Night Work (4 page)

He blew his nose, then squeezed a throat pastille out of its blister pack. He made himself some tea and sat down on the sofa, cup in hand. Sipping, he watched the gyrations of the young people aboard the floats streaming past the Victory Column at a walking pace. Their half-naked figures twitched in time to inaudible music.

He got up and wandered around. His eye fell on the wardrobe. Again he had the feeling that something was wrong. This time he realised what it was. Hanging inside was a jacket that didn’t belong to him. He’d seen it in a shop window some weeks ago, but it was too expensive.

How had it got there?

He put it on. It fitted.

Had he bought it after all? And forgotten it?

Or was it a present from Marie?

He checked the front door. Locked. He rubbed his eyes. His cheeks burnt. The longer he thought about the jacket, the uneasier he felt. He decided to shut it up in the wardrobe for the time being. The explanation would occur to him of its own accord.

He opened the window. The night air was refreshing. He looked down at the Brigittenauer embankment. Once upon a time the night had been filled with the steady hum of passing cars. The silence that now weighed heavy on the street seemed to be trying to drag him down there.

He looked left in the direction of the city centre, where here and there a lighted window could be seen. The heart of
Vienna. History had been made there once, but it had since moved on to other cities. What remained were broad streets, grandiose buildings and monuments. And people who had found it hard to distinguish between past and present.

Now they had gone too.

When he looked straight ahead at the 19th District, he saw a light flickering in a window several hundred metres away. It wasn’t a Morse signal, but it might be a message of some kind.

He had never known such darkness. A windowless room could be very dark, but it was an acquired, unnatural kind of darkness quite unlike the gloom prevailing here in the street. No stars were twinkling in the sky. The street lights had failed. Cars nudged the kerb like dark mounds. Everything resembled a heavy mass vainly endeavouring to move.

While covering the few yards from the front door to the Spider, he glanced round several times and called out in a deep voice.

He could hear the Danube Canal lapping against the embankment wall.

Although he had only a vague idea of the direction in which the building in question lay, he didn’t take long to find it. He pulled up three car-lengths away, with his headlights illuminating the entrance. Then he got out, shotgun at the ready.

Crouching down beside the driver’s door, he listened intently for a minute. Nothing broke the silence but an occasional puff of wind.

He locked the car, leaving the headlights on, and counted the storeys to the lighted window. Then he took the lift to the sixth floor. The passage was in darkness. He felt for a light switch.

Either there wasn’t one or he failed to find it.

Holding the shotgun out in front of him, Jonas made his way cautiously along the passage. He kept stopping to listen. There was no sound, no indication of where to look. It wasn’t until his eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom that he saw a shaft of light at floor level. It was the door. When he pressed what he took to be the bell, the passage light came on. He screwed up his eyes against the glare and raised his shotgun.

The passage was deserted. An ordinary passage.

He looked at the door, which had no nameplate. Like the building itself, it must have been a good thirty years old. There was no spyhole.

He rang the bell.

No response.

He rang again.

Still nothing.

He hammered on the door with the butt of the shotgun and rattled the handle. The door was unlocked.

‘Anyone there?’

He found himself in a kitchen-cum-living-room. Sofa, armchair, glass-topped table, carpet, TV, kitchen units along the back wall. The decor bore a startling resemblance to that of his own flat: parlour palm in the corner, loudspeakers on hooks on either side of the window, herbs in little pots on the radiator, full-length mirror.

He looked at his reflection, holding the shotgun in both hands. Behind him was a sofa that resembled his own, a range of kitchen units like his own. A standard lamp like his. A lampshade like the one at home.

The light was flickering. He wound a tea cloth round
his hand and screwed the bulb in tighter. The flickering stopped.

A loose connection.

He walked round the room, touching things, shifting chairs, tugging at shelves, reading book titles, turning shoes over, removing jackets from the wardrobe. He checked the bathroom and bedroom.

The more closely he looked, the more differences he spotted. The standard lamp was grey, not yellow. The carpet was brown, not red. The armchair was worn and threadbare, like the sofa, the decor universally shabby.

He went from room to room once more, unable to rid himself of the feeling that he’d missed something.

There was nobody here and no indication of when anyone had last been there. It seemed probable that the lights had been on from the first. He hadn’t noticed the flickering window before because this was the first time he’d ventured to look out at the city at night.

An unremarkable flat. CDs lying around, washing hanging up, crockery on the draining board, crumpled paper in the waste bin. An entirely unremarkable flat. No hidden message anywhere – unless he’d failed to grasp it.

He wrote his name and mobile number on a notepad and added his address in case the mobile network failed.

From the window he made out a small, glowing rectangle a few hundred metres away.

The light was coming from his own flat.

Was everything where it should be at this moment? His cup on the sofa table? The duvet on the bed? Were the young people dancing silently on their floats?

Or was there nothing there? Not until he returned?

In the morning he checked the postbox, then drove to the city centre to look for clues and leave some behind. At lunchtime he broke into a pub and ate something. In the afternoon he went on looking. When evening came he stretched out on the sofa with a beer and watched the Berliners dancing silently. He didn’t go to the window.

He explored almost every public building between the ring road and Franz-Josefs-Kai. He combed Vienna’s government offices, museums and banks. With the pump-action shotgun in his left hand he made his way across the stage of the Schauspielhaus, along the passages in the Hofburg and past the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History. He walked round the Albertina, the university, the editorial offices of the
Presse
and
Standard
, leaving notes bearing his address and mobile number everywhere he went. It was hot outside, cool and dim inside. Specks of dust floated in shafts of light slanting down through windows. The sound of his footsteps on the stone floors reverberated around the spacious buildings.

Anxious to leave traces of his presence behind, he loaded a handcart with props and trundled them onto the stage of the Burgtheater. He piled them all on top of each other – costumes, plaster statues, TVs, plastic hammers, flags, chairs, swords – and pinned a business
card, medal-fashion, to the chest of a dummy soldier.

He visited every hotel on the ring road, dialled stored numbers at the reception desks, called Marie in England. He studied the hotel registers. They listed reservations for the period after 3 July. At one hotel he poured himself a drink at the bar and laid out a slalom course with bottles in the lobby. At another he wrote his name in bold capitals on a flip chart he found in a conference room and set it up in the hotel entrance.

He wrapped the Secession building in so much black sticky tape it might have been mistaken for a work of environmental art by Christo. He sprayed his name and phone number on the tape with a can of bright yellow paint.

In the parliament building he set off an alarm when he passed through the metal-detector gate carrying his gun. In the chamber itself he fired at tables and benches. He stuck one note on the lectern and one on the Speaker’s chair.

He checked the Ministry of the Interior, the barracks, the Austrian Radio building. He found his way into the Federal Chancellor’s office and left a note on his desk.

He wrote HELP in gigantic black letters on the paving stones in Heldenplatz.

He looked up at the sky.

Not a cloud for days.

All blue.

He could hear the alarms sounding even in Südtiroler Platz, hundreds of metres from the Südbahnhof. He stopped at a red light and turned off the engine, climbed onto the roof of the car and sat there with the shotgun across his knees.

He dialled the number of his flat on his mobile and let it ring for a long time.

He turned so the sun was shining on his face. Shutting his eyes, he abandoned himself to its rays. He felt his forehead, nose and cheeks grow hot. There was almost no wind.

He called his own mobile number.

Engaged.

The remains of the windows he’d smashed lay untouched on the floor of the ticket office. Nothing seemed to have changed in the last week. The arrivals and departures boards were still blank. The alarms continued to fill the air with their monotonous wailing.

Shotgun at the ready, he boarded the train to Zagreb. His compartment was just as he’d left it. The window in the door was smashed, the door itself still held by strips of curtain and immovable. The 3 July newspapers lay scattered across his makeshift bed of seats beside the lemonade can and the empty packet of crisps.

It was stuffy in there.

Nothing was stirring outside. Another train was standing two platforms away. The intervening tracks were strewn with rubbish of all kinds.

Two minutes’ work with the crowbar sufficed to open the door of Werner’s flat. His bed had been slept in, the bedclothes were thrown back. A towel, obviously used, was lying on the bathroom floor outside the shower cubicle. There was a pile of dirty plates on the draining board in the kitchen. In the living room he found a glass containing dregs of red wine.

What to look for? Jonas didn’t even know. He wanted
to find some clue to where everyone had gone, but what sort of clue? Could he find it in a friend’s flat?

He wandered around for a while. For the first time in days, he came across familiar objects. He was moved even by something as banal as the leathery smell of Werner’s sofa. He’d often sat here in the past, when everything was still as it should be.

He opened the fridge. A lump of cheese, some butter, a carton of long-life milk, some cans of beer and lemonade. Werner hardly ever ate at home. He occasionally sent out for a pizza.

Jonas came across the medication in a drawer.

He had found something important without looking for it. This medication meant that his friend hadn’t disappeared of his own free will. Werner wouldn’t even have gone down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine without his tablets and inhaler.

He remembered now. Werner had called him on the evening of 3 July. They’d chatted for a few minutes and then made a vague arrangement to meet that weekend. It was Werner who had called him.

He pressed the redial button on Werner’s phone. His own number came up on the display.

In Rüdigergasse he tried to recall how the street had looked on his last visit. He immediately recognised the plastic cover on the bicycle saddle. He saw the bottle protruding from the dustbin. The position of the bikes and mopeds also seemed unaltered.

The postbox: empty.

The flat: unchanged. Every object was where it had been before. His tumbler on the table, the remote on top of the TV. The usual chilly atmosphere, the smell of old man.
The displays on the electronic gadgets glowed green.

The same silence.

The bedsprings creaked ominously as he lay down. He stretched out on his back and folded his hands on his chest. His eyes roamed the bedroom.

He’d known all the objects he could see since his childhood. This had been his parents’ bedroom. That portrait of an anonymous young woman had hung opposite the bed. The ticking of the wall clock had accompanied him into sleep. The decor was just as it had been thirty years ago. Only the walls were wrong. Until his mother’s death eight years ago, this bed had stood in a flat in the 2nd District. The one he’d grown up in.

He shut his eyes. The wall clock struck half-past. Two deep, resonant notes.

Jonas almost drove past the building in Hollandstrasse. The frontage had been repainted and repaired in places. It made a respectable impression.

He prised open the postboxes in the lobby with the crowbar. They yielded with a crash. Masses of junk mail, one or two letters. All the postmarks predated 4 July. Postbox No. 1, which had belonged to his family, and from which he himself had often collected the post, was empty. The subsequent tenants’ surname, Kästner, was inscribed on a little plaque dangling inside.

While climbing the stairs to the first floor and making his way along the old, winding corridor, he remembered how, as a boy, he’d been treated to a nameplate of his own by Uncle Reinhard, who’d had it made for him specially. It was attached to the door, and Jonas had proudly showed it off to every visitor. Bearing his first name and surname, it had even hung above the family nameplate.

As he expected, both nameplates had been removed and replaced with that of the Kästner family.

He tried the handle.

The door was unlocked.

He looked around. Resisting an urge to remove his shoes, he tiptoed into the flat.

Hanging in the hall was a sign reading
Welcome!
in childish handwriting. Jonas gave a start. It looked familiar. He peered at it more closely – he even sniffed it, he felt so puzzled – but came to no conclusion.

He toured the familiar rooms with their unfamiliar, incongruous pieces of furniture. Often he came to a halt, folded his arms, and tried to recall what the place had looked like before.

The tiny bedroom he’d moved into at the age of ten, formerly his mother’s sewing room, had been turned into a study. The big room that had doubled as his parents’ bedroom and the living room was still a bedroom, but atrociously furnished. To his annoyance, it contained a three-piece suite in the lousy ’98 series from Holland, which Martina had almost had to force him to sell. The presence of children was indicated by some rubber balls and toy guns in a corner behind the door. The bathroom and toilet were unchanged.

In the toilet, on the wall beside the cistern, he discovered, in childish writing, the phrases:
The fish and I. The
fsh
. The ‘The’ and the ‘f’ and ‘sh’ of ‘fish’ had a line through them.

He remembered it well. He’d written that. But he didn’t know why any more. He’d been eight or nine. His father had told him off for scribbling on the wall but had forgotten to wipe it off. Probably because it was in such an inconspicuous place that it had been months before he’d even noticed it.

Jonas walked up and down, leant against doorposts and adopted certain positions, the better to remember. Shutting his eyes, he fingered door handles that felt the same as they had in the old days.

He lay down on a strange bed. Staring up at the ceiling, he felt dizzy. He had often lain in this position, and now, after many years, he was doing so again. He had gone away, the ceiling had stayed put. The ceiling didn’t care. It had waited, watching other people’s doings. Now he was back. Staring up at the ceiling. As before. The same eyes were looking at the same spot in the ceiling. Time had gone by. Time had broken down.

Jonas hesitantly entrusted himself to the lift in the Danube Tower. He dreaded to think what would happen if it got stuck, but he couldn’t dispense with technology altogether – that would have tied his hands. So he got in, pressed the button and held his breath.

It was 220 metres to the top of the Danube Tower. When the door of the lift opened again, he was 150 metres above the ground. The observation terrace was at this level. A staircase led up to the café.

He found his bearings there at once and helped himself to a bottle of lemonade. He had often been here with Marie, who loved the view and the odd fact that the café slowly revolved. Jonas had always found this rather weird, but Marie had taken a childish delight in it.

In the control room, you could set how long the café took to complete a single revolution: 26, 40, or 52 minutes. Marie had always managed to persuade the man in charge to set the controls at 26. On one occasion the uniformed technician had taken such a fancy to her that he’d started telling stories just to keep her there.
Jonas’s presence didn’t seem to bother him. The café could be made to rotate much faster, he said. The café construction team, to which an uncle of his had belonged, had tinkered with the mechanism while work was in progress. They got the time for a revolution down to eleven seconds before they were caught. Since then a cotter pin had prevented anyone from getting up to similar tricks. Rapid revolutions consumed a lot of electricity and were dangerous into the bargain. Besides, people inside the café felt sick and lurched around like sailors in a gale.

You expect me to believe that? Marie had said. It’s the honest truth, the technician replied with an equivocal smile. That proves what children men are, said Marie. The two of them burst out laughing, and Jonas had dragged her away.

He went into the control booth. To his surprise, he found the cotter pin in place. Having satisfied himself that he wasn’t putting the lift out of action by mistake or overdoing the revolutions like the technician’s uncle, he set the regulator at 26 and switched on.

Without looking down, he made his way out onto the terrace and leant against the parapet, beneath which a grille projected from the wall. It was supposed to prevent spectacular suicides.

Wind buffeted his face. The sun was low in the sky. It was so dazzling he shut his eyes for a while. When he opened them again and looked down, he took an involuntary step backwards.

What had impelled him to come up here? The view? Memories of Marie?

Or hadn’t he come of his own free will at all? Was he like a hamster on a treadwheel? Were his actions determined by someone else?

Had he died and gone to hell?

He drained the bottle of lemonade, drew back his arm and hurled it into the depths. It took a long time to fall, then hit the ground without a sound.

Inside the café he sat down at the table he associated with memories of his visits with Marie. He re-read all the text messages from her stored in his mobile.
I’m just overhead,
only a few kilometres above you. – Licking an ice-cream
cornet and thinking of you.:-) – Please FMH
– You are terrible! * hic *:-) –
I love love love love you
.

He shut his eyes and tried to send her a telepathic message.
I’m alive, are you there?

He pictured her face, her cheeks, her clear-eyed gaze. Her lovely dark hair. Her lips with their slight downward curve at the corners.

It was difficult. Her image dissolved and faded. He could hear her voice in his head, but it sounded like an echo. He’d already forgotten her smell.

In the Internet area he booted up a computer and inserted some euros, propping his chin on his fists. While the view of the city slowly changed before his eyes, he allowed his thoughts to run on.

Perhaps he had to pass a test, one to which there was a correct answer. A correct response that would extricate him from his predicament. A password, an open sesame, an email to God.

If a password of sorts existed, it ought to have some connection with himself. That seemed logical.