With the same result.
For hour after hour he stared at its total immobility without spotting anything unusual. The only thing that had changed was the shadows. He discovered this discrepancy when comparing a still from the beginning with a still from the end, but there was no sign of anything abnormal. The sun had moved, that was all.
The videotapes recorded outside the parliament building, St Stephen’s and the Hofburg were equally uninformative. Jonas devoted several days to them. He wound them on, wound them back, glanced at the phone, dipped into a bag of crisps and wiped his salty fingers on the sofa’s antimacassar. He froze and fast-forwarded, but found nothing. There was no hidden message.
When he put in the Hollandstrasse tape, the screen gave a brief flash and went dark.
He knuckled his forehead and shut his eyes. The tape had been a new one. He’d unwrapped it, put it in the camera and pressed all the right buttons. All of them! The REC symbol had lit up clearly.
He switched cameras. Nothing. The tape was blank. Blank, but not unplayed. He knew what an unplayed tape showed: it flickered. This one showed darkness.
He stroked his chin. Cocked his head. Ran his fingers through his hair.
It had to be chance, a technical fault. He was reluctant to see signs in everything.
To soothe his imagination he shot a test sequence with the same camera and another tape. He expected the playback to be blank. To his bewilderment, the reproduction was perfect.
So it had to be the tape.
He put it into the camera that had been running in Hollandstrasse, shot a few seconds’ worth of film, wound it back and checked it. No complaints. A top-quality picture.
Although it was broad daylight, he lowered the blinds until all that relieved the gloom were two narrow strips of light on the carpet. With the shotgun propped up beside him, he watched the tape from beginning to end. It never came to life. There was nothing to be seen, absolutely nothing. Yet it had been recorded.
Halfway through he pressed freeze-frame and snapped the TV with the Polaroid, then waited tensely for the picture to appear.
It showed the screen as dark as it was in reality.
While looking at the photo he remembered his notion that continuous slowness could kill. If this were true, if you rubbed shoulders with eternity by performing an endless movement that culminated in immobility, what was that — reassuring or terrifying?
He aimed the camera at the screen once more. With his eye to the viewfinder, he put his finger on the shutter release and gently depressed it. He tried to reduce the pressure more and more.
The point of release, he felt, would soon be reached.
He depressed the button more slowly still. A tingling sensation took possession of his finger. Went up into his arm. His shoulder. He sensed that the point of release was approaching, but that the speed of its approach was lessening.
The tingling had now permeated his entire body. His head swam. He seemed to hear a distant whistling that must have been deafening at its source.
He had the impression that a process of some kind had begun. Various constants of perception such as space, matter, air, time, seemed to be coalescing. All were flowing into each other. Coagulating.
A sudden decision. He pressed the shutter release all the way. A click, a flash, and a thin sheet of card came purring out of the camera. He slumped back on the sofa. His sweat smelt acrid. His jaws were clamped together.
*
The last videotape had been shot on the Reichsbrücke. It showed the Danube flowing steadily past and the motionless shape of the Donauinsel, the island whose pubs had been among Jonas’s favourite haunts. Only four weeks ago he had subjected himself, for Marie’s sake, to the alcoholic hurly-burly of the Donauinsel Festival.
After a few minutes his eyes widened. Unconsciously, he sat up inch by inch and leant forwards as if to crawl into the TV.
An object was drifting down the river. A red bundle.
He rewound the tape. He couldn’t make out what it was. It vaguely resembled a hiker’s rucksack, though a rucksack would have tended to sink rather than float. A sheet of plastic seemed more likely, or a plastic container. Or a bag.
Jonas rewound the tape several times. He watched the little red blob come into view top left, grow bigger, gradually take shape, become clearly visible for a moment, and then go out of shot at the bottom of the screen. Should he drive there at once and search the shores of the Donauinsel, or watch the rest of the tape?
He stayed where he was. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa with his heart pounding, he stared avidly at the surface of the Danube. He wasn’t disappointed when the tape ended without his noticing anything else out of the ordinary. Dutifully, he watched the whole tape again and conducted the usual freeze-frame and slow-rewind experiments before pocketing his car keys and picking up the gun.
The phone caught his eye as he passed it.
Oh well, he thought. It wouldn’t ring now.
*
He wanted first of all to inspect the video camera’s location, so he pulled up on the bridge itself. He saw, as soon as he got out, that something was different.
He walked around. Twenty paces this way, twenty paces that. The wind blowing into his face was so chilly he regretted not having worn a jacket. He turned up the collar of his shirt.
Something was wrong, he felt sure.
Roughly at the spot where he’d sited the camera, he rested his elbows on the parapet. He looked down at the Danube, which was flowing past with a subdued murmur. That sound had been drowned before, even at night, by the noise of cars and lorries crossing the bridge. But it wasn’t the sound of the river that puzzled him.
He scanned the surface for the approximate course the object had followed. It had come into shot back there. What was over there? And it had floated out of shot down there. Where would it have drifted to?
He went over to the other side of the bridge. The long, narrow island stretched away to the north-west as far as he could see, lapped by the Danube on either side. There were no grilles or gratings in the river bed, no sizeable spits or inlets, so it was unlikely that the red object had lodged somewhere or been washed ashore. Nevertheless, he had to look for it.
As he stood there with his hands in his pockets, resting his stomach against the parapet, he suddenly recalled his old, long-held ambition: to be a survivor.
Jonas had often imagined what it might be like if he narrowly missed a train that later came to grief in the mountains.
He’d pictured it in every detail. The brakes failed, the train plunged over a precipice. Carriages impacted and were crushed. Shortly afterwards, aerial views of the scene were shown on TV. Paramedics tending the injured, firemen scurrying around, blue lights flashing everywhere. He saw the pictures on a TV in a shop window. Anxious friends kept phoning for reassurance. Marie wept. Even his father nearly broke down. For days afterwards, he had to explain how this dispensation of providence had come about.
Or he took an earlier flight than originally scheduled. He got to the airport in good time, so as to do some shopping and buy Marie something nice in the duty-free shop. Then it turned out that a seat was available on an earlier flight. In one variant of this fantasy he inadvertently checked in at the wrong desk but managed to obtain a seat thanks to a computer error. Every version of the same imaginary scenario culminated in the destruction of the plane on whose passenger list his name appeared. His death was announced on the news. Once again, he had to reassure grief-stricken friends. ‘It’s a mistake, I’m alive.’ A shout at the other end of the line: ‘He’s alive!’
A car crash in which he climbed out of a complete write-off, uninjured save for a few scratches, with dead bodies lying all around him. A falling brick that missed him by inches and killed a total stranger. A heist in which hostages were shot, one by one, until police stormed the building and rescued him. A madman running amok. A terrorist attack. A stabbing. Mass poisoning in a restaurant.