Night Work (6 page)

With the shotgun on his shoulder, which hurt where the sling had chafed it, he tiptoed down the nave. The saintly figures in their niches looked unreal. Pallid and lacklustre. Their frozen faces reminded him of Pompeiians.

He knew from school that the bones of 12,000 people lay mouldering beneath his feet. The city’s graveyard had been sited here during the Middle Ages. The graves were later opened and prisoners assigned the task of cleaning the bones and stacking them against the walls. The class had fallen very silent during this lesson, he recalled.

He stepped over a barrier to get to the high altar, where he left a message. He attached another to the Virgin Mary’s altar. A search of the sacristy yielded nothing but a few empty bottles of communion wine. There was no clue to when someone had been there last.

Opposite the sacristy was the entrance to the catacombs. The next guided tour would leave at 3 p. m., according to the hour hand on a kind of parking disc. Minimum five persons.

Should he go down there? Not a particularly tempting idea. Besides, he was finding it hard to breathe. The smell of incense was overpowering.

At the exit he turned and looked back. The place was as if frozen. Deserted wooden pews harshly illuminated by little lamps. Grey stone columns. Side altars. Statues of saints with forbidding faces. High, narrow windows that admitted little sunlight.

No sound save the squeaking of his soles on the flagstones.

He set up more cameras in front of the parliament building, outside the Hofburg, in the Burgtheater, on the Reichsbrücke, and in a street in the Favoriten quarter. The camera in the Burgtheater he placed so that it was aimed at the pile of junk he’d left on the stage. The one on the Reichsbrücke was pointing down at the Danube. In Favoriten he filmed an intersection. Taking the remaining camera with him, he drove to Hollandstrasse.

After eating something he went back to work. It was the bedroom’s turn today. As before, he began by clearing the decks. He chucked the smaller objects out of the window, flower stands, house plants, chairs, and dumped the contents of a display cabinet in some rubbish bags. By the
time he’d chopped up the bedstead, he felt he’d done enough for one day. He placed the camera on the floor, made a note of the place and time and pressed the record button.

Back home he went round collecting the audio tapes.

He sat down on the sofa with a glass of fruit juice and a bag of crisps. He’d placed the tape recorder on the table beside him, where he could reach it.

The first tape came from his immediate neighbour’s vacant flat. For a whole hour he listened to the silence that had reigned in the empty rooms next door. Sometimes he thought he heard sounds, but they were probably just noises he himself was making in the other flats. Or simply his imagination.

Looking out of the window, he saw that storm clouds had gathered for the first time in two weeks. He decided to save the next tape for later and bring the outdoor cameras under cover instead.

As he drove around the city, casting nervous glances at the steadily darkening sky, he remembered the spiritualist experiments he’d conducted as a part-superstitious, part-adventurous boy. They had been inspired by a half-demented neighbour, old Frau Bender, who kept him company when his mother was busy.

Frau Bender often told him about her experiences with ‘the hereafter’ or ‘the other side’. About table-turning sessions during which the little wooden table had cavorted around the flat with her and her friends’ fingers glued to the top, or about the poltergeists that plagued her family for eighteen months because she and her girlfriends had pooh-poohed their existence. Locked cupboard doors creaked open at night, tapping was heard inside walls, and window panes were scratched by unseen fingernails. Not all at the same time, though. Sometimes it was one phenomenon, sometimes another.

She had a particular passion for talking about the hereafter, which had been described to her by gifted mediums of her acquaintance.

I’M STANDING HERE WITH A ROSE IN MY HAND. A THORN JUST PRICKED ME
, her late mother had told her through the mouth of one such medium.

WE LIVE IN A BEAUTIFUL HOUSE WITH A GORGEOUS GARDEN
, a deceased woman friend had reported.

IT’S ALL SO VAST, AND THERE ARE MANY ROOMS
, said an uncle.
EVERY INSIDE EMBODIES AN OUTSIDE, EVERY ABOVE A BELOW
.

He was holding a hat in his hands and looking troubled, the medium had said. Did the hat possess some significance?

And then, for the hundredth time, Frau Bender disclosed that her uncle had been found lying dead with his hat on his chest. Nobody knew what he’d died of, and he himself wouldn’t say. The most astonishing part of it was that no one except herself and the rest of the family had known about the hat.

Jonas had readily accepted his mother’s suggestion that he go and play at Frau Bender’s for an hour or two. Although his visit spooked him for days afterwards, he learnt a great many arcane and interesting things there. For instance, that a tape recorder left on at night would pick up the voices of the dead. Or that the dead sometimes became visible for a fraction of a second. On the many occasions when you thought you’d glimpsed something, a shadow or a movement, it was advisable not to discount the possibility that you’d seen a ghost. This happened quite often, said Frau Bender.

She also promised to appear to Jonas after her death and tell him what the hereafter was like. He must look out for little signs of her presence, she said. She didn’t know if she would be able to appear in human form.

Frau Bender died in 1989.

He hadn’t heard from her since.

A violent peal of thunder in the distance. He floored the accelerator.

With some reluctance, he glanced at the rear-view mirror. No one there. He turned his head. No one sitting in the back.

The storm broke just as he stowed the last outside camera in the boot. Not wanting to have to make another trip, he decided to collect the other cameras right away. He drove first to the Burgtheater and then to Hollandstrasse, where he closed the windows to prevent the rain, which was drumming almost horizontally against the panes, from doing any damage to the flat.

The Millennium Tower was his last stop. Gun in hand, he rode the escalator up to the entrance. He was about to board the lift when there was an ear-splitting crash. The lightning strike must have been very close. The lift door slid shut in front of his nose. He didn’t press the button again. The risk of a power cut that might leave him stranded between the tenth and twentieth floors was too great.

In Nannini he made himself an espresso and took his cup over to one of the tables outside the entrance. On his right was the electrical appliances store, which occupied two floors. On his left he could see the walkways leading to other rows of shops. Immediately to his front was the down escalator with the tower looming up beyond it.

He craned his neck in an attempt to see the top of the tower. It was blurred and almost invisible. Rain spit-spattered on the glass roof that spanned the entire shopping centre.

He had often sat at one of these tables with Marie. Although the Millennium City shops didn’t attract the smartest of customers, they had enjoyed shopping here.

He went back inside the café and called Marie’s relations in England from the phone behind the counter. Nothing to be heard but the unfamiliar ringing tone.

If only her mobile’s voicemail had cut in, he could have heard her voice. But the phone just rang and rang.

Jonas was so tired after playing the third audio tape, he freshened up by taking a cold shower. Although he’d found nothing on any of the tapes, he was too intrigued to go to bed. He could always catch up on his sleep tomorrow.

Darkness had descended on the city long ago. The thunderstorm had ceased and the rain had moved on soon afterwards. He had lowered the blinds. The young Berliners were silently dancing across the TV screen.

He made himself a snack. Before returning to the sofa with his plate, he stretched his arms and rotated his shoulders. A fierce pain shot from the small of his back to the nape of his neck. He thought longingly of Frau Lindsay.

Shortly after 1 a.m. he put in tape number five. The sixth followed an hour later. The radio alarm was displaying 3.11 a.m. as he pressed the play button for the seventh time.

By the time he had listened to that tape he was suffering from severe overstimulation. While listening to the sixth he had taken to pacing around the living room and doing physical exercises. It wore you down, constantly straining your ears and hearing nothing. He couldn’t rid himself of the sensation that liquid was trickling from his ear canals. Every few minutes he felt his ears and checked if there was any blood on his fingers.

More mechanically than deliberately, he put in the tape that had recorded him asleep.

He went over to the window. With two fingers he parted the slats of the blind. One or two windows were illuminated. He recognised the one over there. It belonged to the flat he’d visited.

Was everything there just as he’d found it?

At 4.30 a.m. he heard sounds on the tape.

Jonas worked for two hours, by which time the gurgling and rumbling in his stomach could be ignored no longer. He had something to eat and went back to work. He wasn’t thinking of anything much.

By evening he reeked of sweat and had torn his trousers badly, but the living room and nursery were stripped of any reminders of the Kästner family. The kitchen he’d left untouched.

He walked slowly round the flat with his hands clasped behind his back. From time to time he nodded to himself. He’d never seen his old home in this state.

Back in his own flat his stomach started rumbling again. He fried himself some cod from the deep-freeze. That exhausted his supplies.

After a long bath he rubbed some ointment into his right shoulder. The weight of the shotgun sling had chafed the skin. Although he had carried the gun on his left shoulder since yesterday to relieve the pressure, he had hurt the spot while working today.

He extracted the damp washing from the machine. While he was draping it over the clothes horse, item by item, the tape recorder occasionally caught his eye. He looked away quickly.

When he had run out of chores and was already shuffling
from one foot to the other, he suddenly remembered the new answerphone. The instructions were brief and intelligible. He was able to record a message immediately.

‘Hello! If you hear this, please come to the following address … My mobile number is … If you can’t make it, tell me where to find you.’

He dialled his home number on his mobile and let it ring. The answerphone cut in after the fourth ring. With the mobile to his ear he heard the message in stereo:

‘Hello! If you hear this, please come to the following address …’

Already there, he thought.

He sat down on the sofa with a glass of Marie’s advocaat and watched the Love Parade again. The sun’s dying rays were slanting through the half-closed blinds.

If he wanted to listen to the tape again, he knew he should do so now.

He wound the tape back, then forwards, then back again. It stopped by chance at the point where the first sound made itself heard. A faint rustle.

Minutes later he heard a murmur.

It was his own voice. It had to be. Whose, if not his? He didn’t recognise it, though. Then a strange, hollow, staccato ‘Hepp’ issued from the loudspeakers. Then silence. Minutes later he heard some more murmuring. It went on for longer this time, like a coherent sentence.

He let the tape run on to the end, listening with his eyes shut. Nothing more.

Was it his voice?

And, if so, what was he saying?

The temperature had dropped. Dense grey clouds hid the sun. A stiff breeze was blowing, and he wasn’t sorry. It was
the same every year: he looked forward to the summer for months, only to tire of the heat after a day or two. Jonas had never been a sun-worshipper. It defeated him how people could barbecue themselves for hours on end.

In the supermarket he mechanically loaded a trolley with food, trying to remember a dream he’d had last night.

He had dreamt of a nasty little boy. Latin in appearance and dressed like a child from the 1930s, the youngster had spoken in a grown-up voice. He’d materialised in front of Jonas again and again. Menacingly, out of nowhere, radiating hostility.

Try as he might, Jonas could only recall the atmosphere, not what had actually happened. He hadn’t recognised the boy.

He had never attributed any significance to his dreams in the old days. Now he kept a pencil and paper beside his bed, so he could make notes if he woke in the night. The paper was blank this morning. His only haul to date had been a sentence scribbled the night before last, but he couldn’t decipher it.

At the supermarket entrance he turned and looked back. Nothing had changed. The refrigeration units of the deep-freeze and dairy cabinets were humming away. Several of the aisles were littered with debris. Here and there, a milk bottle peeped out from under the shelves. The air was cool. Cooler than in other shops.

Back home again, having stowed the frozen food in the three-star compartment and the tinned goods in the kitchen cupboard, he plugged in one of the video cameras and played a tape selected at random.

It showed the stage of the Burgtheater. There was the sound of something being zipped up. Footsteps receded. A door closed with a thud.

Then silence.

A heap of junk from the props department. A papier
mâché soldier with a business card pinned to his chest. A spotlight illuminated the scene from the top right.

Jonas kept his eyes glued to the screen. He considered fast-forwarding the tape but didn’t for fear of missing something, some vital little detail.

He grew fidgety.

He fetched himself a glass of water, massaged his feet.

He had been staring at the screen for an hour, observing the immobility of inanimate objects, when he realised that history was repeating itself. He’d spent hours gazing intently at a meaningless jumble of objects once before. Years ago, at the theatre with Marie, who liked avant-garde plays. Afterwards she’d scolded him for being utterly unreceptive to anything new.

He couldn’t sit still, felt as if his leg were going to sleep, itched all over, jumped up and refilled his glass. Flopped down on the sofa, squirmed around, pedalled in the air with both legs. And all without taking his eyes off the screen.

The phone rang.

He leapt over the sofa table and reached it in two seconds flat. His heart missed a beat, then started again – painfully. His chest heaved as he struggled for breath.

‘Hello?’

‘Lo?’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ere?’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Ee?’

Whoever it was, he wasn’t calling from Austria. The line was so poor and the voice so faint, he felt it must be an overseas call.

‘Hello? Can you hear me? Do you speak German? English? Français?’

‘Say?’

Something had to happen. He couldn’t establish contact, didn’t know if the caller could hear him at all. If not, there would soon be a click followed by the dialling tone.

‘
I am alive!
’ he shouted in English. ‘
I am in Vienna,
Austria! Who are you? Is this a random call? Where are
you? Do you hear me? Do you hear me?
’

‘Ee?’

‘
Where are you?
’

‘Oo?’

He uttered a curse. He could hear himself but not the other person.

‘
Vienna! Austria! Europe!
’

He couldn’t bring himself to accept his failure to establish contact. An inner voice told him it was pointless, but he refused to hang up. He paused. Listened. Bellowed into the mouthpiece. Until it occurred to him that the other person might have gathered that there were problems and would call back. The connection might be better then.

‘
I do not hear you! Please call again! Call again immediately!
’

He had to shut his eyes, he found it so hard to replace the receiver. He didn’t reopen them right away but continued to sit on the stool with his head on his outstretched arm and his hand on the receiver.

Please call back.

Please ring.

Jonas drew several deep breaths and blinked.

He went into the bedroom to fetch his pencil and paper and note down the time. After a moment’s hesitation he added the date: 16 July.

The work he’d undertaken in Hollandstrasse would have to wait. Jonas dared not leave the flat. He put off going to the shops and limited his activities to the bare essentials. He even slept on a mattress beside the phone.

He re-recorded the message on his answerphone at least three times a day. Which items of information were the most important? Name, date and mobile number, certainly, but he couldn’t make up his mind about place and time. The message mustn’t be too long, and it had to be comprehensible.

He grew more dissatisfied with his recordings the more often he listened to them. Doggedly, he amended their sequence again and again – just in case the phone should ring during the six or seven minutes he needed to spend in the supermarket, loading up with apple juice, toilet paper and deep-frozen cod.

Perhaps the phone call was a reward for not resigning himself to his fate and remaining active. For searching for clues.

With fresh determination, he set about assessing the video recordings. He didn’t restrict himself to a single viewing of the tape from the Millennium Tower. Having failed to spot anything the first time, he rewound it and watched it again in slow motion.

For a while he thought the recorder’s slow-motion function was defective. It wasn’t. There was no discernible difference between a normal shot of Vienna’s immobile roofs and one that showed those roofs in slow motion. Any trees that might have been bending before the wind were too few, too small and too far away for him to detect any movement.

Jonas pressed the freeze-frame button. He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button again and opened his eyes.

No difference.

He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button and opened his eyes.

No difference.

He wound the tape on, almost to the end, and put it into reverse. The picture wound back in time-lapse.

No difference.

Undeterred, he spent the next day analysing the videotape of the Favoriten intersection in the same way.

With the same result.

For hour after hour he stared at its total immobility without spotting anything unusual. The only thing that had changed was the shadows. He discovered this discrepancy when comparing a still from the beginning with a still from the end, but there was no sign of anything abnormal. The sun had moved, that was all.

The videotapes recorded outside the parliament building, St Stephen’s and the Hofburg were equally uninformative. Jonas devoted several days to them. He wound them on, wound them back, glanced at the phone, dipped into a bag of crisps and wiped his salty fingers on the sofa’s antimacassar. He froze and fast-forwarded, but found nothing. There was no hidden message.

When he put in the Hollandstrasse tape, the screen gave a brief flash and went dark.

He knuckled his forehead and shut his eyes. The tape had been a new one. He’d unwrapped it, put it in the camera and pressed all the right buttons. All of them! The REC symbol had lit up clearly.

He switched cameras. Nothing. The tape was blank. Blank, but not unplayed. He knew what an unplayed tape showed: it flickered. This one showed darkness.

He stroked his chin. Cocked his head. Ran his fingers through his hair.

It had to be chance, a technical fault. He was reluctant to see signs in everything.

To soothe his imagination he shot a test sequence with the same camera and another tape. He expected the playback to be blank. To his bewilderment, the reproduction was perfect.

So it had to be the tape.

He put it into the camera that had been running in Hollandstrasse, shot a few seconds’ worth of film, wound it back and checked it. No complaints. A top-quality picture.

Although it was broad daylight, he lowered the blinds until all that relieved the gloom were two narrow strips of light on the carpet. With the shotgun propped up beside him, he watched the tape from beginning to end. It never came to life. There was nothing to be seen, absolutely nothing. Yet it had been recorded.

Halfway through he pressed freeze-frame and snapped the TV with the Polaroid, then waited tensely for the picture to appear.

It showed the screen as dark as it was in reality.

While looking at the photo he remembered his notion that continuous slowness could kill. If this were true, if you rubbed shoulders with eternity by performing an endless movement that culminated in immobility, what was that – reassuring or terrifying?

He aimed the camera at the screen once more. With his eye to the viewfinder, he put his finger on the shutter release and gently depressed it. He tried to reduce the pressure more and more.

The point of release, he felt, would soon be reached.

He depressed the button more slowly still. A tingling sensation took possession of his finger. Went up into his arm. His shoulder. He sensed that the point of release was approaching, but that the speed of its approach was lessening.

The tingling had now permeated his entire body. His head swam. He seemed to hear a distant whistling that must have been deafening at its source.

He had the impression that a process of some kind had begun. Various constants of perception such as space, matter, air, time, seemed to be coalescing. All were flowing into each other. Coagulating.

A sudden decision. He pressed the shutter release all the way. A click, a flash, and a thin sheet of card came purring out of the camera. He slumped back on the sofa. His sweat smelt acrid. His jaws were clamped together.

The last videotape had been shot on the Reichsbrücke. It showed the Danube flowing steadily past and the motionless shape of the Donauinsel, the island whose pubs had been among Jonas’s favourite haunts. Only four weeks ago he had subjected himself, for Marie’s sake, to the alcoholic hurly-burly of the Donauinsel Festival.

After a few minutes his eyes widened. Unconsciously, he sat up inch by inch and leant forwards as if to crawl into the TV.

An object was drifting down the river. A red bundle.

He rewound the tape. He couldn’t make out what it was. It vaguely resembled a hiker’s rucksack, though a rucksack would have tended to sink rather than float. A sheet of plastic seemed more likely, or a plastic container. Or a bag.

Jonas rewound the tape several times. He watched the little red blob come into view top left, grow bigger, gradually take shape, become clearly visible for a moment, and then go out of shot at the bottom of the screen. Should he drive there at once and search the shores of the Donauinsel, or watch the rest of the tape?

He stayed where he was. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa with his heart pounding, he stared avidly at the surface of the Danube. He wasn’t disappointed when the tape ended without his noticing anything else out of the ordinary. Dutifully, he watched the whole tape again and conducted the usual freeze-frame and slow-rewind experiments before pocketing his car keys and picking up the gun.