Night Work

28

Jonas went round the flat. He didn’t notice any changes. It looked as it had before his departure. He returned to the truck.

He sat down on the sofa and stretched his legs, then stood up again. It seemed unreal to him that his trip was over. He felt as if he’d made it years ago, as if the drive to Smalltown were something that hadn’t taken place, properly speaking, but had existed within him for ever. Yet it had happened, he knew. That mug with his name on it had fallen over and he’d had to mop coffee off these pieces of furniture. But it was as if those objects had lost some of their character. The armchair in a truck parked on a motorway in France was something other than the armchair he saw here now. The TV on which he’d watched that awful video was the same as the one in the cabinet over there, but it seemed to have lost something. Importance, perhaps. Significance, magnitude. It was just a TV. And he was on the move no longer. He was back.

*

His flat smelt stuffy. He went through the rooms in silence. No one had been here. Even the inflatable doll was still lying in the bath, which was grimy with plaster and brick dust.

He set up a camera in front of the wall mirror in the bedroom. Checked the light and looked through the lens. Saw the reflection of the camera facing the mirror and his figure bending over it. Put in a tape and started filming.

He shut the door. Outside it, right in front of the keyhole, he stationed the second camera. He looked through the lens. The camera position needed adjusting. The chest of drawers with the picture of the washerwoman above it was clearly visible now. He pressed the record button.

He was just leaving when he caught sight of a videotape on top of the TV in the living room. It was the one that had recorded his circuit of the Danube Canal. He took it with him.

*

He walked through the Belvedere Gardens to stretch his legs, which were stiff after the drive. His thoughts were becoming muddled again. He slapped his face. It was still too soon for the next tablet. Better to set to work.

With the aid of a furniture trolley, he took twelve TVs from a nearby shop to the Upper Belvedere Palace. Steadily, slowly, he put them down one after the other on the gravel path. He didn’t want to hurry. He never wanted to do anything quickly ever again.

He placed the fifth set on the first, the sixth on the second, the seventh on the third. The eighth went on top of the fifth, the ninth on the sixth, the tenth on the eighth, the eleventh on the tenth. The twelfth he deposited facing the rest to act as a seat. Cautiously, he sat down to see how it looked. The TVs in front of him formed a handsome sculpture.

He plugged dozens of extension leads together and connected the TVs to sockets inside the Upper Belvedere Palace. Then he turned them on. They all worked. An elevenfold hiss filled the air.

He connected the video cameras to the TVs. The screens turned blue one after another. Then he connected the cameras to mains adaptors, which he also plugged into sockets inside the palace.

It was just before half past two. He programmed all eleven cameras to switch to ‘Play’ at 2.45. Although he took his time, he was ready five minutes after the half-hour.

With impressive precision, all the cameras clicked on together. A moment later, the eleven screens were displaying eleven different images.

St Pölten, Regensburg, Nuremberg. Schwäbisch Hall, Heilbronn. France.

4 p.m. on 11 August eleven times over. Eleven times the same moment recorded in different parts of the world. At St Pölten clouds had gathered, at Rheims a strong wind was blowing. At Amstetten the air shimmered with heat, at Passau it was drizzling.

At precisely that moment Jonas had been standing on the roof of the cab near the mouth of the Channel Tunnel, thinking of these cameras. Of the one at Ansbach — that one there, hi! Of the one at Passau — that one there. Of the one at Saarbrücken. Of the bit of Saarbrücken he was seeing now. Of the bit of Amstetten he was seeing now.

He shut his eyes, recalling those minutes on top of the truck. He felt the roof of the cab beneath him, sensed the heat, smelt the smell. At that time

this

— he opened his eyes –

had been there.

This.

Had been

there.

And now that time was over. It existed only on these tapes. But it was there for ever, whether or not it was shown.

He switched all eleven cameras to pause.

*

At Hollandstrasse he sat down on the floor and unzipped the suitcase. He had packed Marie’s things higgledy-piggledy, so the contents spilled out. He buried his fingers in the soft material. Pulled out one garment after another. Sniffed them. Smooth, cool blouses. Her fragrance. Her.

He weighed her mobile in his hand. There was no object he associated with her more closely. Not her keys, not her blouses, not her panties, not her lipstick, not her identity card. This phone had sent him her messages. She had taken it everywhere with her. And stored in it were the messages he’d sent her. Before and after 4 July.

And he didn’t know her PIN.

He repacked everything in the suitcase and put it down beside the door.

*

He put on the blinkered goggles. The computerised voice guided him across the city. Several times he felt a jolt and heard a scraping sound.

The block of flats outside which he removed his goggles was a modern one in Krongasse, only a few streets from his father’s deserted flat. It made a friendly impression. The front door was open, so he was able to leave the crowbar in the boot.

He climbed the stairs to the first floor and tried the doors. All were locked. He went up to the second floor. Door number four opened. He read the nameplate.

Ilse-Heide Brzo / Christian Vidovic

There was a draught. Windows appeared to be open on both sides of the flat. He turned left. The bedroom. Rumpled sheets. On the wall, a huge map of the world. Jonas measured the distance he’d driven on his trip to England. It wasn’t far at all. Africa was far away, Australia even further. Vienna to England was only an outing.

Smalltown. That was where he’d been. Just there.

The study. Two desks, one bearing a computer, the other a manual typewriter. Walls lined with bookshelves. Most of the titles were unfamiliar to him. One shelf held a dozen copies of each of three books. He read the titles. A chess manual, a thriller, a lifestyle adviser.

He examined the typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32. It amazed him that anyone had still been using such a mechanical monster. What were computers for?

He pressed some keys, saw the types hinge forward.

He put in a sheet of paper and wrote:

I’m standing here, writing this sentence.

A typewriter. The whole alphabet was there. Typed in the correct order, letters could spell out anything. Horrific novels, books on the meaning of life, erotic poems. You only needed to know the correct sequence. Letter after letter. Word. Word after word. Sentence. Sentence after sentence. Forming a whole.

He recalled what, as a boy, he had imagined foreign languages to be. It hadn’t occurred to him that they could differ in vocabulary and grammar. He’d thought a particular letter in German corresponded to a particular letter in English and to other letters in French or Italian. An E in German might be a K in English, an L in German an X in French, an R in German an M in Hungarian, an S in Italian an F in Japanese.

Jonas might be Wilvt in English, Ahbug in Spanish and Elowg in Russian.

The kitchen-cum-living-room. A dining table, a range of kitchen cabinets, photographs on the wall. One was of a man and a woman with a little boy. The woman was smiling, the boy laughing. A pretty woman. Blue eyes, fine features, good figure. The boy, a slice of bread in his hand, was pointing to something. A nice-looking child. This Vidovic fellow was lucky to have such a family. He had no need to look so strained. Although smiling, he didn’t seem wholly at peace with himself.

A pleasant flat. People had lived there harmoniously.

Jonas sat down on the sofa and put his feet up.

*

Most of the overhead lights in St Stephen’s Cathedral had gone out. The smell of incense, on the other hand, was no fainter. Jonas walked along the aisles, looked into the sacristy, called out. His voice went echoing around the walls. The saints in their niches resolutely ignored him.

He was growing sleepy, he noticed, so he took a tablet.

His heart was thumping. He wasn’t agitated. On the contrary, he was feeling relaxed and carefree. The palpitations were a side effect of the tablets. They made him feel he could remain on his feet for days longer, provided he continued to take them at regular intervals. Apart from an accelerated heartbeat, their only disadvantage was the sensation, stronger at some moments than others, that his head was being inflated.

He looked around. Grey walls. Creaky old pews. Statues.

*

Back at the Brigittenauer embankment he packed the two cameras and went round the flat once more. Whatever met his eye, he looked at it knowing he would never see it again.

He blamed his slight feeling of nausea on the tablets.

‘Goodbye,’ he said in a husky voice.

*

Although Jonas had looked out of his window at the Kurier building countless times, he’d never been inside. Having broken the door down, he searched the commissionaire’s cubby hole for a plan of the building. He failed to find one, but he did find two bunches of keys, which he pocketed.

Part of the Kurier’s archive was in the basement, as he’d guessed. Luckily, it was the older part. Back numbers more recent than 1 January 1980 were kept elsewhere.

He walked down row after row of shelves and filing cabinets, pushing library steps aside and pulling out massive steel drawers undoubtedly capable of withstanding fire for some time. Many of the labels on the box files had faded, and he had to pull them out and check their contents to find out the date of the newspapers inside. At last he came upon the section in which newspapers from his year of birth were kept. He looked for the month, opened the relevant box file, and removed the editions that had appeared on his birthday and the day after.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Good night!’

*

He went to Hollandstrasse to fetch Marie’s suitcase. His original intention had been to leave at once, but the sight of those familiar surroundings made him linger.

He roamed around touching things, shutting his eyes and remembering his parents. His childhood. Here.

He went into the next room, where he’d left the boxes he hadn’t unpacked. He reached into one containing photographs and removed a handful. He also took the musical teddy bear with him.

On the way out he suddenly remembered the chest. He put the suitcase down and went upstairs.

*

He stared at the chest with his arms folded. Should he go and get an axe? Or should he get it over and done with and blow the cursed thing up?

He dragged it across the dirty attic floor and over to a skylight. As he did so, he thought he heard a brief clatter. He examined the chest from every side but couldn’t locate the source of the sound.

He sat down on it and buried his face in his hands.

‘Ah! What an idiot I am!’

He turned the chest upside down. It had been the wrong way up — there was the handle. He raised the lid. It wasn’t even locked.

He saw photos, hundreds of them, together with some old wooden platters, several dirty watercolours without protective frames, a set of tobacco pipes and a small silver box with nothing in it. What galvanised him was the sight of two spools of film. They reminded him of the Super-8 camera Uncle Reinhard had given his father in the late 1970s. For some years it had often been used to film special occasions such as Christmases, birthdays and wine-drinking excursions to Wachau. In those days his father would never get into Uncle Reinhard’s car without the camera.

Jonas picked up one of the spools. He felt sure the films were of family outings, of excursions to the wine district, of his mother and grandmother. The ones shot before 1982 would show his grandmother talking to the camera — in silence, because the Super-8 had no sound-recording facility. He felt positive he would find such shots. But he had absolutely no intention of making sure.

*

The double bed was on castors. Jonas trundled it out of the furniture store’s delivery bay and into Schweighofergasse, where he gave it a shove. It coasted down to Mariahilfer Strasse and hit a parked car with a resounding crash. He pushed it on towards the ring road with his foot. Just short of Museumsplatz, where the ground dropped away, he pushed it ahead of him like a bobsleigh and, when it picked up speed, leapt aboard. He got to his knees, then his feet, and went surfing down Babenberger Strasse to the Burgring. It wasn’t too easy to keep his balance.

He set up the bed in Heldenplatz, not far from the spot where he’d painted his plea for help on the ground six weeks earlier. His intention had been to obliterate the letters, but rain had already relieved him of that task. All that remained of them were four vague smudges.

He loaded the essentials for the coming night into the truck and drove it to the square. He arranged some torches round the bed at a distance of five metres and placed two TVs at its foot. These he connected to the cameras he’d filmed with that morning on the Brigittenauer embankment, likewise to the accumulator. For safety’s sake he checked the output level. All was well. There wouldn’t be any power failure tonight, at least.

At random intervals all over the square he distributed spotlights, aiming them at the sky because he didn’t want to be directly illuminated. Before long there were so many cables snaking across the grass and concrete he kept tripping over them, especially as it was getting dark.

He placed Marie’s suitcase beside the bed. He wedged the photos he’d brought from Hollandstrasse into a side pocket, together with the newspapers, to prevent them from blowing away. He fetched the pillow and blanket from the cab of the truck and tossed them onto the mattress. By now the spotlights were bathing the square in an unreal glow. It was like being in an enchanted park.

There stood the Hofburg and there the palace gate. Beyond them, the Burgring lined with trees. On the right, a monument: two basilisks grappling head to head, knee to knee, though they looked as if they were propping each other up.

In the middle of the square, his bed. He felt as if he was on a film set. Even the sky looked artificial. In this orange half light, everything seemed to have two aspects. The trees, the wrought-iron gates, the Hofburg itself, all looked natural and authentic but, at the same time, relentlessly slick.

Jonas lit the torches and started the videotapes. He stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and gazed up at the orange-tinged night sky.

There he lay.

Untroubled by the wolf-bear.

Or by ghosts.

Untroubled.

*

Jonas swallowed another tablet, just to be on the safe side. He was lying on a bed, after all. He looked at the two TV screens. One showed a camera with the red light blinking and, in the background, part of the bed in which he’d slept for years, the other the top of a chest of drawers surmounted by some framed embroidery.

Apart from the red flashes, both pictures were without movement.

The square was silent save for the hum of the cameras and an occasional puff of wind that stirred the trees.

The very first photograph showed him as a boy with his father, half of whose head was missing, needless to say. His father had draped his left arm round Jonas’s shoulders and was gripping the boy’s wrists in his right hand, as if the two of them were tussling. Jonas’s mouth was open, as if he were squealing.

Those hands, his father’s hands. Big hands, they were. He remembered how often he’d nestled against them, those big, rough hands. He felt the roughness of that skin, the strength in those muscles. He even caught a momentary whiff of his father’s smell.

Those hands in that photo had existed. Where were they now?

The picture he was seeing wasn’t just a snapshot taken by his mother. What he was seeing was what his mother had seen at the instant she took it. He was seeing with his mother’s eyes. Seeing what a long-dead person had seen at a particular moment many years ago.

He still had a vivid recollection of the phone call. He was sitting in his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment, into which he’d moved a short while before, doing a difficult crossword puzzle. He’d opened a can of beer and was looking forward to a quiet evening when the phone rang. His father said, with uncharacteristic bluntness: ‘If you want to see her alive one more time, you’d better come at once.’

She’d been ill for ages, so they all knew it would happen. Even so, that sentence rang in his ears like a thunderclap. He dropped the ballpoint and drove to Hollandstrasse. The hospital had taken his mother home at her own request.

She was past speaking. He took her hand and squeezed it. She didn’t open her eyes.

He sat down on a chair beside the bed. His father sat on the other side. He reflected that he’d been born in this room, this bed, and now it was his mother’s deathbed.

It happened in the small hours. They both knew exactly when. His mother heaved a loud, stertorous sigh and fell silent. Silent and still.

It occurred to Jonas that, if people’s accounts of near-death experiences were to be believed, she was hovering overhead, looking down at them. Looking down at what she was leaving behind. At herself.

He stared at the ceiling.

He waited for the medical officer to come and certify her death. He waited for the men from the Municipal Funeral Service. There was a dull thud as they were placing the corpse in the metal coffin, as if her head had struck the side. He and his father winced. The men didn’t turn a hair. They were the most aloof and taciturn individuals he’d ever come across.

He helped his father with the formalities, which entailed registering the death certificate in a gloomy government office and applying for a cremation licence. Then he drove home.

Back at his flat he recalled the previous day, when she’d still been alive — when he’d still been ignorant of what was to come. He walked around, looking at various objects and thinking: the last time I saw this, she was still alive. He thought this while looking at the espresso machine, the kitchen stove, the bedside light. The newspaper, too. He went on doing the crossword puzzle, looking at the letters he’d written in the night before and remembering.

A before. And a now.

*

Towards midnight Jonas felt hungry. He daubed some slices of pumpernickel with jam in the semi-darkness of a supermarket aisle.

*

The screens were displaying their usual images. He had switched the cameras to repeat, so this was their third showing of the camera in the mirror and the room with no one in it. His back was stiff. He stretched, grimacing with pain, then lay down on the bed and took out the newspapers.

He remembered this typeface and layout. This was what the Kurier had looked like when he was a boy.

He read the articles in his birthday edition without really taking them in. It fascinated him to think that he was reading what people had read on the day his mother brought him into the world. This was what they had held in their hands at that time.

He perused the next day’s paper even more closely. After all, it reported what had happened on his birthday. He learnt that Americans had demonstrated against the Vietnam War, that Austria was in the grip of election fever, that a drunk had driven his car into the Danube without injuring anyone, and that the open-air swimming baths had been besieged because of the glorious weather.

That had been his birthday. His first day on earth.

*

In the morning he turned off all the spotlights and dunked the torches in a bucket of water. They hissed, sending up clouds of steam. Having got hold of a video recorder from an electrical shop on the way, he connected it to a TV. He put in the tape of his drive to Schwedenplatz, which he hadn’t watched after editing it.

He sat down on the bed and pressed ‘Play’.

He saw the Spider coming towards him. It rounded the bend and headed towards the bridge. Drove along the Heiligenstädter embankment and past the Rossbauer Barracks to Schwedenplatz. Drove across the bridge and along Augartenstrasse to Gaussplatz, where it had an accident.

The driver got out, walked unsteadily to the back of the car and reached into the boot. Got in again and drove on.

Jonas turned off the recorder.

*

He found himself back in the Prater. It was just before noon. He’d been for a long walk but couldn’t remember it in detail. All he knew was that he’d simply set off, immersed in thoughts that had long eluded him.

He was dragging one leg, he didn’t know why. He tried to walk normally. It was something of an effort, but he succeeded. He walked across the Jesuitenwiese. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he walked on. The sun was almost directly overhead.

It occurred to him that he’d meant to revisit the pubs in which he’d left messages, so as to recall the meal and day in question, but he didn’t care to do so, not now.

He felt as if he’d been in a battle. Such a violent and protracted battle it no longer mattered who had won.

He swallowed a tablet and crossed over into the Wurstelprater. At the cycle-hire depot he got into a rickshaw, one of those canopied four-wheelers tourists used to enjoy pedalling across the Prater. There was something he still had to do.

*

Pedalling steadily and rhythmically, he rode across the Central Cemetery. The spade he’d got from the cemetery’s nursery clanked against the rickshaw’s frame. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the sun had disappeared behind a small bank of clouds. This made the trip even pleasanter. In contrast to the hush prevailing in the city, he found the silence here soothing. At least it didn’t intimidate him.

His quest for a freshly dug mound of earth took him past the graves of many famous people. Many were reminiscent of royal mausoleums. Others were plain, with nothing more than unobtrusive stone slabs bearing the names of their occupants.

It surprised him to see how many well-known people were buried here. In the case of some names, he wondered why their owners had been laid to rest among celebrities, as he’d never heard of them. Where others were concerned, he was astonished to see that they’d died only a few years ago, having been under the impression that they’d been dead for decades. In the case of still others, he was surprised he hadn’t heard of their death.

He was so enjoying his leisurely progress across the cemetery, he temporarily forgot why he’d come. He recalled the frequent occasions in his childhood when he and his grandmother had travelled here by tram to tend his great-grandparents’ grave. Later on he had visited his grandmother’s grave with his mother. His mother had lit candles, pulled out weeds and planted flowers while he wandered around, inhaling the cemetery’s characteristic scent of flowers, soil and freshly mown grass.

He’d wasted no thought on death, nor even on his dead grandmother. The sight of all the trees had aroused visions of the marvellous games he and his friends could have played in this place and how long one would take to be found in a game of hide-and-seek. When his mother summoned him to fill the watering can at the fountain, he had returned to her world with reluctance.

In a way, he’d been closer to the dead than to the living around him. The dead beneath his feet he incorporated into his daydreams as a matter of course. The grown-ups carrying their carrier bags along the paths, on the other hand, he faded out. In his imagination he’d been alone with his friends.

Did it really have to be a new grave? The soil wouldn’t be that much looser.

An idea occurred to him.

*

The post-1995 records were stored in a data bank. The heavy ledgers used in previous years smelt of mildew and some of the pages were coming adrift. Jonas had to consult one of these tomes. He knew the year precisely, 1989. But he wasn’t so sure of the month. He thought it was May. May or June.

His search was made more difficult by the handwriting of the officials who had recorded the location of the graves. Many entries, especially the ones written in Gothic script, were almost indecipherable, others had faded. What was more, the tablets’ side effects were becoming more pronounced. His head felt as if it were in a vice and the lines were dancing before his eyes. He was determined to go on looking, however, even if he had to sit on this worn-out swivel chair for another twenty-four hours.

And then he found it. Date of death: 23 April. Date of interment: 29 April.

He hadn’t been present at the time.

He wrote the coordinates of the grave on a slip of paper and replaced the ledger tidily on its shelf. The rickshaw was standing in front of the cemetery’s administration building. He pedalled off, spade clattering. There was a strong scent of grass.

Bender, Ludwig 1892–1944

Bender, Juliane 1898–1989

The old woman had never mentioned a husband, but that didn’t matter now. He took the spade and started digging.

After a quarter of an hour he had to get down into the pit to go on working. After an hour his hands were raw and blistered. His back ached so badly he had to keep shutting his eyes and groaning. He laboured on until, nearly two hours after his spade first bit into the ground, it struck something hard. At first he thought it was just another of the stones he’d already thrown out of the grave. To his relief, however, a little more of the coffin was revealed with each spadeful of earth he flung aside.

The lid had become dislodged. He peered through the crack. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he saw a shred of cloth with something grey inside it.

He straightened up, breathing heavily. To his surprise, he could smell nothing but earth.

Sorry, it has to be done.

He pushed the lid aside. Lying in the damp, decaying wooden box was a human skeleton clad in rags.

Hello.

That was what remained of Frau Juliane Bender. That hand had held his own when it was still clothed in flesh. He had gazed into that face when it was still a face.

Goodbye.

Jonas replaced the lid, climbed out of the grave and shovelled the soil back on top of the coffin, working steadily. He wondered if it had all been worthwhile.

Yes. Because now he knew that the dead were dead. They’d been dead before 4 July and they still were. Where the living had got to, he couldn’t tell. They probably weren’t below ground, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else they might be. But the dead were still there. That was one certainty, at least.

But what of the dead on the earth’s surface?

What of Scott in his tent in the Antarctic? The tent that had collapsed on top of him and his comrades and was probably covered by a sheet of ice. Did that count as being dead and buried? Was his body still there?

What of Amundsen? What if his remains had spent the last eighty years on an ice floe? Were they still there?

And what of all the people who had died in the mountains and never been buried? Had they disappeared like the living, or were they still there?

He no longer needed to know.

*

He made his way into St Stephen’s carrying Marie’s case and a folding chair. The smell of incense was as faint as it had been the last time. Only two of the overhead lights were still on.

With the case and the folding chair in either hand, Jonas set off slowly, step by step, for the lift. He turned to listen.

Silence.

He put the case and the chair in the lift and turned once more.

Silence.

*

Jonas unfolded the chair and sat down, pulling the case towards him. He looked out across the twilit city. An occasional puff of wind fanned his face.

I hope I don’t catch cold, he thought.

And laughed.

He picked up a pebble and examined it. Felt the dust that stuck to it. Looked at the curves and protrusions, indentations and tiny fissures on its surface. No other pebble like this existed. Just as no two people resembled each other in every detail, so no two pebbles were exactly similar in shape, colour and weight. This pebble was unique. There was no other pebble in existence like the one his hand was holding right

now.

He tossed it over the parapet.

He knew he would never see it again. Never, even if he wanted to. He wouldn’t find it even if he searched the whole of the cathedral square. Even if he found a pebble resembling the one he’d thrown away, he could never be sure he was really holding the right one in his hand. No one would be able to tell him. No certainty, only vague conjecture.

Yet he remembered holding the pebble and what it had felt like. He remembered the moment he’d held it in his hand.

*

The Sleeper came into his mind, as did something that used to bother Jonas about hand-to-hand combat. When two people fought because one was trying to throttle or knife the other, they were so close in spatial terms that little difference existed between one and the other, assailant and victim. But only spatially. They were grappling skin against skin, but one was a murderer and the other his victim. One self was attacking. The other, two millimetres away, was being killed. So near, yet so great the difference between being one or the other.

Not so where he and the Sleeper were concerned.

He started flicking tablets over the edge of the parapet.

The self. The selves of others. What of the others? What had happened to them?

Why hadn’t he woken up screaming on 4 July?

He had often asked himself that question. If countless people perished simultaneously because of some natural or nuclear disaster, why hadn’t he sensed it? How was it possible for so many to disappear without his receiving news of them? How could hundreds of thousands of selves meet their end without transmitting some message? How could someone chew bread or watch TV or cut his nails at precisely that moment without getting goosebumps or experiencing an electric shock? So much suffering? And no sign?

That could mean only one thing: it was the principle that counted, not the individual. Either all were doomed or none was.

Or none. So what was he doing here? Why had he woken up all alone? Was there nothing in the entire universe that wanted him?

Marie. Marie wanted him.

With her case in his hand, he climbed over the parapet. He could see the truck standing in the cathedral square far below.

He looked out over the city. He saw the Millennium Tower, the Danube Tower, the churches, the public buildings, the Big Wheel. His mouth was dry, his palms were moist. He smelt of sweat. He sat down again.

Should he do it deliberately, or would it be better to act on impulse?

He leafed through his notebook until he came to the place where he’d asked himself to think, on 4 September, of the day he’d written those words. He had jotted them down in his room at Kanzelstein on 4 August. Now it was 20 August.

He thought of 4 September. The one in two weeks’ time and the one 1,000 years hence. There would be no difference between the two, or none worth mentioning. He had once read that, if humanity succeeded in exterminating itself, not a vestige of civilisation would remain after only 100 years. By 4 September in 1,000 years’ time, therefore, everything in front of him would have disappeared. But, even on 4 September two weeks from now, there would be no witness left. That being so, how did the two days differ?

Marie. He could see her face. Her whole being.

He wedged the case between his legs and took the old musical teddy from his pocket. Took out Marie’s mobile.

Wound up the music box,

thought of Marie,

and toppled

forwards,

slowly,

falling,

ever more slowly.

*

Jonas was already familiar with the distant but swelling sound, except that this time it seemed to be coming from within him. Within him yet remote. At the same time, he was enveloped in a glow that seemed to bear him up. He felt he was being caught hold of and embraced. He felt he could absorb everything that came his way.

A life. You were the same for only two or three years, then you had less and less in common with the person you’d been four years ago. It was like being on a suspension bridge or a tightrope high in the air. Wherever you went, the rope sagged at the point of maximum weight. One step forwards or backwards and the sag became less pronounced, and some distance away the effect of the weight upon the rope was scarcely visible. Such was time, and such was the effect of time on personality. Jonas had once come across some letters he’d written to a girlfriend but never sent. The writer was a completely different person. Another person, not another self, for that remained constant.

He saw Marie’s face in front of him. It grew bigger and bigger until it settled over him, spread itself out above his head and slid into him. Was he already falling? Was he falling at all?

The uproar inside him seemed to liquefy. He could smell and taste the closeness of a sound. He saw a book coming towards him and absorbed it.

A book was written and printed, delivered to a bookshop and placed on a shelf, taken out and examined from time to time. After spending a few weeks among other books, between James and Marcel or Emma and Virginia, it was sold. Taken home by the purchaser. Read and placed on a shelf. And there it remained. Years later it might be read a second or third time. But back it would go on the shelf. Five, ten, twelve or fifteen years later it would be given away or sold, read once and placed on a shelf once more. It would be there during the day, when it was light, and in the evening when the lights went out, and at night in the dark. And at daybreak it would still be on the shelf. For five years or thirty, after which it would be resold. Or given away. That was a book: a life on a shelf that harboured life within itself.

He was falling, yet he didn’t seem to be moving.

He hadn’t known that time could be so sluggish.

He felt as if hundreds of helicopters were starting up all around him. He tried to clasp his head but couldn’t see his hand move, it was so slow.

Dying old or young. He had often thought how tragic it was to die young. And yet, in a way, the tragic nature of an early death was diminished by the passing of time. Two men were born in the year 1900. One died in the First World War, the other lived on for twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty years. In 2000 he died too. It no longer mattered that he’d seen many more summers than the one who died young, or that he’d undergone this or that experience denied to the younger man, who had been hit by a Russian or French or German bullet. Why not? Because none of that counted any more. All those days in springtime, all those sunrises and parties, love affairs and winter landscapes were long gone. All of them.

Two people were both born in 1755. One died in 1790, the other in 1832. Forty-two years’ difference in age. A great deal at the time. Two centuries later, statistics. Everything far away. Everything small.

The persistent uproar was all around him now. All around and inside him too.

He saw a tree flying towards him. He absorbed the tree. He knew the tree.

Nuclear waste was stored in the ground. Radioactive fuel rods lay buried at many points in the world. They would continue to give off radiation for 32,000 years. Jonas had often wondered what people would say about those responsible for that problem 16,000 years hence. They would think that other people living 16,000 years before them had failed to grasp the meaning of time. Thirty-two thousand years — 1,000 generations. Mystified, everyone would have to work hard to pay for what two or three or ten earlier generations had done for their own short-term benefit. Time was a juxtaposition, not a succession. Generations were neighbours. In 1,000 years’ time, householders would be complaining about the retarded hooligan living in their basement and making their lives a misery.

Or so Jonas had thought. But it wouldn’t come to that, not now. The fuel rods would continue to emit radiation until it had all dispersed, yet silence would have reigned on the planet for no longer than the time it took to click your fingers.

He was falling ever more slowly. His body seemed to be a part of what lay ahead, just as he was becoming a part of that moment and the owner of the uproar in and around himself.

People had spoken of heaven and hell, heaven being reserved for the good and hell for the bad. Good and evil existed on the earth, it was true. Perhaps those people had been right, perhaps heaven and hell did exist. But you didn’t have to play the harp or be roasted on a spit by creatures with horns. Heaven and hell, as he had conceived of them, were subjective forms of expression for the past self. Anyone who had come to terms with himself and the world would feel better and find peace in that long, long moment of death: that was heaven. Anyone spiritually impure would consume himself with fire: that was hell.

He could see everything so clearly from up here.

Happiness was a summer’s day in childhood, when the grown-ups were watching the World Cup on TV and water wings were being handed out at the swimming baths. When it was hot, and there were ice creams and lemonade, shouts and laughter.

Happiness was a winter’s day on which you should have been at school but were on board the night train to Italy with your parents. Snow and mist and an imposing railway station, a comic book and a cosy compartment. Cold outside, warm within.

He saw a mirror flying towards him. He saw himself. He went into himself.

He saw the Secession building wrapped in sticky tape, the Danube Tower, the Big Wheel. He saw the bed in the middle of Heldenplatz, infinitesimally small. He saw his TV-set sculpture in the Belvedere Gardens, barely visible.

Happiness was also being pushed along in your pram as a little child. Watching the grown-ups, listening to their voices and marvelling at so many new things. Being greeted and smiled at by unfamiliar faces. Sitting there and riding along at the same time. Clutching something sweet in your hand and feeling the warmth of the sun on your legs. And, possibly, meeting another pram, a little girl with curls, being wheeled past each other and waving in the knowledge that she was the one, she was the one, the one you would come to love.