Night Work

by Thomas Glavinic

  He vaguely remembered that they’d stored a lot of things in the attic because there were no storage spaces in the basement. He hadn’t been up there since he was a boy.

  He fetched the bunch of keys left behind by the Kästner family, together with the torch and the shotgun. There was no lift, but he was scarcely out of breath by the time he reached the fifth floor. At least he was still reasonably fit.

  The heavy door creaked open. A cold current of air rushed out at him. The light switch was so thick with dust and cobwebs that he guessed he must be the attic’s first visitor for years. He surveyed it by the light of the naked bulb suspended from a beam.

  There were no separate compartments. Numbers scrawled in whitewash on three-metre-high beams indicated that the space beneath each belonged to a particular flat. In one corner lay a bicycle frame without its tyres and chain, and not far from it a heap of sacks filled with plaster. Some broken slats were leaning against the wall in another corner. He also spotted a tubeless TV.

  On the floor beneath the number of his parents’ flat stood a heavy chest. Jonas knew at once that it had belonged to his father, not the Kästners. There was nothing to indicate this, no nameplate or label. Nor did he recognise it. But it was his father’s beyond a doubt.

  When he went to open the chest, he found that it had no lock or handles.

  He examined every side, getting his hands dirty in the process. He patted off the dust on his trouser legs and pulled a face. Then he gave up.

  He went downstairs again. At least the attic would have enough room for the boxes. Before carrying them up there, however, he wanted to inspect their contents. For the moment, he dumped them in one of the neighbouring flats.

  It struck him that he could simply leave them there. It was cleaner and he wouldn’t have so far to go if he needed something. But he stuck to his original plan: to restore order and maintain it. Those boxes didn’t belong in his parents’ flat. They had no business there, only in the space reserved for them in the attic.

  *

  The wind had got up again. Dozens of rustling plastic and paper bags, which must have escaped from one of the vegetable stalls in the Karmelitermarkt, were scudding across the square. Jonas got a speck of dust in his eye. It started to water.

  He made himself a quick snack in an inviting-looking pub, then walked on through the streets. This district had undergone many changes since his boyhood. Most of the shops and restaurants were unfamiliar to him. He felt in his pocket for one of the little cards he’d written on. It bore the word ‘Blue’. That was no help. He looked around but couldn’t see anything that colour.

  The wind was so strong it nudged him in the back. He kept on breaking into an involuntary trot. He turned to look. Just the wind, nothing more. He walked on, only to swing round again.

  The street was deserted. No suspicious movement, no sound. Just the slithering of paper and scraps of refuse being blown along the street by the wind.

  In Nestroygasse he looked at his watch. Not even six yet. He had plenty of time.

  *

  The front door wasn’t locked. He called, waited a few moments, then ventured inside.

  A low hum was coming from behind the door on his left. He raised his shotgun and kicked the handle. The door burst open. He fired, cocked the gun and fired again. Waited a moment, then yelled and dashed into the room.

  It was empty.

  He was standing in a pellet-riddled bathroom, and the sound he’d heard was the gas boiler heating up the water. Catching sight of his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin, he quickly averted his gaze.

  The floorboards creaked as he made his way around the flat. From the bathroom into the hallway. From the hallway to the kitchen. Back into the hallway and from there into the living room. The place was dark, like most old flats. He turned some lights on.

  He searched various drawers for notes, letters and similar documents. All he found were bills.

  The bedroom curtains were drawn. He saw the framed photograph on the wall as soon as he turned on the light. A boy of about ten with an expressionless face. Ingo. For a moment he thought the boy was smiling. Something else puzzled him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  ‘Anyone there?’ His voice cracked.

  There were some photo albums on a shelf in the living room. He pulled one out and flicked through it without putting his gun down.

  Photos dating from the seventies. Colour prints as poor as the ones he’d found at Rüdigergasse. The same haircuts, the same trousers, the same shirt collars, the same little cars.

  All at once it went dark outside. He ran to the window. The shotgun fell over with a crash behind him. But it was only a storm cloud passing across the sun.

  He had to sit down. Absently, he glanced at photo after photo. He felt close to tears. His heartbeat steadied, but only gradually.

  In one of the photos he recognised himself.

  He turned over the page. Snaps of himself and Ingo. More of the same on the next page. He couldn’t recall being on such close terms with Ingo. He’d been here only once, so he couldn’t think when or where these pictures had been taken. The backgrounds offered no clue.

  A page torn from a newspaper fell out of one of the albums and onto his lap. It was foxed and faded and folded in the middle. Most of it was filled with death notices.

  Our Ingo. In his tenth year. Tragic accident. Sorely missed.

  Shaken, he laid the album aside. Then he remembered the framed photograph. He went back into the bedroom. This time he noticed what had escaped him before: it had a black border.

  He was almost as thrown by his former playmate’s death as he was by the fact that he hadn’t learnt of it until twenty-five years after the event. They’d only had anything to do with one another in primary school. To him, Ingo Lüscher had been alive throughout these years – in fact he’d sometimes wondered what had become of the fair-haired lad from the neighbourhood. Little had been said about the accident, it seemed. His parents couldn’t have known Ingo’s, or they would have mentioned it.

  How had it happened?

  He made another search of the drawers in the living room. He shook the photograph albums, but only a couple of loose prints fell out. He looked for a computer, but the Lüschers didn’t seem to have gone in for modern technology. There wasn’t even a TV.

  The folder was in the bedside table. It contained press cuttings. Accident: child killed. Motorbike knocks boy down: dead.

  He read every article. What one omitted, the other mentioned, and he soon managed to form an idea of what had happened. Ingo had evidently run out into the street while playing, and the motorcyclist had been unable to avoid him. The rear-view mirror had broken the boy’s neck.

  Killed by a rear-view mirror. Jonas had never heard of such a thing before.

  He paced around the flat in a turmoil. A collision with a motorbike had caused the boy’s death. Thirty-year-old Ingo didn’t exist because of ten-year-old Ingo’s accident. The thirty-year-old might have escaped injury. He could have protected the ten-year-old, but the ten-year-old had been unable to protect the thirty-year-old.

  The same person. One a boy, the other an adult. The latter didn’t exist because the former had had an accident. A rear-view mirror, which mightn’t have done much to the adult, had broken the boy’s neck.

  Jonas pictured thirty-year-old Ingo standing on the other side of the street and watching the motorbike knock down his ten-year-old self, knowing that he would never exist. Did the two of them speak to each other? Did the ten-year-old apologise to the thirty-year-old? Did the latter console the former by saying it was an accident for which he bore no blame?

  And Jonas himself? What if a car had killed him? Or a disease? Or even a murderer? Then he wouldn’t have existed at twenty or thirty, nor would he exist at forty or eighty.

  Or would he? Would the older Jonases have existed? Somehow, somewhere? In some unfulfilled form?

  *

  He parked
the truck outside his block of flats. The embankment road was as deserted as ever. The Danube Canal gurgled softly past. Nothing seemed to have changed.

  Once inside the flat he packed the clothes belonging to the dwarf from Attnang-Puchheim in his holdall and took a last look round. The inflatable doll was lying in the bathtub where he’d left it. The sack filled with debris from the wall was bursting at the seams. He tied up the neck and heaved it out of the window. He enjoyed watching it fly through the air. It landed with a crash on the roof of a car.

  He thought for a moment. Yes, that was the lot.

  He was worried there wouldn’t be room for the 4WD, but the tailboard shut even after he’d driven it up the ramp and stopped a good two metres short of the Spider, which he’d loaded aboard the truck in Hollandstrasse. There was even some room to spare.

  He found a filling station near the Augarten. While diesel was flowing into the tank he explored the shop. He’d already skimmed every newspaper and magazine on the shelves. The shop also stocked a wide range of soft toys, personalised coffee mugs, sunglasses and models of St Stephen’s Cathedral, as well as drinks and chocolate bars. Jonas filled one plastic bag with a random assortment of snacks and tossed some cans of lemonade into another.

  On a revolving stand, in addition to products for cleaning car windows and polishing bodywork, were some Day-Glo nameplates of the kind truck drivers liked to display behind their windscreens. Albert headed the list, followed by Alfons and Anton. Out of curiosity he looked for J. To his surprise he found a couple of Jonases sandwiched between Johann and Josef. He took one and put it behind the truck’s windscreen.

  *

  Although it wasn’t dark yet, he got the cameras ready for the night. He was tired, and he wanted to make an early start. Besides, he hoped that if he watched last night’s tape before sunset, it wouldn’t prey on his mind so much.

  Jonas locked the door and shut all the windows. He looked out at Hollandstrasse. The truck was parked outside the building next door, so as not to obstruct his view. No movement was visible. Standing close to the window pane, he thumbed his nose and stuck his tongue out.

  *

  The bed was empty.

  No sign of the Sleeper.

  The knife was embedded in the wall.

  Jonas wondered when the recording had been made. He couldn’t remember what time he’d set it for, and, as so often, the alarm clock was lying face down on the bed although he’d turned it to face the camera.

  He was about to fast-forward when he heard a sound coming from the TV. It was a long-drawn-out, high-pitched wail. So high-pitched it could well have been made by a human voice, but also by a musical instrument.

  Eeee!

  Angrily, he jumped out of bed and darted across the room. Either he was hearing a ghost, or someone was making fun of his fear of ghosts.

  Eeee!

  He was tempted to switch off, but his desire to know what would happen next proved too strong. He got back under the bedclothes. For a while he turned his back on the screen, but that was even more unendurable. He looked again. No one to be seen.

  Eeee!

  ‘Very funny,’ he called out. His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat. ‘Oh yes. Yes, well. Oh. Yes, yes.’

  Should he fast-forward? He might miss some message. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that the sound would lead to something.

  Eeee!

  He immersed himself in a comic. This enabled him to push the wailing sound to the back of his mind sufficiently for him to let the tape run on. He even grinned at some drawing now and then, but he more than once had to start a page again from scratch.

  Music?

  Where was the music coming from?

  He turned off the sound. Listened. The wall clock was ticking away.

  He turned up the volume again. Wailing. But there was something else, something softer. A kind of tune.

  He listened, but he couldn’t hear it any longer.

  Eeee!

  ‘And the same to you!’

  It was getting dark. Assailed by toothache and a fit of conscience, Jonas pushed away the box of chocolates he’d been eating, there were hardly any left in any case, and pressed the pause button. Then he went to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. On the way back he noticed that the kitchen was in darkness. He turned on the light.

  All he saw at first was someone’s back coming into shot. The figure turned round. It was the Sleeper.

  Wide-eyed, Jonas watched the Sleeper go over to the wall and grip the hilt of the knife, staring defiantly at the camera. He pulled it out with ease.

  The Sleeper walked towards the camera until his head almost filled the screen. He stepped forwards, his eyes and nose becoming visible in extreme close-up, then stepped back again and winked in a strangely endearing manner. The only thing Jonas didn’t care for was the way he brandished the knife near his throat.

  Having nodded as though in confirmation of something, the Sleeper moved out of shot.

  19

  Although it was only first light, Jonas padded barefoot across the creaking floorboards to his clothes, which were draped over a chair. He peered out of the window. Some rubbish skips were standing on the other side of the street, just visible in outline. The street looked as it did on a normal Sunday morning, when the last of the night owls had come home and everyone was asleep. He had always liked this time of day. Everything became easier when the darkness receded. It was appropriate that murderers should be strapped into the electric chair or sent to the gas chamber a minute after midnight, Jonas thought, because there was no more hopeless time than the middle of the night.

  He had some breakfast and packed the camera. When the sun came up he said: ‘Goodbye, have a nice time!’

  He not only locked the front door behind him, he sealed it with sticky tape. No one would be able to get in without his knowing.

  *

  While driving along the motorway he pondered on the latest videotape.

  How had the Sleeper pulled the knife out of the wall with no effort when he himself had failed to do so several times? True, the Sleeper wasn’t in bed when the tape started. He could have messed around with the wall and the blade beforehand. But how? The wall was undamaged.

  Where the motorway had three lanes, Jonas drove in the middle. Where there were two he kept to the right. He sounded the horn from time to time. Its powerful blare gave him a feeling of security. He’d switched on the driver’s transceiver, which was emitting a soft hiss. So was the radio.

  In Linz he looked for the pub where he’d eaten during the thunderstorm. He spent some time cruising around the district where he thought it was, but he couldn’t even find the chemist’s he’d raided for cold cures. He gave up and drove back to the main road. Finding the car showroom was all that mattered.

  The Toyota was standing outside, just as he’d left it. Although it didn’t appear to have rained for quite a while, the car was quite clean. The air was evidently less dirty than it used to be.

  ‘Hello, you,’ he said, and drummed on the roof.

  He’d never felt sentimental about the Toyota before. But now it was his car, the one he’d owned in the old days. The Spider would never be that for the same reason that Jonas never got himself any new clothes. No new shirts or shoes, because he couldn’t have regarded them as his property. What had belonged to him before 4 July belonged to him now. He would never get any richer.

  He backed the 4WD and the Spider off the truck. The Toyota started first time. He drove it aboard. Although the Spider had been smaller, there was still room for the 4WD.

  *

  He left the motorway at Laakirchen. The road to Attnang-Puchheim was well signposted, but the house he’d slept in was considerably harder to find. Not having expected to return, he hadn’t bothered to memorise the route. Eventually he recalled that the house with the few windows had been near the station. That narrowed it down. Five minutes later he spotted the DS standing beside the
kerb.

  Jonas trod on the kick-starter and the engine fired. He let the moped putter away for a while. Then he pushed it up the ramp and into the truck and secured it to the side. He counted backwards. It was almost incredible but true: he’d been here only a week ago. It felt like months.

  Whether or not he’d turned off all the lights before leaving the house, he had to turn them on again now. Going into the bedroom with the bundle of clothes under his arm, he caught sight of his approaching figure in the wardrobe mirror and dropped his gaze. He put the shirt and trousers back where they belonged.

  ‘Thanks for these.’

  He left the room without looking back and headed, stiff-backed, for the front door. He wanted to walk faster, but something held him back. He paid no attention to the curious pictures in the hallway and replaced the car key on its hook.

  Just then it struck him that there was

  one

  more

  picture

  than last time.

  He shut the front door behind him and made his way along the narrow path to the street with marionette-like movements. Nothing in the world could have persuaded him to set foot in that house again

  He wasn’t mistaken. One of those pictures hadn’t been there a week ago. Which one, he didn’t know, but there had been seven. Now there were eight.

  No, he must have miscounted. That was the only explanation. He’d been tired and agitated and soaked to the skin. His memory was playing tricks.

  *

  On the way to Salzburg he felt hungry. He opened the bag of sweets lying on the bunk behind him and drank some lemonade. The weather was deteriorating. Just before the Mondsee exit he drove into a violent rainstorm. Memories of his last visit were not pleasant and he didn’t want to stop, but at the last moment he braked and swerved off down the exit road. The truck’s big wiper blades were whipping back and forth across the windscreen, the cab was warm and he had plenty to eat and drink. He felt almost snug. His shotgun was lying beside him. Nothing bad could happen.