He zipped up his leather jacket. Why hadn’t he put on a scarf? He well remembered how wretchedly cold he’d been throughout that first trip, and he didn’t want to repeat everything to the last detail.
The moon was huge.
He’d never seen it so big. A perfect, luminous orb so close overhead it looked almost menacing. As if it had drawn closer to the earth.
He didn’t look up any more.
The moped purred along at a constant speed. His old machine had almost come to a stop on hills. This one managed every incline with no obvious loss of speed. Its former owner had tinkered with the engine so much that any police check would have resulted in an instant ban.
He leant into the bends, impressed by the rate at which the DS sped downhill. His eyes were watering so much he had to put on his old ski goggles.
Whenever he came to a long descent he disengaged the clutch and switched off the ignition. Coasted silently through the darkness. He removed the two woolly hats he was wearing against the cold. All he could hear was the whistle of the wind. The headlight functioned only when the engine was running, so the road ahead lay in darkness. He only abandoned these escapades when he almost missed a bend and narrowly avoided ending up on the verge.
By the time he got to St Pölten his fingers were so numb with cold it took him several attempts to remove the petrol cap. He wanted to relax in the warm over a cup of coffee. Instead, he drank a bottle of mineral water in the filling station shop and pocketed some chewing gum and a bar of chocolate. On the magazine rack he saw newspapers which dated from 3 July. The freezer cabinet was humming away, a defective neon tube flickering at the back of the shop. It was just as chilly inside.
I’ve ridden along this road before, he told himself when he was back on the moped. The person who rode along it was me.
He thought of the youth he’d been eighteen years ago. He didn’t recognise himself. Your cells renewed themselves completely every seven years, so it was said. That meant you became a new person every seven years, physiologically speaking. Although your mental development didn’t create you anew, it changed you to such an extent that you could happily call yourself another person after so many years.
In that case, what was an ‘I’? The ‘I’ he used to be was still himself.
Here he was again. On a moped like this one, on the same asphalt. With the same trees and houses all around, the same road signs and place names. His eyes had seen them all before. They were his eyes, even though they had renewed themselves twice in the meantime. That apple tree beside the road had stood there last time. He’d seen it. Now he was passing it again — zooming past it! He couldn’t see the tree in the darkness, but it was there, its image crystal-clear in his mind’s eye.
Many past experiences seemed so fresh and immediate he felt they couldn’t possibly have happened ten or fifteen years ago. It was as if time curved back on itself, so that events separated by years were suddenly mere days apart. As if time possessed a spatial constant capable of being seen and felt.
The sky was getting lighter.
Something had changed in the last few minutes, something to do with himself. His teeth were chattering, he noticed.
*
Just beyond Melk, where the countryside ahead opened out, he approached a building he felt he’d seen before. From a distance it looked in need of renovation. Some plasterwork was missing. That, too, seemed familiar. The place held some significance for him.
It was a substantial building with a spacious car park in front of it. The only car parked there was an eggshell-blue Mercedes dating from the 1970s.
Jonas tipped the moped on to its stand beside the car. He peered through a side window. Lying on the fur-upholstered passenger seat were a box of raspberry sweets and a can of beer. An air-freshener dangled from the rear-view mirror. The ashtray had been pulled out, but all it contained were coins.
He went looking for the entrance, waddling like a duck because his limbs were so stiff and painful. He came to a halt and massaged his thighs, which also helped to restore the circulation in his numb fingers. The fields beyond the building were swathed in early-morning mist. The tarpaulin covering a woodpile rustled in the wind.
Above the entrance was a sign that read: Snackbar Landler-Pröll. The name was unfamiliar to him.
He unslung the shotgun and took off his rucksack. There was something wrong here. He knew for sure that Steyr had been his first stop, and he felt just as certain that he’d never come this way since. So how did he know this establishment? Was he just imagining it?
He also found it puzzling that the entrance faced away from the road. There was no sign beside the road, either.
The door wasn’t locked. Lying in the passage beyond was an untidy jumble of slippers and mud-encrusted walking shoes. He could just make out a taproom through the frosted glass of the door on his left. Some stairs on the right looked as if they led to the proprietor’s private quarters.
‘Anyone there?’
The taproom door creaked open. He stamped his feet, cleared his throat. Paused on the threshold. Nothing to be heard but the occasional sound of wind nudging the windows.
He turned on the lights, naked bulbs suspended from the ceiling. They shed a harsh glare. He turned them off again. By now, the morning sun was bathing the room in an unreal halflight sufficient for him to find his way around.
The restaurant was neat and tidy. Bronze ashtrays on tables with gingham cloths, every table adorned with a vase of dried flowers, banquettes with decorative, embroidered cushions. A wall clock was showing the wrong time. The newspaper on top of the pile beside the espresso machine was dated 3 July.
He knew this place. Or at least, one that resembled it.
He abandoned his plan to reproduce the original trip and not to stop until he got to Steyr. He turned on the espresso machine. In the fridge he found some eggs and bacon. He heated a frying pan.
After washing his meal down with fruit juice and coffee, he tried the old radio above the serving counter. White noise. He turned it off again. He wiped off the writing on the bill of fare, took a piece of chalk and wrote: Jonas, 25 July.
Then he stomped up the wooden stairs. As expected, they led to a private apartment. He saw jackets hanging in a wardrobe, more shoes, empty wine bottles.
‘Hooo!’ he called harshly. ‘Hooo!’
A cramped kitchen with a clock ticking on the wall. The floor was sticky; his shoes made a sucking sound with every step.
He went into the next room. A bedroom. The single bed unmade, a pair of underpants lying on the floor.
Another room, evidently used as a storage room. Cluttered with stepladders, beer crates, paint pots, brushes, sacks of cement, a vacuum cleaner, old newspapers, toilet rolls, oily gloves, a mattress with a hole in it. It was only after a while that he noticed all the floors were uncarpeted. He was standing on bare concrete.
There was a coffee mug on the window sill, half full. He sniffed it. Water, or possibly some kind of hard liquor whose alcohol content had evaporated.
The living room, equally untidy. The air was damp, the temperature several degrees lower than in the other rooms. He looked around for something that might explain it. There were still-lifes and landscapes on the walls. Hanging above the TV were some antlers. All the furniture was red, he noticed. A red sofa, a cupboard lined with red velvet, a carmine red carpet. Even the old wooden table had red legs as well as a red cloth draped over it.
He climbed the stairs to the attic. They creaked. The door at the top, a thin sheet of hammer-finished metal, was unlocked.
Enveloped in cool, fresh air, he thought at first that a window must be open. Then he saw the broken panes.