Thomas Glavinic: Night Work

His shirt was fluttering in the front row. He followed its progress through the air, shading his eyes with his hand. After three minutes the swingboat came to rest and the safety bars snapped open automatically.

Jonas retrieved his shirt. He wondered if you could speak of a view if there was no one there to admire it. Was a shirt enough to make a view a view?

He opened another can of beer and took it with him into the House of Adventure. A children’s attraction. It was quite hard to squeeze between sandbags and cross swaying wooden bridges with the shotgun on his back. He trod on stairs that gave way with a crash, teetered across sloping rooms, blundered along unlit passages. When he hadn’t activated some mechanism or other, all was quiet. Now and then a beam would creak beneath his weight.

On reaching the third floor, he stationed himself beside the balustrade overlooking the forecourt.

Nothing was stirring down below.

He drank his beer.

Then he went lurching down a rope walkway in the shape of a spiral staircase.

*

At the shooting gallery he couldn’t resist the air rifle lying on the counter. He took his time aiming. He fired and reloaded. He took aim, fired and reloaded again. Six times the gun spat air, and six times came the almost simultaneous smack of the slug striking home. He examined the target. The result was not unsatisfactory.

He hung up another target and slowly crooked his finger.

He had always fancied that you could die of slowness by prolonging some everyday action indefinitely — to infinity, or, rather, to finality — because you would depart this world while still engaged in that process. A step, a gesture, a wave of the arm, a turn of the head — if you slowed that movement more and more, everything would come to an end, more or less of its own accord.

His finger curled around the trigger. With surprising clarity, he realised that he must long ago have reached, yet failed to reach, the point of release.

Unslinging the shotgun, he cocked it and fired. A gratifyingly loud report rang out. Simultaneously, he felt the weapon kick him in the shoulder.

The target displayed a gaping hole big enough to take a man’s fist. Sunlight was twinkling through some other, smaller holes around it.

*

He went for a trip round the Prater on the miniature railway, whose diesel locomotive was simple to operate. The engine puttered, the air smelt of greenery. It was much cooler in the shade of the trees than among the booths in the amusement park. He pulled on his shirt, which he’d tied round his waist after its ride on the Flying Carpet.

At the Heustadlwasser he climbed unsteadily into one of the boats moored there. Tossing the painter onto the landing stage, he pushed off and rowed vigorously until the boatman’s hut was out of sight. Then he shipped his oars.

He lay down on his back and drifted. Sunlight flickered through the trees overhead.

*

He awoke with a start.

Blinking in the gloom, he gradually made out the furniture’s familiar outlines and realised that he was at home in bed. He wiped his sweaty face on his forearm, threw back the thin linen sheet he slept beneath in summer and went into the bathroom. His nose was blocked up, his throat sore. He drank a glass of water.

Sitting on the edge of the bath, he groped his way back into the nightmare.

He had dreamt of his family. The strange thing was, they were all his own age. He’d spoken to his grandmother, who was seventy when he was born and had died at eighty-eight. In his dream she was thirty-five. Although Jonas had never seen her at that age, he knew it was her. He’d marvelled at her smooth complexion and dark, luxuriant hair.

His grandfather, likewise thirty-five, had also appeared. His mother, his father, his uncle, his aunts — all were his own age.

David, his cousin Stephanie’s son, who had celebrated his eleventh birthday last February, sported a moustache and had chill blue eyes.

Paula, another cousin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had bumped into by chance in Mariahilfer Strasse not long ago, glanced at him over her shoulder and said: ‘Well?’ Her face was older, more expressive and a little careworn. She, too, was thirty-five beyond a doubt. Standing beside her was the baby she’d given birth to last autumn, an aloof-looking thirty-five-year-old man wearing brown gloves.

There was something else as well, some disquieting feature he couldn’t put his finger on.

They’d all yammered at him in a language of which he understood only snatches. His dead young grandmother had patted his cheek and muttered ‘UMIROM, UMIROM, UMIROM’ — at least, that was what it had sounded like to him. Thereafter she merely moved her lips. His father, who resembled his wartime photos, had been jogging along behind her on a treadmill. He hadn’t looked at Jonas.

But there was something else.

He sluiced his face in cold water and looked up at the ceiling. A damp patch had appeared there some months ago, but it hadn’t grown any bigger of late.

Going straight back to bed was out of the question. He turned on every light in the flat. And the TV, whose flickering screen he now accepted as normal. He put in a video but killed the sound. It was the highlights of the Berlin Love Parade of 1999, which he’d inadvertently tossed into his trolley at the supermarket.

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.