Night Work (11 page)

The alarm clock beeped from somewhere far away. It was an exasperating sound that gradually penetrated his consciousness. Jonas groped for the clock on either side of him. His fingers closed on thin air. He opened his eyes.

He was lying on the bare floor of the kitchen-cumliving-room.

He was cold. No bedclothes. A glance at the display on the microwave informed him that it was 3 a.m. He had set the alarm clock for that hour. Its monotonous beeping continued to fill the flat.

He went into the bedroom. His duvet was lying on the bed. Thrown back, as if he’d just gone to the bathroom. The camera was on its tripod, the floor strewn with dirty clothes. He brought his fist down on the alarm clock, silencing it at last.

He looked at his naked form in the bedroom mirror. For a moment he thought he’d shrunk.

He turned and leant against the wall, frowning up at the ceiling. All he could remember were the thoughts and mental images that had passed through his mind just before he fell asleep. He couldn’t account for his presence in the living room.

While riding out of Vienna on the rattling DS, heading west, he was reminded of the night he’d set off in the same direction eighteen years ago. It had been just as dark and cold. But pairs of headlights had regularly zoomed past him. Today, the roads were deserted. All he’d had with him then was a rucksack on his back, no pump-action shotgun. And his head had been protected by a crash helmet.

He zipped up his leather jacket. Why hadn’t he put on a scarf? He well remembered how wretchedly cold he’d been throughout that first trip, and he didn’t want to repeat everything to the last detail.

The moon was huge.

He’d never seen it so big. A perfect, luminous orb so close overhead it looked almost menacing. As if it had drawn closer to the earth.

He didn’t look up any more.

The moped purred along at a constant speed. His old machine had almost come to a stop on hills. This one managed every incline with no obvious loss of speed. Its former owner had tinkered with the engine so much that any police check would have resulted in an instant ban.

He leant into the bends, impressed by the rate at which the DS sped downhill. His eyes were watering so much he had to put on his old ski goggles.

Whenever he came to a long descent he disengaged the clutch and switched off the ignition. Coasted silently through the darkness. He removed the two woolly hats he was wearing against the cold. All he could hear was the whistle of the wind. The headlight functioned only when the engine was running, so the road ahead lay in darkness. He only abandoned these escapades when he almost missed a bend and narrowly avoided ending up on the verge.

By the time he got to St Pölten his fingers were so numb with cold it took him several attempts to remove the petrol cap. He wanted to relax in the warm over a cup of coffee.
Instead, he drank a bottle of mineral water in the filling station shop and pocketed some chewing gum and a bar of chocolate. On the magazine rack he saw newspapers which dated from 3 July. The freezer cabinet was humming away, a defective neon tube flickering at the back of the shop. It was just as chilly inside.

I’ve ridden along this road before, he told himself when he was back on the moped. The person who rode along it was me.

He thought of the youth he’d been eighteen years ago. He didn’t recognise himself. Your cells renewed themselves completely every seven years, so it was said. That meant you became a new person every seven years, physiologically speaking. Although your mental development didn’t create you anew, it changed you to such an extent that you could happily call yourself another person after so many years.

In that case, what was an ‘I’? The ‘I’ he used to be was still himself.

Here he was again. On a moped like this one, on the same asphalt. With the same trees and houses all around, the same road signs and place names. His eyes had seen them all before. They were his eyes, even though they had renewed themselves twice in the meantime. That apple tree beside the road had stood there last time. He’d seen it. Now he was passing it again – zooming past it! He couldn’t see the tree in the darkness, but it was there, its image crystal-clear in his mind’s eye.

Many past experiences seemed so fresh and immediate he felt they couldn’t possibly have happened ten or fifteen years ago. It was as if time curved back on itself, so that events separated by years were suddenly mere days apart. As if time possessed a spatial constant capable of being seen and felt.

The sky was getting lighter.

Something had changed in the last few minutes, something to do with himself. His teeth were chattering, he noticed.

Just beyond Melk, where the countryside ahead opened out, he approached a building he felt he’d seen before. From a distance it looked in need of renovation. Some plasterwork was missing. That, too, seemed familiar. The place held some significance for him.

It was a substantial building with a spacious car park in front of it. The only car parked there was an eggshell-blue Mercedes dating from the 1970s.

Jonas tipped the moped on to its stand beside the car. He peered through a side window. Lying on the fur-upholstered passenger seat were a box of raspberry sweets and a can of beer. An air-freshener dangled from the rear-view mirror. The ashtray had been pulled out, but all it contained were coins.

He went looking for the entrance, waddling like a duck because his limbs were so stiff and painful. He came to a halt and massaged his thighs, which also helped to restore the circulation in his numb fingers. The fields beyond the building were swathed in early-morning mist. The tarpaulin covering a woodpile rustled in the wind.

Above the entrance was a sign that read: Snackbar Landler-Pröll. The name was unfamiliar to him.

He unslung the shotgun and took off his rucksack. There was something wrong here. He knew for sure that Steyr had been his first stop, and he felt just as certain that he’d never come this way since. So how did he know this establishment? Was he just imagining it?

He also found it puzzling that the entrance faced away from the road. There was no sign beside the road, either.

The door wasn’t locked. Lying in the passage beyond was an untidy jumble of slippers and mud-encrusted walking shoes. He could just make out a taproom through the frosted glass of the door on his left. Some stairs on the right looked as if they led to the proprietor’s private quarters.

‘Anyone there?’

The taproom door creaked open. He stamped his feet, cleared his throat. Paused on the threshold. Nothing to be heard but the occasional sound of wind nudging the windows.

He turned on the lights, naked bulbs suspended from the ceiling. They shed a harsh glare. He turned them off again. By now, the morning sun was bathing the room in an unreal halflight sufficient for him to find his way around.

The restaurant was neat and tidy. Bronze ashtrays on tables with gingham cloths, every table adorned with a vase of dried flowers, banquettes with decorative, embroidered cushions. A wall clock was showing the wrong time. The newspaper on top of the pile beside the espresso machine was dated 3 July.

He knew this place. Or at least, one that resembled it.

He abandoned his plan to reproduce the original trip and not to stop until he got to Steyr. He turned on the espresso machine. In the fridge he found some eggs and bacon. He heated a frying pan.

After washing his meal down with fruit juice and coffee, he tried the old radio above the serving counter. White noise. He turned it off again. He wiped off the writing on the bill of fare, took a piece of chalk and wrote:
Jonas, 25
July
.

Then he stomped up the wooden stairs. As expected, they led to a private apartment. He saw jackets hanging in a wardrobe, more shoes, empty wine bottles.

‘Hooo!’ he called harshly. ‘Hooo!’

A cramped kitchen with a clock ticking on the wall. The floor was sticky; his shoes made a sucking sound with every step.

He went into the next room. A bedroom. The single bed unmade, a pair of underpants lying on the floor.

Another room, evidently used as a storage room. Cluttered with stepladders, beer crates, paint pots, brushes, sacks of cement, a vacuum cleaner, old newspapers, toilet rolls, oily gloves, a mattress with a hole in it. It was only after a while that he noticed all the floors were uncarpeted. He was standing on bare concrete.

There was a coffee mug on the window sill, half full. He sniffed it. Water, or possibly some kind of hard liquor whose alcohol content had evaporated.

The living room, equally untidy. The air was damp, the temperature several degrees lower than in the other rooms. He looked around for something that might explain it. There were still-lifes and landscapes on the walls. Hanging above the TV were some antlers. All the furniture was red, he noticed. A red sofa, a cupboard lined with red velvet, a carmine red carpet. Even the old wooden table had red legs as well as a red cloth draped over it.

He climbed the stairs to the attic. They creaked. The door at the top, a thin sheet of hammer-finished metal, was unlocked.

Enveloped in cool, fresh air, he thought at first that a window must be open. Then he saw the broken panes.

In the middle of the room stood a kitchen chair with the back missing. Dangling from a beam above it was a noose.

Jonas got hold of a small tent and a sleeping mat in Attersee-Ort, then drove to the Mondsee. After straying down two farm tracks by mistake, he found the spot where he’d
camped in the old days. Thirty metres from the shore of the lake and formerly covered with scrub, it now formed part of a public bathing place. Jonas dumped his kit and reconnoitred the area on the moped.

Modern times had arrived. The lido consisted of a tree-fringed expanse of grass the size of a football pitch. In addition to changing cubicles and toilets, it boasted open-air showers, a children’s playground, boats for hire and a refreshment kiosk. The terrace of an inn lay invitingly on the far side of the car park.

He started to put up the tent. The instructions were incomprehensible. Wearily, he staggered around the grass with diagrams and poles, but he got it up in the end and tossed the mat inside. He deposited the rest of his kit beside the entrance. Then he sank onto the grass.

He wasn’t wearing a watch. The sun was high, it had to be past midday. He peeled off his T-shirt and removed his shoes and socks. Gazed out across the lake.

It was nice here. Trees rustling in the breeze. Lush green grass. Shrubs dotted along the shore. The surface of the lake glittering in the sunlight. Distant mountains rising into a deep blue sky. For all that, he had to force himself to realise that he was enjoying a magnificent view. Perhaps he was short of sleep.

He recalled an idea he’d often toyed with in the old days, one to which he’d surrendered in a variety of forms, especially in idyllic spots like this. It was that some historical figure, Goethe for instance, could not see what Jonas himself was seeing. Because he no longer existed.

There had been days like this in times gone by. Goethe had roamed the fields, seen the sun, admired the mountains and bathed in the lake when there was no Jonas, yet to Goethe they had all been there in the present. Perhaps Goethe had thought of his successors. Perhaps he had pictured the changes to come. Goethe had experienced a day
like this one, and Jonas hadn’t existed. The day had dawned nonetheless, Jonas or no Jonas. And now Jonas was experiencing this day, but without Goethe. Goethe had gone. Or rather, he wasn’t there any more, just as Jonas hadn’t been there in Goethe’s day. Jonas was now seeing what Goethe had seen, the scenery and the sun, and it made no difference to the lake or the air whether Goethe was there or not. The scenery was the same. The day was the same. And all would be the same in 100 years’ time. But without Jonas.

That was what had bothered him: the idea that there would be days without him, days perceived without him. Scenery and sunlight and ripples on the lake, but no Jonas. Someone else would see them and reflect that others had stood there in earlier times. That someone might even think of Jonas. Of his perceptions, just as Jonas had thought of Goethe. And then Jonas pictured the day, 100 years hence, that would go by without his perceiving it.

But now?

Would someone perceive this day in 100 years’ time? Would someone roam the countryside thinking of Goethe and Jonas? Or would the day be a day without observation, a day that simply existed? If so, would it still be a day? Was there anything more nonsensical than such a day? What would the
Mona Lisa
be on such a day?

All this had existed millions of years ago. It might have looked different. That mountain might have been a hill or even a hole in the ground and the lake a peak, but no matter. It had existed, and no one had seen it.

Jonas took a tube of sun cream from his rucksack and rubbed some in. Then he stretched out on a towel in front of the tent and shut his eyes. His eyelids twitched nervously.

Half asleep, he listened to the rustle of leaves mingling with the sibilant sound of canvas caressed by the wind and the murmur of wavelets breaking on the shore. From time to time he sat up with a start, imagining that he’d heard a birdcall. He peered in all directions, blinking in the sunlight, then lay down again on his stomach.

Later he thought he heard the voices of hikers enthusing about the view and calling to their children. Although he knew he was imagining it, he could see their rucksacks and checked shirts, the children’s lederhosen, the grey stockings and long-laced hiking boots.

He crawled out of the sunlight and into the tent.

It was late afternoon by the time he felt he’d caught up on his sleep. He had a snack at the pub. On the return trip he passed an Opel with Hungarian number plates. There were towels and inflatable mattresses lying on the rear seat. He topped up his sun cream back at the tent, then walked down to the boatman’s landing stage.

Various types of craft were moored there. He gave a pedalo a shove with his foot. It thudded into the boat alongside. The water gurgled beneath their keels. Each had a few inches of rainwater in the bottom with leaves and empty cigarette packets floating in it.