Thomas Glavinic: Night Work

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?