Night Work

7

Jonas worked for two hours, by which time the gurgling and rumbling in his stomach could be ignored no longer. He had something to eat and went back to work. He wasn’t thinking of anything much.

By evening he reeked of sweat and had torn his trousers badly, but the living room and nursery were stripped of any reminders of the Kästner family. The kitchen he’d left untouched.

He walked slowly round the flat with his hands clasped behind his back. From time to time he nodded to himself. He’d never seen his old home in this state.

Back in his own flat his stomach started rumbling again. He fried himself some cod from the deep-freeze. That exhausted his supplies.

After a long bath he rubbed some ointment into his right shoulder. The weight of the shotgun sling had chafed the skin. Although he had carried the gun on his left shoulder since yesterday to relieve the pressure, he had hurt the spot while working today.

He extracted the damp washing from the machine. While he was draping it over the clothes horse, item by item, the tape recorder occasionally caught his eye. He looked away quickly.

When he had run out of chores and was already shuffling from one foot to the other, he suddenly remembered the new answerphone. The instructions were brief and intelligible. He was able to record a message immediately.

‘Hello! If you hear this, please come to the following address … My mobile number is … If you can’t make it, tell me where to find you.’

He dialled his home number on his mobile and let it ring. The answerphone cut in after the fourth ring. With the mobile to his ear he heard the message in stereo:

‘Hello! If you hear this, please come to the following address …’

Already there, he thought.

He sat down on the sofa with a glass of Marie’s advocaat and watched the Love Parade again. The sun’s dying rays were slanting through the half-closed blinds.

If he wanted to listen to the tape again, he knew he should do so now.

He wound the tape back, then forwards, then back again. It stopped by chance at the point where the first sound made itself heard. A faint rustle.

Minutes later he heard a murmur.

It was his own voice. It had to be. Whose, if not his? He didn’t recognise it, though. Then a strange, hollow, staccato ‘Hepp’ issued from the loudspeakers. Then silence. Minutes later he heard some more murmuring. It went on for longer this time, like a coherent sentence.

He let the tape run on to the end, listening with his eyes shut. Nothing more.

Was it his voice?

And, if so, what was he saying?

*

The temperature had dropped. Dense grey clouds hid the sun. A stiff breeze was blowing, and he wasn’t sorry. It was the same every year: he looked forward to the summer for months, only to tire of the heat after a day or two. Jonas had never been a sun-worshipper. It defeated him how people could barbecue themselves for hours on end.

In the supermarket he mechanically loaded a trolley with food, trying to remember a dream he’d had last night.

He had dreamt of a nasty little boy. Latin in appearance and dressed like a child from the 1930s, the youngster had spoken in a grown-up voice. He’d materialised in front of Jonas again and again. Menacingly, out of nowhere, radiating hostility.

Try as he might, Jonas could only recall the atmosphere, not what had actually happened. He hadn’t recognised the boy.

He had never attributed any significance to his dreams in the old days. Now he kept a pencil and paper beside his bed, so he could make notes if he woke in the night. The paper was blank this morning. His only haul to date had been a sentence scribbled the night before last, but he couldn’t decipher it.

At the supermarket entrance he turned and looked back. Nothing had changed. The refrigeration units of the deep-freeze and dairy cabinets were humming away. Several of the aisles were littered with debris. Here and there, a milk bottle peeped out from under the shelves. The air was cool. Cooler than in other shops.

Back home again, having stowed the frozen food in the three-star compartment and the tinned goods in the kitchen cupboard, he plugged in one of the video cameras and played a tape selected at random.

It showed the stage of the Burgtheater. There was the sound of something being zipped up. Footsteps receded. A door closed with a thud.

Then silence.

A heap of junk from the props department. A papier mâché soldier with a business card pinned to his chest. A spotlight illuminated the scene from the top right.

Jonas kept his eyes glued to the screen. He considered fast-forwarding the tape but didn’t for fear of missing something, some vital little detail.

He grew fidgety.

He fetched himself a glass of water, massaged his feet.

He had been staring at the screen for an hour, observing the immobility of inanimate objects, when he realised that history was repeating itself. He’d spent hours gazing intently at a meaningless jumble of objects once before. Years ago, at the theatre with Marie, who liked avant-garde plays. Afterwards she’d scolded him for being utterly unreceptive to anything new.

He couldn’t sit still, felt as if his leg were going to sleep, itched all over, jumped up and refilled his glass. Flopped down on the sofa, squirmed around, pedalled in the air with both legs. And all without taking his eyes off the screen.

The phone rang.

He leapt over the sofa table and reached it in two seconds flat. His heart missed a beat, then started again — painfully. His chest heaved as he struggled for breath.

‘Hello?’

‘Lo?’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ere?’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Ee?’

Whoever it was, he wasn’t calling from Austria. The line was so poor and the voice so faint, he felt it must be an overseas call.

‘Hello? Can you hear me? Do you speak German? English? Français?’

‘Say?’

Something had to happen. He couldn’t establish contact, didn’t know if the caller could hear him at all. If not, there would soon be a click followed by the dialling tone.

‘I am alive!’ he shouted in English. ‘I am in Vienna, Austria! Who are you? Is this a random call? Where are you? Do you hear me? Do you hear me?’

‘Ee?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Oo?’

He uttered a curse. He could hear himself but not the other person.

‘Vienna! Austria! Europe!’

He couldn’t bring himself to accept his failure to establish contact. An inner voice told him it was pointless, but he refused to hang up. He paused. Listened. Bellowed into the mouthpiece. Until it occurred to him that the other person might have gathered that there were problems and would call back. The connection might be better then.

‘I do not hear you! Please call again! Call again immediately!’

He had to shut his eyes, he found it so hard to replace the receiver. He didn’t reopen them right away but continued to sit on the stool with his head on his outstretched arm and his hand on the receiver.

Please call back.

Please ring.

*

Jonas drew several deep breaths and blinked.

He went into the bedroom to fetch his pencil and paper and note down the time. After a moment’s hesitation he added the date: 16 July.

*

The work he’d undertaken in Hollandstrasse would have to wait. Jonas dared not leave the flat. He put off going to the shops and limited his activities to the bare essentials. He even slept on a mattress beside the phone.

He re-recorded the message on his answerphone at least three times a day. Which items of information were the most important? Name, date and mobile number, certainly, but he couldn’t make up his mind about place and time. The message mustn’t be too long, and it had to be comprehensible.

He grew more dissatisfied with his recordings the more often he listened to them. Doggedly, he amended their sequence again and again — just in case the phone should ring during the six or seven minutes he needed to spend in the supermarket, loading up with apple juice, toilet paper and deep-frozen cod.

Perhaps the phone call was a reward for not resigning himself to his fate and remaining active. For searching for clues.

With fresh determination, he set about assessing the video recordings. He didn’t restrict himself to a single viewing of the tape from the Millennium Tower. Having failed to spot anything the first time, he rewound it and watched it again in slow motion.

For a while he thought the recorder’s slow-motion function was defective. It wasn’t. There was no discernible difference between a normal shot of Vienna’s immobile roofs and one that showed those roofs in slow motion. Any trees that might have been bending before the wind were too few, too small and too far away for him to detect any movement.

Jonas pressed the freeze-frame button. He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button again and opened his eyes.

No difference.

He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button and opened his eyes.

No difference.

He wound the tape on, almost to the end, and put it into reverse. The picture wound back in time-lapse.

No difference.

*

Undeterred, he spent the next day analysing the videotape of the Favoriten intersection in the same way.

With the same result.

For hour after hour he stared at its total immobility without spotting anything unusual. The only thing that had changed was the shadows. He discovered this discrepancy when comparing a still from the beginning with a still from the end, but there was no sign of anything abnormal. The sun had moved, that was all.

The videotapes recorded outside the parliament building, St Stephen’s and the Hofburg were equally uninformative. Jonas devoted several days to them. He wound them on, wound them back, glanced at the phone, dipped into a bag of crisps and wiped his salty fingers on the sofa’s antimacassar. He froze and fast-forwarded, but found nothing. There was no hidden message.

When he put in the Hollandstrasse tape, the screen gave a brief flash and went dark.

He knuckled his forehead and shut his eyes. The tape had been a new one. He’d unwrapped it, put it in the camera and pressed all the right buttons. All of them! The REC symbol had lit up clearly.

He switched cameras. Nothing. The tape was blank. Blank, but not unplayed. He knew what an unplayed tape showed: it flickered. This one showed darkness.

He stroked his chin. Cocked his head. Ran his fingers through his hair.

It had to be chance, a technical fault. He was reluctant to see signs in everything.

To soothe his imagination he shot a test sequence with the same camera and another tape. He expected the playback to be blank. To his bewilderment, the reproduction was perfect.

So it had to be the tape.

He put it into the camera that had been running in Hollandstrasse, shot a few seconds’ worth of film, wound it back and checked it. No complaints. A top-quality picture.

Although it was broad daylight, he lowered the blinds until all that relieved the gloom were two narrow strips of light on the carpet. With the shotgun propped up beside him, he watched the tape from beginning to end. It never came to life. There was nothing to be seen, absolutely nothing. Yet it had been recorded.

Halfway through he pressed freeze-frame and snapped the TV with the Polaroid, then waited tensely for the picture to appear.

It showed the screen as dark as it was in reality.

While looking at the photo he remembered his notion that continuous slowness could kill. If this were true, if you rubbed shoulders with eternity by performing an endless movement that culminated in immobility, what was that — reassuring or terrifying?

He aimed the camera at the screen once more. With his eye to the viewfinder, he put his finger on the shutter release and gently depressed it. He tried to reduce the pressure more and more.

The point of release, he felt, would soon be reached.

He depressed the button more slowly still. A tingling sensation took possession of his finger. Went up into his arm. His shoulder. He sensed that the point of release was approaching, but that the speed of its approach was lessening.

The tingling had now permeated his entire body. His head swam. He seemed to hear a distant whistling that must have been deafening at its source.

He had the impression that a process of some kind had begun. Various constants of perception such as space, matter, air, time, seemed to be coalescing. All were flowing into each other. Coagulating.

A sudden decision. He pressed the shutter release all the way. A click, a flash, and a thin sheet of card came purring out of the camera. He slumped back on the sofa. His sweat smelt acrid. His jaws were clamped together.

*

The last videotape had been shot on the Reichsbrücke. It showed the Danube flowing steadily past and the motionless shape of the Donauinsel, the island whose pubs had been among Jonas’s favourite haunts. Only four weeks ago he had subjected himself, for Marie’s sake, to the alcoholic hurly-burly of the Donauinsel Festival.

After a few minutes his eyes widened. Unconsciously, he sat up inch by inch and leant forwards as if to crawl into the TV.

An object was drifting down the river. A red bundle.

He rewound the tape. He couldn’t make out what it was. It vaguely resembled a hiker’s rucksack, though a rucksack would have tended to sink rather than float. A sheet of plastic seemed more likely, or a plastic container. Or a bag.

Jonas rewound the tape several times. He watched the little red blob come into view top left, grow bigger, gradually take shape, become clearly visible for a moment, and then go out of shot at the bottom of the screen. Should he drive there at once and search the shores of the Donauinsel, or watch the rest of the tape?

He stayed where he was. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa with his heart pounding, he stared avidly at the surface of the Danube. He wasn’t disappointed when the tape ended without his noticing anything else out of the ordinary. Dutifully, he watched the whole tape again and conducted the usual freeze-frame and slow-rewind experiments before pocketing his car keys and picking up the gun.

The phone caught his eye as he passed it.

Oh well, he thought. It wouldn’t ring now.

*

He wanted first of all to inspect the video camera’s location, so he pulled up on the bridge itself. He saw, as soon as he got out, that something was different.

He walked around. Twenty paces this way, twenty paces that. The wind blowing into his face was so chilly he regretted not having worn a jacket. He turned up the collar of his shirt.

Something was wrong, he felt sure.

Roughly at the spot where he’d sited the camera, he rested his elbows on the parapet. He looked down at the Danube, which was flowing past with a subdued murmur. That sound had been drowned before, even at night, by the noise of cars and lorries crossing the bridge. But it wasn’t the sound of the river that puzzled him.

He scanned the surface for the approximate course the object had followed. It had come into shot back there. What was over there? And it had floated out of shot down there. Where would it have drifted to?

He went over to the other side of the bridge. The long, narrow island stretched away to the north-west as far as he could see, lapped by the Danube on either side. There were no grilles or gratings in the river bed, no sizeable spits or inlets, so it was unlikely that the red object had lodged somewhere or been washed ashore. Nevertheless, he had to look for it.

As he stood there with his hands in his pockets, resting his stomach against the parapet, he suddenly recalled his old, long-held ambition: to be a survivor.

Jonas had often imagined what it might be like if he narrowly missed a train that later came to grief in the mountains.

He’d pictured it in every detail. The brakes failed, the train plunged over a precipice. Carriages impacted and were crushed. Shortly afterwards, aerial views of the scene were shown on TV. Paramedics tending the injured, firemen scurrying around, blue lights flashing everywhere. He saw the pictures on a TV in a shop window. Anxious friends kept phoning for reassurance. Marie wept. Even his father nearly broke down. For days afterwards, he had to explain how this dispensation of providence had come about.

Or he took an earlier flight than originally scheduled. He got to the airport in good time, so as to do some shopping and buy Marie something nice in the duty-free shop. Then it turned out that a seat was available on an earlier flight. In one variant of this fantasy he inadvertently checked in at the wrong desk but managed to obtain a seat thanks to a computer error. Every version of the same imaginary scenario culminated in the destruction of the plane on whose passenger list his name appeared. His death was announced on the news. Once again, he had to reassure grief-stricken friends. ‘It’s a mistake, I’m alive.’ A shout at the other end of the line: ‘He’s alive!’

A car crash in which he climbed out of a complete write-off, uninjured save for a few scratches, with dead bodies lying all around him. A falling brick that missed him by inches and killed a total stranger. A heist in which hostages were shot, one by one, until police stormed the building and rescued him. A madman running amok. A terrorist attack. A stabbing. Mass poisoning in a restaurant.

Jonas had always wanted to brave some public peril. To win the laurels of one who had undergone some great ordeal.

To be a survivor.

To be a member of the elect.

Now he was.

*

Driving along the Donauinsel wasn’t difficult, but he was afraid of missing some important detail, so he set off on foot. He soon came to the shop that hired out bicycles and mopeds. This, he remembered, was where he and Marie had rented one of those pedal-operated buggies favoured by tourists at seaside resorts in Italy.

The place wasn’t locked. The keys for the mopeds were hanging on the wall, each tagged with its registration number.

He picked a dark green Vespa that would have delighted his sixteen-year-old self. His parents had no savings. The money he’d earned from his first holiday job wouldn’t run to more than an ancient Puch DS 50. When he bought a second-hand Mazda at the age of twenty, he’d been only the second car-owner in the family after Uncle Reinhard.

With the shotgun clamped between his thighs, he cruised along the island’s asphalted roads. Again he had the feeling that something was wrong. It wasn’t just the absence of people. Something else was missing.

He got off and walked down to the water’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth.

‘Hello!’

He hadn’t shouted in the hope that anyone would hear him. It relieved the pressure in his chest for a moment.

‘Hello!’

He kicked some pebbles along in front of him. Gravel crunched beneath his soles. He ventured too close to the water and sank in, soaking his shoes.

His quest for the red object no longer interested him. It seemed pointless, looking for a scrap of plastic that had drifted past here days ago. It wasn’t a sign. It was a bit of flotsam.

The day was growing colder. Dark clouds were racing towards him, wind lashing the long grass beside the road. Jonas suddenly remembered the phone at home. He turned to go just as the first raindrops spattered his face.