And he didn’t know her PIN.
He repacked everything in the suitcase and put it down beside the door.
*
He put on the blinkered goggles. The computerised voice guided him across the city. Several times he felt a jolt and heard a scraping sound.
The block of flats outside which he removed his goggles was a modern one in Krongasse, only a few streets from his father’s deserted flat. It made a friendly impression. The front door was open, so he was able to leave the crowbar in the boot.
He climbed the stairs to the first floor and tried the doors. All were locked. He went up to the second floor. Door number four opened. He read the nameplate.
Ilse-Heide Brzo / Christian Vidovic
There was a draught. Windows appeared to be open on both sides of the flat. He turned left. The bedroom. Rumpled sheets. On the wall, a huge map of the world. Jonas measured the distance he’d driven on his trip to England. It wasn’t far at all. Africa was far away, Australia even further. Vienna to England was only an outing.
Smalltown. That was where he’d been. Just there.
The study. Two desks, one bearing a computer, the other a manual typewriter. Walls lined with bookshelves. Most of the titles were unfamiliar to him. One shelf held a dozen copies of each of three books. He read the titles. A chess manual, a thriller, a lifestyle adviser.
He examined the typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32. It amazed him that anyone had still been using such a mechanical monster. What were computers for?
He pressed some keys, saw the types hinge forward.
He put in a sheet of paper and wrote:
I’m standing here, writing this sentence.
A typewriter. The whole alphabet was there. Typed in the correct order, letters could spell out anything. Horrific novels, books on the meaning of life, erotic poems. You only needed to know the correct sequence. Letter after letter. Word. Word after word. Sentence. Sentence after sentence. Forming a whole.
He recalled what, as a boy, he had imagined foreign languages to be. It hadn’t occurred to him that they could differ in vocabulary and grammar. He’d thought a particular letter in German corresponded to a particular letter in English and to other letters in French or Italian. An E in German might be a K in English, an L in German an X in French, an R in German an M in Hungarian, an S in Italian an F in Japanese.
Jonas might be Wilvt in English, Ahbug in Spanish and Elowg in Russian.
The kitchen-cum-living-room. A dining table, a range of kitchen cabinets, photographs on the wall. One was of a man and a woman with a little boy. The woman was smiling, the boy laughing. A pretty woman. Blue eyes, fine features, good figure. The boy, a slice of bread in his hand, was pointing to something. A nice-looking child. This Vidovic fellow was lucky to have such a family. He had no need to look so strained. Although smiling, he didn’t seem wholly at peace with himself.
A pleasant flat. People had lived there harmoniously.
Jonas sat down on the sofa and put his feet up.
*
Most of the overhead lights in St Stephen’s Cathedral had gone out. The smell of incense, on the other hand, was no fainter. Jonas walked along the aisles, looked into the sacristy, called out. His voice went echoing around the walls. The saints in their niches resolutely ignored him.
He was growing sleepy, he noticed, so he took a tablet.
His heart was thumping. He wasn’t agitated. On the contrary, he was feeling relaxed and carefree. The palpitations were a side effect of the tablets. They made him feel he could remain on his feet for days longer, provided he continued to take them at regular intervals. Apart from an accelerated heartbeat, their only disadvantage was the sensation, stronger at some moments than others, that his head was being inflated.
He looked around. Grey walls. Creaky old pews. Statues.
*
Back at the Brigittenauer embankment he packed the two cameras and went round the flat once more. Whatever met his eye, he looked at it knowing he would never see it again.
He blamed his slight feeling of nausea on the tablets.
‘Goodbye,’ he said in a husky voice.
*
Although Jonas had looked out of his window at the Kurier building countless times, he’d never been inside. Having broken the door down, he searched the commissionaire’s cubby hole for a plan of the building. He failed to find one, but he did find two bunches of keys, which he pocketed.
Part of the Kurier’s archive was in the basement, as he’d guessed. Luckily, it was the older part. Back numbers more recent than 1 January 1980 were kept elsewhere.
He walked down row after row of shelves and filing cabinets, pushing library steps aside and pulling out massive steel drawers undoubtedly capable of withstanding fire for some time. Many of the labels on the box files had faded, and he had to pull them out and check their contents to find out the date of the newspapers inside. At last he came upon the section in which newspapers from his year of birth were kept. He looked for the month, opened the relevant box file, and removed the editions that had appeared on his birthday and the day after.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Good night!’
*
He went to Hollandstrasse to fetch Marie’s suitcase. His original intention had been to leave at once, but the sight of those familiar surroundings made him linger.
He roamed around touching things, shutting his eyes and remembering his parents. His childhood. Here.
He went into the next room, where he’d left the boxes he hadn’t unpacked. He reached into one containing photographs and removed a handful. He also took the musical teddy bear with him.
On the way out he suddenly remembered the chest. He put the suitcase down and went upstairs.
*
He stared at the chest with his arms folded. Should he go and get an axe? Or should he get it over and done with and blow the cursed thing up?
He dragged it across the dirty attic floor and over to a skylight. As he did so, he thought he heard a brief clatter. He examined the chest from every side but couldn’t locate the source of the sound.
He sat down on it and buried his face in his hands.
‘Ah! What an idiot I am!’
He turned the chest upside down. It had been the wrong way up — there was the handle. He raised the lid. It wasn’t even locked.
He saw photos, hundreds of them, together with some old wooden platters, several dirty watercolours without protective frames, a set of tobacco pipes and a small silver box with nothing in it. What galvanised him was the sight of two spools of film. They reminded him of the Super-8 camera Uncle Reinhard had given his father in the late 1970s. For some years it had often been used to film special occasions such as Christmases, birthdays and wine-drinking excursions to Wachau. In those days his father would never get into Uncle Reinhard’s car without the camera.
Jonas picked up one of the spools. He felt sure the films were of family outings, of excursions to the wine district, of his mother and grandmother. The ones shot before 1982 would show his grandmother talking to the camera — in silence, because the Super-8 had no sound-recording facility. He felt positive he would find such shots. But he had absolutely no intention of making sure.
*
The double bed was on castors. Jonas trundled it out of the furniture store’s delivery bay and into Schweighofergasse, where he gave it a shove. It coasted down to Mariahilfer Strasse and hit a parked car with a resounding crash. He pushed it on towards the ring road with his foot. Just short of Museumsplatz, where the ground dropped away, he pushed it ahead of him like a bobsleigh and, when it picked up speed, leapt aboard. He got to his knees, then his feet, and went surfing down Babenberger Strasse to the Burgring. It wasn’t too easy to keep his balance.