He kicked off the blanket and went to the window. The street lights weren’t on. He had to press his forehead and nose against the pane to make out the shapes outside.
The Spider was parked in the street with the truck in front of it. The tailboard was down. It hadn’t looked like rain.
He tiptoed back to the bed. The carpet felt rough beneath his feet.
15
Jonas sat up with a start and looked round. To his relief, he discovered that everything wasn’t red.
Extricating his feet from the ragged blanket, he sank back on the mattress. He stared at the opposite wall. A pale rectangle marked the spot where he’d removed a watercolour. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. They made another circuit of the room. All the colours were normal.
He couldn’t remember the dream in detail. Only that he’d been striding through a big building in which everything, walls and floors and objects, was a rich, luminous red. The various shades of red differed only slightly, creating the impression that things were dissolving and merging into one another. He had wandered through this building, in which no sound could be heard, encountering nothing but colour, the colour red. It even dictated the shape of things.
*
He threw the mattresses out of the window. The first row of slats he wrenched out of the bedstead offered considerable resistance. The second proved less difficult. He trundled both into the street on the trolley and stowed them in the back of the truck beside the mattresses. Taking the handsaw he’d obtained from the DIY store, he set to work on the bedstead itself. It took him nearly an hour, but then it was done. He stacked the pieces of the bed on the trolley, wheeled them outside and loaded them into the truck.
He made a final tour of inspection. The kitchen cabinets were unfamiliar, they hadn’t been in his parents’ home, so they stayed where they were. Likewise the kitchen stove, fridge and bench. He’d cleared out all the other possessions. Last of all he took the box of photographs and put it in the Spider’s boot.
He perched on the rear end of the truck and looked up at the sky. He had a sense of déjà vu. It was as if the few open windows had only just been opened. The stone figures projecting from the walls seemed to be watching him. One in particular, a knight in chain mail brandishing a sword from behind a shield emblazoned with a fish, was regarding him with scorn. All this he’d experienced before.
Moments later everything was normal again. The windows had long been open. The statues were merely statues. The swordsman stared down with indifference.
Jonas swung round.
He clambered onto the roof of the cab and looked up and down the street. Nothing had changed in the last four weeks. Not the smallest detail. The piece of plastic over the bicycle saddle still fluttered in every breath of wind. The bottle still protruded from the dustbin. The mopeds were still in their usual places.
He swung round again.
He fetched some paper and sticky tape from the cab, together with the marker pen which he’d got from he couldn’t remember where. He stuck a note on the door of the building, where anyone coming back would see it at once.
Come home. Jonas.
After a moment’s thought he attached another sheet of paper bearing the same message to the inside of the door as well.
*
Jonas drove the truck back to Hollandstrasse. Under a blistering sun he cycled back to Rüdigergasse, where he picked up the Spider and drove it to the Brigittenauer embankment. He had a headache. He blamed it on the sawdust he must have inhaled when dismembering the bed, but it might also have been the heat.
It occurred to him, as he removed the photos from the Spider, that he’d forgotten to clear out the cellar. That annoyed him. He hadn’t wanted to set foot in the Rüdigergasse flat again. Now he would have to go back there tomorrow.
He opened the front door and listened. Closed it behind him and locked it. Stood there, straining his ears and peering round. Everything looked as it had when he left the building the day before. When he opened and closed the door, flyers went fluttering across the floor. Lying in the corner was a toy that had belonged to a neighbour’s Alsatian, a well-chewed tennis ball. The lift was on the ground floor, the air laden with the musty smell of damp plaster.
Cautiously, he opened the door of his flat. He searched all the rooms, then locked the door. He put the shotgun down and tossed the photos onto the sofa. He didn’t feel he’d been imagining things the day before. Something had been different from usual. Although appearances were against it and indicated an overactive imagination.
When he shampooed his hair he avoided shutting his eyes until the foam made them smart. He held his face under the shower and wiped the foam away with nervous little movements. His heart beat faster.
For some time now, Jonas had had to contend with an uninvited guest whenever he closed his eyes in the shower. The beast came into his mind on this occasion too. Walking upright on two legs, it was a shaggy creature over two metres tall, a cross between a wolf and a bear, and he knew that its fur concealed something far more intimidating. Every time he shut his eyes he felt overcome with fear of this creature, which came prancing up and threatened him. It moved much faster than a man — faster, too, than any animal he knew. It bounded in, rattled the door of the shower cubicle and tried to pounce on him. But it never got that far because he opened his eyes just in time.
Hearing a rustling sound in the corner, Jonas looked round, yelled and dashed out into the passage. With shampoo in his hair and foam over his naked body, he stood peering back into the bathroom.
‘Oh, no you don’t! Ha, ha!’
He dried himself on a towel from the cupboard in the bedroom. But what about all that shampoo in his hair? He paced irresolutely to and fro between the kitchen sink and the shoe cupboard in the passage without crossing the bathroom threshold.
He was being silly. A rustling sound. That was all. And the wolf-bear creature existed only in his imagination. He could take a shower with his eyes shut, no trouble. No one was threatening him.
The door was locked.
The windows were closed.
No one was hiding in the wardrobe or lurking under the bed.
No one was clinging to the ceiling.
He went back into the cubicle and turned on the tap, held his head under the shower. Shut his eyes.
He guffawed. ‘Hey! Ha, ha! There! You see? I told you! Hallelujah!’
*
It was getting dark outside when he sat down on the living-room floor, wrapped in a bathrobe, and rested his back against the sofa. He smelt of shower gel and was feeling refreshed.
He put the photos on the carpet in front of him.
Ingo Lüscher.
He’d been trying the whole time, at the back of his mind, to recall the full name of the boy above whom the ring had moved in a circle. He had also been pondering the name of the unknown boy. At least he’d remembered Ingo’s surname. They’d teased him, saying he shared the name of a Swiss downhill skier, which had naturally annoyed a patriotic sports fan like Ingo. Jonas hadn’t seen him since primary school. He hadn’t lost sight of Leonhard, on the other hand, until they were put in different classes when they started secondary school.
His thoughts strayed back to his pendulum experiments in the cellar. In principle, he considered such things nonsense, although he had to admit that the results were remarkable. Had he influenced the pendulum without meaning to? His mother was dead and his father had disappeared. He knew this, so he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that his subconscious had guided the chain.
He opened the catch, threaded the ring back onto the chain and dangled it over the first snap he came to. It was one of himself trailing a tennis racket far too big for him across a stretch of grass.