Night Work (33 page)

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?

That could mean only one thing: it was the principle that counted, not the individual. Either all were doomed or none was.

Or none. So what was he doing here? Why had he woken up all alone? Was there nothing in the entire universe that wanted him?

Marie. Marie wanted him.

With her case in his hand, he climbed over the parapet. He could see the truck standing in the cathedral square far below.

He looked out over the city. He saw the Millennium Tower, the Danube Tower, the churches, the public buildings, the Big Wheel. His mouth was dry, his palms were moist. He smelt of sweat. He sat down again.

Should he do it deliberately, or would it be better to act on impulse?

He leafed through his notebook until he came to the place where he’d asked himself to think, on 4 September, of the day he’d written those words. He had jotted them down in his room at Kanzelstein on 4 August. Now it was 20 August.

He thought of 4 September. The one in two weeks’ time and the one 1,000 years hence. There would be no difference between the two, or none worth mentioning. He had once read that, if humanity succeeded in exterminating
itself, not a vestige of civilisation would remain after only 100 years. By 4 September in 1,000 years’ time, therefore, everything in front of him would have disappeared. But, even on 4 September two weeks from now, there would be no witness left. That being so, how did the two days differ?

Marie. He could see her face. Her whole being.

He wedged the case between his legs and took the old musical teddy from his pocket. Took out Marie’s mobile.

Wound up the music box,

thought of Marie,

and toppled

forwards,

slowly,

falling,

ever more slowly.

Jonas was already familiar with the distant but swelling sound, except that this time it seemed to be coming from within him. Within him yet remote. At the same time, he was enveloped in a glow that seemed to bear him up. He felt he was being caught hold of and embraced. He felt he could absorb everything that came his way.

A life. You were the same for only two or three years, then you had less and less in common with the person you’d been four years ago. It was like being on a suspension bridge or a tightrope high in the air. Wherever you went, the rope sagged at the point of maximum weight. One step forwards or backwards and the sag became less pronounced, and some distance away the effect of the weight upon the rope was scarcely visible. Such was time, and such was the effect of time on personality. Jonas had once come across some letters he’d written to a girlfriend but never sent. The writer was a
completely different person. Another person, not another self, for that remained constant.

He saw Marie’s face in front of him. It grew bigger and bigger until it settled over him, spread itself out above his head and slid into him. Was he already falling? Was he falling at all?

The uproar inside him seemed to liquefy. He could smell and taste the closeness of a sound. He saw a book coming towards him and absorbed it.

A book was written and printed, delivered to a bookshop and placed on a shelf, taken out and examined from time to time. After spending a few weeks among other books, between James and Marcel or Emma and Virginia, it was sold. Taken home by the purchaser. Read and placed on a shelf. And there it remained. Years later it might be read a second or third time. But back it would go on the shelf. Five, ten, twelve or fifteen years later it would be given away or sold, read once and placed on a shelf once more. It would be there during the day, when it was light, and in the evening when the lights went out, and at night in the dark. And at daybreak it would still be on the shelf. For five years or thirty, after which it would be resold. Or given away. That was a book: a life on a shelf that harboured life within itself.

He was falling, yet he didn’t seem to be moving.

He hadn’t known that time could be so sluggish.

He felt as if hundreds of helicopters were starting up all around him. He tried to clasp his head but couldn’t see his hand move, it was so slow.

Dying old or young. He had often thought how tragic it was to die young. And yet, in a way, the tragic nature of an early death was diminished by the passing of time. Two men were born in the year 1900. One died in the First World War, the other lived on for twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty years. In 2000 he died too. It no longer mattered
that he’d seen many more summers than the one who died young, or that he’d undergone this or that experience denied to the younger man, who had been hit by a Russian or French or German bullet. Why not? Because none of that counted any more. All those days in springtime, all those sunrises and parties, love affairs and winter landscapes were long gone. All of them.

Two people were both born in 1755. One died in 1790, the other in 1832. Forty-two years’ difference in age. A great deal at the time. Two centuries later, statistics. Everything far away. Everything small.

The persistent uproar was all around him now. All around and inside him too.

He saw a tree flying towards him. He absorbed the tree. He knew the tree.

Nuclear waste was stored in the ground. Radioactive fuel rods lay buried at many points in the world. They would continue to give off radiation for 32,000 years. Jonas had often wondered what people would say about those responsible for that problem 16,000 years hence. They would think that other people living 16,000 years before them had failed to grasp the meaning of time. Thirty-two thousand years – 1,000 generations. Mystified, everyone would have to work hard to pay for what two or three or ten earlier generations had done for their own short-term benefit. Time was a juxtaposition, not a succession. Generations were neighbours. In 1,000 years’ time, householders would be complaining about the retarded hooligan living in their basement and making their lives a misery.

Or so Jonas had thought. But it wouldn’t come to that, not now. The fuel rods would continue to emit radiation until it had all dispersed, yet silence would have reigned on the planet for no longer than the time it took to click your fingers.

He was falling ever more slowly. His body seemed to be a part of what lay ahead, just as he was becoming a part of that moment and the owner of the uproar in and around himself.

People had spoken of heaven and hell, heaven being reserved for the good and hell for the bad. Good and evil existed on the earth, it was true. Perhaps those people had been right, perhaps heaven and hell did exist. But you didn’t have to play the harp or be roasted on a spit by creatures with horns. Heaven and hell, as he had conceived of them, were subjective forms of expression for the past self. Anyone who had come to terms with himself and the world would feel better and find peace in that long, long moment of death: that was heaven. Anyone spiritually impure would consume himself with fire: that was hell.

He could see everything so clearly from up here.

Happiness was a summer’s day in childhood, when the grown-ups were watching the World Cup on TV and water wings were being handed out at the swimming baths. When it was hot, and there were ice creams and lemonade, shouts and laughter.

Happiness was a winter’s day on which you should have been at school but were on board the night train to Italy with your parents. Snow and mist and an imposing railway station, a comic book and a cosy compartment. Cold outside, warm within.

He saw a mirror flying towards him. He saw himself. He went into himself.

He saw the Secession building wrapped in sticky tape, the Danube Tower, the Big Wheel. He saw the bed in the middle of Heldenplatz, infinitesimally small. He saw his TV-set sculpture in the Belvedere Gardens, barely visible.

Happiness was also being pushed along in your pram as a little child. Watching the grown-ups, listening to their voices and marvelling at so many new things. Being greeted
and smiled at by unfamiliar faces. Sitting there and riding along at the same time. Clutching something sweet in your hand and feeling the warmth of the sun on your legs. And, possibly, meeting another pram, a little girl with curls, being wheeled past each other and waving in the knowledge that she was the one, she was the one, the one you would come to love.

Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw