*
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement on the screen.
The tape had been running for two hours fifty-seven minutes. The Sleeper extricated himself from the bedclothes and sat up on the edge of the bed, a metre from where Jonas was lying. The Sleeper turned to face the camera. He looked wide awake.
Jonas sat up too. Turned up the volume. Looked at the Sleeper.
The Sleeper cocked an eyebrow.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
He shook his head.
And burst out laughing.
Louder and louder he laughed. The Sleeper’s hilarity wasn’t feigned. He seemed to be genuinely amused by something. He laughed and laughed, fighting for breath and trying to pull himself together, only to bellow with laughter once more. Just before the tape ran out he regained his composure and stared straight at the camera.
Jonas had never seen anyone stare so fixedly, least of all himself. It was a look of such determination that he found it overwhelming.
The screen went blue.
*
Jonas stretched out his arms and legs. He stared up at the ceiling.
The ceiling he’d stared at twenty years ago. And three weeks ago.
He had lain here as a child and thought about himself. About the self that was synonymous with the life in which each individual was imprisoned. If you were born with a club foot you retained it all your life. If your hair fell out you could wear a wig, but you were well aware you were bald and couldn’t escape that fate. If all your teeth had been pulled out you would never again be able to chew with your own teeth for the rest of your days. If you suffered from a disability you had to resign yourself to it. You had to come to terms with anything you couldn’t change, and most things couldn’t be changed. A weak heart, a sensitive stomach, a deformed spine — they formed the individual, they were yourself, a part of life. And you were trapped in that life and would never know what it was like or what it meant to be someone else. Nothing could convey to you what another person felt on waking up or eating or making love. You could never know what life felt like without a backache or without belching after meals. Your life was a cage.
He had lain there and yearned to be a comic book character. He didn’t want to be the Jonas he was in the body he inhabited. He wanted to be the Jonas who was also Mort or Phil, or both of them, or at least a friend of theirs. He wanted to live in their reality, under the rules and natural laws that governed their world. They were forever being beaten up, having accidents, jumping off skyscrapers, getting burnt, dismembered or devoured, exploding or being hurled through space to distant planets. But explosions didn’t kill them and severed hands could be sewn on again. They got hurt, admittedly, but the pain had gone in the next picture. They had a whale of a time. Being them must be fun.
They didn’t die, either.
The ceiling. To be that, not Jonas. To be suspended, year after year, above a room in which people came and went. Some would disappear and others take their place, but he would remain suspended up there. Time would trickle on. He wouldn’t care.
To be a pebble by the sea. To hear the roar of the waves. Or not to hear it. To lie on the shore for centuries and then be tossed into the sea by some little girl, only to be washed up again after hundreds more years have gone by. Washed up on the shore. On seashells ground to sand.
To be a tree. When it was planted, Henry I, or IV, or VI ruled, and then came a Leopold or a Charles. The tree had stood in a field with the sun shining down on it. It had bidden the sun farewell at dusk, when the dew started to fall. Reunited in the morning, the tree and the sun couldn’t have cared less whether someone named Shakespeare was alive or some queen was beheaded 1,000 kilometres away. A peasant had come and lopped off some branches, and the peasant had a son, and the son had a son of his own, but the tree continued to stand there. It was still young, pain-free, fearless. Napoleon became emperor, but the tree didn’t budge. Napoleon came past and bivouacked in its shade, but the tree didn’t care. Kaiser Wilhelm had come and touched the tree later on, unaware that Napoleon had done the same, but the tree cared as little about Napoleon and Wilhelm as it did about the great-grandson of the great-grandson of the first peasant who had come and pruned its shoots.
To be a tree like that one, a tree that had stood in the field at the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, in the sixties, eighties and nineties. One that was standing there now, caressed by the wind.
*
The sun was twinkling through the blinds. Jonas locked the door behind him and searched the flat, leaving his shotgun beside the hall cupboard. No one appeared to have been there. The knife was still embedded in the wall. He tugged at it without success.
He made himself something to eat and drank a grappa. Leaning out of the window, he savoured the sun’s rays with his eyes shut.
Eight o’clock. He felt tired but couldn’t afford to go to sleep, there was so much to do.
He removed the tapes from the cameras in the flat next door and numbered them. Clasping tapes 1–26 to his chest, he returned to his own flat, pushed a blank video into the recorder and put tape 1 in the camera.
The Spider came into shot, travelling at full speed. It raced along the Brigittenauer embankment, heading straight for the camera. The roar of the engine was so deafening as it drove past he turned the volume down.
The din subsided to a distant hum. Moments later silence fell.
The screen showed the deserted embankment.
No sign of movement anywhere.
He wound the tape on. Three, eight, twelve minutes. Then pressed the play button. Again he saw the deserted embankment. He waited. Another few minutes, and the sound of a rapidly approaching car could be heard. The Spider came into shot once more. It raced towards the camera, its battered bonnet clearly visible. And roared past.
The street lay there, deserted once more. The branches of the trees lining the embankment stirred gently in the wind.
Jonas rewound the tape. He pressed the play button on the camera and the record button on the recorder. Just as the car sped out of shot, he stopped recording. He removed tape 1 and put in tape 2, which showed the route from the balcony. He pressed the red button. Again he stopped recording just as the Spider went out of shot.
The third tape, which came from the other balcony camera, had filmed the Heiligenstädter Brücke. He had to rewind it twice to catch the precise moment when the car came into shot. The Spider crossed the canal and disappeared. Jonas stopped recording and left the tape in the camera running.
He looked at the deserted bridge.
No one had ever seen what he was seeing. The bridge railings, the waters of the Danube Canal. The street, the winking traffic lights. At just after 3 p.m. on that particular day. It had been recorded with no one nearby. This recording had been made by a machine with no human witnesses around. Any enjoyment to be derived from the process had been confined to the machine itself and its subjects. The deserted street. The traffic lights. The bushes. Otherwise: no one.
But these images proved that those minutes had elapsed. They had come and gone. If he went there now, he would encounter a different bridge at a different time from the one he was seeing. Yet it had existed, even though he hadn’t been present.
He put in tape 4, followed by 5, 6 and 7. He made rapid progress. From time to time he got up to refill his glass, make a snack or simply stretch his legs. He never took long, but it was dark outside by the time he played the tape showing Gaussplatz.
The Spider grazed a parked car and went into a skid. It rammed a car on the opposite side of the street, then skidded back across the roadway and collided with a van. The impact was so violent, Jonas stared at the screen transfixed. The Spider cannoned off the van and out onto the roundabout, where it spun several times on its own axis and finally came to rest.