Night Work

by Thomas Glavinic

  *

  The double bed was on castors. Jonas trundled it out of the furniture store’s delivery bay and into Schweighofergasse, where he gave it a shove. It coasted down to Mariahilfer Strasse and hit a parked car with a resounding crash. He pushed it on towards the ring road with his foot. Just short of Museumsplatz, where the ground dropped away, he pushed it ahead of him like a bobsleigh and, when it picked up speed, leapt aboard. He got to his knees, then his feet, and went surfing down Babenberger Strasse to the Burgring. It wasn’t too easy to keep his balance.

  He set up the bed in Heldenplatz, not far from the spot where he’d painted his plea for help on the ground six weeks earlier. His intention had been to obliterate the letters, but rain had already relieved him of that task. All that remained of them were four vague smudges.

  He loaded the essentials for the coming night into the truck and drove it to the square. He arranged some torches round the bed at a distance of five metres and placed two TVs at its foot. These he connected to the cameras he’d filmed with that morning on the Brigittenauer embankment, likewise to the accumulator. For safety’s sake he checked the output level. All was well. There wouldn’t be any power failure tonight, at least.

  At random intervals all over the square he distributed spotlights, aiming them at the sky because he didn’t want to be directly illuminated. Before long there were so many cables snaking across the grass and concrete he kept tripping over them, especially as it was getting dark.

  He placed Marie’s suitcase beside the bed. He wedged the photos he’d brought from Hollandstrasse into a side pocket, together with the newspapers, to prevent them from blowing away. He fetched the pillow and blanket from the cab of the truck and tossed them onto the mattress. By now the spotlights were bathing the square in an unreal glow. It was like being in an enchanted park.

  There stood the Hofburg and there the palace gate. Beyond them, the Burgring lined with trees. On the right, a monument: two basilisks grappling head to head, knee to knee, though they looked as if they were propping each other up.

  In the middle of the square, his bed. He felt as if he was on a film set. Even the sky looked artificial. In this orange half light, everything seemed to have two aspects. The trees, the wrought-iron gates, the Hofburg itself, all looked natural and authentic but, at the same time, relentlessly slick.

  Jonas lit the torches and started the videotapes. He stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and gazed up at the orange-tinged night sky.

  There he lay.

  Untroubled by the wolf-bear.

  Or by ghosts.

  Untroubled.

  *

  Jonas swallowed another tablet, just to be on the safe side. He was lying on a bed, after all. He looked at the two TV screens. One showed a camera with the red light blinking and, in the background, part of the bed in which he’d slept for years, the other the top of a chest of drawers surmounted by some framed embroidery.

  Apart from the red flashes, both pictures were without movement.

  The square was silent save for the hum of the cameras and an occasional puff of wind that stirred the trees.

  The very first photograph showed him as a boy with his father, half of whose head was missing, needless to say. His father had draped his left arm round Jonas’s shoulders and was gripping the boy’s wrists in his right hand, as if the two of them were tussling. Jonas’s mouth was open, as if he were squealing.

  Those hands, his father’s hands. Big hands, they were. He remembered how often he’d nestled against them, those big, rough hands. He felt the roughness of that skin, the strength in those muscles. He even caught a momentary whiff of his father’s smell.

  Those hands in that photo had existed. Where were they now?

  The picture he was seeing wasn’t just a snapshot taken by his mother. What he was seeing was what his mother had seen at the instant she took it. He was seeing with his mother’s eyes. Seeing what a long-dead person had seen at a particular moment many years ago.

  He still had a vivid recollection of the phone call. He was sitting in his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment, into which he’d moved a short while before, doing a difficult crossword puzzle. He’d opened a can of beer and was looking forward to a quiet evening when the phone rang. His father said, with uncharacteristic bluntness: ‘If you want to see her alive one more time, you’d better come at once.’

  She’d been ill for ages, so they all knew it would happen. Even so, that sentence rang in his ears like a thunderclap. He dropped the ballpoint and drove to Hollandstrasse. The hospital had taken his mother home at her own request.

  She was past speaking. He took her hand and squeezed it. She didn’t open her eyes.

  He sat down on a chair beside the bed. His father sat on the other side. He reflected that he’d been born in this room, this bed, and now it was his mother’s deathbed.

  It happened in the small hours. They both knew exactly when. His mother heaved a loud, stertorous sigh and fell silent. Silent and still.

  It occurred to Jonas that, if people’s accounts of near-death experiences were to be believed, she was hovering overhead, looking down at them. Looking down at what she was leaving behind. At herself.

  He stared at the ceiling.

  He waited for the medical officer to come and certify her death. He waited for the men from the Municipal Funeral Service. There was a dull thud as they were placing the corpse in the metal coffin, as if her head had struck the side. He and his father winced. The men didn’t turn a hair. They were the most aloof and taciturn individuals he’d ever come across.

  He helped his father with the formalities, which entailed registering the death certificate in a gloomy government office and applying for a cremation licence. Then he drove home.

  Back at his flat he recalled the previous day, when she’d still been alive – when he’d still been ignorant of what was to come. He walked around, looking at various objects and thinking: the last time I saw this, she was still alive. He thought this while looking at the espresso machine, the kitchen stove, the bedside light. The newspaper, too. He went on doing the crossword puzzle, looking at the letters he’d written in the night before and remembering.

  A before. And a now.

  *

  Towards midnight Jonas felt hungry. He daubed some slices of pumpernickel with jam in the semi-darkness of a supermarket aisle.

  *

  The screens were displaying their usual images. He had switched the cameras to repeat, so this was their third showing of the camera in the mirror and the room with no one in it. His back was stiff. He stretched, grimacing with pain, then lay down on the bed and took out the newspapers.

  He remembered this typeface and layout. This was what the Kurier had looked like when he was a boy.

  He read the articles in his birthday edition without really taking them in. It fascinated him to think that he was reading what people had read on the day his mother brought him into the world. This was what they had held in their hands at that time.

  He perused the next day’s paper even more closely. After all, it reported what had happened on his birthday. He learnt that Americans had demonstrated against the Vietnam War, that Austria was in the grip of election fever, that a drunk had driven his car into the Danube without injuring anyone, and that the open-air swimming baths had been besieged because of the glorious weather.

  That had been his birthday. His first day on earth.

  *

  In the morning he turned off all the spotlights and dunked the torches in a bucket of water. They hissed, sending up clouds of steam. Having got hold of a video recorder from an electrical shop on the way, he connected it to a TV. He put in the tape of his drive to Schwedenplatz, which he hadn’t watched after editing it.

  He sat down on the bed and pressed ‘Play’.

  He saw the Spider coming towards him. It rounded the bend and headed towards the bridge. Drove along the Heiligenstädter embankment and past
the Rossbauer Barracks to Schwedenplatz. Drove across the bridge and along Augartenstrasse to Gaussplatz, where it had an accident.

  The driver got out, walked unsteadily to the back of the car and reached into the boot. Got in again and drove on.

  Jonas turned off the recorder.

  *

  He found himself back in the Prater. It was just before noon. He’d been for a long walk but couldn’t remember it in detail. All he knew was that he’d simply set off, immersed in thoughts that had long eluded him.

  He was dragging one leg, he didn’t know why. He tried to walk normally. It was something of an effort, but he succeeded. He walked across the Jesuitenwiese. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he walked on. The sun was almost directly overhead.

  It occurred to him that he’d meant to revisit the pubs in which he’d left messages, so as to recall the meal and day in question, but he didn’t care to do so, not now.

  He felt as if he’d been in a battle. Such a violent and protracted battle it no longer mattered who had won.

  He swallowed a tablet and crossed over into the Wurstelprater. At the cycle-hire depot he got into a rickshaw, one of those canopied four-wheelers tourists used to enjoy pedalling across the Prater. There was something he still had to do.

  *

  Pedalling steadily and rhythmically, he rode across the Central Cemetery. The spade he’d got from the cemetery’s nursery clanked against the rickshaw’s frame. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the sun had disappeared behind a small bank of clouds. This made the trip even pleasanter. In contrast to the hush prevailing in the city, he found the silence here soothing. At least it didn’t intimidate him.

  His quest for a freshly dug mound of earth took him past the graves of many famous people. Many were reminiscent of royal mausoleums. Others were plain, with nothing more than unobtrusive stone slabs bearing the names of their occupants.

  It surprised him to see how many well-known people were buried here. In the case of some names, he wondered why their owners had been laid to rest among celebrities, as he’d never heard of them. Where others were concerned, he was astonished to see that they’d died only a few years ago, having been under the impression that they’d been dead for decades. In the case of still others, he was surprised he hadn’t heard of their death.

  He was so enjoying his leisurely progress across the cemetery, he temporarily forgot why he’d come. He recalled the frequent occasions in his childhood when he and his grandmother had travelled here by tram to tend his great-grandparents’ grave. Later on he had visited his grandmother’s grave with his mother. His mother had lit candles, pulled out weeds and planted flowers while he wandered around, inhaling the cemetery’s characteristic scent of flowers, soil and freshly mown grass.

  He’d wasted no thought on death, nor even on his dead grandmother. The sight of all the trees had aroused visions of the marvellous games he and his friends could have played in this place and how long one would take to be found in a game of hide-and-seek. When his mother summoned him to fill the watering can at the fountain, he had returned to her world with reluctance.

  In a way, he’d been closer to the dead than to the living around him. The dead beneath his feet he incorporated into his daydreams as a matter of course. The grown-ups carrying their carrier bags along the paths, on the other hand, he faded out. In his imagination he’d been alone with his friends.

  Did it really have to be a new grave? The soil wouldn’t be that much looser.

  An idea occurred to him.

  *

  The post-1995 records were stored in a data bank. The heavy ledgers used in previous years smelt of mildew and some of the pages were coming adrift. Jonas had to consult one of these tomes. He knew the year precisely, 1989. But he wasn’t so sure of the month. He thought it was May. May or June.

  His search was made more difficult by the handwriting of the officials who had recorded the location of the graves. Many entries, especially the ones written in Gothic script, were almost indecipherable, others had faded. What was more, the tablets’ side effects were becoming more pronounced. His head felt as if it were in a vice and the lines were dancing before his eyes. He was determined to go on looking, however, even if he had to sit on this worn-out swivel chair for another twenty-four hours.

  And then he found it. Date of death: 23 April. Date of interment: 29 April.

  He hadn’t been present at the time.

  He wrote the coordinates of the grave on a slip of paper and replaced the ledger tidily on its shelf. The rickshaw was standing in front of the cemetery’s administration building. He pedalled off, spade clattering. There was a strong scent of grass.

  Bender, Ludwig 1892–1944

  Bender, Juliane 1898–1989

  The old woman had never mentioned a husband, but that didn’t matter now. He took the spade and started digging.

  After a quarter of an hour he had to get down into the pit to go on working. After an hour his hands were raw and blistered. His back ached so badly he had to keep shutting his eyes and groaning. He laboured on until, nearly two hours after his spade first bit into the ground, it struck something hard. At first he thought it was just another of the stones he’d already thrown out of the grave. To his relief, however, a little more of the coffin was revealed with each spadeful of earth he flung aside.

  The lid had become dislodged. He peered through the crack. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he saw a shred of cloth with something grey inside it.

  He straightened up, breathing heavily. To his surprise, he could smell nothing but earth.

  Sorry, it has to be done.

  He pushed the lid aside. Lying in the damp, decaying wooden box was a human skeleton clad in rags.

  Hello.

  That was what remained of Frau Juliane Bender. That hand had held his own when it was still clothed in flesh. He had gazed into that face when it was still a face.

  Goodbye.

  Jonas replaced the lid, climbed out of the grave and shovelled the soil back on top of the coffin, working steadily. He wondered if it had all been worthwhile.

  Yes. Because now he knew that the dead were dead. They’d been dead before 4 July and they still were. Where the living had got to, he couldn’t tell. They probably weren’t below ground, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else they might be. But the dead were still there. That was one certainty, at least.

  But what of the dead on the earth’s surface?

  What of Scott in his tent in the Antarctic? The tent that had collapsed on top of him and his comrades and was probably covered by a sheet of ice. Did that count as being dead and buried? Was his body still there?

  What of Amundsen? What if his remains had spent the last eighty years on an ice floe? Were they still there?

  And what of all the people who had died in the mountains and never been buried? Had they disappeared like the living, or were they still there?

  He no longer needed to know.

  *

  He made his way into St Stephen’s carrying Marie’s case and a folding chair. The smell of incense was as faint as it had been the last time. Only two of the overhead lights were still on.

  With the case and the folding chair in either hand, Jonas set off slowly, step by step, for the lift. He turned to listen.

  Silence.

  He put the case and the chair in the lift and turned once more.

  Silence.

  *

  Jonas unfolded the chair and sat down, pulling the case towards him. He looked out across the twilit city. An occasional puff of wind fanned his face.

  I hope I don’t catch cold, he thought.

  And laughed.

  He picked up a pebble and examined it. Felt the dust that stuck to it. Looked at the curves and protrusions, indentations and tiny fissures on its surface. No other pebble like this existed. Just as no two people resembled each other in every detail, so no two pebbles were exactly similar in shape, colour a
nd weight. This pebble was unique. There was no other pebble in existence like the one his hand was holding right

  now.

  He tossed it over the parapet.

  He knew he would never see it again. Never, even if he wanted to. He wouldn’t find it even if he searched the whole of the cathedral square. Even if he found a pebble resembling the one he’d thrown away, he could never be sure he was really holding the right one in his hand. No one would be able to tell him. No certainty, only vague conjecture.

  Yet he remembered holding the pebble and what it had felt like. He remembered the moment he’d held it in his hand.

  *

  The Sleeper came into his mind, as did something that used to bother Jonas about hand-to-hand combat. When two people fought because one was trying to throttle or knife the other, they were so close in spatial terms that little difference existed between one and the other, assailant and victim. But only spatially. They were grappling skin against skin, but one was a murderer and the other his victim. One self was attacking. The other, two millimetres away, was being killed. So near, yet so great the difference between being one or the other.

  Not so where he and the Sleeper were concerned.

  He started flicking tablets over the edge of the parapet.

  The self. The selves of others. What of the others? What had happened to them?

  Why hadn’t he woken up screaming on 4 July?

  He had often asked himself that question. If countless people perished simultaneously because of some natural or nuclear disaster, why hadn’t he sensed it? How was it possible for so many to disappear without his receiving news of them? How could hundreds of thousands of selves meet their end without transmitting some message? How could someone chew bread or watch TV or cut his nails at precisely that moment without getting goosebumps or experiencing an electric shock? So much suffering? And no sign?