Night Work

by Thomas Glavinic

  It took him less than half an hour to cover the eighty kilometres to Ljubljana. The place was deserted. So were Domzale, Celje, Slovenska Bistrica and Maribor.

  He left messages in English and German everywhere. Posted cards with Slovenian stamps on them. Dialled stored numbers at service stations. Tried the internal communications network at toll gates. Set off alarms and waited a minute or two. Left business cards behind because he’d run out of notepaper from the Marriott.

  Just short of the Slovenian–Hungarian border he passed an overturned truck. He braked so sharply he almost lost control of the car. The cab of the truck had come to rest on its side. He had to clamber on top to open the driver’s door. The cab was empty.

  He examined the nearby area. Skid marks could be seen. The crash barrier was damaged and part of the load – building materials – was lying in the ditch. Everything pointed to a normal accident.

  *

  Jonas didn’t find a soul in Hungary either.

  He drove to Zalaegerszeg. From there he took the expressway to Austria and crossed the frontier at Heiligenkreuz. Absurdly, he felt he was back home.

  4

  The night before he’d left a matchbox propped against the front door the way he’d seen people do it in films. It was still there when he checked in the morning. In exactly the same spot.

  Except that the side with the eagle was facing upwards, not the one with the flag.

  The door was locked. It was a deadlock. No one could have got in without a duplicate key. Besides, the matchbox was still propped against the door. No one had been there. No one. It was impossible.

  But how to account for the matchbox?

  *

  When he made himself some coffee the milk curdled. He hurled the cup at the wall. It smashed, leaving brown splashes on the wallpaper.

  Cautiously, he put the milk bottle to his nose. He winced and pulled a face, then dumped it in the waste bin and poured himself another cup.

  He stormed downstairs with the cup in his hand, spilling half its contents. He put it down on the grimy pavement outside the supermarket and kicked the automatic door a couple of times. When it refused to open he picked up a bicycle and flung it at the glass. A few scratches, nothing more.

  He used the Spider as a battering ram. There was a crash, and the door disintegrated into a shower of glass. Shelves toppled over like dominoes as he drove to the back of the shop. Coming to a halt in a mound of overturned tins, he went to fetch his cup and took it to the dairy section.

  He unscrewed a bottle of milk and sniffed. It smelt iffy, so he tossed it aside. He opened another bottle and flung it after the first. The third smelt passable. He poured some into his cup. No clots.

  He leant against a humming freezer cabinet and sipped his coffee with relish.

  He wondered how many more such coffees he would drink. Made not with powdered or long-life milk, but with milk yielded by a cow only days ago.

  How much more fresh meat? How much more freshly squeezed orange juice?

  He took the bottle back upstairs with him. He left the car where it was.

  *

  After his third cup he tried Marie again. Nothing to be heard but the English ringing tone. He slammed the receiver down.

  He hurried downstairs again and checked the postbox. Empty.

  He ran himself a bubble bath.

  He pulled the dirty dressing off his finger. The cut was healing pretty well – it wouldn’t leave much of a scar. He crooked his finger. It didn’t hurt.

  He got into the bath. His toes protruded from the foam. He fiddled with them, had a shave and cut his nails. Now and then he darted out of the bathroom, leaving wet footprints on the floor, because he thought he’d heard a noise.

  *

  At midday he took the scratched and dented Spider on a tour of the city. He met no one. He sounded his horn at every intersection, but more for form’s sake than anything else.

  He doubted if he would find a crowbar in a normal DIY store, but that didn’t deter him from demolishing the glass doors of several such establishments with the Spider. He didn’t get out to look for a crowbar. It was an odd sensation, driving a car along aisles normally frequented by taciturn men with big hands pushing trolleys and putting on their reading glasses to squint at price tickets.

  I need something more robust, he told himself, having inspected the front of the Spider after his fourth foray.

  He eventually struck lucky in a musty old hardware store near the Volkstheater. He couldn’t help recalling that Marie had lived near there years ago, when they’d first met. Engrossed in his memories, he stowed the crowbar in the car. Just as he slammed the passenger door he heard a noise behind him. It sounded like two bits of wood knocking together.

  He froze, unable to turn round.

  He had the feeling that someone was there. He knew there wasn’t, but the sensation tormented him.

  He waited, hunching his shoulders.

  Then he swung round. No one there.

  *

  It took him a while to find a gun shop, but the one in Lerchenfelder Strasse left nothing to be desired. Rifles of all kinds stood in racks against the walls, and revolvers and automatics were displayed in glass cases. There were throwing knives, even Ninja throwing stars. Tear-gas sprays for the lady’s handbag stood on the counter, and hunting bows and crossbows were hanging in cabinets at the back of the shop. Also on sale were camouflage jackets and protective clothing, gas masks, radio sets and other equipment.

  Jonas was familiar with guns. During his national service he’d been offered a choice between doing a normal stint in the army and signing up for fifteen months. In the latter case he could choose which unit to be assigned to after basic training. He hadn’t hesitated for an instant. He didn’t enjoy marching and would have done anything to avoid the infantry, so he became a driver and later joined an explosives team. He’d spent two months blasting avalanches in the Tyrolean mountains.

  He toured the shop. He disliked guns on principle and abhorred loud noises of any kind. In recent years he’d seen in the New Year in a mountain hut with Marie and Werner and Werner’s girlfriend Simone. However, there were situations in which the possession of a gun had its advantages. Not just any old gun. The best firearm in the world, at least psychologically, was a pump-action shotgun. Nobody who had heard one being reloaded ever forgot the sound.

  *

  A bollard-free side street enabled him to drive out across the Prater. The first turning he took brought him to a hotdog stand. He lit the gas under the hotplate and brushed the surface with oil. When the temperature was right he laid out a row of sausages on it.

  With the scent of frying sausages in his nostrils he looked up at the towering, motionless shape of the Big Wheel nearby. He’d been on it often. The first time as a boy accompanied by his father, who may have been quite as intimidated by the unaccustomed altitude as his son, because it would have been difficult to tell whose hand had squeezed the other’s harder. He’d had many rides since then. Sometimes with girlfriends, mostly with colleagues at the exuberant conclusion of a work outing.

  The sausages sizzled and smoked as he turned them on the hotplate. He opened a can of beer and drank it with his head tilted back, gazing at the Big Wheel.

  On the day Marie landed a job as a flight attendant with Austrian Airlines, Jonas had overcome his reluctance to splash out: he’d rented a gondola for three hours, just for the two of them. Overly romantic gestures weren’t his thing. He detested sentimentality, but he felt sure Marie would be thrilled.

  A dinner table awaited them, complete with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a long-stemmed red rose in a cut-glass vase. They took their seats, the waiter brought the hors d’oeuvres, bowed and withdrew. An almost imperceptible lurch, and the wheel got under way.

  One revolution took twenty minutes. From high above they had a panoramic view of the city, whose traffic lights, street lights and floodlights punctuated the dusk.
They drew each other’s attention to long-familiar sights, now given fresh appeal by the unaccustomed viewpoint. Jonas topped up their glasses. By the time they reached ground level and the next course was served, Marie’s cheeks were glowing.

  During a conversation a year later, she made some faintly ironical reference to his romantic streak. Taken aback, he asked what she meant, and she reminded him of their evening on the Big Wheel. That was when he discovered that Marie had as little time as he did for candlelit dinners high above Vienna. She had enthused about the atmosphere to please him, whereas what she’d really longed for was a glass of beer on a bar stool in some pub or other.

  He took a bite of sausage. It tasted of nothing. He looked around for some ketchup and mustard.

  *

  He was surprised to find how relatively easy it was to operate the fairground attractions.

  He smashed the window of the ticket office with the butt of his gun, took a handful of chips and seated himself in a go-cart. Nothing happened when he depressed the accelerator. He inserted a chip in the slot. Now it worked. With the shotgun on his lap, his free hand on the steering wheel and his foot down hard, he raced round the track several times, doing his best not to graze the barriers on the bends.

  He broke into the ticket office of the old scenic railway. All he had to do then was press a button, and the wooden cars came gliding into position alongside the boarding platform. The trip passed off without incident. He might have been an ordinary customer on an ordinary day.

  He hurled spears at balloons, threw rings over statuettes, fired arrows at a target. He spent a short time in the slot-machine arcade, but winning money was no fun.

  He surveyed the rows of empty seats on the Flying Carpet. An idea occurred to him. He stripped off his shirt and tied it to one of the seats in the huge swingboat. In the ticket office he found the lever that controlled the motor. He turned it to automatic. The Flying Carpet swung into action. No girlish screams rent the air, as they usually did, and no one but Jonas stood watching.

  His shirt was fluttering in the front row. He followed its progress through the air, shading his eyes with his hand. After three minutes the swingboat came to rest and the safety bars snapped open automatically.

  Jonas retrieved his shirt. He wondered if you could speak of a view if there was no one there to admire it. Was a shirt enough to make a view a view?

  He opened another can of beer and took it with him into the House of Adventure. A children’s attraction. It was quite hard to squeeze between sandbags and cross swaying wooden bridges with the shotgun on his back. He trod on stairs that gave way with a crash, teetered across sloping rooms, blundered along unlit passages. When he hadn’t activated some mechanism or other, all was quiet. Now and then a beam would creak beneath his weight.

  On reaching the third floor, he stationed himself beside the balustrade overlooking the forecourt.

  Nothing was stirring down below.

  He drank his beer.

  Then he went lurching down a rope walkway in the shape of a spiral staircase.

  *

  At the shooting gallery he couldn’t resist the air rifle lying on the counter. He took his time aiming. He fired and reloaded. He took aim, fired and reloaded again. Six times the gun spat air, and six times came the almost simultaneous smack of the slug striking home. He examined the target. The result was not unsatisfactory.

  He hung up another target and slowly crooked his finger.

  He had always fancied that you could die of slowness by prolonging some everyday action indefinitely – to infinity, or, rather, to finality – because you would depart this world while still engaged in that process. A step, a gesture, a wave of the arm, a turn of the head – if you slowed that movement more and more, everything would come to an end, more or less of its own accord.

  His finger curled around the trigger. With surprising clarity, he realised that he must long ago have reached, yet failed to reach, the point of release.

  Unslinging the shotgun, he cocked it and fired. A gratifyingly loud report rang out. Simultaneously, he felt the weapon kick him in the shoulder.

  The target displayed a gaping hole big enough to take a man’s fist. Sunlight was twinkling through some other, smaller holes around it.

  *

  He went for a trip round the Prater on the miniature railway, whose diesel locomotive was simple to operate. The engine puttered, the air smelt of greenery. It was much cooler in the shade of the trees than among the booths in the amusement park. He pulled on his shirt, which he’d tied round his waist after its ride on the Flying Carpet.

  At the Heustadlwasser he climbed unsteadily into one of the boats moored there. Tossing the painter onto the landing stage, he pushed off and rowed vigorously until the boatman’s hut was out of sight. Then he shipped his oars.

  He lay down on his back and drifted. Sunlight flickered through the trees overhead.

  *

  He awoke with a start.

  Blinking in the gloom, he gradually made out the furniture’s familiar outlines and realised that he was at home in bed. He wiped his sweaty face on his forearm, threw back the thin linen sheet he slept beneath in summer and went into the bathroom. His nose was blocked up, his throat sore. He drank a glass of water.

  Sitting on the edge of the bath, he groped his way back into the nightmare.

  He had dreamt of his family. The strange thing was, they were all his own age. He’d spoken to his grandmother, who was seventy when he was born and had died at eighty-eight. In his dream she was thirty-five. Although Jonas had never seen her at that age, he knew it was her. He’d marvelled at her smooth complexion and dark, luxuriant hair.

  His grandfather, likewise thirty-five, had also appeared. His mother, his father, his uncle, his aunts – all were his own age.

  David, his cousin Stephanie’s son, who had celebrated his eleventh birthday last February, sported a moustache and had chill blue eyes.

  Paula, another cousin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had bumped into by chance in Mariahilfer Strasse not long ago, glanced at him over her shoulder and said: ‘Well?’ Her face was older, more expressive and a little careworn. She, too, was thirty-five beyond a doubt. Standing beside her was the baby she’d given birth to last autumn, an aloof-looking thirty-five-year-old man wearing brown gloves.

  There was something else as well, some disquieting feature he couldn’t put his finger on.

  They’d all yammered at him in a language of which he understood only snatches. His dead young grandmother had patted his cheek and muttered ‘UMIROM, UMIROM, UMIROM’ – at least, that was what it had sounded like to him. Thereafter she merely moved her lips. His father, who resembled his wartime photos, had been jogging along behind her on a treadmill. He hadn’t looked at Jonas.

  But there was something else.

  He sluiced his face in cold water and looked up at the ceiling. A damp patch had appeared there some months ago, but it hadn’t grown any bigger of late.

  Going straight back to bed was out of the question. He turned on every light in the flat. And the TV, whose flickering screen he now accepted as normal. He put in a video but killed the sound. It was the highlights of the Berlin Love Parade of 1999, which he’d inadvertently tossed into his trolley at the supermarket.

  He blew his nose, then squeezed a throat pastille out of its blister pack. He made himself some tea and sat down on the sofa, cup in hand. Sipping, he watched the gyrations of the young people aboard the floats streaming past the Victory Column at a walking pace. Their half-naked figures twitched in time to inaudible music.

  He got up and wandered around. His eye fell on the wardrobe. Again he had the feeling that something was wrong. This time he realised what it was. Hanging inside was a jacket that didn’t belong to him. He’d seen it in a shop window some weeks ago, but it was too expensive.

  How had it got there?

  He put it on. It fitted.

  Had he bought it after all? An
d forgotten it?

  Or was it a present from Marie?

  He checked the front door. Locked. He rubbed his eyes. His cheeks burnt. The longer he thought about the jacket, the uneasier he felt. He decided to shut it up in the wardrobe for the time being. The explanation would occur to him of its own accord.

  He opened the window. The night air was refreshing. He looked down at the Brigittenauer embankment. Once upon a time the night had been filled with the steady hum of passing cars. The silence that now weighed heavy on the street seemed to be trying to drag him down there.

  He looked left in the direction of the city centre, where here and there a lighted window could be seen. The heart of Vienna. History had been made there once, but it had since moved on to other cities. What remained were broad streets, grandiose buildings and monuments. And people who had found it hard to distinguish between past and present.

  Now they had gone too.

  When he looked straight ahead at the 19th District, he saw a light flickering in a window several hundred metres away. It wasn’t a Morse signal, but it might be a message of some kind.

  *

  He had never known such darkness. A windowless room could be very dark, but it was an acquired, unnatural kind of darkness quite unlike the gloom prevailing here in the street. No stars were twinkling in the sky. The street lights had failed. Cars nudged the kerb like dark mounds. Everything resembled a heavy mass vainly endeavouring to move.

  While covering the few yards from the front door to the Spider, he glanced round several times and called out in a deep voice.

  He could hear the Danube Canal lapping against the embankment wall.

  *

  Although he had only a vague idea of the direction in which the building in question lay, he didn’t take long to find it. He pulled up three car-lengths away, with his headlights illuminating the entrance. Then he got out, shotgun at the ready.