His assumption was correct: the cameras were equipped with timers, like coffee machines or electric heaters. As long as you put in a powerful enough battery, you could programme them to start recording up to seventy-two hours ahead.
He found a portion of fish in the deep-freeze compartment. He heated it up and ate it with some mixed-bean salad straight from the jar, which wasn’t a good combination. He washed up, then watched the sun go down with the mobile in his hand.
You are terrible. * hic *:-) I love love love love you.
Where was she at this moment? In England? Was she looking at the sun too?
This sun?
Perhaps he wasn’t the only person going through this nightmare. Perhaps everyone had suddenly found themselves alone. Perhaps they, too, were stumbling through a deserted world, and the spell would be broken if two people who belonged together turned up at the same spot simultaneously. That would mean he must go looking for Marie and run the risk of missing her because she, in her world, would be doing her utmost to get to him. It would be wiser to wait here.
Besides, this theory was utter nonsense. So, probably, was every idea he’d so far entertained about the events that had overtaken him.
He picked up the duvet and tossed it onto the bed. He righted the tripod with the camera on it. Removing the tape, he put it in the camera connected to the TV in the living room. Then he ran himself a bath.
The water was hot. Floating in front of him was a mound of foam resembling a kneeling elephant. He could clearly make out its rump, legs, ears and trunk. He blew. The elephant drifted away a little. He blew again. A hole appeared in the elephant’s cheek.
He recalled a story told him as a child by his mother, who had a liking for moral tales.
A little girl sits weeping in a forest. A fairy appears and asks why. The girl explains that she has smashed her father’s collection of china and is afraid he’ll punish her. The fairy gives her a reel of thread. If she tugs at it, time will pass more quickly. A few centimetres equals a few days, so she must be careful. If she wants to avoid being scolded and beaten, however, she should make use of the reel of thread.
Although dubious at first, the little girl decides she has nothing to lose and gives the reel of thread a tug. The next moment she’s on her way home from school for the summer holidays, which are still several weeks ahead. ‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘I’ve escaped a beating.’
The little girl finds a scar on her knee whose origin mystifies her. She also sees some slowly fading weals on her backside when looking at her reflection in the mirror.
From then on she often gives the reel of thread a tug. So often that she’s old before she knows it. She sits sobbing beneath a weeping willow in the forest where it all began. The fairy reappears, whereupon the old maid bemoans the fact that she has frittered her life away by using up too much thread. She should still be young, but she’s already old.
The fairy raises an admonitory finger — and reverses the whole process. The girl finds herself sitting in the forest, young once more but no longer afraid of being punished. She walks home singing and accepts her beating gladly.
To Jonas’s mother the moral of the story was beyond dispute: you must face up to everything, misfortune included. Misfortune, above all, makes people what they are. To Jonas himself the story’s inherent truth was nothing like as clear-cut. If his mother’s argument held good, everyone would undergo operations without an anaesthetic. As for the girl’s premature ageing, he couldn’t see that as a miscalculation on her part. What a terrible life the poor little thing must have led, to have tugged at her reel of thread so often!
His mother, his father and his schoolteacher, who also told the story on one occasion, all seemed to find the little girl’s conduct plain stupid. Fancy throwing away her life just to avoid a few minutes’ unpleasantness! It never occurred to anyone that she might, after all, have done the right thing. Jonas found it quite understandable. Having been through hell on earth, she had every right to tug at her thread. Now, in old age, she was simply viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, like all old people. She would have been in for a nasty surprise if she’d begun again from the beginning.
His mother had never understood that line of thought.
The bathwater was lukewarm, the elephant had dissolved.
Jonas pulled on his bathrobe without rinsing himself off. In the fridge he found three bananas whose skins were already dark brown. He peeled them, mashed them up in a bowl and added a pinch of brown sugar. Sat down in front of the TV. Ate.
*
The Sleeper walked past the camera, got into bed and pulled up the covers.
He started snoring.
Jonas remembered how often Marie had complained of his snoring. He rasped away half the night, she said. She could hardly sleep a wink. He disputed this. Everybody denied snoring. Although they couldn’t possibly know what they did while asleep.
The Sleeper turned over. Went on snoring.
Jonas peered through the blinds. The window in the flat he’d visited some weeks ago was still illuminated. He took a swig of orange juice and raised his glass to it. Massaged his face.
The Sleeper sat up. Without opening his eyes, he grabbed the other duvet and flung it at the camera. The screen went dark.
*
Jonas rewound and pressed ‘Play’.
The tape had been running for an hour and fifty-one minutes when the Sleeper crawled out from under the bedclothes. His eyes remained shut. His features were relaxed. But Jonas couldn’t shake off the feeling that he knew exactly what he was doing. That the Sleeper was constantly aware of his actions, and that he himself was seeing something without seeing what mattered. Watching an occurrence he didn’t understand, but which possessed some underlying significance.
Three, four, five times the Sleeper sat up, took hold of the duvet, put his right foot on the floor and threw it.
Jonas went into the next room. He looked at the bed, got into it. Sat up, took hold of the duvet and threw it.
He felt nothing. He might have been doing it for the first time. No sense of anything strange. A duvet. He threw it. But why?
He went over to the wall and inspected the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against. He rapped it with his knuckles. A dull sound. No cavity.
He leant against the wall and deliberated, his hands buried in the sleeves of the towelling bathrobe and his arms folded on his chest.
The Sleeper’s behaviour was odd. Was there something behind it? Hadn’t he often walked in his sleep as a child? Wasn’t it understandable that he should have reverted to that habit in this exceptional situation? Perhaps his sleeping self had occasionally undertaken similar strange excursions earlier on, unnoticed by Marie.
Someone in the living room uttered a cry.
He froze, convulsed less with terror than with astonishment and disbelief. With a feeling of impotence in the face of a new law of nature, one he didn’t understand and had no defence against.
Another cry rang out.
Jonas went into the next room.
At first he couldn’t work out where the cries were coming from.
From the TV. The screen was dark.
Shrill cries suggestive of fear and pain, as if coming from someone who was being tortured. As if that someone’s body were being briefly stuck with pins and then allowed a few seconds’ respite.
Another cry. It was loud and piercing. There was no humour in it. Just the sound of terrible happenings.
He fast-forwarded. Cries. He wound the tape on some more. Cries. He fast-forwarded to the end of the tape. Hoarse breathing, groans, occasional cries.
He rewound the tape to where the Sleeper got up and hurled the duvet at the camera. He studied his face, trying to discover some clue to what lay ahead. Nothing to be seen. The Sleeper hurled the duvet, the camera fell over, the screen went dark.