Thomas Glavinic: Night Work

Jonas turned off the recorder.

*

He found himself back in the Prater. It was just before noon. He’d been for a long walk but couldn’t remember it in detail. All he knew was that he’d simply set off, immersed in thoughts that had long eluded him.

He was dragging one leg, he didn’t know why. He tried to walk normally. It was something of an effort, but he succeeded. He walked across the Jesuitenwiese. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he walked on. The sun was almost directly overhead.

It occurred to him that he’d meant to revisit the pubs in which he’d left messages, so as to recall the meal and day in question, but he didn’t care to do so, not now.

He felt as if he’d been in a battle. Such a violent and protracted battle it no longer mattered who had won.

He swallowed a tablet and crossed over into the Wurstelprater. At the cycle-hire depot he got into a rickshaw, one of those canopied four-wheelers tourists used to enjoy pedalling across the Prater. There was something he still had to do.

*

Pedalling steadily and rhythmically, he rode across the Central Cemetery. The spade he’d got from the cemetery’s nursery clanked against the rickshaw’s frame. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the sun had disappeared behind a small bank of clouds. This made the trip even pleasanter. In contrast to the hush prevailing in the city, he found the silence here soothing. At least it didn’t intimidate him.

His quest for a freshly dug mound of earth took him past the graves of many famous people. Many were reminiscent of royal mausoleums. Others were plain, with nothing more than unobtrusive stone slabs bearing the names of their occupants.

It surprised him to see how many well-known people were buried here. In the case of some names, he wondered why their owners had been laid to rest among celebrities, as he’d never heard of them. Where others were concerned, he was astonished to see that they’d died only a few years ago, having been under the impression that they’d been dead for decades. In the case of still others, he was surprised he hadn’t heard of their death.

He was so enjoying his leisurely progress across the cemetery, he temporarily forgot why he’d come. He recalled the frequent occasions in his childhood when he and his grandmother had travelled here by tram to tend his great-grandparents’ grave. Later on he had visited his grandmother’s grave with his mother. His mother had lit candles, pulled out weeds and planted flowers while he wandered around, inhaling the cemetery’s characteristic scent of flowers, soil and freshly mown grass.

He’d wasted no thought on death, nor even on his dead grandmother. The sight of all the trees had aroused visions of the marvellous games he and his friends could have played in this place and how long one would take to be found in a game of hide-and-seek. When his mother summoned him to fill the watering can at the fountain, he had returned to her world with reluctance.

In a way, he’d been closer to the dead than to the living around him. The dead beneath his feet he incorporated into his daydreams as a matter of course. The grown-ups carrying their carrier bags along the paths, on the other hand, he faded out. In his imagination he’d been alone with his friends.

Did it really have to be a new grave? The soil wouldn’t be that much looser.

An idea occurred to him.

*

The post-1995 records were stored in a data bank. The heavy ledgers used in previous years smelt of mildew and some of the pages were coming adrift. Jonas had to consult one of these tomes. He knew the year precisely, 1989. But he wasn’t so sure of the month. He thought it was May. May or June.

His search was made more difficult by the handwriting of the officials who had recorded the location of the graves. Many entries, especially the ones written in Gothic script, were almost indecipherable, others had faded. What was more, the tablets’ side effects were becoming more pronounced. His head felt as if it were in a vice and the lines were dancing before his eyes. He was determined to go on looking, however, even if he had to sit on this worn-out swivel chair for another twenty-four hours.

And then he found it. Date of death: 23 April. Date of interment: 29 April.

He hadn’t been present at the time.

He wrote the coordinates of the grave on a slip of paper and replaced the ledger tidily on its shelf. The rickshaw was standing in front of the cemetery’s administration building. He pedalled off, spade clattering. There was a strong scent of grass.

Bender, Ludwig 1892–1944

Bender, Juliane 1898–1989

The old woman had never mentioned a husband, but that didn’t matter now. He took the spade and started digging.

After a quarter of an hour he had to get down into the pit to go on working. After an hour his hands were raw and blistered. His back ached so badly he had to keep shutting his eyes and groaning. He laboured on until, nearly two hours after his spade first bit into the ground, it struck something hard. At first he thought it was just another of the stones he’d already thrown out of the grave. To his relief, however, a little more of the coffin was revealed with each spadeful of earth he flung aside.

The lid had become dislodged. He peered through the crack. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he saw a shred of cloth with something grey inside it.

He straightened up, breathing heavily. To his surprise, he could smell nothing but earth.

Sorry, it has to be done.

He pushed the lid aside. Lying in the damp, decaying wooden box was a human skeleton clad in rags.

Hello.

That was what remained of Frau Juliane Bender. That hand had held his own when it was still clothed in flesh. He had gazed into that face when it was still a face.

Goodbye.

Jonas replaced the lid, climbed out of the grave and shovelled the soil back on top of the coffin, working steadily. He wondered if it had all been worthwhile.

Yes. Because now he knew that the dead were dead. They’d been dead before 4 July and they still were. Where the living had got to, he couldn’t tell. They probably weren’t below ground, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else they might be. But the dead were still there. That was one certainty, at least.

But what of the dead on the earth’s surface?

What of Scott in his tent in the Antarctic? The tent that had collapsed on top of him and his comrades and was probably covered by a sheet of ice. Did that count as being dead and buried? Was his body still there?

What of Amundsen? What if his remains had spent the last eighty years on an ice floe? Were they still there?

And what of all the people who had died in the mountains and never been buried? Had they disappeared like the living, or were they still there?

He no longer needed to know.

*

He made his way into St Stephen’s carrying Marie’s case and a folding chair. The smell of incense was as faint as it had been the last time. Only two of the overhead lights were still on.

With the case and the folding chair in either hand, Jonas set off slowly, step by step, for the lift. He turned to listen.

Silence.

He put the case and the chair in the lift and turned once more.

Silence.

*

Jonas unfolded the chair and sat down, pulling the case towards him. He looked out across the twilit city. An occasional puff of wind fanned his face.

I hope I don’t catch cold, he thought.

And laughed.

He picked up a pebble and examined it. Felt the dust that stuck to it. Looked at the curves and protrusions, indentations and tiny fissures on its surface. No other pebble like this existed. Just as no two people resembled each other in every detail, so no two pebbles were exactly similar in shape, colour and weight. This pebble was unique. There was no other pebble in existence like the one his hand was holding right