Night Work (27 page)

He took the next exit road. Thereafter he followed the map. It was up-to-date and accurate, and he had no trouble finding his way. At 2 p.m. he pulled up not far from the yawning mouth of the Channel Tunnel.

He wasted no thought on Calais, which once he would have liked to visit. He couldn’t imagine driving through a sizeable town, not now. As few buildings as possible and as few things that were big and overwhelming, that was what he wanted.

He began his preparations at once. He wheeled the DS down onto the unmade-up road that ran along the fence enclosing the railway tracks. Armed with crowbar and wire-cutters, he went in search of a way through it. He found one after a few hundred metres: a gate used by construction workers for delivering building materials, and it was open. He took the crowbar and wire-cutters back to the truck.

He debated what to take in his rucksack. Food and drink, certainly, and cartridges for the shotgun. A torch, matches, a knife, some string. But were a raincoat and a spare pair of shoes indispensable items of equipment? Maps and first-aid dressings were more important. And ought he to take an extra can of petrol, or could he be sure of finding another vehicle on the other side?

It was half past three when he fastened the straps of the rucksack. He went and sat in the back of the truck, where he was at least shielded from direct sunlight, if not from the heat. His fingers felt for something to occupy themselves with. He longed to shut his eyes for a little, but he knew he wouldn’t open them again for hours if he did.

He took out his mobile. The network display showed
Orange
, so he could, in theory, have phoned even from here.

He skimmed through his stored text messages. All were from Marie and one was several years old. Jonas had anxiously preserved it every time he changed mobiles. It was her first declaration of love. She’d written it, because she’d been too shy to come out with it during their most recent conversation, even though everything had already been said or hinted at. They’d intended to see in the New Year together, but Marie’s sister had been taken ill and she’d had to fly to England unexpectedly. Her message was timed at exactly 0.00.

Approaching
, he thought.

At one minute to four he climbed onto the roof of the cab. He followed the second hand on his watch. At 4 p.m. precisely he spread out his arms.

Now.

At this moment almost a dozen cameras were coming to life, filming a landscape that existed for them alone. That stretch of motorway near Heilbronn, that car park at Amstetten. They existed purely for themselves at this moment, but he would witness it. This selfsame moment was occurring throughout the world. He was capturing it in eleven different places. Now.

And this one. Now.

In a few days, possibly weeks, he would watch the films of Nuremberg and Regensburg and Passau and reflect that he’d been standing on top of the truck at that moment. That he had set off afterwards, and that at the moment recorded fifteen minutes later he would already be below ground. On his way to England.

He kept to the strip between the tracks. This was a smooth expanse of concrete, fortunately, so he didn’t have to ride over any sleepers. The tunnel was wide for the first
hundred metres. Then the walls gradually converged. His headlight illuminated the tube in front of him. The clatter of the engine was amplified by the confined space, and he soon regretted not having worn a helmet. He didn’t even have a handkerchief he could have torn up for ear plugs.

He was so tired he kept throttling back in alarm, under the impression that he’d spotted some obstacle ahead. He also fancied he saw pictures, faces, figures on the walls on either side of him.

‘Hooo!’

He was bound for England, he really was. He had to say it aloud to make himself believe it. He was really on his way.

‘Hooo! I’m coming!’

He rode flat out, undeterred by the fact that he could hardly keep his weary eyes open and was having to screw them up against the headwind. All fear had left him.

He was the wolf-bear.

Nothing could stop him now. He would surmount every obstacle. He was afraid of no one. He was on his predestined way.

You’re close to collapse, said someone at his elbow.

Startled, he gave the handlebars a jerk. His front tyre grazed a rail. He managed to regain his balance in the nick of time and throttled back. He would have to lie down for a sleep as soon as he got to the other side, even if only in a field in pouring rain.

And then an obstacle really did loom up ahead.

He mistook it for an optical illusion at first, but as he drew nearer the reflection of his headlight in the tail lights banished all doubt. It was a train.

He dismounted but left the engine running so he could see. He rested his hand on one of the buffers of the rearmost carriage.

Jonas was now so bemused with fatigue, he considered
pursuing his journey on the roof of the train. Then it occurred to him that he couldn’t get a moped up there for one thing, and, for another, that there simply wasn’t room on the roof for a moped rider.

He checked the sides. The train and the wall of the tunnel were forty centimetres apart at most.

A moped wouldn’t go through.

Only a man on foot.

He was halfway along the tunnel, he estimated. That meant a fifteen-kilometre walk with a torch in his hand and legs that could scarcely carry him.

He set off. One step, one metre after another, with a beam of light ahead of him. Descriptions of wartime experiences surfaced in his mind. People were capable of walking in their sleep. Perhaps he was asleep already. Without realising it.

Marie.

‘Hooo,’ he tried to call, but he wasn’t up to producing more than a hoarse, uncontrolled whisper.

Hearing a noise behind him, he stopped short and shone the torch. Nothing, just rails.

The next few steps were an immense effort. Mountaineers must feel like this just before reaching the summit, he reflected. One step a minute. Or perhaps not a minute, only seconds. Perhaps he was walking at a normal speed. He’d lost his sense of time.

Again he thought he’d heard something. It sounded as if someone were walking along the tunnel in the same direction, fifty metres behind him.

The third time he heard the noise it didn’t seem to come from behind, nor was its source ahead of him. It was inside his head.

The decision to lie down wasn’t a conscious one. His knees buckled and the ground came up to meet him. He lay there, arms outstretched.

Unrelieved darkness. Jonas opened his eyes wide. Blackness.

He hadn’t known such darkness existed. Utter darkness, without a speck of light. It was so all-embracing, he had an urge to sink his teeth into it.

He felt for the torch. He’d put it down beside his head, but it wasn’t there. He felt for the rucksack but couldn’t find that either.

He sat up and collected his thoughts. The rucksack had been on his back when he went to sleep. Now it was gone, like the torch. Not only would he have to manage without his supplies, he would have to proceed in total darkness.

He wondered what time it was. His watch was an analogue model without a light.

He got to his feet.

Despite his fatigue, he set off at a trot. He felt that if he stopped again it would be the end. Something would suddenly be there. It was there already, he could sense it. The moment he lay down it would descend on him.

He had a sudden vision of the hundred or more metres of seawater above his head. He managed to brush it aside, but it soon recurred. He thought of something else. The vision returned. Himself inside a concrete tube with a gigantic mass of water overhead.

This is an ordinary tunnel.

It doesn’t matter what’s above the tunnel, sand or granite or water.

Jonas paused to listen. He thought he could hear water dripping, even hissing under pressure. At the same time, he
had the feeling that something was robbing him of breath, as if the oxygen in the tunnel were being sucked out. Or displaced by something else.

He walked on, half supporting himself with one hand against the side of the tunnel.

He felt more and more afraid of noise. He feared an explosion might go off right beside his head and burst his eardrums.

There’s no explosion down here. Everything is quiet.

He had the feeling that he should have reached the end of the tunnel by now. Could he have turned around in his sleep? Could he be going in the wrong direction?

Or had he woken up somewhere else? Did the tunnel he was in lead nowhere? Would he walk on for ever?

‘Hey! Hello! Hey!’

Think of something pleasant.

His most enjoyable daydreams in the old days had transported him to distant lands. He had pictured himself standing on a seaside promenade, glass in hand, gazing out to sea. It didn’t matter to him whether he’d travelled there by car or in the chandelier-hung stateroom of a luxury liner. In his imagination he could smell the salt air and feel the sun caressing his skin. No worries, no more responsibility for others or himself. All he had to do was be at peace with himself and enjoy the sea.

Or he transplanted himself to the Antarctic, where it was never, in his imagination, unpleasantly cold. He trekked across the eternal ice beneath a blazing sun. He reached the South Pole, hugged some bearded scientists who were spending the winter at the research station there, and touched the signpost, thinking at that moment of his home.

Whenever things were bad in the old days, whenever he was suffering from personal unhappiness or professional dissatisfaction, he would dream himself into the distance.
He’d wanted to know as little as possible about it in the past few weeks. Distance meant loss of control. And you didn’t plunge into some reckless venture when you sensed that everything was slipping through your fingers.

As he did right now.

He was mad, completely round the bend. Stumbling along in pitch-darkness. What did he think he was …

Think of the Antarctic
.

He saw ice-clad mountains, blue and white. The ice across which he was hauling his rucksack was white, an infinity of whiteness. The sky above him was blue.

He had once seen a TV documentary in which scientists extracted a cylinder of Antarctic ice from a depth of one kilometre. The piece of ice they brought up was meant to help them understand climate change. Jonas was less fascinated by the climatic outlook than by the cylinder itself.

A piece of ice half a metre long and ten centimetres in diameter. Until a few minutes earlier, buried under millions of cubic metres of ice. Exposed to the light of day for the first time for – yes, since when? – a hundred thousand years. Frozen an eternity ago, this water had bidden the world a gradual farewell. Ten centimetres below the surface. Fifty. Two metres. Ten. And what a long time had elapsed between the day it left the surface and the one on which it reached a depth of ten metres. Jonas could scarcely imagine such a lapse of time, but it was a mere click of the fingers compared to the interval between ten metres and a kilometre.

Now it was there, that piece of ice. It was seeing the sun once more.

Hello, sun, here I am again. How’ve you been?

What was going on inside it? Did it realise what was happening? Was it pleased? Worried? Thinking of the time it began its descent? Comparing one time with another?

He had to think of the ice still down below, the immediate
neighbours of the fragment that had been brought to the surface. Were they missing it? Envying it? Feeling sorry for it? And he had to think as well of the other ice two or three kilometres down. How it had got there. Whether it would regain the surface and when, and what the earth would look like when it did. What it was thinking and feeling down there in the dark.

Jonas thought he heard a sound. A distant roar.

He stopped. No, no mistake. The sound of rushing water was coming from up ahead.

He turned and ran, tripped and fell headlong, felt a sharp pain in his knee.

It seemed to him, as he lay there, that the track sloped gently downwards. Immediately afterwards he had the opposite impression. He stood up and took a few steps, but he couldn’t tell whether he was walking uphill or down. He seemed to be going downhill one moment and uphill the next, but he noticed that steps taken in the original direction were more of an effort.

He walked on. The roar increased in volume. His feet were splashing through water. The sound grew steadily louder. A clap of thunder rent the air. Seconds later he was standing in the open.

It was night. Lightning zigzagged overhead, followed almost simultaneously by fierce growls of thunder. Rain came pelting down on his head. The gusts of wind were so strong they almost blew him over. No lights on anywhere.

He quit the railway track in a hurry despite the storm. Before long he found an open gate in the fence. He turned left, where he thought he’d find buildings sooner. He might just as well have gone in the opposite direction. It was pitch-dark and he had no idea where he was going. He hoped he wouldn’t plunge straight into the sea, whose breaking waves he thought he could hear between claps of thunder.

He was walking across a field of long grass. A flash of lightning glinted on something a few metres away. A motorbike. The sides of the tent beyond it were ballooning in the wind.

Beneath the awning Jonas stumbled over wet rucksacks, trampled on shoes, caught his foot on a stone that was weighing down a mat. His fingers were trembling so much with cold and exhaustion, it took him a while to open the flap. He crawled inside but only zipped up the mosquito net so as to be able to see out.

He explored the interior by touch. His fingers found a sleeping bag. A small pillow. An alarm clock. Another sleeping bag. Beneath the second pillow was a torch. He turned it on. At that moment an all-enveloping clap of thunder rent the air. Startled, he dropped the torch.

He felt he must sleep very soon.

He retrieved the torch and shone it round the interior. In one corner were some tins of food and a camping stove. On the opposite side of the tent was a Discman with a stack of CDs beside it. In the corner near the entrance he found some toilet articles: razor, shaving cream, skin cream, a box of contact lenses, soap, toothbrushes. Lying between the rucksacks was a Bosnian newspaper dated 28 June and a sex magazine.