Night Work

27

It was the motorway that seemed to move while Jonas stayed where he was. His car made no sound, the white lines glided past and the scenery changed, but he might have been stationary.

The tyreless car flashed past him. He raised his arm stiffly, unable to wave, then turned and watched it grow smaller. When he turned back again he noticed that the countryside was moving past far more slowly. He put his foot back on the accelerator and everything went back to how it had been before.

Shortly before it got dark he stopped near Northampton for some food. He searched the kitchen of a pub, but all he found was a rock-hard loaf, some rancid bacon and several eggs he didn’t dare to eat. As he turned to go he caught sight of some tins on a shelf. Without bothering to check what was in them, he tipped the contents of two of them into a saucepan.

*

It was dark. He was driving, he realised. He seemed to be getting used to the effects of the drug. Its effects and side effects. He was alert and lucid, without a trace of fatigue. His heart was racing, his forehead permanently moist with sweat. When he wiped the film away it reappeared within ten seconds. Before long the wiping became just a habit.

His powers of perception were gradually returning. He knew that he was going north, that night had fallen and he’d been driving for hours. He knew he’d stopped near Northampton and had something to eat. On the other hand, he’d forgotten what he’d eaten and whether he’d had anything to drink, whether he’d spent long there and done anything else. But that was unimportant.

He was driving.

*

He needed a break at some stage. He pulled up in the centre lane and folded the seat back. There was no danger of his going to sleep, he wasn’t sleepy. He needed to relax, that was all.

He folded his hands on his chest and shut his eyes.

They opened again.

He shut them.

They opened again.

He clamped his eyelids together. His eyes were smarting. He could feel and hear the veins throbbing in his temples.

His eyes opened yet again.

He lay there for a while, gazing with owl-like intensity at the roof of the car. Then he returned the seat to its normal position. He mopped his brow and his eyes and drove on.

*

Dawn was just visible on the horizon when he stopped at a filling station near Lancaster. He got out. It was cold. He looked on the back seat for something to put on. No luck, and the boot contained nothing but a grubby sheet of plastic.

He waited, rubbing his arms and shuffling from one foot to the other, while the petrol flowed into the tank. It was a slow business. Something was wrong with the pump. He got back in the car and closed the door, watched the needle of the fuel gauge creep across the dial.

He had a strange sensation.

He felt he’d been here before. He hadn’t, of course, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he’d seen this little filling station with the flat concrete roof once before — in a different place. It was as if someone had uprooted a place familiar to him and transplanted it here.

He peered out. Nothing. As far as he could see, nothing and no one nearby. No one had been here for the last six weeks.

A trap. This incredibly slow petrol pump: a trap intended for him. He mustn’t get out again. He must get away from here.

He lowered a rear window and swung round. There was no one behind him. He leant out of the window, then recoiled. No hand came reaching into the interior. He put his head out again. Swung round again. Still no one there. No alien creature, no wolf-bear, although he’d seen it. In the fraction of a second he’d spent looking out of the window, something had been sitting behind him. Sitting behind him, staring at his back.

He reached out of the window, released the catch on the nozzle of the petrol pump and let it fall to the ground. He shut the flap without screwing the cap back on, then closed the window, climbed back onto the driver’s seat and drove off.

He looked in the rear-view mirror.

No one.

He switched on the interior light and turned round.

Dirty upholstery. A crumpled cigarette packet. A CD.

He switched off the light. Looked in the rear-view mirror again.

Mopped his brow.

Listened.

*

8 a.m. Smalltown.

The sun was up, but Jonas felt it was a cinematic hoax, as if the sky were a sheet of painted canvas in a film studio. He couldn’t feel the sun’s rays. He couldn’t feel any wind.

He looked at the building, the number on the gate, the railings in front of it. On a hoarding across the road, a young housewife was advertising some product he’d never heard of.

Without reckoning up how many he’d taken, he swallowed another tablet. Quite suddenly he wondered how he’d got here. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember the journey, but everything had become so unreal. Nothing seemed real, neither the drive here, nor the car, nor his present surroundings. Those tablets. Strong.

He rested his hands on the steering wheel. You. This is you, here and now.

Smalltown. Home to Marie’s sister, who had married an English sexton, and to her mother, who had moved in with her younger daughter after her husband’s death. This was where Marie had spent brief vacations twice a year. Jonas had never accompanied her, pleading pressure of work. The truth was, he’d always disliked getting to know his girlfriends’ parents.

This was the building. The number was right and its appearance matched Marie’s description of it. A four-storeyed, brick-built block of flats on the outskirts of town.

Jonas kicked the driver’s door open but didn’t get out. He eyed the woman on the hoarding. She reminded him of an actress he’d much admired. In the days before he acquired a video recorder he had postponed and cancelled appointments for her sake, filled with an abiding sense of gratitude for the privilege of being her contemporary.

He had often tried to imagine what it would have been like to be born in another age with other contemporaries. In the fifteenth century, or in ad 400, or in 1000 bc. In Africa or Asia. Would he have been the same person?

Chance dictated who you lived with. The waiter who served you in a restaurant, your coal merchant, your schoolteacher, your daughter-in-law. They were your contemporaries. Singers, CEOs, scientists, committee chairmen — they were the people with whom you shared the planet in your day. People living 100 years hence would be different and have other contemporaries. Even if they lived in another part of the world, contemporaries were, ultimately, something positively private. They could just as well have lived 500 years before or after you, but they were doing so now. At the same time as you. That was how Jonas had felt, simply grateful to many of his contemporaries for being alive at the same time as himself, for breathing the same air and seeing the same sunrises and sunsets. He would have liked to tell them so, too.

He had wondered, many a time, whether Marie was his predestined partner in life. Would he have met her in any event? Might they also have met ten years later, and would the outcome have been the same? Might there exist, somewhere in the world, another woman who had been predestined for him? Might he only just have missed her on some occasion? Had they been standing together in a bus? Could they even have exchanged a glance, never to see each other again? Was her name Tanya, did she live with a man named Paul, was she unhappy with him, did she have children by him, was she wondering whether there might have been someone else?

Or was there a woman living in some other age with whom he should be, or should have been, linked? Was she already dead? Had she been a contemporary of Haydn? Of Schönberg? Or was she yet to be born, and had he himself been born too soon? When debating all these possibilities, Jonas had ruled nothing out. He’d really been more interested in the question than in any possible answers.

Drawing a deep breath, he got out and went up to the entrance, where he read the list of names beside the intercom.

T. Gane / L. Sadier

P. Harvey

R. M. Hall

Rosy Labouche

Peter Kaventsmann

F. Ibañez-Talavera

Hunter Stockton

Oscar Kliuna-ai

P. Malachy

That was the name. Malachy. The name of the man Marie’s sister had married. The sexton.

Jonas drew another deep breath, then pushed the door open. It didn’t occur to him to look around for a weapon. Although the lobby and stairs were only dimly lit, he felt unafraid. What drove him was a mixture of longing and despair. Nothing that would have made him turn back, whatever unpleasantness he encountered.

The flat was on the second floor. He tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked.

He turned the light on. The first thing he saw was a pair of shoes — hers. Almost at the same time, he remembered how they had bought them together from a shop in Judengasse. He rubbed his eyes.

When he looked up again he saw her jacket hanging from a hook in the passage. He put out his hand and stroked the material, buried his face in it, breathed in her smell.

‘Hi,’ he said dully.

He couldn’t help thinking of the rest of her clothes. The ones in Vienna at this moment. How far away they were. Thousands of kilometres away.

It was a spacious flat. The kitchen led off the living room, the living room adjoined a bedroom, probably that of Marie’s sister and her husband. The occupant of the next bedroom was clearly an elderly woman. This was apparent from various objects, but also from its tidiness and the way it smelt.

The third bedroom lay at the end of the passage. One look was enough to convince him. Marie’s suitcase against the wall. Her make-up case on the chest of drawers. The slippers she took everywhere beside the bed, on which lay her nightdress. Her jeans, her blouse, her jewellery, her bra, her scent. Her mobile. Which he’d called so often. And on whose voicemail he’d left messages. The battery was flat. He didn’t know her PIN number.

Having dumped the suitcase on the bed, he opened the wardrobe and drawers and packed anything that came to hand. He didn’t bother to fold things any more than he worried about soiling her blouses with the soles of her shoes.

A last look around. Nothing else. He knelt on the suitcase and zipped it up.

*

He lay on her bed, his head on her pillow, her duvet over him for warmth. Her smell enveloped him. He found it odd that she seemed far more alive to him here than in the flat they’d shared. Perhaps it was because this was where she’d been last.

He heard a noise. He didn’t know where it was coming from, but it didn’t scare him.

*

He hadn’t checked the time, so he couldn’t have said how long he’d been lying there. It was after midday. He carried the suitcase out to the car and went back to see if he’d missed anything. In the wastepaper basket he found a shopping list in Marie’s handwriting. He smoothed it out and put it in his pocket.

*

He drove steadily, nonchalantly. Now and then he turned his head, but not for fear that someone might be sitting behind him, just to make sure the suitcase was really there. He stopped to eat and drink and stacked some bottles of mineral water on the passenger seat. He’d been tormented since that morning by an almost unquenchable thirst, probably another side effect of the tablets. His urine, when he relieved himself, had a pinkish tinge. Shaking his head, he squeezed another tablet out of its blister pack. His shoulders were going numb.

He soon lost all conception of how long he’d been driving. Distances seemed to be relative. The motorway signs meant nothing. Having only just passed Lancaster, he came to the Coventry turn-off shortly afterwards. On the other hand, the stretch between Northampton and Luton seemed to take hours. He looked at his feet operating the pedals.

As a youngster he’d been mystified when pop and film stars committed suicide. Why kill yourself when you had everything? Why did people snuff themselves out when they had millions in the bank, consorted with other celebrities and went to bed with the most famous and desirable individuals on the planet? Because they were lonely, was the answer. Lonely and unhappy. How stupid, he’d thought. You didn’t kill yourself because of that. That singer shouldn’t have slit her wrists, she should have called him instead. He would have been a good friend to her. He would have listened to her, comforted her, taken her away on holiday. She would have had a better friend in him than any she could ever have found among her fellow stars. He would have taken a detached view of her problems and straightened her out. In his company she would have felt secure.

Or so he had thought. It wasn’t until later that he grasped why those people had killed themselves: for the same reason as the poor and unknown. They couldn’t hold on to themselves. They couldn’t endure being alone with themselves and had realised that other people’s company was only a palliative. That it thrust the problem into the background without solving it. Being yourself twenty-four hours a day, never anyone else, was a blessing in many cases but a curse in others.

*

At Sevenoaks, south of London, he exchanged the car for a moped big enough for him to wedge the suitcase between his legs and the handlebars. Whether he would last fifty kilometres like that was another matter, but he needed a two-wheeler. He had no wish to go through the Tunnel on foot. The light of the setting sun helped him in his quest. He hadn’t wanted to make his way through Dover in the dark.

Jonas rode down the motorway at eighty to ninety k.p.h., trying every few minutes to find a more comfortable position for his legs. He drew up his knees and cautiously rested his feet on the suitcase, hung his legs over it and let his feet dangle. He even doubled up one leg and sat on it, but a relaxed position eluded him. When it got dark he wedged his legs between the suitcase and the seat and left it at that.

The headwind seemed to refresh his brain. He soon felt more clear-headed and less as if he were propelling himself along under water. He was able to reflect on what lay ahead. First through the Tunnel, then across France and Germany, collecting up the cameras. And all this on tablets, with a smouldering fuse.

He would never sleep again.

Shortly before his destination he recognised a grain silo despite the darkness. From here it was barely two kilometres to the mouth of the Tunnel. If he turned off right, however, he would get to the field where he’d spent the night.

He didn’t know why, but something inside him made him turn off. His muscles automatically tensed as the beam of the moped’s headlight illuminated the field ahead of him. The wind was strengthening. The silence seemed to be more natural, and that was just what Jonas found so unpleasant. But he didn’t turn back. Something lured him on. At the same time, he knew that he was being irrational, that there was no good reason for this escapade.

Outside the tent he killed the engine but left the headlight on. He got off.

The motorbike with the slashed tyres. The awning. Sleeping mats lying around. An uninflated air-bed. A torn road map. Two sacks of rubbish. And the clothes he’d left here. He felt them. They were almost dry. He took off his borrowed things and put on his trousers and T-shirt. Only his shoes were past wearing. The damp had warped and shrunk the leather. He couldn’t get his feet into them.

He switched off the moped’s headlight, not wanting to be stranded here with a flat battery.

Although everything inside him balked at the prospect, he went inside the tent and sat down. He groped for the torch and turned it on. Two rucksacks. The tins of food. The camping stove. The Discman and CDs. The newspaper. The sex magazine.

Five days ago he’d spent the night here.

This sleeping bag had been lying here on its own for five days. And for over a month before his first visit. It would lie here on its own from now on.

Something brushed against the outside of the tent.

‘Hey!’

It sounded as if someone were searching for the entrance on the wrong side. Jonas strained his eyes but could see nothing, no figure, no moving shape. He knew it was the wind, could only be the wind, but he gulped involuntarily. And coughed.

No need to be scared of anything that has a voice, he told himself.

Taking care to move steadily and smoothly, he crawled out of the tent. It was a clear night. He drew several deep breaths. Without looking round, he started the moped and rode off with one arm raised in farewell.

Never again. He would never come back here again.

This thought preoccupied him on the way to the Tunnel. The same thought continued to preoccupy him as he plunged into its dark mouth and the space around him was suddenly filled with the throaty hum of the engine. That tent, those sleeping bags, those CDs — he’d seen them for the last time, would never see them again. They were over and done with. He realised that they were arbitrarily selected, unimportant objects. To him, however, they possessed importance, if only the importance conferred on them by the fact that he remembered them better than other things. They were objects he’d touched and whose touch he could still feel. Objects he could recall as vividly as if they were right in front of him. End of story.

*

He squeezed between the train and the side of the tunnel. Once past the rearmost carriage, he felt around in the darkness until he grasped the handlebars of the DS. The saddle emitted its usual pneumatic hiss as he sat down on it. A well-remembered sound. He smiled.

‘Hello,’ he murmured.

The DS had been waiting here since he’d abandoned it. It had stood in this spot beneath the sea while he’d been in England, hearing and seeing nothing, just standing here behind the train. It had been standing here in the dark when he got to Smalltown. Standing here with these handlebars and this seat and this footrest. Click-click. With this gear change. Here. While he was far away.

And now the moped was standing at the other end of the train. It would continue to stand there for a long time. Until it rusted away and disintegrated, or until the roof of the tunnel collapsed. For many years. All alone in the dark.

Jonas wedged the suitcase between himself and the handlebars. He’d had more room on the moped, but there was enough to enable him to ride straight along a tunnel. He stepped on the kick-starter. The engine caught, the headlight came on.

‘Ah,’ he said softly.

*

Stars were twinkling overhead when he reached the other side, and he felt he ought to greet each one. The moon was shining, the air was mild. Silence reigned.

The truck was standing where he’d left it. He thumped the side with his fist. No sound of movement. Cautiously, he opened the tailboard and peered in. Darkness.

He crawled inside. He knew roughly where a torch was to be found. While feeling around for it he sang a marching song at the top of his voice, one his father had taught him. Whenever he couldn’t remember the words he plugged the gaps with barrack-room expletives.

He turned on the torch and searched every corner of the interior, even shining a light beneath the furniture. It wouldn’t have surprised him to come across an explosive charge or an acid bath, but he found nothing. Nothing that struck him as suspicious.

He wheeled the DS on board. He was about to secure it to the bars when the floor beneath his feet gave a lurch. At the same time, he heard a clatter.

He leapt out of the truck. On the ground the swaying sensation was even stronger. Feeling dizzy, he lay down.

An earthquake.

It stopped just as this occurred to him, but he went on lying there for several minutes with his arms and legs stretched out, waiting.

An earthquake. Only a minor one, but an earthquake in a world in which only one human being existed provided the latter with food for thought. Was this an ordinary natural phenomenon — part of a process that would continue for countless millions of years? Was it a displacement of tectonic plates, in other words, or was it a message?

After lying on the bare ground for ten minutes and getting his clothes wet again, he ventured back into the truck. He promptly closed the tailboard and turned on all the lights. Then he stripped off his wet things and took some trousers and a pair of shoes from a cupboard.

While changing he recalled what had been reported about another quake some years ago. That one had occurred on the sun, not the earth. Its magnitude had been estimated at 12 on the Richter scale. The most powerful quake ever recorded here on earth had reached a magnitude of 9.5. Because magnitude 12 defied the imagination, the scientists added that the sunquake had been comparable in extent to the cataclysm that would result if dynamite were laid across all five continents to a depth of one metre and detonated all at once.

A layer of dynamite one metre deep. All over the world. Detonated all at once. That was magnitude 12. It sounded colossal, but who could really imagine the devastation that would be wrought by the detonation of some 150 million cubic kilometres of dynamite?

Jonas had pictured that sunquake, yet no one had been there to witness it. The sun had quaked in solitude. At magnitude 12. Neither he nor anyone else had been there. Nobody had seen that quake, just as nobody had seen the robot land on Mars, but it had happened just the same. The sun had quaked, the robot had floated down to the surface of Mars. Those events had taken place — had exerted an influence on other things.

*

Dawn was breaking when Jonas collected the first camera at Metz. He was delighted to discover that it hadn’t rained and the mechanism was still working. He rewound the tape, which appeared to have recorded something. He would have liked to watch it right away, but there was no time.

Although his eyes were smarting more and more, he drove on. He didn’t bother with another tablet for the time being. He wasn’t tired. The problems with which his body was contending were mechanical. His eyes. His joints. It was as if the marrow had been sucked from his bones. He swallowed a Parkemed.

He stared at the grey ribbon ahead of him. This was him, Jonas. Here on the motorway to Vienna. Homeward-bound with Marie’s suitcase. And with unsolved mysteries.

He thought of his parents. Could they see him at this moment? Were they sad?

Jonas had always done this at the sight of someone in distress: thought of the parents of the person concerned and wondered how they would feel if they could see their offspring in that state.

Whenever he watched a cleaning woman at work, he wondered whether it saddened her mother that her daughter had to pursue such a menial occupation. Or when he saw the holes in the dirty socks of a wino sleeping it off on a park bench. He too had had a mother and father, and his parents must have dreamt of a different future for their son. The same applied to the workman breaking up asphalt in the street with a pneumatic drill, or to the timid young woman sitting anxiously in a doctor’s waiting room, awaiting his diagnosis. Their parents weren’t present, but they would be riven with pity if they could see how their offspring were faring. The concern they felt would be directed at a particular aspect of those offspring: at the child whom they’d reared, whose nappies they’d changed, whom they had taught to speak and walk, whom they had nursed through childhood ailments and accompanied to school. The child whose life they had shared from the very first day, and whom they had loved from first to last. That child was now in distress. It wasn’t leading the life its parents had wanted for it.

Jonas had thought of the parents whenever he saw a small boy in a sandpit being bullied by a bigger one. Or workmen with gaunt faces and grimy fingernails and coughs, with worn-out bodies and atrophied minds. Or failures. Or those in distress, in dread, in despair. Their faces spoke of their parents’ sorrow, not merely their own.

Could his own parents see him at this moment?

*

Jonas took the next tablet after collecting another camera at Saarbrücken. He could hear the roar of a waterfall that existed only in his head. He looked around. He was sitting on the end of the truck with his legs dangling. The bottle of mineral water beside him had toppled over and spilled some of its contents on the asphalt. He took a swig and screwed the cap on.

He drove on, picking up more cameras as he went. Sometimes he deliberately concentrated on the difficulties that lay ahead, sometimes he allowed his thoughts to wander. This occasionally caused him to sideslip into a world he found uncomfortable, and he had to extricate himself by force — by feeding his mind with images and subjects that had proved themselves in the past. Images of an icy waste. Images of the seashore.

He drove as fast as he could. It would be hard to spot the cameras on the motorway at night, he realised, but he had to stop three times. Once to relieve himself, once because he was hungry, and once because he couldn’t bear to sit in the cab any longer and felt he would go mad if he didn’t get out at once and stretch his legs.

He got to Regensburg and picked up the camera there. At the service area where he’d eaten on the outward trip he strolled around the shop, eyeing the shelves full of chocolate bars and drinks, but nothing took his fancy. All he wanted to do was walk and allow his mind to wander.

He thumbed through some sports papers. Tried to fathom the content of an article in a Turkish newspaper. Played with the buttons on the lighting console. Wheeled a wire trolley filled with containers of engine oil in front of the filling station and looked at it on the CCTV screen. Planted himself in front of the camera and pulled faces. Went back to the monitor. Saw the trolley standing there.

He got back in the cab before dawn could be seen in the sky. It was so light by the time he neared Passau, fortunately, that he spotted the road maintenance depot just as he drove past it.

At the Austrian border he felt a weight lift from his shoulders. He had often felt this in the past, but only when driving in the opposite direction. Now he was almost through. Two more cameras, then on to Vienna. To complete his work.

He glanced at the suitcase lying on the bunk behind him. That had been her, the woman with whom he’d felt a part of something great. Although he hadn’t needed anyone’s confirmation that Marie was right for him, he could have done with such an oracle in other respects. When in his life had he been in extreme danger without realising it? The answer might have been: On 23 November 1987, when you very nearly touched a live wire. Or on 4 June 1992, when you were tempted to make some truculent remark to that uppity type in the bar but swallowed your annoyance, thereby avoiding a lethal punch-up. But Jonas would have been interested in more mundane questions as well. Like: What profession should he have taken up in order to become rich? Which women would have come home with him like a shot, and where and when? Had he met Marie before their first conscious encounter without remembering it? Or: Did there exist, somewhere in the world, a woman who was looking for a man exactly like himself? Answer: Yes, Esther Kraut of such and such a street in Amsterdam. One look, and she would have pounced on you.

No, that was cheap of him. The answer would probably have been: You’ve already found her.

Question: Which well-known woman would have fallen in love with me if I’d done something? Answer: The painter Mary Hansen, if you’d spontaneously, without saying a word, presented her with a lucky charm in the foyer of the Hotel Orient, Brussels, on the night of 26 April 1997.

Question: Who would have become the best friend I could ever have had? Answer: Oskar Schweda, 23 Liecht-ensteinstrasse, Vienna 1090.

Question: How often has Marie cheated on me? Answer: Never.

Question: On whom would I have fathered the nicest children? Answer: Your masseuse, Frau Lindsay. The two of you would have produced Benjy and Anne.

Well, who knows?

He squeezed another tablet out of the pack and washed it down with some beer.