He glanced at the screen. The Sleeper wasn’t stirring.
The characters on one page had been given glasses drawn with a ballpoint pen. He couldn’t remember doing that.
Jonas started to read the comic in his hand. Even the first page made him grin. He read on with increasing enjoyment, casting only an occasional, mechanical glance at the TV. The absurdity of the plot, the characters, the drawings delighted him. The next time he looked at the screen it was blue. At once, he put in the third tape. The Sleeper was still asleep. He pressed the fast-forward button.
He finished the comic, laughing aloud more than once. Having read the last page he skimmed the rest of it again in a happy mood. He couldn’t remember this issue. He might have been seeing and reading it for the first time. This surprised him. Once read, his children’s books had always imprinted their stories and characters on his memory.
The Sleeper was sleeping. So soundly that Jonas checked to see if he’d pressed the freeze-frame button by mistake.
He arranged the books on the shelves, browsing from time to time when one aroused his interest. He glanced at the screen, looked around to see if he’d done enough to justify taking a break, then read on until his curiosity was satisfied.
Box after flattened box went sailing out into the backyard. Pressing the freeze-frame button, he went into the bathroom to connect the washing machine and hang some hand towels on the hook beside the washbasin. Back in the living room he pressed ‘Play’ and set about sorting out his father’s personal possessions. A few rings. His medals. His passport. Some minor souvenirs. These he put in the drawer they’d been kept in for decades. Only the knife was missing. It was stuck in the wall. He also couldn’t find some photos, which might turn up in the cellar at Rüdigergasse.
The thought of the knife being irretrievable distressed him. His mood had brightened for the first time for weeks and he didn’t want to sour it. He picked up another comic.
Jonas surveyed the room. He’d finished, really. A few things might benefit from a more thorough clean, but that he could do another day.
He stretched out on the bed and helped himself to some peanuts. The tape was fast-forwarding, the display registered 2.30. He switched to normal play. With his head facing the TV, he turned over on his stomach and started reading. He crunched a peanut with relish.
*
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement on the screen.
The tape had been running for two hours fifty-seven minutes. The Sleeper extricated himself from the bedclothes and sat up on the edge of the bed, a metre from where Jonas was lying. The Sleeper turned to face the camera. He looked wide awake.
Jonas sat up too. Turned up the volume. Looked at the Sleeper.
The Sleeper cocked an eyebrow.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
He shook his head.
And burst out laughing.
Louder and louder he laughed. The Sleeper’s hilarity wasn’t feigned. He seemed to be genuinely amused by something. He laughed and laughed, fighting for breath and trying to pull himself together, only to bellow with laughter once more. Just before the tape ran out he regained his composure and stared straight at the camera.
Jonas had never seen anyone stare so fixedly, least of all himself. It was a look of such determination that he found it overwhelming.
The screen went blue.
*
Jonas stretched out his arms and legs. He stared up at the ceiling.
The ceiling he’d stared at twenty years ago. And three weeks ago.
He had lain here as a child and thought about himself. About the self that was synonymous with the life in which each individual was imprisoned. If you were born with a club foot you retained it all your life. If your hair fell out you could wear a wig, but you were well aware you were bald and couldn’t escape that fate. If all your teeth had been pulled out you would never again be able to chew with your own teeth for the rest of your days. If you suffered from a disability you had to resign yourself to it. You had to come to terms with anything you couldn’t change, and most things couldn’t be changed. A weak heart, a sensitive stomach, a deformed spine – they formed the individual, they were yourself, a part of life. And you were trapped in that life and would never know what it was like or what it meant to be someone else. Nothing could convey to you what another person felt on waking up or eating or making love. You could never know what life felt like without a backache or without belching after meals. Your life was a cage.
He had lain there and yearned to be a comic book character. He didn’t want to be the Jonas he was in the body he inhabited. He wanted to be the Jonas who was also Mort or Phil, or both of them, or at least a friend of theirs. He wanted to live in their reality, under the rules and natural laws that governed their world. They were forever being beaten up, having accidents, jumping off skyscrapers, getting burnt, dismembered or devoured, exploding or being hurled through space to distant planets. But explosions didn’t kill them and severed hands could be sewn on again. They got hurt, admittedly, but the pain had gone in the next picture. They had a whale of a time. Being them must be fun.
They didn’t die, either.
The ceiling. To be that, not Jonas. To be suspended, year after year, above a room in which people came and went. Some would disappear and others take their place, but he would remain suspended up there. Time would trickle on. He wouldn’t care.
To be a pebble by the sea. To hear the roar of the waves. Or not to hear it. To lie on the shore for centuries and then be tossed into the sea by some little girl, only to be washed up again after hundreds more years have gone by. Washed up on the shore. On seashells ground to sand.
To be a tree. When it was planted, Henry I, or IV, or VI ruled, and then came a Leopold or a Charles. The tree had stood in a field with the sun shining down on it. It had bidden the sun farewell at dusk, when the dew started to fall. Reunited in the morning, the tree and the sun couldn’t have cared less whether someone named Shakespeare was alive or some queen was beheaded 1,000 kilometres away. A peasant had come and lopped off some branches, and the peasant had a son, and the son had a son of his own, but the tree continued to stand there. It was still young, pain-free, fearless. Napoleon became emperor, but the tree didn’t budge. Napoleon came past and bivouacked in its shade, but the tree didn’t care. Kaiser Wilhelm had come and touched the tree later on, unaware that Napoleon had done the same, but the tree cared as little about Napoleon and Wilhelm as it did about the great-grandson of the great-grandson of the first peasant who had come and pruned its shoots.
To be a tree like that one, a tree that had stood in the field at the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, in the sixties, eighties and nineties. One that was standing there now, caressed by the wind.
*
The sun was twinkling through the blinds. Jonas locked the door behind him and searched the flat, leaving his shotgun beside the hall cupboard. No one appeared to have been there. The knife was still embedded in the wall. He tugged at it without success.
He made himself something to eat and drank a grappa. Leaning out of the window, he savoured the sun’s rays with his eyes shut.
Eight o’clock. He felt tired but couldn’t afford to go to sleep, there was so much to do.
He removed the tapes from the cameras in the flat next door and numbered them. Clasping tapes 1–26 to his chest, he returned to his own flat, pushed a blank video into the recorder and put tape 1 in the camera.
The Spider came into shot, travelling at full speed. It raced along the Brigittenauer embankment, heading straight for the camera. The roar of the engine was so deafening as it drove past he turned the volume down.
The din subsided to a distant hum. Moments later silence fell.
The screen showed the deserted embankment.
No sign of movement anywhere.
He wound the tape on. Three, eight, twelve minutes. Then pressed the play button. Again he saw the deserted embankmen
t. He waited. Another few minutes, and the sound of a rapidly approaching car could be heard. The Spider came into shot once more. It raced towards the camera, its battered bonnet clearly visible. And roared past.
The street lay there, deserted once more. The branches of the trees lining the embankment stirred gently in the wind.
Jonas rewound the tape. He pressed the play button on the camera and the record button on the recorder. Just as the car sped out of shot, he stopped recording. He removed tape 1 and put in tape 2, which showed the route from the balcony. He pressed the red button. Again he stopped recording just as the Spider went out of shot.
The third tape, which came from the other balcony camera, had filmed the Heiligenstädter Brücke. He had to rewind it twice to catch the precise moment when the car came into shot. The Spider crossed the canal and disappeared. Jonas stopped recording and left the tape in the camera running.
He looked at the deserted bridge.
No one had ever seen what he was seeing. The bridge railings, the waters of the Danube Canal. The street, the winking traffic lights. At just after 3 p.m. on that particular day. It had been recorded with no one nearby. This recording had been made by a machine with no human witnesses around. Any enjoyment to be derived from the process had been confined to the machine itself and its subjects. The deserted street. The traffic lights. The bushes. Otherwise: no one.
But these images proved that those minutes had elapsed. They had come and gone. If he went there now, he would encounter a different bridge at a different time from the one he was seeing. Yet it had existed, even though he hadn’t been present.
He put in tape 4, followed by 5, 6 and 7. He made rapid progress. From time to time he got up to refill his glass, make a snack or simply stretch his legs. He never took long, but it was dark outside by the time he played the tape showing Gaussplatz.
The Spider grazed a parked car and went into a skid. It rammed a car on the opposite side of the street, then skidded back across the roadway and collided with a van. The impact was so violent, Jonas stared at the screen transfixed. The Spider cannoned off the van and out onto the roundabout, where it spun several times on its own axis and finally came to rest.
For a minute nothing happened. Another minute went by. And another. Then the driver got out, went round to the back of the car and opened the boot. After looking for something, he sat behind the wheel again.
Three minutes later the car drove on.
Jonas still hadn’t transferred this sequence to the video recorder. He rewound the tape, but he didn’t press the record button even then. He watched the accident in disbelief, saw the driver get out and look around to see if he was being observed, then go to the back of the car. Why had he done that? What was he looking for in the boot?
And why couldn’t he, Jonas, remember all this?
The tape came to an end at half past eleven. He still hadn’t watched the second circuit. Maybe he would catch up with it another time. One circuit would suffice for the present. He would watch it when he got a chance.
Jonas roamed the flat, glass in hand, thinking how many years he’d lived there. He made sure the front door was locked. Read Marie’s text messages on his mobile. Flexed his stiff shoulders. Contemplated the knife in the bedroom wall.
Catching sight of his eyes in the mirror as he cleaned his teeth, he gave a start and looked down while the humming electric toothbrush whipped the toothpaste into foam. He spat it out and rinsed his mouth.
Back in the bedroom once more, he gripped the hilt of the knife and tugged with all his might. It didn’t move a single millimetre.
He examined the carpet on his knees. It seemed to him that the carpet beneath the knife was a little cleaner than the surrounding area.
He took the vacuum cleaner from the bedroom cupboard, where the unwieldy contraption was kept for lack of space. Removing the bag, he went into the bathroom and emptied its contents into the bathtub. A cloud of dust went up. He coughed, one hand shielding his face and the other probing the wad of compressed fluff. He soon came across some white powder.
Plaster dust.
18
Perhaps order was the key.
He rubbed his eyes, trying to fix the thought in his mind. Order. Changing as little as possible and, wherever possible, re-creating the original state of affairs.
He blinked. He’d had a dream, a bad dream. About what?
He looked at the wall. The knife had gone. He sat up abruptly. The camera, the shotgun, the computer, all were in their proper places. But the knife had disappeared.
He scanned the floor while trying to button his shirt with trembling fingers. Nothing. He went into the living room. No knife.
His head was aching badly. He took two aspirins and breakfasted on some marble cake straight from the plastic wrapping. It tasted artificial. He washed it down with orange juice. The memory of his dream came back to him.
He was in a room full of undersized pieces of furniture that looked as if they’d shrunk or been made for midgets. Seated in an armchair facing him was a body without a head. It didn’t move.
Jonas stared at the headless man. He thought he was dead until one of his hands moved. So, soon afterwards, did his arm. Jonas muttered something unintelligible. The headless man made a dismissive gesture. Jonas noticed that the place between his shoulders from which the neck would have emerged was dark with a white circle in the middle.
Without knowing or understanding what he was saying, Jonas addressed the headless man once more. The upper part of the headless man’s torso moved stiffly, as if he meant to turn and look sideways or over his shoulder. He was wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, the top two buttons undone to reveal a chest covered with curly grey hair. Jonas said something. Then the headless man started to rock in his chair. Back and forth, back and forth he went, much faster than normal strength and agility would have permitted.
Laying aside his slice of cake, Jonas drained his glass and jotted down the outline of the dream in his notebook.
*
All he could find in the tool drawer was a small hammer suitable at best for knocking picture hooks into a plywood partition. He looked in the box beneath the bathroom washbasin, where he kept tools when he was too lazy to take them downstairs. Empty.
He took the lift down. His compartment in the cellar smelt of cold rubber. The toolbox containing the bigger tools was behind the Toyota’s winter tyres.
Jonas swung the sledgehammer experimentally. That would do the trick. He got out of the cellar quickly and ran back up the stairs. From below came more and more noises he didn’t like the sound of. He was imagining them, of course. But he didn’t want to expose himself to them for too long.
He stood in front of the wall. For a moment he debated whether it wouldn’t be better to abandon the whole idea. Then he raised the sledgehammer and swung it with all his might. It struck the very spot where the knife had been embedded. There was a dull thud. Flakes of plaster rained down.
He took a second swing. This time the sledgehammer made a big dent in the wall. Red brick dust trickled from it.
Bricks in a building made of reinforced concrete?
He swung at the wall again and again. The hole grew bigger. Before long it was the size of the mirror-fronted cabinet over the bathroom basin. Now, whenever the sledgehammer landed on the edges of the hole, it bounced off them.
He explored the cavity with his hands. This part of the wall really did consist of brittle old brickwork, whereas the surrounding area, which was impervious to the sledgehammer, was concrete.
His fingers felt something wedged between two bricks.
Carefully, he knocked them out. A piece of plastic. He yanked at it, but it seemed to be deeply embedded.
There was so much debris on the floor by now that he had to fetch a broom and sweep it up. Deeper and deeper into the wall he went. He didn’t like the look of the thing he was tugging at, so he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. The dust was making him cough.
Having exposed a substantial area with one hard blow, he gave the object another tug. With a jerk, it came away in his hand. Holding it gingerly, he took it through to the bathtub.
Jonas examined his find closely before turning on the tap. He wanted to make sure that the grey film adhering to the surface was ordinary dust, not powdered potassium or magnesium, substances that gave off an inflammable gas when in contact with water. It might even be some kind of explosive that detonated under similar circumstances. He would simply have to risk it.
Using the shower head, he washed off the dust and dirt that clung to the object. It was indeed made of plastic. It looked like a raincoat. He mopped his brow and used the same cloth to dry the object. Then he picked it up and spread it out.
It wasn’t a raincoat. It was an inflatable doll. Although, on closer inspection, it lacked the orifices that would have identified it as a sex toy.
*
Jonas deposited the two suitcases beside the Spider. He circled the car, closely examining the bodywork. He could now understand why the front had been so badly damaged. After a crash like that, it was a miracle the car still went.
He inspected the boot very closely before loading the suitcases. It was empty save for the first-aid kit and the crowbar. What he had been doing in there after the collision remained a mystery.
He checked the number of kilometres on the clock, comparing the numerals with those he had recorded in his notebook the day before. They tallied.
At his parents’ flat he discovered he was short of space. The cupboard he’d kept his clothes in as a boy had ended up on a rubbish tip years ago. He would have to dump the unopened suitcases in his former nursery until he found the time to get hold of an additional wardrobe, which he would also put in there. The living room was now as it had been in his childhood, and any extraneous piece of furniture would spoil its appearance.
Night Work Page 19