He hadn’t noticed it while on the move, but as he stood there, lost in thought, it struck him how cold it was getting. Mechanically, he rubbed his arms, chest and thighs. He took a few steps. His legs were leaden and his back ached. He was thirsty.
In the middle of the clearing he sat down. Visible overhead was a rectangular patch of blue sky tinged with red. At that moment, he knew the wolf-bear would appear tonight. He would hear crackling sounds, then footsteps. And then the beast would burst through the bushes over there and pounce on him. Huge, unstoppable, impersonal. Invincible.
‘No, please don’t,’ he whispered feebly, tears springing to his eyes.
The darkness frightened him even more than the increasing cold. The battery in his mobile was flat, so he didn’t know what time it was. It couldn’t be much after seven. He had obviously strayed deep into the forest.
He took one of the little cards from his pocket.
Shout loudly!, it read.
The fact that chance had dealt him a suitable instruction raised his hopes. He got to his feet, the better to shout.
‘Hello! I’m here! Over here! Help!’
He turned and shouted again in the opposite direction. He didn’t dare shoot because he’d left the bag of cartridges behind on the old chest. Although he didn’t think he would have to fight off something or someone in the immediate future, the feel of the smooth wooden butt reassured him. At least he wasn’t completely defenceless.
But … What if nobody came?
What if he couldn’t find his way back?
He peered in all directions. He shut his eyes and listened to his inner self. Was this how it would end? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
He tried hard to make his mind a blank. Took deep breaths, imagined himself elsewhere. Some place where there were no goosebumps, no hunger and no suspicious rustling sounds. With Marie. In bed with Marie, thigh to thigh. Feeling her softness, her warmth. Feeling her breath on his face and the pressure of her hands. Inhaling her scent, hearing the faint grunt as she turned over without losing contact with him.
He wasn’t alone. She was with him. He always had her with him if he chose. All at once, she was far nearer to him than three or four weeks ago, when he thought he’d lost her.
He was feeling better. His fear had dwindled to a growl in the background. He was calm. Tomorrow morning he would find his way back. He would go home. And then he would go looking for Marie. He mustn’t fall asleep, that was all.
He opened his eyes.
It was dark.
*
It must have been about midnight when the stiffness in his arms and legs became unbearable. He tossed the rifle into the grass and sat down.
His thoughts had stopped obeying him hours ago. They drifted, took on colour, lost it again. Enveloped him, were enveloped. The wolf-bear appeared in them, he couldn’t chase it away. The creature radiated a savage power and determination that tormented him until, without his doing anything, it disappeared and he was filled with a mysterious warmth and cheerfulness. He felt tempted to get up and go on looking for the way back, but the knowledge that he would soon be governed by other emotions restrained him.
He looked up. Convinced that he was being stared at by someone seated almost within arm’s reach but invisible to him. At the same time, he noticed that his eyelids took longer to blink than they should. Alarmed, he reached for the gun. It seemed two or even three times further away than it had been. He couldn’t see his hand, but he sensed that its progress towards the gun was becoming steadily, inexorably slower. He lowered his head and shook off his hat. He wasn’t moving at all, he felt. Listening to the rustle of the trees, he noticed that every sound consisted of many individual notes, and that these, in their turn, were made up of acoustic particles.
He didn’t know how he managed to snap out of this. His willpower proved stronger than his inertia. He jumped up, levelled the rifle – and waited to see what he would do next.
He laughed.
To his own surprise.
*
3 a.m. Possibly 2 a.m., possibly half past three. He didn’t dare go to sleep. Although his joints were aching and red rings were dancing before his eyes. Every sound the night wind struck from the trees echoed in his head. Trying to keep reality and imagination apart, he looked around. He pretended he was having problems with his shoelaces or the zip of the landlord’s fleece, just so he could scoff and swear aloud.
Whenever he had thought about God and death, the same image had always recurred: that of the body from which all derived and to which all returned. He had doubted the Church’s teachings. God wasn’t one, he was everyone. What other people called God, he saw as a principle in the form of a body. A principle that sent everyone off to live and then report back. God was a body that sent off human beings, possibly animals and plants as well, or even stones, raindrops and light, to acquaint themselves with everything that went to make up life. Returning to the body at the end of their existence, they shared their experiences with God and absorbed those of other people. That way, they all learnt what it was like to be an arable farmer in Switzerland or a motor mechanic in Karachi. A teacher in Mombasa or a whore in Brisbane. Or an Austrian adviser on interior decoration. What it was like to be a waterlily, a stork, a frog, a gazelle in the rain, a honey bee in springtime or a bird. A woman in heat, or a man. A success, a failure. Fat or slim, robust or frail. A murderer or a victim of murder. A rock. An earthworm. A stream. A puff of wind.
Living life in order to return and bestow that life on others. That had been his notion of God. And now he wondered if the disappearance of all life meant that God and the others had no interest in his life. That his life was redundant.
*
6 a.m. He sensed the dawn before he saw it. It didn’t come in its usual form, as a kind of resurrection or liberation. It was merely cold. As soon as it was light enough for him to avoid bumping into trees, he got to his feet. His teeth were chattering, the dew-sodden shirt and trousers clinging to his body.
He spent the first hour trying to get his bearings, following false trails, looking out for landmarks. All he saw was a monotonous alternation of bushes and undergrowth, glades and dense forest. None of it looked familiar.
Later he came to a broad clearing. There he remained until the sun had driven the cold from his bones. His thirst, which was steadily intensifying, made him move on. No longer centred on his stomach, his hunger had induced a feeling of general weakness. His dearest wish was to lie down and go to sleep.
From then on he proceeded haphazardly. He consulted the cards in his pocket, but their only injunctions were Red Cat and Botticelli. He trudged on with his head down. Until a sound came to his ears, a liquid sound. It came from his right.
He didn’t make a dash for it at once; he looked in all directions. No one was watching him. No would-be practical joker.
He set off to his right. His ears hadn’t deceived him, the gurgling sound grew louder. He fought his way through the undergrowth, ripped his trousers on a bramble bush that scratched his hands and arms as well. Then he saw the stream. Clear, cold water. He drank until his belly almost burst and rolled over on his back, panting.
Images arose before him. Of the office, of his father, of home. Of Marie. Of earlier years, when he’d had a different hairstyle. Of a younger Jonas with all kinds of interests. Flirting with Inge in the park, arguing heatedly with friends in cafés, counting empty beer bottles in the kitchen the morning after. As an adolescent in front of the brightly lit windows of sex shops. As a boy on a pushbike, smiling as only children smile.
He clenched his fists and punched the ground. No, he would find his way out of this forest.
He got up and patted his trousers down, then followed the course of the stream. For one thing, because he didn’t want to die of thirst; for another, because streams usually led somewhere, quite often to houses.
He took the easiest route. Sometimes the stream narrowed and he leapt across it, hoping tha
t it wouldn’t become a trickle and peter out. Sometimes it sank into the ground, but he always found the spot where it re-emerged into the light. He shook his fist.
‘Hahaha, we’ll soon see!’
He no longer felt tired and hungry. He walked on and on until the forest suddenly ended. He found himself standing on a slab of rock over which the stream plunged, almost inaudibly, into the depths.
Before him lay a broad expanse of open countryside. To his front, separated from him by a deep gorge, he could make out a small village. It took him a while to identify the dark specks he saw in the surrounding fields as bales of hay. He counted a dozen houses and as many outbuildings. There was no sign of life. He estimated that the village was ten kilometres away, possibly fifteen.
Immediately in front of him was a drop of at least 100 metres. A precipitous wall of rock, and no path leading down into the valley.
He couldn’t account for it, because he felt sure he’d never been there, but the distant village looked familiar.
He turned left. Keeping to the edge of the plateau, he walked until the village had long disappeared from view. He encountered no road, no track, no fence or signpost, not even a notice put up by the Forestry Commission or the Alpine Association.
Worried that he was getting further and further away from Kanzelstein and the surrounding villages, he retraced his steps. Three hours later he was back at the place where the stream plunged down the gorge. Having drunk his fill, he leapt across it with contemptuous ease. He looked over at the village. It was as lifeless as before.
Something about this panorama alarmed him. Ignoring it, Jonas walked on. He pulled his hat brim down with his left hand to avoid having to see the village out of the corner of his eye. He felt like shouting something. But he was too weak.
*
In a big clearing he waited for darkness to come. He had no illusions about his fate. He even felt vaguely thankful that it was happening like this, here, where he preserved at least an inkling of what had been, and that he hadn’t ended his life in a lift immobilised between two floors.
And yet … Something within him could not believe that this was the end.
He took a card from his pocket.
Sleep, he read.
He crumpled it between his fingers.
*
Jonas had often thought about death. He managed to banish the thought of that dark, looming wall for months at a time, but then it recurred day and night. What was death? A joke you understood only after the event? Was it good, evil? And how would it strike him down? Cruelly or mercifully? Would a blood vessel in his skull burst? Would pain rob him of his reason? Would he feel a stab in the chest or be felled by a stroke? Would his guts churn? Would he vomit for fear of what lay ahead? Would he be knifed by a madman, so that he still had time to grasp what was happening to him? Would he be tormented by some disease, fall from the sky in a plane, drive into a brick wall? Would it be: Five … four … three … two … one … zero? Or: Five, four, three, two, one, zero? Or: fivefourthreetwoonezero?
Or would he grow old and die in his asleep?
And was there someone who already knew this?
And was it all preordained, or could he still do something about it?
Whatever happened, he’d told himself, there would be people who thought of him and reflected on the fact that he’d died in such and such a manner, not another. On the fact that he’d always wondered how it would happen, and now they knew. Who wondered how they themselves would die some day.
But it wouldn’t be like that. No one would ever reflect on his death. No one would ever know how he’d died.
Had Amundsen wondered the same thing adrift on his ice floe, or struggling in the water, or afloat on the wing of his plane, or wherever it had happened? Or had he assumed that his body would be found? But they never did find it, Roald. You simply disappeared.
He could hardly see his hand before his face, but he didn’t reach for the rifle lying beside him in the grass. He stretched out on his back and stared into the darkness.
What lay in store for him, he had wondered, transition or extinction?
Whatever his destination, he had always wanted his final thought to be of love. Love as a word. Love as a condition. Love as a principle. Love was to be his final thought and ultimate emotion. A yes, not a no, regardless of whether he was only being transported elsewhere or coming to a full stop. He had always hoped he would manage to think of it. Of love.
21
Jonas awoke, roused by the cold and the drops of moisture on his face. He opened his eyes without grasping where he was. Then it dawned on him that he was in the forest, and that it had started to rain. It was daylight, the sun no more than a pale glimmer in a mass of grey cloud. He shut his eyes again and didn’t move.
Some inner voice urged him to his feet. Without thinking, he set off in a particular direction. Leaning on the rifle, he trudged up slopes, scrambled over fences, stumbled across muddy hollows. He passed a barn but didn’t stop. He felt he mustn’t diverge from his route. As if through a veil, he realised that the rain was lashing his body. His sense of time had deserted him completely. He might have been on the move for one hour or four – he didn’t know.
A valley opened out in front of him. Some buildings came into view. The inn was the first one he recognised. All he felt was the wind and rain on his skin. No sense of relief.
*
He opened his eyes. There were no trees to be seen nearby. He wasn’t in the forest, he was lying in front of the garden fence.
He stood up and looked down at himself. His clothes were in tatters, his forearms covered with thin red scratches, his fingernails as black as a motor mechanic’s, and he’d lost his hat. Still, he seemed to be largely unscathed. He wasn’t in pain, either.
The garden gate squeaked. He noticed, as he walked up the gravel path to the front door, that he’d left the rifle behind. Instinctively, he clenched his fists.
‘Hooo!’
His voice went echoing round the house.
He stuck his head into the storeroom, the games room. Nothing had changed. He dashed into all the bedrooms. Nothing seemed to have been touched.
He avoided looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, but one brief glance was enough: there was something written on his forehead.
The glass felt smooth and cool beneath his fingers as he locked eyes with the face in the mirror. The inscription on his forehead was in mirror writing, so he read it the right way round:
MUDJAS!
Jonas had no idea what Mudjas meant.
He peered at the word more closely. It seemed to have been written with a marker pen, and he felt sure he knew which one. He would find it outside in the cab of his truck.
He stared at the reflected letters.
Perhaps he’s real and I’m the reflection?
Without removing the fingers of his left hand from the glass, he used his right hand to wash his face. At first he tried soap. When the letters merely faded a little, he resorted to a scrubbing brush lying on the floor, which had presumably been used for scouring the tiles. He held it under the hot tap, then scrubbed his forehead.
Having showered without thinking of the wolf-bear, he threw his torn clothes into the dustbin and changed into some clean ones. He couldn’t help reflecting, when his gaze fell on the things in his suitcase, that the last time he’d stood there, looking into the suitcase, he hadn’t known what lay ahead. He hadn’t known that he would be lost in the forest for two days. And this suitcase had lain on the table the whole time. It hadn’t moved, just waited. Had been neither looked at nor touched.
*
In the inn kitchen he plugged his mobile into the charger. He was surprised to see that it was already 4 p.m. by the digital clock on the stove. The rain had stopped, but clouds were scudding across the sky and the sun was invisible.
While the saucepan of water for the beans was rattling away on the hob, Jonas went in search of things he re
membered. All the electrical appliances in the kitchen were new, like the TV, which was connected to a satellite dish on the roof. A soup tureen on a shelf looked familiar. He took it down and turned it round in his hands. It was almost deep and wide enough for him to have stuck his head in it.
He picked up a blue beer mug inscribed Lotta. He hadn’t thought of Lotta once since he’d been here, oddly enough, although he’d often helped the crippled maidservant to feed the hens. This had evidently been her personal mug. She was a beer drinker, he remembered.
He made another leisurely tour of the building. Occasionally he would touch some object, shut his eyes and commit the moment to memory. Days or weeks hence, perhaps months, he would shut his eyes and picture himself touching this lamp or that bottle opener. He would remember what he had thought and felt at the time. And that bygone moment was now. Right now.
He made sure all the windows were closed. He took a wooden-handled spoon from the taproom as a souvenir and stowed some beer in a plastic bag. Leaning against the old wood-burning stove, he ate the beans salted and tossed in garlic. He washed up. The bell over the door tinkled one more time. Then he was standing on the terrace.
He knew he would never return.
*
Jonas took the walking stick to the wood cellar and put it back behind the door. He contemplated it for a while, then gave it a nod and went outside.
He locked the front door of the holiday house and barricaded it with an armchair from the games room, fully aware that this was less a safety measure than an aid to preserving the illusion that he hadn’t entirely lost the initiative.
Then he sat down on the chest in the living room and drank some beer.
He had played cards and Memory over there.
He had sat on that bench and listened to the grown-ups talking over their wine.
He had hidden in this chest when playing hide-and-seek with Uncle Reinhard.
Night Work Page 23