Now he was standing on an ordinary balcony some four metres long and one-and-a-half wide. It was the same with the garden. He could have walked from end to end in well under a minute. He used to think of the Löhnebergers’ inn as a really big establishment. Now he saw that the open space outside could accommodate no more than four cars parked side by side. Yesterday he’d counted the tables in the bar. There were six.

As for the view from the balcony, in his imagination it had stretched for hundreds of kilometres. He now discovered that he could see little further than the next valley. His eye was brought up short by a range of hills no more than twenty kilometres away. The only really sizeable feature was the forest behind the house, which marked the extent of the property.

In the games room he recognised the cupboard in which the table-tennis bats and balls and a spare net were kept. He examined its wooden sides for inscriptions and messages. He took out a bat and began to play against himself. He hit the ball high, to give himself time to get to the other end and return the shot. The sound of the ball striking the table top went echoing round the almost empty room.

This was where his father had taught him to play. At first Jonas had made the mistake of standing too near the table, which exasperated his father. ‘No, back! Further back!’ he would yell, and he’d been known to hurl his bat at the net when annoyed with his incorrigible pupil. Jonas’s mother and Aunt Lena didn’t enjoy playing table tennis, and his father was no match for Uncle Reinhard.

The handle of the bat had lost some of its plastic coating. Jonas’s hand stuck to it. He tossed it back into the cupboard, took out another and gave it an experimental swing, turning it over in his hand. It looked familiar.

He eyed the bat with a touch of emotion. He had always picked it in the old days because he preferred its black surface and ribbed handle. Now he couldn’t see any appreciable difference between this bat and the others.

Here. This was the place. His father had stood over there, he himself on this side.

He flexed his knees to re-create a child’s-eye view of the table and leapt to and fro as if diving for the ball.

His bat. His walking stick, too. From a time that was long gone. That would never come back. A time he could never re-enter, never use again.

*

Early that afternoon Jonas cooked himself some lunch at the inn. A plateful of noodles and potatoes from the larder he’d discovered behind an inconspicuous door. He ate a lot and drew himself a beer. It tasted and smelt bad. He poured it away and opened a bottle instead.

He sat down on the terrace with the bottle and a fleece belonging to the landlord tied round his waist by the arms. He had also put on a frayed old peasant hat he had found hanging on a hook. The sun was scorching hot, but a strong wind was blowing. He finished off the bottle. Then he thought of the transceiver. He went inside and spent half an hour looking for it until he was satisfied it had gone.

It had been there that Christmas nearly twenty-five years ago, but it hadn’t been working. They were snowed in, the roads were impassable, and then it happened: Leo the waiter, who was helping out over the holidays, gashed his hand chopping wood. Although the wound wasn’t thought to be too serious, it became infected. They couldn’t call a doctor because all the phone lines had been brought down by avalanches. To everyone’s alarm, Leo was confined to bed with blood poisoning. They were afraid he would die.

Jonas happened to hear about the defective transceiver. The grown-ups, who thought he wanted to play some game or show off, gave him sidelong, pitying looks when he asked to see it. One look at the relay circuit, however, and Jonas realised that he really could be of help. He had drawn so many circuit diagrams in physics, an optional subject he was studying at school, that he asked for a length of copper wire and a soldering iron.

A few minutes later, with his heart thumping, he gestured grandly at the transceiver and announced that it was working again. They all thought at first that he was joking. In fact his father showed signs of wanting to chuck him out of the window, transceiver and all. Jonas turned it on. As soon as the landlord heard it crackling he dashed over and sent an SOS. The helicopter that flew Leo to hospital landed two hours later.

Frau Löhneberger wept. Herr Löhneberger slapped Jonas on the back, stood him an ice cream, and invited the whole family to a meal on the house. Jonas thought he would be in for more praise and more ice creams, but the incident wasn’t mentioned again after a day or two. Nor was any further reference made to a reporter who had wanted to put something about it in the local paper.

*

Once in the forest, Jonas put on the fleece and zipped it up. It didn’t seem to have rained here for some time. Little puffs of dust arose at every step he took up the path to the alpine hut. He recalled wearing a hood as a boy, for fear of ticks, which he wrongly believed to lurk in trees. Now, even one of those revolting little creatures would have been a comfort to him.

He thought he remembered which way to go. To his surprise, however, nothing looked familiar. It wasn’t until he reached the hut from which he’d collected milk, and where he’d been presented with the walking stick, that images came to life in his mind’s eye.

One summer holiday he was allowed to bring a school-friend whose parents had naturally, at his father’s insistence, been expected to pay for their son’s board and lodging. Jonas had decided to invite Leonhard. And it was with Leonhard, he now remembered, that he’d been up here one day. They had prowled around the hut like two Redskins planning to raid a ranch. Then, when the grizzled old giant of a man appeared in his doorway, the raiders’ courage had suddenly deserted them. They had bidden the trapper a sheepish good morning and vanished into the undergrowth.

Jonas surveyed the mountainside, rifle over shoulder and peasant hat on head. He rested for a minute or two. Should he break into the hut? No, he didn’t feel hungry or thirsty, so he left the clearing and started climbing again.

Nothing looked familiar to him.

Now and then he heard a crack, like someone stepping on a fallen branch. He froze, listening.

Jonas suppressed his mounting alarm. There was no need to be scared, he’d proved that last night. No one was after him. The sounds he was hearing sprang from his overheated imagination or were chance natural phenomena. Twigs snapping by themselves, perhaps. He was alone.

‘You aren’t there either,’ he said, looking over his shoulder. He repeated the words and laughed aloud despite himself, as if he’d cracked a joke.

His mobile was showing half past five. The battery was nearly flat. There was no dialling tone, he noticed. That worried him, but why? Who would he have called? All the same, it was like a warning that he’d strayed too far. He turned back.

And lengthened his stride.

Something was welling up inside him. Growing stronger.

To take his mind off it he recalled how, as a boy, he’d gone looking for Attila’s grave in these woods. He’d heard tell of it. According to legend, the king of the Huns had died while marching through Austria and been buried in a forest. Any hummock might conceal his tomb, and if Jonas found the spot it would make him rich and famous. He had also combed these woods with Leonhard. Every time they had come to a sizeable mound of earth they’d looked at each other and discussed its chances like experts. When out by himself he had only searched the edge of the forest within sight of the holiday house or the inn.

The path was so overgrown with bracken, he kept tripping over hidden stones. Twice the rifle dug him hard in the side, knocking the breath out of him. He was annoyed he’d taken it with him, for all the use it had been.

As if he’d bumped into a wall, he stopped short. It took him a long moment to realise what he’d just heard: a bell. A cowbell.

There — there it went again, over to his left.

‘Wait! Now you’ll see something!’ he yelled.

Holding his rifle in front of his chest, he dashed in the direction he thought the sound had come from. To his bewilderment, the third clang seemed to come from even further to his left. He changed direction. He gave no thought to what he would find and what he would do when he found it. He simply ran on.

The sixth time the bell clanged, he felt unsure whether he was heading towards it or away from it.

‘Hooo!’

No answer. The bell, too, remained silent.

He looked around. A geocaching tree caught his eye. Something told him he was on the right track. He hurried past the tree and squeezed through some bushes. Beyond them he came out in a small clearing with a lone birch tree standing in the middle.

The bell was hanging from one of its branches.

He scanned the area before going over to it. It was suspended on a surprisingly thin length of cord. The metal rims were flecked with rust, but there was no indication of how long the bell had been there or who had hung it up. It clanged whenever the wind blew, that was the only certainty.

It occurred to Jonas how the bell might have got there, but that theory was too unpleasant to be credited.

He looked for the route he had come by. Having ventured too far, he needed to get his bearings again. It wasn’t long before he thought he knew where he was and where he would come upon a path. He set off in that direction. Ten minutes later, when he had merely strayed even deeper into the forest, he was overcome by the feeling he’d had before.

‘Well, Attila, coming to get me?’

He tried to give the words a hint of mockery, but his voice sounded feebler than he’d intended.

He looked back. Dense forest. He didn’t even know which direction he’d come from.

He ploughed straight on. On and on. You had to look for fixed points, enlist the help of the sun or the stars, that’s what he’d been taught as a boy. But he’d never got lost before, and he’d forgotten how you made sure of going straight ahead instead of in a circle.

After another hour he thought he recognised a particular spot. However, he couldn’t decide whether he’d passed this way before or after he heard the cowbell. Or even twenty years ago.

It surprised him how quickly the light was fading.

Ahead of him was a small clearing overgrown with knee-high bracken and hazel bushes. The trunks of the surrounding beech trees were thickly coated with moss. The air smelt of mushrooms, but there were none to be seen.

He hadn’t noticed it while on the move, but as he stood there, lost in thought, it struck him how cold it was getting. Mechanically, he rubbed his arms, chest and thighs. He took a few steps. His legs were leaden and his back ached. He was thirsty.

In the middle of the clearing he sat down. Visible overhead was a rectangular patch of blue sky tinged with red. At that moment, he knew the wolf-bear would appear tonight. He would hear crackling sounds, then footsteps. And then the beast would burst through the bushes over there and pounce on him. Huge, unstoppable, impersonal. Invincible.

‘No, please don’t,’ he whispered feebly, tears springing to his eyes.

The darkness frightened him even more than the increasing cold. The battery in his mobile was flat, so he didn’t know what time it was. It couldn’t be much after seven. He had obviously strayed deep into the forest.

He took one of the little cards from his pocket.

Shout loudly!, it read.

The fact that chance had dealt him a suitable instruction raised his hopes. He got to his feet, the better to shout.

‘Hello! I’m here! Over here! Help!’

He turned and shouted again in the opposite direction. He didn’t dare shoot because he’d left the bag of cartridges behind on the old chest. Although he didn’t think he would have to fight off something or someone in the immediate future, the feel of the smooth wooden butt reassured him. At least he wasn’t completely defenceless.

But … What if nobody came?

What if he couldn’t find his way back?

He peered in all directions. He shut his eyes and listened to his inner self. Was this how it would end? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?

He tried hard to make his mind a blank. Took deep breaths, imagined himself elsewhere. Some place where there were no goosebumps, no hunger and no suspicious rustling sounds. With Marie. In bed with Marie, thigh to thigh. Feeling her softness, her warmth. Feeling her breath on his face and the pressure of her hands. Inhaling her scent, hearing the faint grunt as she turned over without losing contact with him.

He wasn’t alone. She was with him. He always had her with him if he chose. All at once, she was far nearer to him than three or four weeks ago, when he thought he’d lost her.

He was feeling better. His fear had dwindled to a growl in the background. He was calm. Tomorrow morning he would find his way back. He would go home. And then he would go looking for Marie. He mustn’t fall asleep, that was all.

He opened his eyes.

It was dark.

*

It must have been about midnight when the stiffness in his arms and legs became unbearable. He tossed the rifle into the grass and sat down.

His thoughts had stopped obeying him hours ago. They drifted, took on colour, lost it again. Enveloped him, were enveloped. The wolf-bear appeared in them, he couldn’t chase it away. The creature radiated a savage power and determination that tormented him until, without his doing anything, it disappeared and he was filled with a mysterious warmth and cheerfulness. He felt tempted to get up and go on looking for the way back, but the knowledge that he would soon be governed by other emotions restrained him.

He looked up. Convinced that he was being stared at by someone seated almost within arm’s reach but invisible to him. At the same time, he noticed that his eyelids took longer to blink than they should. Alarmed, he reached for the gun. It seemed two or even three times further away than it had been. He couldn’t see his hand, but he sensed that its progress towards the gun was becoming steadily, inexorably slower. He lowered his head and shook off his hat. He wasn’t moving at all, he felt. Listening to the rustle of the trees, he noticed that every sound consisted of many individual notes, and that these, in their turn, were made up of acoustic particles.

He didn’t know how he managed to snap out of this. His willpower proved stronger than his inertia. He jumped up, levelled the rifle — and waited to see what he would do next.

He laughed.

To his own surprise.

*

3 a.m. Possibly 2 a.m., possibly half past three. He didn’t dare go to sleep. Although his joints were aching and red rings were dancing before his eyes. Every sound the night wind struck from the trees echoed in his head. Trying to keep reality and imagination apart, he looked around. He pretended he was having problems with his shoelaces or the zip of the landlord’s fleece, just so he could scoff and swear aloud.

Whenever he had thought about God and death, the same image had always recurred: that of the body from which all derived and to which all returned. He had doubted the Church’s teachings. God wasn’t one, he was everyone. What other people called God, he saw as a principle in the form of a body. A principle that sent everyone off to live and then report back. God was a body that sent off human beings, possibly animals and plants as well, or even stones, raindrops and light, to acquaint themselves with everything that went to make up life. Returning to the body at the end of their existence, they shared their experiences with God and absorbed those of other people. That way, they all learnt what it was like to be an arable farmer in Switzerland or a motor mechanic in Karachi. A teacher in Mombasa or a whore in Brisbane. Or an Austrian adviser on interior decoration. What it was like to be a waterlily, a stork, a frog, a gazelle in the rain, a honey bee in springtime or a bird. A woman in heat, or a man. A success, a failure. Fat or slim, robust or frail. A murderer or a victim of murder. A rock. An earthworm. A stream. A puff of wind.

Living life in order to return and bestow that life on others. That had been his notion of God. And now he wondered if the disappearance of all life meant that God and the others had no interest in his life. That his life was redundant.

*

6 a.m. He sensed the dawn before he saw it. It didn’t come in its usual form, as a kind of resurrection or liberation. It was merely cold. As soon as it was light enough for him to avoid bumping into trees, he got to his feet. His teeth were chattering, the dew-sodden shirt and trousers clinging to his body.

He spent the first hour trying to get his bearings, following false trails, looking out for landmarks. All he saw was a monotonous alternation of bushes and undergrowth, glades and dense forest. None of it looked familiar.

Later he came to a broad clearing. There he remained until the sun had driven the cold from his bones. His thirst, which was steadily intensifying, made him move on. No longer centred on his stomach, his hunger had induced a feeling of general weakness. His dearest wish was to lie down and go to sleep.

From then on he proceeded haphazardly. He consulted the cards in his pocket, but their only injunctions were Red Cat and Botticelli. He trudged on with his head down. Until a sound came to his ears, a liquid sound. It came from his right.

He didn’t make a dash for it at once; he looked in all directions. No one was watching him. No would-be practical joker.

He set off to his right. His ears hadn’t deceived him, the gurgling sound grew louder. He fought his way through the undergrowth, ripped his trousers on a bramble bush that scratched his hands and arms as well. Then he saw the stream. Clear, cold water. He drank until his belly almost burst and rolled over on his back, panting.

Images arose before him. Of the office, of his father, of home. Of Marie. Of earlier years, when he’d had a different hairstyle. Of a younger Jonas with all kinds of interests. Flirting with Inge in the park, arguing heatedly with friends in cafés, counting empty beer bottles in the kitchen the morning after. As an adolescent in front of the brightly lit windows of sex shops. As a boy on a pushbike, smiling as only children smile.

He clenched his fists and punched the ground. No, he would find his way out of this forest.

He got up and patted his trousers down, then followed the course of the stream. For one thing, because he didn’t want to die of thirst; for another, because streams usually led somewhere, quite often to houses.

He took the easiest route. Sometimes the stream narrowed and he leapt across it, hoping that it wouldn’t become a trickle and peter out. Sometimes it sank into the ground, but he always found the spot where it re-emerged into the light. He shook his fist.

‘Hahaha, we’ll soon see!’

He no longer felt tired and hungry. He walked on and on until the forest suddenly ended. He found himself standing on a slab of rock over which the stream plunged, almost inaudibly, into the depths.

Before him lay a broad expanse of open countryside. To his front, separated from him by a deep gorge, he could make out a small village. It took him a while to identify the dark specks he saw in the surrounding fields as bales of hay. He counted a dozen houses and as many outbuildings. There was no sign of life. He estimated that the village was ten kilometres away, possibly fifteen.

Immediately in front of him was a drop of at least 100 metres. A precipitous wall of rock, and no path leading down into the valley.

He couldn’t account for it, because he felt sure he’d never been there, but the distant village looked familiar.

He turned left. Keeping to the edge of the plateau, he walked until the village had long disappeared from view. He encountered no road, no track, no fence or signpost, not even a notice put up by the Forestry Commission or the Alpine Association.

Worried that he was getting further and further away from Kanzelstein and the surrounding villages, he retraced his steps. Three hours later he was back at the place where the stream plunged down the gorge. Having drunk his fill, he leapt across it with contemptuous ease. He looked over at the village. It was as lifeless as before.

Something about this panorama alarmed him. Ignoring it, Jonas walked on. He pulled his hat brim down with his left hand to avoid having to see the village out of the corner of his eye. He felt like shouting something. But he was too weak.

*

In a big clearing he waited for darkness to come. He had no illusions about his fate. He even felt vaguely thankful that it was happening like this, here, where he preserved at least an inkling of what had been, and that he hadn’t ended his life in a lift immobilised between two floors.

And yet … Something within him could not believe that this was the end.

He took a card from his pocket.

Sleep, he read.

He crumpled it between his fingers.

*

Jonas had often thought about death. He managed to banish the thought of that dark, looming wall for months at a time, but then it recurred day and night. What was death? A joke you understood only after the event? Was it good, evil? And how would it strike him down? Cruelly or mercifully? Would a blood vessel in his skull burst? Would pain rob him of his reason? Would he feel a stab in the chest or be felled by a stroke? Would his guts churn? Would he vomit for fear of what lay ahead? Would he be knifed by a madman, so that he still had time to grasp what was happening to him? Would he be tormented by some disease, fall from the sky in a plane, drive into a brick wall? Would it be: Five … four … three … two … one … zero? Or: Five, four, three, two, one, zero? Or: fivefourthreetwoonezero?

Or would he grow old and die in his asleep?

And was there someone who already knew this?

And was it all preordained, or could he still do something about it?

Whatever happened, he’d told himself, there would be people who thought of him and reflected on the fact that he’d died in such and such a manner, not another. On the fact that he’d always wondered how it would happen, and now they knew. Who wondered how they themselves would die some day.

But it wouldn’t be like that. No one would ever reflect on his death. No one would ever know how he’d died.

Had Amundsen wondered the same thing adrift on his ice floe, or struggling in the water, or afloat on the wing of his plane, or wherever it had happened? Or had he assumed that his body would be found? But they never did find it, Roald. You simply disappeared.

He could hardly see his hand before his face, but he didn’t reach for the rifle lying beside him in the grass. He stretched out on his back and stared into the darkness.

What lay in store for him, he had wondered, transition or extinction?

Whatever his destination, he had always wanted his final thought to be of love. Love as a word. Love as a condition. Love as a principle. Love was to be his final thought and ultimate emotion. A yes, not a no, regardless of whether he was only being transported elsewhere or coming to a full stop. He had always hoped he would manage to think of it. Of love.