He wondered what time it was. His watch was an analogue model without a light.
He got to his feet.
Despite his fatigue, he set off at a trot. He felt that if he stopped again it would be the end. Something would suddenly be there. It was there already, he could sense it. The moment he lay down it would descend on him.
He had a sudden vision of the hundred or more metres of seawater above his head. He managed to brush it aside, but it soon recurred. He thought of something else. The vision returned. Himself inside a concrete tube with a gigantic mass of water overhead.
This is an ordinary tunnel.
It doesn’t matter what’s above the tunnel, sand or granite or water.
Jonas paused to listen. He thought he could hear water dripping, even hissing under pressure. At the same time, he had the feeling that something was robbing him of breath, as if the oxygen in the tunnel were being sucked out. Or displaced by something else.
He walked on, half supporting himself with one hand against the side of the tunnel.
He felt more and more afraid of noise. He feared an explosion might go off right beside his head and burst his eardrums.
There’s no explosion down here. Everything is quiet.
He had the feeling that he should have reached the end of the tunnel by now. Could he have turned around in his sleep? Could he be going in the wrong direction?
Or had he woken up somewhere else? Did the tunnel he was in lead nowhere? Would he walk on for ever?
‘Hey! Hello! Hey!’
Think of something pleasant.
His most enjoyable daydreams in the old days had transported him to distant lands. He had pictured himself standing on a seaside promenade, glass in hand, gazing out to sea. It didn’t matter to him whether he’d travelled there by car or in the chandelier-hung stateroom of a luxury liner. In his imagination he could smell the salt air and feel the sun caressing his skin. No worries, no more responsibility for others or himself. All he had to do was be at peace with himself and enjoy the sea.
Or he transplanted himself to the Antarctic, where it was never, in his imagination, unpleasantly cold. He trekked across the eternal ice beneath a blazing sun. He reached the South Pole, hugged some bearded scientists who were spending the winter at the research station there, and touched the signpost, thinking at that moment of his home.
Whenever things were bad in the old days, whenever he was suffering from personal unhappiness or professional dissatisfaction, he would dream himself into the distance. He’d wanted to know as little as possible about it in the past few weeks. Distance meant loss of control. And you didn’t plunge into some reckless venture when you sensed that everything was slipping through your fingers.
As he did right now.
He was mad, completely round the bend. Stumbling along in pitch-darkness. What did he think he was …
Think of the Antarctic.
He saw ice-clad mountains, blue and white. The ice across which he was hauling his rucksack was white, an infinity of whiteness. The sky above him was blue.
He had once seen a TV documentary in which scientists extracted a cylinder of Antarctic ice from a depth of one kilometre. The piece of ice they brought up was meant to help them understand climate change. Jonas was less fascinated by the climatic outlook than by the cylinder itself.
A piece of ice half a metre long and ten centimetres in diameter. Until a few minutes earlier, buried under millions of cubic metres of ice. Exposed to the light of day for the first time for — yes, since when? — a hundred thousand years. Frozen an eternity ago, this water had bidden the world a gradual farewell. Ten centimetres below the surface. Fifty. Two metres. Ten. And what a long time had elapsed between the day it left the surface and the one on which it reached a depth of ten metres. Jonas could scarcely imagine such a lapse of time, but it was a mere click of the fingers compared to the interval between ten metres and a kilometre.
Now it was there, that piece of ice. It was seeing the sun once more.
Hello, sun, here I am again. How’ve you been?
What was going on inside it? Did it realise what was happening? Was it pleased? Worried? Thinking of the time it began its descent? Comparing one time with another?
He had to think of the ice still down below, the immediate neighbours of the fragment that had been brought to the surface. Were they missing it? Envying it? Feeling sorry for it? And he had to think as well of the other ice two or three kilometres down. How it had got there. Whether it would regain the surface and when, and what the earth would look like when it did. What it was thinking and feeling down there in the dark.
Jonas thought he heard a sound. A distant roar.
He stopped. No, no mistake. The sound of rushing water was coming from up ahead.
He turned and ran, tripped and fell headlong, felt a sharp pain in his knee.
It seemed to him, as he lay there, that the track sloped gently downwards. Immediately afterwards he had the opposite impression. He stood up and took a few steps, but he couldn’t tell whether he was walking uphill or down. He seemed to be going downhill one moment and uphill the next, but he noticed that steps taken in the original direction were more of an effort.
He walked on. The roar increased in volume. His feet were splashing through water. The sound grew steadily louder. A clap of thunder rent the air. Seconds later he was standing in the open.
It was night. Lightning zigzagged overhead, followed almost simultaneously by fierce growls of thunder. Rain came pelting down on his head. The gusts of wind were so strong they almost blew him over. No lights on anywhere.
He quit the railway track in a hurry despite the storm. Before long he found an open gate in the fence. He turned left, where he thought he’d find buildings sooner. He might just as well have gone in the opposite direction. It was pitch-dark and he had no idea where he was going. He hoped he wouldn’t plunge straight into the sea, whose breaking waves he thought he could hear between claps of thunder.
He was walking across a field of long grass. A flash of lightning glinted on something a few metres away. A motorbike. The sides of the tent beyond it were ballooning in the wind.
Beneath the awning Jonas stumbled over wet rucksacks, trampled on shoes, caught his foot on a stone that was weighing down a mat. His fingers were trembling so much with cold and exhaustion, it took him a while to open the flap. He crawled inside but only zipped up the mosquito net so as to be able to see out.
He explored the interior by touch. His fingers found a sleeping bag. A small pillow. An alarm clock. Another sleeping bag. Beneath the second pillow was a torch. He turned it on. At that moment an all-enveloping clap of thunder rent the air. Startled, he dropped the torch.
He felt he must sleep very soon.
He retrieved the torch and shone it round the interior. In one corner were some tins of food and a camping stove. On the opposite side of the tent was a Discman with a stack of CDs beside it. In the corner near the entrance he found some toilet articles: razor, shaving cream, skin cream, a box of contact lenses, soap, toothbrushes. Lying between the rucksacks was a Bosnian newspaper dated 28 June and a sex magazine.
Jonas had a feeling that someone or something was nearby. Imagination, he told himself.
He turned off the torch. In the dark he stripped off his sodden clothes, unzipped the mosquito net and wrung them out beneath the awning. His shirt, trousers and socks he deposited on the other side of the tent and crawled, naked, into one of the sleeping bags. The other he used as a blanket. He turned his head and looked at the entrance, shivering.
While listening to the storm he wondered if there was higher ground nearby, or if he should be prepared for a lightning strike. Moments later the interior of the tent was lit up, bright as day, by an electric flash. He shut his eyes and made his mind a blank. The ensuing clap of thunder came several seconds later than he’d expected.