Thomas Glavinic: Night Work

‘Good morning!’ he called as he entered the kitchen-cum-living-room.

He carried the breakfast things to the table and turned on the TV. He sent Marie a text: Sleep well? Dreamt about you, then found I was awake. ILU .

Nothing on the screen but snow. He zapped from ORF to ARD: no picture. He tried ZDF, RTL, 3sat, RAI: snow. The Viennese local channel: snow. CNN: more snow. French-language channel, Turkish-language channel: no reception.

No Kurier on the doormat, just an old advertising leaflet he’d been too lazy to remove. Shaking his head, he pulled one of last week’s papers from the pile in the hall and went back to his coffee. Made a mental note to cancel his order. They’d already failed to deliver it once last month.

He surveyed the room. The floor was strewn with shirts, trousers and socks, and last night’s dirty plates stood beside the sink. The waste bin stank. Jonas pulled a face. He yearned for a few days’ sea air. He ought to have gone with Marie, although he disliked visiting relations.

When he went to cut himself another slice of bread the knife slipped and bit deep into his finger.

‘Damn! Ah! What the …?’

Gritting his teeth, Jonas held his hand under the cold tap until the blood stopped flowing. He examined the wound. He’d cut himself to the bone, but he didn’t appear to have damaged a tendon. It didn’t hurt, either. There was a neat, gaping slit in his finger, and he could see the bone.

He felt queasy, took some deep breaths.

No one, himself included, had ever seen what he could see. He’d lived with this finger for thirty-five years without ever knowing what it looked like inside. He had no idea what his heart looked like, or his spleen. Not that he’d have been particularly interested in their appearance, far from it. But this bare bone was unquestionably a part of him. A part he’d never seen until now.

By the time he had bandaged up his finger and wiped the table, he’d lost his appetite. He sat down at the computer to check his emails and skim the world news. His browser homepage was set to Yahoo. A server error message appeared instead.

‘Damn and blast!’

He still had time, so he dialled the help line. The automated voice listing alternatives didn’t answer. He let it ring for a long time.

*

At the bus stop he took the weekend supplement from his briefcase. He hadn’t had time to read it before. The morning sun was dazzling. He felt in his jacket pockets, then remembered that his sunglasses were lying on the chest in the hall. He checked to see if Marie had texted him back, opened the paper again and turned to the Style section.

He found it hard to concentrate on the article. Something was puzzling him.

After a while he realised he was reading the same sentence over and over again without taking it in. He clamped the newspaper under his arm and took a few steps along the pavement. When he looked up he saw there was no one else in sight. Not a soul or a car to be seen.

A practical joke was his first thought. Then: it must be a public holiday.

Yes, that would account for it, a public holiday. Telephone engineers took longer to repair a faulty line on public holidays. Buses were more infrequent too. And there were fewer people in the street.

Except that 4 July wasn’t a public holiday. Not in Austria, at least.

He walked to the supermarket on the corner. Shut. He rested his forehead against the glass and shaded his eyes with his hands. No one there. So it had to be a public holiday. Or a strike, and he’d missed the announcement.

On his way back to the bus stop he looked round to see if the 39A was turning the corner. It wasn’t.

He called Marie’s mobile. No reply, not even her recorded message.

He dialled his father’s number. He didn’t answer either.

He tried the office. No one picked up the phone.

Werner and Anne were both unobtainable.

Bewildered, he replaced the mobile in his breast pocket. At that moment it occurred to him how utterly quiet everything was.

He went back to the flat and turned on the TV again. Snow. He turned on the computer. Server error. He turned on the radio. White noise.

He sat down on the sofa, trying to collect his thoughts. His palms were moist.

He went to the corkboard in the kitchen and consulted a grubby slip of paper Marie had pinned up years ago. It bore the phone number of the sister she was visiting in the north of England. He dialled it. The ringing tone was different from the Austrian one, lower and consisting of two short purring sounds. After listening to it for the tenth time, he hung up.

*

When he went outside again he peered in both directions. He didn’t pause on his way to the car, just glanced over his shoulder a couple of times. Then he stood and listened.

Nothing to be heard. No hurrying footsteps, no throat-clearing, not a breath. Nothing.

It was stuffy inside the Toyota. The steering wheel was so hot, he could only touch it with the balls of his thumbs and his bandaged forefinger. He wound the window down.

Nothing to be heard outside.

He turned on the radio. White noise on all stations.

He drove across the deserted Heiligenstädter Brücke, where the traffic was usually nose-to-tail, and along the embankment towards the city centre. He kept an eye open for signs of life, or at least for some indication of what might have happened here, but all he saw were abandoned cars neatly parked as if their owners had merely nipped inside for a moment.

He pinched his thighs, scratched his cheeks.

‘Hey! Hello!’

On Franz-Josefs-Kai, driving at over seventy k.p.h. because he felt safer that way, he was flashed by a speed camera. He turned off onto the ring road that separates the centre of Vienna from the rest of the city and upped his speed still more. At Schwarzenbergplatz he debated whether to stop and look in at the office. He sped past the Opera, the Burggarten and the Hofburg doing ninety. At the last moment he braked and drove through the gate into Heldenplatz.

Not a soul in sight.

At a red light he screeched to a halt and killed the engine. Nothing to be heard but metallic pings from under the bonnet. He ran his fingers through his hair and mopped his brow, clasped his hands together and cracked his knuckles.

Something suddenly struck him: there wasn’t even a bird to be seen.

*

He skirted the 1st District at high speed until he found himself back in Schwarzenbergplatz. Turning right, he pulled up just beyond the next intersection. Schmidt & Co.’ s offices were on the second floor.

He looked in all directions. Stood still and listened. Walked the few metres back to the intersection and peered down the adjoining streets. Parked cars, nothing else.

Shading his eyes, he squinted up at the office windows and called his boss’s name. Then he pushed the heavy door open. Cool, stale air wafted to meet him. He blinked, still dazzled by the brightness outside. The lobby was as gloomy, grimy and deserted as ever.

Schmidt & Co. occupied the whole of the second floor, six rooms in all. Jonas toured them one by one. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Computer screens on desks with stacks of paper beside them. Walls hung with garish amateur daubs by Anzinger’s aunt. Martina’s pot plant in its usual place on the window sill. Rubber balls, building bricks and plastic locomotives lying forlornly in the crèche corner installed by Frau Pedersen. His progress was obstructed at every turn by bulky parcels containing the latest consignment of catalogues. The smell hadn’t changed either. A blend of wood, cloth and paper. You either got used to it at once or handed in your notice within days.