Authors: Thomas Glavinic
He came across familiar objects everywhere. Rolled up and leaning against the wall in one corner was the map of the world from his parents’ bedroom, which had so often sent his thoughts on their travels. The globe perched on top of a stack of boxes had served him as a desk lamp when he was a boy. His father’s binoculars were lying on a rickety shelf with his hiking boots beside them. As a child Jonas had marvelled at their huge size.
He must have been blind. He had stowed and packed and arranged things without noticing that half of their household effects were missing.
It was surprising, nonetheless, that his father had kept these objects in the cellar. He could understand it in the case of the walking stick, and the globe needn’t have stood
around in the living room. But he couldn’t fathom why his father had left the books and photographs to moulder away in the cellar.
The light went out.
He counted up to thirty, breathing deeply.
Gripping the shotgun in both hands, he groped his way back to the exit. A penetrating smell of grain filled his nostrils. Presumably, one of the compartments contained a small batch of the stuff with which older folk still, in spite of everything, liked to insulate their windows in winter.
*
He replaced the receiver and rewound the tapes. On one he wrote ‘EMPTY’, on the other ‘Bosch residence, 23 July’.
With an apple in one hand, he searched the stack of camera boxes, which he’d been too lazy to dispose of, for the relevant documents. He wasn’t methodical enough. Chewing hurriedly, he finished the apple and threw the core out of the window. He wiped his fingers on his trouser leg. They felt sticky, so he rinsed them under the tap and went on searching the empty boxes. Then it occurred to him that he’d thrown the instructions into the wastepaper basket.
His assumption was correct: the cameras were equipped with timers, like coffee machines or electric heaters. As long as you put in a powerful enough battery, you could programme them to start recording up to seventy-two hours ahead.
He found a portion of fish in the deep-freeze compartment. He heated it up and ate it with some mixed-bean salad straight from the jar, which wasn’t a good combination. He washed up, then watched the sun go down with the mobile in his hand.
You are terrible. * hic *:-) I love love love love you
.
Where was she at this moment? In England? Was she looking at the sun too?
This sun?
Perhaps he wasn’t the only person going through this nightmare. Perhaps everyone had suddenly found themselves alone. Perhaps they, too, were stumbling through a deserted world, and the spell would be broken if two people who belonged together turned up at the same spot simultaneously. That would mean he must go looking for Marie and run the risk of missing her because she, in her world, would be doing her utmost to get to him. It would be wiser to wait here.
Besides, this theory was utter nonsense. So, probably, was every idea he’d so far entertained about the events that had overtaken him.
He picked up the duvet and tossed it onto the bed. He righted the tripod with the camera on it. Removing the tape, he put it in the camera connected to the TV in the living room. Then he ran himself a bath.
The water was hot. Floating in front of him was a mound of foam resembling a kneeling elephant. He could clearly make out its rump, legs, ears and trunk. He blew. The elephant drifted away a little. He blew again. A hole appeared in the elephant’s cheek.
He recalled a story told him as a child by his mother, who had a liking for moral tales.
A little girl sits weeping in a forest. A fairy appears and asks why. The girl explains that she has smashed her father’s collection of china and is afraid he’ll punish her. The fairy gives her a reel of thread. If she tugs at it, time will pass more quickly. A few centimetres equals a few days, so she must be careful. If she wants to avoid being scolded and beaten, however, she should make use of the reel of thread.
Although dubious at first, the little girl decides she has nothing to lose and gives the reel of thread a tug. The next moment she’s on her way home from school for the summer holidays, which are still several weeks ahead. ‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘I’ve escaped a beating.’
The little girl finds a scar on her knee whose origin mystifies her. She also sees some slowly fading weals on her backside when looking at her reflection in the mirror.
From then on she often gives the reel of thread a tug. So often that she’s old before she knows it. She sits sobbing beneath a weeping willow in the forest where it all began. The fairy reappears, whereupon the old maid bemoans the fact that she has frittered her life away by using up too much thread. She should still be young, but she’s already old.
The fairy raises an admonitory finger – and reverses the whole process. The girl finds herself sitting in the forest, young once more but no longer afraid of being punished. She walks home singing and accepts her beating gladly.
To Jonas’s mother the moral of the story was beyond dispute: you must face up to everything, misfortune included. Misfortune, above all, makes people what they are. To Jonas himself the story’s inherent truth was nothing like as clear-cut. If his mother’s argument held good, everyone would undergo operations without an anaesthetic. As for the girl’s premature ageing, he couldn’t see that as a miscalculation on her part. What a terrible life the poor little thing must have led, to have tugged at her reel of thread so often!
His mother, his father and his schoolteacher, who also told the story on one occasion, all seemed to find the little girl’s conduct plain stupid. Fancy throwing away her life just to avoid a few minutes’ unpleasantness! It never occurred to anyone that she might, after all, have done the right thing. Jonas found it quite understandable. Having
been through hell on earth, she had every right to tug at her thread. Now, in old age, she was simply viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, like all old people. She would have been in for a nasty surprise if she’d begun again from the beginning.
His mother had never understood that line of thought.
The bathwater was lukewarm, the elephant had dissolved.
Jonas pulled on his bathrobe without rinsing himself off. In the fridge he found three bananas whose skins were already dark brown. He peeled them, mashed them up in a bowl and added a pinch of brown sugar. Sat down in front of the TV. Ate.
*
The Sleeper walked past the camera, got into bed and pulled up the covers.
He started snoring.
Jonas remembered how often Marie had complained of his snoring. He rasped away half the night, she said. She could hardly sleep a wink. He disputed this. Everybody denied snoring. Although they couldn’t possibly know what they did while asleep.
The Sleeper turned over. Went on snoring.
Jonas peered through the blinds. The window in the flat he’d visited some weeks ago was still illuminated. He took a swig of orange juice and raised his glass to it. Massaged his face.
The Sleeper sat up. Without opening his eyes, he grabbed the other duvet and flung it at the camera. The screen went dark.
*
Jonas rewound and pressed ‘Play’.
The tape had been running for an hour and fifty-one minutes when the Sleeper crawled out from under the bedclothes. His eyes remained shut. His features were relaxed. But Jonas couldn’t shake off the feeling that he knew exactly what he was doing. That the Sleeper was constantly aware of his actions, and that he himself was seeing something without seeing what mattered. Watching an occurrence he didn’t understand, but which possessed some underlying significance.
Three, four, five times the Sleeper sat up, took hold of the duvet, put his right foot on the floor and threw it.
Jonas went into the next room. He looked at the bed, got into it. Sat up, took hold of the duvet and threw it.
He felt nothing. He might have been doing it for the first time. No sense of anything strange. A duvet. He threw it. But why?
He went over to the wall and inspected the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against. He rapped it with his knuckles. A dull sound. No cavity.
He leant against the wall and deliberated, his hands buried in the sleeves of the towelling bathrobe and his arms folded on his chest.
The Sleeper’s behaviour was odd. Was there something behind it? Hadn’t he often walked in his sleep as a child? Wasn’t it understandable that he should have reverted to that habit in this exceptional situation? Perhaps his sleeping self had occasionally undertaken similar strange excursions earlier on, unnoticed by Marie.
Someone in the living room uttered a cry.
He froze, convulsed less with terror than with astonishment and disbelief. With a feeling of impotence in the face of a new law of nature, one he didn’t understand and had no defence against.
Another cry rang out.
Jonas went into the next room.
At first he couldn’t work out where the cries were coming from.
From the TV. The screen was dark.
Shrill cries suggestive of fear and pain, as if coming from someone who was being tortured. As if that someone’s body were being briefly stuck with pins and then allowed a few seconds’ respite.
Another cry. It was loud and piercing. There was no humour in it. Just the sound of terrible happenings.
He fast-forwarded. Cries. He wound the tape on some more. Cries. He fast-forwarded to the end of the tape. Hoarse breathing, groans, occasional cries.
He rewound the tape to where the Sleeper got up and hurled the duvet at the camera. He studied his face, trying to discover some clue to what lay ahead. Nothing to be seen. The Sleeper hurled the duvet, the camera fell over, the screen went dark.
Dark, not black. He noticed that now. The tape had wound on, but blindly. Having seen the screen go dark, he’d automatically dismissed the possibility that recording had continued.
The first cry rang out ten minutes after the camera fell over. No sounds of any kind could be heard before that. No footsteps. No knocking. No strange voices.
Then, after ten minutes, that first cry. The scream of someone being skewered with an iron spike. It was a sudden cry, more of terror than of pain.
Jonas dashed into the bedroom and stripped off his bathrobe. He turned in front of the mirror, contorted his body, lifted his feet and inspected the soles. His joints creaked. He couldn’t see a thing. No cuts, no stitches, no burns. Not even a bruise.
He went right up to the glass and stuck out his tongue.
It wasn’t furred. No visible injuries. He pulled his lower lids down. His eyes were bloodshot.
*
He sat down on the sofa and treated himself to a few minutes of the Love Parade’s silent cavortings. He ate some ice cream. Poured himself a whisky. Only a small one, though. He had to remain sober, clear-headed.
He got the camera ready for the night. In his agitation he’d forgotten how to set the timer. He was too tired to reread the instructions. He contented himself with a normal three-hour recording.
He tried the front door. It was locked.
The camera was in its place.
He looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed.
He threw off the duvet. No injuries.
He went over to the mirror. His face, too, looked unmarked.
*
Jonas was already well-acquainted with the DIY store in Adalbert-Stifter-Strasse. He drove the Spider down the aisle until it became too narrow, then went looking on foot. He found a torch and some industrial gloves right away. The furniture trolley took longer. He strode briskly round the silent store. It was half an hour before he thought of looking in the stock room. There were dozens of trolleys in there. He loaded one into the boot.
He drove back and forth across the 20th District, steered the car along the narrow streets of the Karmeliter quarter in the 2nd, crossed over to the 3rd, performed a U-turn in Landstrasse and combed the 2nd again. That, he figured, was where he was likeliest to find what he was looking for.
He could generally tell, without getting out of the car, whether a machine beside the kerb was unsuitable.
A Vespa wouldn’t do, nor would a Maxi or even a Honda Goldwing. He wanted a 1960s Puch DS, 50 cc, top speed forty k.p.h.
He spotted one in Nestroygasse, but the key was missing. Another was parked in Franz-Hochedlinger-Gasse. Again no key. Someone in Lilienbrunngasse had also been a fan of ancient mopeds. No key.
He called in at Hollandstrasse and looked round the flat. Nothing had changed. He looked into the backyard through the bedroom window. It was like a rubbish dump.
He suddenly remembered what he had dreamt of last night.
The dream had consisted of a single image. A bound skeleton lay on its back on the ground. Both feet in a single oversized leather boot. It was being slowly dragged across a field by a lasso tied to the saddle of a horse whose head could not be seen. Only the rider’s legs were visible.
The image stood before him quite distinctly. A skeleton with a stout rope wrapped around its ribcage, the horse dragging it along. The feet in the boot. The skeleton’s slow progress across the grass.
*
He was driving along Obere Augartenstrasse when he spotted another one. Exactly what he was looking for. A DS 50 with the key in it. Pale blue, like the one he himself had owned. He estimated its date of manufacture at 1968 or 1969.
He turned on the fuel tap, climbed aboard and trod on the kick-starter. At first he gave too little throttle, then too much. The engine sprang to life at the third attempt, sounding far louder than he’d expected. Although he wobbled for the first few yards, he had the moped under control by the time he drove through the gates into the Augarten.
It was a peculiar sensation, riding along the park’s dusty paths on a DS. At sixteen he’d worn a visored crash helmet and had never felt the wind on his face, or not to this extent. Nor had the sound of the engine ever punctured such a silence.
On the long, tree-lined straight that ran past the park café he opened the throttle as far as it would go. The speedometer read forty k.p.h., but the moped was doing at least sixty-five. Its owner had been more skilful at souping up an engine than Jonas had been in his day. His one good idea had been to remove the exhaust mufflers, which had had no appreciable effect on the moped’s speed but had made it sound much louder.
After circling the anti-aircraft tower he left the paths and veered off across the grass. He avoided the areas with tall hedges. Jonas didn’t care for hedges. Particularly when they were trimmed with excessive care. And it was still clear that these had been. Trees, shrubs, hedges – all had been neatly pruned and clipped.
*
I’m just overhead – only a few kilometres above you
.
*
Jonas made his way into the café. After he’d checked the rather small premises, he brewed himself a coffee and took it out into the garden.
Although the Augarten had never appealed to him much, he’d sat here several times. With Marie, whom he’d had to accompany to a series of al fresco film shows on summer evenings. Shuffling around on his chair and yawning furtively, he had gone there for Marie’s sake, drunk beer or tea, eaten at the multicultural buffet and been
plagued by mosquitoes. They seldom bit him, but the sound of them had more than once driven him to distraction.
He had waited for Marie here at the café, 100 yards from the cinema and the buffet, which operated only during the film season. He’d watched cheeky sparrows land on tables and peck at titbits. Shooed away wasps and scowled at old ladies’ yapping poodles. But he hadn’t been really annoyed because he knew that, any moment now, Marie would prop her bike against one of the chestnut trees, sit down beside him with a smile and tell him about her days on the beach at Antalya.
He rode the moped to the Brigittenauer embankment. The cars in the area had no ignition keys in them, he knew. He fetched Marie’s bicycle from the cellar and pedalled back to the Spider within five minutes. He was in pretty good shape. Then, nagged by the feeling that he’d been wasting time, he drove off to work in Hollandstrasse.
He lunched at a pub in Pressgasse noted for its 150-year-old bar. He rubbed out the food and drink prices on the blackboard and wrote
Jonas, 24 July
on it in chalk.
*
Taking the torch and shotgun with him, Jonas made his way down into the cellar. He turned on the torch and the cellar light in quick succession.
‘Anyone there?’ he called in a deep voice.
The tap gurgled.
Warily, he approached his father’s compartment with the gun held out in front of him and the torch clamped against the barrel. The biting smell of oil and insulating stuff filled his nostrils as before. He might be mistaken, but the smell seemed to have intensified in the last twenty-four hours.
Why was the compartment door open? Had he forgotten to shut it?
He remembered that the cellar light had gone out, and that he’d groped his way to the stairs without a second thought. So the open door was probably all right.
He hung the torch on a hook at head height so that it would light up the whole compartment when the time-switch’s fifteen minutes were up. Before putting the shotgun in a corner he glanced over his shoulder.
‘Hello?’
The tap went ‘ping’, the cellar light flickered. The skeins of dust and cobwebs around the bulb trembled in a draught.
He took a handful of photos out of the first box. Black-and-white snapshots, they looked as if they dated from the 1950s. His parents in the countryside. On walking tours. At home. At work parties. His mother in witch’s get-up, his father as a sheikh. Many were stuck together as if fruit juice had been spilt on them.
A photo from the next box was of Jonas himself. Five or six years old, he was dressed up as a cowboy, complete with charcoal moustache. Standing round him and grinning at the camera were three more youngsters in fancy dress. One of them, who had lost his upper front teeth, was brandishing a sword and laughing. Jonas remembered him. Robert and he had been at nursery school together, so the snapshot must be thirty years old.
A few more photos from the nursery school era. Some with his mother. Fewer with his father. Most of the latter lacked a head or a pair of legs. His mother had been no photographer.
A picture of him on his first day at school. In colour, but faded. He was clutching a satchel not much smaller than himself.
The light in the passage went out.
He straightened up. Half facing the passage, he listened, then shook his head. If he heard any noises from now on, he would ignore them. They were nothing, meant nothing.
A snapshot of himself cuddling a tiger cub and wearing a forced smile. A seaside holiday.
He still remembered the annual holidays at North Italian resorts on the Adriatic. The whole family had had to get up in the middle of the night because the coach left at 3 a.m. He pictured the wall clock’s hands showing half past twelve and vividly recalled the sense of adventure and happiness with which he had packed his little checked rucksack.
They were driven to the bus station by a friend of his father who owned a car. Seaside holidays were a communal venture involving the entire family. That was why, when they got there, he said hello to Uncle Richard and Aunt Olga, Uncle Reinhard and Aunt Lena, whom he recognised by their voices in the darkness. Cigarettes glowed, somebody blew their nose, ring-pull cans of beer snapped open, strangers took bets on when the coach would be ready to leave.
The journey. The voices of the other passengers, some of whom snored. The rustle of paper. It gradually grew lighter and he could make out faces.
A stop at a picnic area in unfamiliar surroundings. Grassy hills glistening with dew. Birds twittering. Glaring light and deep, foreign voices in the toilets. The driver, who had introduced himself as Herr Fuchs, cracked jokes with him. He liked Herr Fuchs. Herr Fuchs was taking them to a place where everything smelt different, where the sun shone differently, where the sky seemed a little denser and the air more treacly.
Those two weeks at the seaside were wonderful. He adored the waves, the seashells, the sand, the hotel meals and glasses of fruit juice. He was allowed to go for a ride in a pedalo. He made friends with youngsters from other countries. Like all the other tourist kids, he was photographed
on the corso with a tiger cub in his arms. He was presented with toy pistols and helicopters. It was fun, going on holiday with the whole family. No one was bad-tempered, no one argued, and at night they lingered so long over their Lambrusco that even he didn’t have to go to bed too early. They were glorious, those holidays. Yet his fondest memory was of the few hours prior to departure. The holidays were lovely, but not as lovely as his sense of anticipation, the feeling that anything might happen.
Jonas had passed Herr Fuchs on the way to school a few months later. He said hello, but there was no response. No friendly smile. Herr Fuchs hadn’t recognised him.
*
His stomach tensed as he inserted the videotape.
The Sleeper walked past the camera, got into bed and went to sleep.
Since when had he gone to sleep so easily? In the old days he often used to stare into the darkness for an hour, tossing and turning so violently that he woke Marie. Then she too would get up and drink some warm milk or bathe her feet or count sheep. These days he lay down and passed out as though anaesthetised.
The Sleeper turned over. Jonas poured himself some grapefruit juice, staring absently at the sell-by date on the carton. He tipped some pistachio nuts into a bowl and put it on the sofa table. Then he took the camera’s operating instructions from the lower shelf.
They weren’t complicated. Turn a switch to ‘A’, press a button and key in the required start time. So he wouldn’t have to look it up again, he briefly noted the programming procedure on the back of a stray envelope.
‘What a restless night we’re having,’ he remarked to the screen as the Sleeper turned over for the third time.
Jonas took a swig of juice and sat back. He put his feet up on the table, knocking over the bowl of pistachio nuts. His immediate impulse was to pick them up, but he made a dismissive gesture instead. He rubbed his shoulder, which was sore from carrying the gun around.
The Sleeper sat up. He covered his face with his hands. Then, standing with his back to the camera, he raised his arms. His outstretched forefingers were pointing to his temples.
He remained standing like that.
Until the tape ran out.
Jonas needed a pee, but he felt as if he’d become part of the sofa. He couldn’t even reach for his glass. He rewound the tape with the remote, which felt like a lead weight in his hand. Watched the back of the Sleeper’s head a second time. A third.
He had an urge to throw all the cameras out of the window. All that stopped him was the realisation that this would change nothing. It would merely destroy any chance he had of understanding his predicament.
There was an answer, there had to be. The outside world was a big place. He was just himself. He might never be able to find the answer outside, but he must look for the one within himself. And go on looking.
Gradually, he regained control over his limbs.
He went straight into the bedroom without a detour to the toilet and put in a new tape. He set the alarm. It was nine o’clock. Tonight he had no need to use the timer.
He pressed the record button. He went to the toilet, then into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and took a shower. Naked, he walked past the softly humming video camera and wrapped himself in the duvet. He hadn’t dried himself thoroughly. The sheet beneath him became damp.
The camera’s steady hum carried to his ears. He was tired. But his thoughts were racing.