Night Work (31 page)

He would never sleep again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five days ago he’d spent the night here.

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

Something brushed against the outside of the tent.

‘Hey!’

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

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

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

Never again. He would never come back here again.

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

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

‘Hello,’ he murmured.

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

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

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

‘Ah,’ he said softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An earthquake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could his own parents see him at this moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, who knows?

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

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.