Just as he was leaving a girl’s bedroom, which wasn’t particularly clean and tidy, the voice in his ear said:
‘Did you see that?’
He came to a halt and looked back over his shoulder.
‘There was something there, did you notice? You caught a glimpse of it.’
He hadn’t seen a thing.
‘It was there for a moment.’
An inner voice warned him not to go back into the room. The voice in his ear urged him to do so. He hesitated. Shut his eyes, rested his hand on the handle and slowly pushed it down. The pressure of his hand eased a little, so little that although he knew it was happening he didn’t feel it. He pushed the handle ever more slowly.
He was gripped by a sensation that time was freezing beneath his hand. The brass handle felt soft. It seemed to be melting into its surroundings. Neither hot nor cold, it had no temperature at all. Without hearing a sound, he felt he was being subjected to a thunderous din that had material substance and emanated from no particular direction. At the same time, he became aware that he consisted of nothing more than the movement his hand was performing at that moment.
He let go, breathing heavily and staring at the door.
‘But don’t bring it home with you,’ said the voice in his ear.
*
He spent the rest of the day packing boxes like an automaton. Apart from one short break, during which he grilled some sausages in the pub as he had the day before, he worked until early evening.
It wasn’t the incident in the house that disturbed him. What weighed on his mind was the potential significance of the overturned video camera. Did it have some connection with the Sleeper’s odd behaviour? Would it be worth investigating that wall? Should he break it open?
Having taped up the last box, he surveyed the empty cupboards and shelves. There weren’t as many as there had been. Where were the possessions they’d lived with in Hollandstrasse? Had they all been thrown away? Where was the picture that had so engrossed him as a child whenever he passed it in the hall?
Now that he came to think of it, there were other things he missed. The red photo album. The ship in the bottle. The linocut. The chessboard.
He either carried or dragged the boxes out into the street, depending on how heavy they were. When they were all loaded, he sat down wearily on the tailboard. Leaning back on his hands, he looked up. Windows were open here and there. The statues projecting from the walls stared forbiddingly over his head. The sky was a flawless, merciless blue.
*
The cellar stairs were narrow. Cobwebs clung to every nook and cranny, dusty skeins dangled from the ceiling. The plaster on the grimy walls was flaking off. Jonas shivered. Although he descended the stairs at a crouch, he hit his head twice. In a panic, he ran a hand over his face and forehead in case something nasty had stuck to them.
Pinned to the cellar door was an old damaged sign vividly illustrating the dangers of rat poison. There were four panes of glass in the upper part of the door, one of them broken. The passage beyond lay in darkness. Jonas’s nose was assailed by a smell of mildewed wood.
He raised his shotgun and kicked the door open. Singing at the top of his voice, he quickly turned the light on.
It was a communal cellar divided into separate sections by timber partitions a hand’s-breadth clear of the floor and ceiling. There were no floorboards, just hard-packed earth studded with stones the size of a man’s fist.
Although Jonas had never been down here before, he identified his father’s compartment at once. He recognised, protruding into the passage from between two wooden slats, the hand-carved walking stick his father had used when walking in the woods at Kanzelstein. He hadn’t carved it himself. It was the work of a toothless old peasant who was versed in that craft. Jonas had fetched fresh cow’s milk from his farmstead every morning. He’d been scared of him, but one day the old man had called him over and presented him with a little carved walking stick of his own. Jonas could still remember what it looked like after all these years. He had proudly strutted around with it and worshipped the taciturn old peasant from then on.
He made sure that he was alone, and that the dimly lit compartments around him held no unpleasant surprises. Coming from one of them was a smell of paraffin so strong that he buried his nose in his shirtsleeve. One of the tanks in which the occupants stored paraffin for their stoves must have sprung a leak. But there was no danger as long as he didn’t strike a light.
He took his father’s bunch of keys from his pocket. The second key fitted. Jonas paused and listened before entering the compartment. The muffled, intermittent dripping of a tap could be heard. The dusty electric bulb on the wall was flickering. It was chilly.
With a cry of encouragement, he opened the door. And recoiled.
Most of his father’s compartment was filled with the boxes he’d just loaded into the truck.
He turned on the spot with his gun at the ready. The barrel knocked some bowls and saucepans off a shelf and sent them crashing to the floor. He cowered down, peered into the passage through the slats and strained his ears. Nothing to be heard but the defective tap.
Turning back to the boxes, he stared wide-eyed at the firm’s imprint.
Until he realised that they were different. Similar, but not identical. The longer he looked, the more clearly he saw that the two batches of boxes bore only a vague resemblance in shape and colour.
He tore one open and took out a bunch of photographs. He opened another. Nothing but photographs. A third. Documents and more photographs. The fourth contained books. So did the next three, which were the only ones he could get at without having to do a lot of rearranging.
He came across familiar objects everywhere. Rolled up and leaning against the wall in one corner was the map of the world from his parents’ bedroom, which had so often sent his thoughts on their travels. The globe perched on top of a stack of boxes had served him as a desk lamp when he was a boy. His father’s binoculars were lying on a rickety shelf with his hiking boots beside them. As a child Jonas had marvelled at their huge size.
He must have been blind. He had stowed and packed and arranged things without noticing that half of their household effects were missing.
It was surprising, nonetheless, that his father had kept these objects in the cellar. He could understand it in the case of the walking stick, and the globe needn’t have stood around in the living room. But he couldn’t fathom why his father had left the books and photographs to moulder away in the cellar.
The light went out.
He counted up to thirty, breathing deeply.
Gripping the shotgun in both hands, he groped his way back to the exit. A penetrating smell of grain filled his nostrils. Presumably, one of the compartments contained a small batch of the stuff with which older folk still, in spite of everything, liked to insulate their windows in winter.
*
He replaced the receiver and rewound the tapes. On one he wrote ‘EMPTY’, on the other ‘Bosch residence, 23 July’.
With an apple in one hand, he searched the stack of camera boxes, which he’d been too lazy to dispose of, for the relevant documents. He wasn’t methodical enough. Chewing hurriedly, he finished the apple and threw the core out of the window. He wiped his fingers on his trouser leg. They felt sticky, so he rinsed them under the tap and went on searching the empty boxes. Then it occurred to him that he’d thrown the instructions into the wastepaper basket.