‘Hello! If you hear this, please come to the following address …’
Already there, he thought.
He sat down on the sofa with a glass of Marie’s advocaat and watched the Love Parade again. The sun’s dying rays were slanting through the half-closed blinds.
If he wanted to listen to the tape again, he knew he should do so now.
He wound the tape back, then forwards, then back again. It stopped by chance at the point where the first sound made itself heard. A faint rustle.
Minutes later he heard a murmur.
It was his own voice. It had to be. Whose, if not his? He didn’t recognise it, though. Then a strange, hollow, staccato ‘Hepp’ issued from the loudspeakers. Then silence. Minutes later he heard some more murmuring. It went on for longer this time, like a coherent sentence.
He let the tape run on to the end, listening with his eyes shut. Nothing more.
Was it his voice?
And, if so, what was he saying?
*
The temperature had dropped. Dense grey clouds hid the sun. A stiff breeze was blowing, and he wasn’t sorry. It was the same every year: he looked forward to the summer for months, only to tire of the heat after a day or two. Jonas had never been a sun-worshipper. It defeated him how people could barbecue themselves for hours on end.
In the supermarket he mechanically loaded a trolley with food, trying to remember a dream he’d had last night.
He had dreamt of a nasty little boy. Latin in appearance and dressed like a child from the 1930s, the youngster had spoken in a grown-up voice. He’d materialised in front of Jonas again and again. Menacingly, out of nowhere, radiating hostility.
Try as he might, Jonas could only recall the atmosphere, not what had actually happened. He hadn’t recognised the boy.
He had never attributed any significance to his dreams in the old days. Now he kept a pencil and paper beside his bed, so he could make notes if he woke in the night. The paper was blank this morning. His only haul to date had been a sentence scribbled the night before last, but he couldn’t decipher it.
At the supermarket entrance he turned and looked back. Nothing had changed. The refrigeration units of the deep-freeze and dairy cabinets were humming away. Several of the aisles were littered with debris. Here and there, a milk bottle peeped out from under the shelves. The air was cool. Cooler than in other shops.
Back home again, having stowed the frozen food in the three-star compartment and the tinned goods in the kitchen cupboard, he plugged in one of the video cameras and played a tape selected at random.
It showed the stage of the Burgtheater. There was the sound of something being zipped up. Footsteps receded. A door closed with a thud.
Then silence.
A heap of junk from the props department. A papier mâché soldier with a business card pinned to his chest. A spotlight illuminated the scene from the top right.
Jonas kept his eyes glued to the screen. He considered fast-forwarding the tape but didn’t for fear of missing something, some vital little detail.
He grew fidgety.
He fetched himself a glass of water, massaged his feet.
He had been staring at the screen for an hour, observing the immobility of inanimate objects, when he realised that history was repeating itself. He’d spent hours gazing intently at a meaningless jumble of objects once before. Years ago, at the theatre with Marie, who liked avant-garde plays. Afterwards she’d scolded him for being utterly unreceptive to anything new.
He couldn’t sit still, felt as if his leg were going to sleep, itched all over, jumped up and refilled his glass. Flopped down on the sofa, squirmed around, pedalled in the air with both legs. And all without taking his eyes off the screen.
The phone rang.
He leapt over the sofa table and reached it in two seconds flat. His heart missed a beat, then started again — painfully. His chest heaved as he struggled for breath.
‘Hello?’
‘Lo?’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Ere?’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Ee?’
Whoever it was, he wasn’t calling from Austria. The line was so poor and the voice so faint, he felt it must be an overseas call.
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Do you speak German? English? Français?’
‘Say?’
Something had to happen. He couldn’t establish contact, didn’t know if the caller could hear him at all. If not, there would soon be a click followed by the dialling tone.
‘I am alive!’ he shouted in English. ‘I am in Vienna, Austria! Who are you? Is this a random call? Where are you? Do you hear me? Do you hear me?’
‘Ee?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Oo?’
He uttered a curse. He could hear himself but not the other person.
‘Vienna! Austria! Europe!’
He couldn’t bring himself to accept his failure to establish contact. An inner voice told him it was pointless, but he refused to hang up. He paused. Listened. Bellowed into the mouthpiece. Until it occurred to him that the other person might have gathered that there were problems and would call back. The connection might be better then.
‘I do not hear you! Please call again! Call again immediately!’
He had to shut his eyes, he found it so hard to replace the receiver. He didn’t reopen them right away but continued to sit on the stool with his head on his outstretched arm and his hand on the receiver.
Please call back.
Please ring.
*
Jonas drew several deep breaths and blinked.
He went into the bedroom to fetch his pencil and paper and note down the time. After a moment’s hesitation he added the date: 16 July.
*
The work he’d undertaken in Hollandstrasse would have to wait. Jonas dared not leave the flat. He put off going to the shops and limited his activities to the bare essentials. He even slept on a mattress beside the phone.
He re-recorded the message on his answerphone at least three times a day. Which items of information were the most important? Name, date and mobile number, certainly, but he couldn’t make up his mind about place and time. The message mustn’t be too long, and it had to be comprehensible.
He grew more dissatisfied with his recordings the more often he listened to them. Doggedly, he amended their sequence again and again — just in case the phone should ring during the six or seven minutes he needed to spend in the supermarket, loading up with apple juice, toilet paper and deep-frozen cod.
Perhaps the phone call was a reward for not resigning himself to his fate and remaining active. For searching for clues.
With fresh determination, he set about assessing the video recordings. He didn’t restrict himself to a single viewing of the tape from the Millennium Tower. Having failed to spot anything the first time, he rewound it and watched it again in slow motion.
For a while he thought the recorder’s slow-motion function was defective. It wasn’t. There was no discernible difference between a normal shot of Vienna’s immobile roofs and one that showed those roofs in slow motion. Any trees that might have been bending before the wind were too few, too small and too far away for him to detect any movement.
Jonas pressed the freeze-frame button. He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button again and opened his eyes.
No difference.
He shut his eyes, wound the tape on, pressed the freeze-frame button and opened his eyes.
No difference.
He wound the tape on, almost to the end, and put it into reverse. The picture wound back in time-lapse.
No difference.
*
Undeterred, he spent the next day analysing the videotape of the Favoriten intersection in the same way.