Night Work

by Thomas Glavinic

  He drove over to the Spider and lowered the tailboard. Having gauged the distance between the wheels, he placed the ramps in position. The Spider was aboard the truck a minute later.

  *

  He parked the truck outside his father’s flat. With a metallic clatter, he backed the Spider down the ramps and onto the roadway. Dutifully, he checked the flat. All was as it had been on his last visit, the smell included. The place still smelt of his father.

  He looked at the phone in the hall.

  Had it rung a few days ago, when he’d called and pictured it ringing? Had this phone actually been here? Had the flat been filled with the sound?

  He surveyed the street through the bedroom window. The mopeds were obscured by the truck. So was the dust-bin with the bottle protruding from it.

  The wall clock was ticking away behind him.

  He felt an urge to leave the city. For a while. To convince himself, once and for all, that he would never come across another soul anywhere. Even if he encountered no one in Berlin or Paris, he might find a way of getting to England. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine spending long in unfamiliar surroundings. He felt he had to fight for every metre, laboriously adapt to every place he came to.

  Jonas had never understood how people could maintain two homes. How, in the long run, could they bear to spend a week or a month here and a week or a month there? In his new home he would think of his old home, and after a month the former would become the latter, and he wouldn’t be able to find his way around when he returned. He would roam around the rooms and see things that were wrong. A wrong alarm clock, a wrong wardrobe, a wrong phone. Although the coffee cup he drank from at breakfast would belong to him, he would still find himself thinking of the cup he’d used the day before. And of where it was at that moment. In a crockery cupboard. Or an unemptied dishwasher.

  The bathroom mirror in which he looked at himself after showering wouldn’t show him anything different from the mirror he’d looked in the day before. Yet he would feel that something about the reflection was wrong.

  He could lounge on the balcony and leaf through magazines. He could watch TV or use the vacuum cleaner or do some cooking. But he would inevitably think of his other home. Of the other balcony, the other TV, the other vacuum cleaner, the other pepper mill in the other kitchen cabinet. He would also think of the books on the shelves in his other home. Of the sentences in those unopened books and the stories those sentences conveyed to those who were able to interpret them.

  And before going to sleep he would lie in bed and think of the bed in his other home, and he would wonder if he was about to go to sleep at home or had slept at home the night before.

  *

  Jonas connected the video camera to the TV. He lowered the blinds while the tape was rewinding, so as not to be dazzled by the setting sun. The room lay in twilit evening gloom.

  He pressed ‘Play’. Turned the sound up full.

  He saw himself walk past the camera and flop down on the bed. He turned over on his stomach as usual. He couldn’t go to sleep in any other position.

  The subdued glow of the bedside light was bright enough to illuminate everything clearly. The Sleeper lay there with his eyes shut, breathing deeply and evenly.

  Although Jonas wasn’t one of those who looked in the mirror more than twice a day, he was familiar with his outward appearance and had a vague idea of the expression he usually wore. But the thought of watching himself with his features entirely relaxed made him rather nervous.

  He took the mobile from his hip pocket and put it on the table so he wouldn’t call himself again. He looked at the display. For once, he’d thought to lock the keypad.

  After a few minutes the Sleeper turned his face away from the camera. There was a rustle as he buried his head under the pillow. Some time later it reappeared. He turned on his side. Shortly afterwards he rolled over on his back and drew a hand across his eyes.

  Now and then Jonas stopped the tape and listened for sounds outside the door. He walked round the room, swinging his arms. Poured himself a glass of water. It was all he could do to start the tape again.

  Twelve minutes before the tape ended the Sleeper turned over again with his face towards the camera.

  *

  Jonas had the fleeting impression that one eye had opened. The Sleeper was looking at the camera. Looking at it in full awareness of being filmed. Then the eye snapped shut again.

  *

  The second time he watched this sequence he wasn’t so sure. The fourth viewing convinced him that he’d been mistaken. It made no sense in any case.

  After fifty-nine minutes the Sleeper muttered a few sentences. He didn’t get their meaning. He flung his arms about and turned away from the camera. The screen went black, the tape whirred. Jonas felt annoyed with himself for only putting in a one-hour tape.

  He rewound it and watched the last minute in slow motion. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary. He listened to the four sentences. The second was the most intelligible. He thought he picked out three words: ‘Kaiser’, ‘wood’ and ‘finish’. Not very informative.

  He watched the whole tape again from the beginning.

  Nearly fifty minutes went by without incident. Then came the sequence that had puzzled him the first time.

  It happened again.

  For a fraction of a second, the Sleeper’s eye looked sharply into the camera. Without a trace of drowsiness. Then it shut.

  Jonas scanned the sofa table for the remote. Didn’t see it. He was holding it in his hand. It was a while before his trembling thumb pressed the stop button.

  He mustn’t drive himself crazy. If he wanted to, he was sure he could find some other disconcerting details on the tape. Just as he could hear imaginary noises on the audio tapes. If he wanted, he could find a dozen potential pointers to any number of things. Why had that bus driver eyed him so oddly on 1 July? What had Martina and their peculiar new colleague been whispering about at the office party? Why, on 3 July, had leaflets advertising a pizza delivery service been stuck to the door of every flat in the building except his? Why had it rained so seldom? Why, after ten hours’ sleep, did he sometimes feel as if he hadn’t slept a wink? Why did he think he was being watched?

  He must cling at all costs to what existed. To what was definitely verifiable and beyond dispute.

  He raised the blinds and opened the window. Made sure the door was locked and bolted. After checking all the rooms, he glanced into the wall cupboard.

  With the shotgun beside him, he watched the whole tape again, frame by frame. When he reached the sequence that puzzled him he looked out of the window. Before coming to the muttered sentences he switched to normal play.

  Those three words were all he could catch. He didn’t get the impression that the Sleeper had wanted to tell him something. Nevertheless, he felt he was watching something important.

  He set up two cameras in the bedroom. One he positioned a couple of metres from the bed, the other so that only the head of the bed was in shot. Although there was a risk that he would roll out of shot while asleep, he was anxious to watch his face in close-up, if only for a few minutes.

  He put in two three-hour tapes.

  9

  He awoke with a twitchy hand. His thumb was itching. He thumped the pillow, scratched the place with his forefinger. The itch wouldn’t go away.

  He turned over on his side. Lying on the pillow beside him was one of Marie’s T-shirts. She hadn’t worn it, not even for one night. He’d changed the duvet covers after waving her taxi goodbye, but the smell of her lingered faintly.

  He looked at her bathrobe hanging on a hook on the wall. At her chest of drawers, from which a pair of panties was peeping. At the stack of books on her bedside table.

  *

  On his way to the 5th District he ate an apple. He wasn’t particularly fond of apples, or of any kind of fruit with pips or stones. His mother had forced them on him. Jonas had argued with her unt
il her death about what was and wasn’t healthy, what should and shouldn’t be eaten. He took the view that what was good for one person needn’t necessarily be good for another. She disputed this. In her world, everything had its allotted place. She used to ruin his summer holidays at Kanzelstein by roaming the garden with him daily and making him sample things: apples, pears, berries – even plants like sorrel. His father would shake his head at this but confined himself to sitting in his deckchair and reading a newspaper.

  Just as Jonas turned into the Wienzeile he remembered that he hadn’t got hold of any cardboard packing boxes, nor did he know of any nearby shop that stocked them. He thumped the steering wheel with his fist and did a U-turn. For the second time that morning he drove past the church whose poster assured him he was loved by Jesus. He sounded his horn.

  The automatic doors of the DIY store on the Lerchenfelder Gürtel hummed open with a jerk. Without so much as grazing anything, he drove the Spider along the aisles. The packing boxes were right at the back of the store. He couldn’t judge how many he needed, so he took a whole carload.

  Before going into the flat he went for a walk down Rüdigergasse. He rang various doorbells but didn’t wait for an answer. He shot out some window panes in Schönbrunner Strasse.

  There were statues everywhere. Statues and statuettes, human figures, decorative gargoyles.

  It had never struck him before. Almost every building was adorned with stone carvings. None of them was looking at him, but all had faces. Jutting from the oriel moulding on one house was a winged dog, on another a fat boy silently playing the flute. One wall displayed a grimacing face, another a little, bearded old man preaching to an invisible congregation. He’d never noticed any of these things before.

  He took aim at the old preacher, but his arm shook. With a threatening gesture, he lowered the gun.

  Just as he turned into Wehrgasse he caught sight of a post office sign. It occurred to him that he’d never searched a post office. Although he’d posted some cards that had never landed in his letterbox, he’d never thought to take a closer look at a post office.

  The automatic door didn’t open when he stepped in front of the sensor. He blasted it open. He gained access to the area behind the counter by doing the same to another door beyond it.

  There wasn’t much money in the drawers, 10,000 euros at most. The bulk of the cash was probably in a strongroom at the rear, but money wasn’t his concern.

  He sat down beside one of the big trolleys full of unsorted post. Picking up an envelope at random, he tore it open. A business letter demanding settlement of an unpaid bill for a consignment of materials.

  The next letter was private. The shaky handwriting was that of an old woman writing to a girl named Hertha, who lived in Vienna. Hertha was urged to study hard, but not so hard that she let life pass her by. Love, Granny.

  He examined the envelope. It was postmarked Hohenems.

  He toured the premises. There was no indication that the staff had left in a hurry.

  He felt in the pockets of a blue overall hanging on a hook in the back room. They contained some small change, matches, cigarettes, a packet of tissues, a ballpoint pen and a lottery ticket, filled in but not yet stamped.

  In a woman’s jacket hanging alongside there was a packet of condoms.

  In a briefcase he found nothing but an unappetising sausage sandwich.

  Before leaving he took his marker pen and wrote his mobile number on the window of every counter position. He trod on an alarm button. Nothing happened.

  *

  He packed one box after another, but it was a longer job than he’d expected. Many of the objects that passed through his hands were fraught with associations. In some cases he could only vaguely recall the circumstances surrounding a particular book or shirt. He would stand there, stroking his chin and staring into space. It usually helped to sniff the object, because its smell was more evocative than its appearance.

  Moreover, sorting and packing weren’t his forte. He chafed at having to wrap each china cup in newspaper, if only because he’d always disliked touching newsprint. The sound of sheets of paper rubbing together gave him goose-bumps, just as Marie had been allergic to the squeak of chalk on a blackboard or the clatter of cutlery. He could read a newspaper, but any other kind of rustling sound was anathema to him.

  Late that afternoon he broke into a local pub. He found something to eat in the deep-freeze and drew himself a beer. It tasted stale. He left as soon as he’d finished eating. The return trip seemed longer. His legs felt heavy.

  Seeing the boxes stacked in every room, he had no inclination to go back to work that day. Half the cupboards and shelves had been emptied, after all, and there was no rush.

  He lay down on the bed surrounded by rolls of sticky tape, newspapers, scissors. Unused boxes, not yet unfolded, were leaning against the wall.

  He shut his eyes.

  The clock was ticking on the wall. His father’s smell still lingered in the air, but he no longer had the pleasurable sensation of being immersed in a vanished world. The rooms were filled with the atmosphere that precedes departure.

  If he wanted to call anything in the world his own, he would have to re-create the past. Although everything in Vienna, every car, every vase, every glass was his for the taking, nothing remained that belonged to him.

  *

  He stood at the window, watching the sun sink below the skyline. It had reached its maximum height on 21 June and gone down behind a thick clump of trees on the Exelberg. Since then its setting point had been almost imperceptibly moving leftwards.

  It was on an evening like this, sixteen or seventeen years ago, that Jonas had got ready for his first solo vacation. He had packed his rucksack, taken his new two-man tent from the cupboard, borrowed a crash helmet from a neighbour. The alarm clock went off at 4 a. m., but he’d been awake for a long time before that.

  He’d got horribly cold during that eight-hour trip to the Mondsee in Upper Austria, having underestimated the night-time chill and dressed too lightly. But the adventure was worth it. Riding through villages in the dark. Passing houses in which people were just getting up, showering, shaving, brewing coffee or still asleep while he himself was on the road. The unfamiliar smells. Dawn in a place he’d never seen before. The solitude. The sense of romantic daring.

  He lowered the blinds.

  He paused outside the bedroom door. He withdrew his hand, which was already on the handle. Bending down, he peered through the keyhole.

  On the opposite wall he saw the embroidery Marie’s mother had given them, and beneath it the chest of drawers. On the right he glimpsed the foot of the bed.

  The embroidery showed a woman standing beside a well with a shirt in her hands. A traditional farmhouse could be seen in the background. The door was done in bright red, whereas the other colours were muted. Above it was the inscription K+M+B, although Jonas couldn’t read this through the keyhole.

  On the chest of drawers was a ceramic fruit bowl. Beside it, leaning against a pile of books, a pair of imitation duelling pistols, a gift from his father.

  He felt a slight draught on his eyeball.

  He was separated from the picture of the washerwoman by a door. He was outside, yet he could see what was happening inside the deserted room. Strictly speaking, no one could look at that chest of drawers. From the room’s point of view, there was no one there. It was like seeing the contents of an unopened book.

  Or was he wrong? By looking through the keyhole, wasn’t he crossing a line? Becoming a part of the room once more?

  *

  He started the tape. The whole of the bed was in shot. As he had the last time, he saw himself walk past the camera and fall into bed. Minutes later his gentle snoring issued from the loudspeakers.

  While watching the Sleeper, he debated whether he ought to view the other tape in parallel. The one that showed his face in close-up. For that, of course, he would need another TV and video recorder. Th
ese could be obtained from the neighbouring flats. Now that he was comfortably stretched out on the sofa, however, he realised how weary he was after his exertions. He dropped the idea. It probably wouldn’t make any difference.

  The Sleeper must have been equally tired last night. He lay quite still. It was more than thirty minutes before he turned over for the first time. From one point of view, that was a good thing. His almost total inertia meant that the second camera had also kept him in shot, so he would later be able to study his changes of expression. On the other hand, this uneventfulness wasn’t exactly a spur to his investigations.

  His throat felt sore. No, it couldn’t be. He normally caught one cold a year at most. Surely he couldn’t have caught another so soon. Better safe than sorry.

  He prepared a hot toddy, scarcely taking his eyes off the screen, and made a mental note to get hold of some vitamin tablets.

  The Sleeper rolled over again. He seemed to be hot, because he kicked his hairy white legs free of the bedclothes. A sigh was heard. A minute later he turned over so far that he escaped the second camera’s field of view. The upper part of his body was now lying on the other side of the bed, beside the T-shirt Marie hadn’t worn.

  Jonas pulled a face. He’d overdone the sugar. There was a little whisky left in the saucepan. He poured it into his cup and added some more lemon juice.

  After an hour and a half the Sleeper pressed Marie’s pillow to his face.

  That was last night, Jonas thought, and tonight will be the same. I shall lie there and sleep, and there won’t be any difference.

  This time he’d overdone the whisky. He laid the cup aside. The toddy had gone cold in any case.

  Jonas rubbed his eyes. He sluiced his face and neck with cold water. He found an aspirin in the bathroom cabinet. It was soluble, but he let it dissolve on his tongue. It prickled.