Night Work (21 page)

With the rifle under his arm he plodded along the path to the garden gate in front of the holiday house. His heart was beating faster. He couldn’t help reflecting, at every step, how often he’d trodden this path, but as an entirely different person leading an entirely different life. Twenty or more years had gone by. The surrounding fields, the forest looming darkly beyond the house, he’d seen them all as a boy. He remembered the house well. Did the house remember him? He had eaten meals, watched TV and slept within its walls. That lay far in the past, but to him it was all still valid.

The front door wasn’t locked. That came as no surprise to him. The locals never locked their doors for fear of being thought needlessly suspicious. His parents had also observed this convention and given him many an uneasy night as a child.

There were two rooms on the ground floor: a storeroom and the games room. He glanced inside. The ping-pong table was still there. He even remembered the view from the window.

The first floor was approached by a winding, creaking flight of stairs. There Jonas was confronted by five doors. Three led to bedrooms, the fourth to the bathroom, the fifth to the kitchen-cum-living-room. He went into the first bedroom. The bed had not been made, nor had the suitcase on the table been unpacked. It contained clothes, toilet articles and books. The room smelt stuffy. He opened the window and looked back down the road he’d come by.

In the second bedroom, whose window faced the Löhnebergers’ inn, the bed was made up but had not
been slept in. An alarm clock was ticking on the rickety bedside table. Startled, Jonas picked it up, but it was a battery-powered model.

He looked around the room once more. The red-and-white-checked bedspread. The faux baroque wooden panelling. The crucifix in the corner. He himself had never slept in this room. It had usually been allocated to Uncle Reinhard and Aunt Lena.

The last and largest bedroom was a regular dormitory. The balcony blinds were lowered. They rose with a familiar rumble when he pulled them up. He looked at the décor. The room resembled a hospital ward. Six single beds stood facing one another in two rows of three. At the foot of each iron bedstead was a bar of the kind a patient’s medical record might have hung from. Jonas tapped the metal with his fingernails. He and his parents had slept in this room several times.

He went out onto the balcony and rested his hands on the balustrade. The wood beneath his fingers was warm. In many places it was encrusted with blobs of bird shit the rain had failed to wash off.

The forest stretched away below him. Mountains and hills, wooded slopes and alpine pastures were visible on the skyline. He remembered this view well. This was where his father had sat in a deck chair with his crossword puzzle, and where he himself had hidden from his mother when she wanted to show him something in the garden. They both stood firm to begin with, but his father had sent him downstairs when her voice became steadily shriller.

From the living room he looked out at the garden. The redcurrant bushes were still there. The vine arbour, the benches, the crude wooden table on which they’d played cards, the garden fence, the fruit trees, the rabbit hutch, all were still there. The grass needed cutting and the fence needed repairing, but in other respects the garden was in reasonable condition.

The view triggered a memory. He had dreamt of this garden some years ago. Here among the apple trees he’d seen a man-sized badger cavorting on two legs. The creature, whose face looked like Grandpa Petz from the children’s TV programme, came prancing across the garden in a series of strangely rhythmical movements. It bobbed up and down instead of swaying to and fro. After a while, Jonas joined in. He was frightened of the huge beast, which was twice his size, but it showed no hostility towards him. They had danced together, and he’d felt good.

Having carried his gear into the room whose bed had been slept in, he stripped off the duvet cover and sheet and fetched some clean ones from the biggest bedroom. By the time he’d finished he had to turn on the light. He was growing jittery.

He made sure everything that mattered was inside the house, then noted down the truck’s kilometre reading and locked it. Passing the old skittle alley, he headed for the entrance to the inn. The decrepit Fiat in the car park must have belonged to the Löhnebergers.

The doorbell tinkled as the door closed behind him. He recognised the sound. The bell had been there in the old days. He waited. Nothing stirred.

A second door led to the bar and restaurant. Jonas wasted no time on reminiscences. He simmered a packet of peas from the freezer, adding some wine and stock cubes to improve their flavour, if only marginally.

Should he climb the stairs to the Löhnebergers’ private quarters? He’d never been up there before. A glance out of the window reminded him that the sun was already low in the sky. He put two bottles of beer in a plastic bag.

All seemed peaceful.

Jonas strolled through the garden, combing the long grass with his fingers. He picked some redcurrants. They tasted insipid. He spat them out. Behind the house he came to the door of the wood cellar. He’d forgotten about that.

Still standing in the middle of the cellar, which was lit only by such sunlight as could penetrate the little window above the woodpile, was the big tree stump used as a chopping block. The cellar was another of the places where Jonas had hidden from his garden-obsessed mother. He’d used his pocket knife to carve little figures out of blocks of wood, some of them quite successful, and had left a sizeable collection of them behind at the end of the holidays. Although he hadn’t liked sitting in this gloomy vault, he preferred the company of spiders and beetles to that of his overzealous mother.

He peered at the corner behind the door. Looked away, looked again. There were some tools there. A spade, a hoe, a broom. And a walking stick.

He looked more closely, then picked up the walking stick. It was decorated with carvings.

Jonas took it outside for a better look. He recognised the carvings. No doubt about it. It was the stick the old man had given him.

He went inside the house. Luckily, he found the key in a little box beside the front door, which he locked behind him. He thought for a moment, then put the key in his pocket. Having opened a bottle of beer, he sat down in the living room and examined the walking stick.

Twenty years.

This walking stick was unlike the bench he was sitting on, or the bed on which he would later lie down, or that wooden chest over there. Twenty years ago it had been his property, and in a certain sense it had never stopped being that. It had stood in its grimy corner, ignored by everyone.
On twenty separate occasions, people nearby had celebrated the last day of the year and let off fireworks, but the walking stick had continued to stand propped against the wall of the wood cellar, unconcerned by Christmas and New Year and visitors singing. Now Jonas had returned and the walking stick still belonged to him.

Much had changed since the last time he saw it. He had left school and done his national service, had girlfriends and lost his mother. He had grown up and started on a life of his own. The Jonas who had last touched this stick had been a child, an entirely different person. Yet not so different, for if Jonas searched his inner self the self he found was the same as the one he remembered. Twenty years ago, when he’d said ‘I’ with this stick in his hand, he’d meant the same person as he was today. He, Jonas, was that person. He couldn’t escape. Would always be that person. Whatever happened. Never anyone else. Not Martin. Not Peter. Not Richard. Only himself.

Jonas couldn’t bear to watch the night at its work. The blinds came rattling down as he lowered them. He connected the camera to the TV and put in last night’s tape.

He saw himself walk past the camera and get into bed.

After an hour the Sleeper tossed around for the first time.

After two hours he turned over on his side.

He continued to sleep in that position until the tape ran out.

Nothing, absolutely nothing had happened. Jonas switched off. Midnight. He was thirsty. He’d polished off the second bottle of beer a long time ago. All he could find in his bag of snacks from the filling station was a packet of
pumpernickel, some chocolate bars and some cans of lemonade. He wanted beer.

He made his way out onto the landing, tapping the wall with his knuckles as he went. He turned off the light and peered out of the window. The darkness outside was impenetrable. Clouds had blotted out the stars. There was no moon. He sensed rather than saw the track that led past the skittle alley to the inn.

Uncle Reinhard had wanted to make a bet with him one night: Jonas was to go and get a bottle of lemonade from the inn. All by himself and without a torch, he was to sally forth into the darkness and buy a bottle from the Löhnebergers, who were serving some late customers. The banknote Uncle Reinhard produced from his pocket made Jonas stare wide-eyed and made his parents quietly groan.

Nothing to it, they all said briskly. There was a light above the inn door. It was only really dark near the skittle alley. He was chicken if he didn’t go. No fuss now, just get it over with quickly.

No, he said.

Uncle Reinhard came closer, waving the banknote under his nose. They were downstairs, just inside the front door. Jonas looked at the path that led past the skittle alley, looked at each grown-up in turn.

No, he repeated.

And that was that, even though his mother was gesticulating and pulling angry faces behind Uncle Reinhard’s back. Uncle Reinhard had laughed and patted him on the shoulder. Jonas would soon discover that ghosts didn’t exist, he said. His parents had turned away and hardly spoken to him for the next two days.

‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Jonas said, vainly scanning the darkness for some recognisable shapes at least.

He turned his head abruptly. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that sooner or later, when he looked over his
shoulder like that, the wolf-bear would be standing there. It would be there, and he would have known it would appear.

Leaving the rifle behind, he went downstairs. He opened the front door and stepped out onto the weatherworn flagstones of the forecourt.

It was cold. And pitch-black. No wind, no crickets chirping, no sound save the grating of pebbles on the flagstones beneath his feet. He couldn’t get used to the absence of sounds made by living creatures. Wasps, bees and flies could be annoying. He had cursed their persistent humming and buzzing a thousand times. The barking of dogs had sometimes struck him as a diabolical nuisance, and even some birdsong was strident rather than easy on the ear. But he would have preferred the whine of a mosquito to the relentless silence prevailing here. Even, perhaps, the roar of a prowling lion.

He had to go, he knew.

‘Well, this is it.’

He pretended to be holding something in his hand as if shielding it from view. Meanwhile, he ran through the forthcoming excursion in his mind’s eye. He pictured himself opening the garden gate, making his way past the skittle alley and, finally, reaching the inn’s terrace. He would open the door, turn on the lights, get two bottles of beer from the bar, turn out the lights and return by the same route.

‘Really nice,’ he muttered, scratching his palm with a fingernail.

In thirty seconds he would set off. In five minutes at most he would be back. In five minutes’ time he would be holding two bottles. He would also have proved something. Five minutes were bearable, they were a mere nothing. He could count off the seconds and think of something else.

His legs felt numb. He stood motionless on the flagstones with the open door behind him. Minutes went by.

So he was wrong. He’d been mistaken when he’d thought it would all be over in five minutes. He’d been destined to set off a few minutes later. The time he’d thought would mark the end of his ordeal was really its beginning.

He concentrated on making his mind a blank and setting off.

He thought of nothing, thought of nothing, thought of nothing. And then set off.

He bumped into the garden gate. Opened it. Stumbled through the darkness. Groped his way along the wooden wall of the skittle alley.

A crunch of gravel beneath his feet announced that he’d reached the car park. He glimpsed the terrace and hurried on. I’ll kill you, he thought.

The bell tinkled. He didn’t think he could bear it. His hand felt for the light switch. He screwed up his eyes, then cautiously opened them and looked round. Don’t think, carry on.

‘Good evening, I’ve come for some beer!’

He turned on all the lights, laughing harshly, and helped himself to two bottles of beer. Without turning off the lights he made his way back across the terrace to the car park. The glow from the inn windows was enough for him to see where he was going. But he could also see where the light ended and the sea of darkness awaited him.

When he plunged into the gloom he felt he wouldn’t make it. He would start thinking again any minute. And that would be that.

He broke into a run. Tripped and recovered his balance at the last moment. Kicked the garden gate open. Bounded across the threshold, slammed the front door and locked it. Slid to the floor with his back against it, a cold bottle of beer in either hand.

At 2 a.m. he was lying in bed, checking to see how much of the second bottle was left. The camera was facing the bed, but he hadn’t started it yet. He did so and turned over on his side.

He awoke and peered at the alarm clock. It was 3 a.m. He must have fallen asleep at once.

The camera was humming.

He thought he could hear other sounds overhead. Creaking footsteps, an iron ball rolling across the floor. At the same time, he was in no doubt that those sounds were all in his imagination.

He couldn’t help reflecting that the camera was filming him at that moment. Him, not the Sleeper. Would he spot the difference when he watched the tape? Would he remember?

His bladder was bursting. He threw off the bedclothes. As he passed the camera he waved, gave a twisted grin and said: ‘It’s me, not the Sleeper!’