He rubbed his bare arms, looking at the Haas Haus. He’d never been inside. He’d meant to take Marie to eat at Do & Co, but they’d never got round to it.
He gazed across the deserted square, eyeing the statues that projected from the walls wherever he looked. Fantasy figures, musicians, dwarfs, gargoyles. And, on St Stephen’s Cathedral, saints. They all stared mutely over his head.
He had the impression that the statues were multiplying. As if there had been fewer of them the day he made the video. Buildings all over the city seemed to be sprouting more and more of them.
*
The photographic shops in the city centre, which weren’t as numerous as he’d assumed, yielded eight video cameras of his preferred model. He also loaded five tripods into the car. Then he drove to Mariahilfer Strasse by way of the Burgring and stopped outside each photographic shop. After that he tried the Neubaugürtel.
He was feeling limp. More than once he had doubts about the point of this expedition or was tempted at least to postpone it until a better day. His nose was running, his throat sore, his head muzzy. But he wasn’t ill enough to go to bed. Besides, absurd though it was, he felt he oughtn’t to waste any time. Although he had all the time in the world and didn’t really have to do a thing, he was feeling restless. And since he’d left the Mondsee, he was feeling more restless than ever.
By afternoon the car was so full all he could see in the rear-view mirror were boxes. There were twenty video cameras and twenty-six tripods. Added to the ones at home, that made just short of thirty cameras ready for use. They ought to be sufficient.
*
Jonas gave the flat a quick once-over to see if all was well. Without putting on his industrial gloves, he took the torch and shotgun and went down to the cellar. He noticed no changes there either.
He felt in a box at random. Instead of the photographs he’d expected, his fingers dug into something soft and fluffy. He recoiled with a start, then shone the torch inside the box. It was a soft toy he’d never seen before. A dirty green teddy bear with its left eye missing and its right ear nibbled away. A string protruded from its backside. Jonas pulled it. A tune started playing.
He shuddered, transfixed by the sound, and listened to it in frozen silence. Ding, dang, dong. A soft, tinkly little tune. Then it ended, and his fingers automatically gave the string another tug.
Out of the blue, he was hit by the realisation that this had been his musical box. This was the melody that had lulled him to sleep as a baby. Now he remembered the song. His infant self had heard it every night. He didn’t know it any more, but part of the melody had stayed with him longer than most things:
La-le-lu, only the man in the moon’s watching you.
Suddenly the fever hit him.
It happened instantaneously. His head swam. He clutched his brow, noticing as he did so that billows of heat were surging through him. His legs threatened to give way at any moment. This was serious. He would never make it back home. Even getting out of the cellar would be something.
With a movement of almost infinite slowness, he stuffed the musical teddy bear under his T-shirt. He was vaguely aware of the danger this movement put him in. He concentrated on keeping the movement going, continuing it, ignoring the sound that was swelling to a roar in the distance.
He tucked the T-shirt into his waistband and turned round. Leaning on the shotgun, with the torch dangling from his wrist by its cord, he tottered step by step to the exit. The billows of heat gained strength. He was breathing through his mouth. After a couple of steps he paused to catch his breath.
He reached the stairway somehow, but his knees gave way on the second step. He crouched down, supporting himself on his hands. Ignoring the dirt and cobwebs, he rested his head against the wall. It felt pleasantly cool.
The light on the stairs went out. Now all that illuminated the stairwell were a few faint rays of sunlight coming through a small window on the half landing. It was a moment or two before he managed to turn on the torch. A bright dot of light flitted across the stone floor.
Feeling marginally better, he forced himself to stand up. Everything went round and round. His heart was thudding.
He hauled himself up on the handrail step by step, trying to reassure the panic-stricken voice inside him. He wasn’t going to die. There would be no point in it. It wouldn’t be a heart attack on the stairs that carried him off.
He tried hard to ignore his brief, but recurrent, missing heartbeats as he tottered upstairs to the flat. He’d stopped thinking about anything at all. He put one foot in front of the other, breathing in, breathing out, pausing to rest, moving on.
Water, he thought, when he’d locked the front door behind him. He needed a drink.
He found an aspirin in his trouser pocket. The packet was dirty and crumpled. It hadn’t come from the chemist’s in Himmelpfortgasse, so he’d probably been carrying it around for quite a while. His other medication was in the car. It might as well have been on another continent.
He dissolved the aspirin in some water and drank it.
He found two empty lemonade bottles. He rinsed them out, filled them with water and set off on the long trek to the bedroom, taking them with him. The shotgun he left in the hallway. It was too heavy.
He wasn’t greeted by the ticking of the wall clock, which was already packed. Pale patches of wallpaper marked the places where shelves had been. The bed was stripped. The sheets had been used to protect the crockery that lay in boxes in the truck outside. He would have to manage without any bedclothes. It was summer, after all.
He lay down on the bare mattress. Almost simultaneously, he started shivering again. He’d made a mistake, he realised. Instead of toiling upstairs to the flat, he should have got into the car and turned on the heater.
He shivered himself to sleep. When he surfaced again, not knowing if he’d slept for ten minutes or three hours, his teeth were chattering violently. His arm twitched convulsively and thumped the wall. The bedstead contained a second mattress. He dragged it out and put it over himself.
Jonas submerged once more. His mind drew involuntary patterns and lines. Geometrical figures loomed up before him. Rectangles. Hexagons. Dodecagons. It was his laborious task to draw straight lines inside them. Not with a pencil, but with a look that left an instantaneous track behind it. He also had to discover the central point in a field of tension that held each geometrical figure together on the one hand, and, on the other, was rendered intangible by magnetism. Magnetism appeared to be the strongest power on earth. Confronted by an endless succession of new shapes, he had to draw lines and locate points inside them all. As if that were not enough, the two activities steadily merged without his being able to grasp how.
*
The bedside light was on. It was dark outside. Jonas took a drink of water. It hurt when he swallowed. He had to force himself. He drank half the bottle. Sank back on the mattress.
The shivering had let up. He felt his forehead. He was running a very high temperature. He turned over on his stomach. The mattress smelt of his father.
He no longer had to deal with hexagons and dodecagons, but with shapes that defied his comprehension. He knew he was dreaming but couldn’t find a way out. He was still being forced to draw lines and look for central magnetic points. Shape after shape appeared to him. He drew line after line, located point after point. He awoke for just long enough to turn over. He saw the shapes boring into him but couldn’t fend them off. They were there. They were everywhere. When one appeared, the next was already lying in wait.