He set up the bed in Heldenplatz, not far from the spot where he’d painted his plea for help on the ground six weeks earlier. His intention had been to obliterate the letters, but rain had already relieved him of that task. All that remained of them were four vague smudges.
He loaded the essentials for the coming night into the truck and drove it to the square. He arranged some torches round the bed at a distance of five metres and placed two TVs at its foot. These he connected to the cameras he’d filmed with that morning on the Brigittenauer embankment, likewise to the accumulator. For safety’s sake he checked the output level. All was well. There wouldn’t be any power failure tonight, at least.
At random intervals all over the square he distributed spotlights, aiming them at the sky because he didn’t want to be directly illuminated. Before long there were so many cables snaking across the grass and concrete he kept tripping over them, especially as it was getting dark.
He placed Marie’s suitcase beside the bed. He wedged the photos he’d brought from Hollandstrasse into a side pocket, together with the newspapers, to prevent them from blowing away. He fetched the pillow and blanket from the cab of the truck and tossed them onto the mattress. By now the spotlights were bathing the square in an unreal glow. It was like being in an enchanted park.
There stood the Hofburg and there the palace gate. Beyond them, the Burgring lined with trees. On the right, a monument: two basilisks grappling head to head, knee to knee, though they looked as if they were propping each other up.
In the middle of the square, his bed. He felt as if he was on a film set. Even the sky looked artificial. In this orange half light, everything seemed to have two aspects. The trees, the wrought-iron gates, the Hofburg itself, all looked natural and authentic but, at the same time, relentlessly slick.
Jonas lit the torches and started the videotapes. He stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and gazed up at the orange-tinged night sky.
There he lay.
Untroubled by the wolf-bear.
Or by ghosts.
Untroubled.
*
Jonas swallowed another tablet, just to be on the safe side. He was lying on a bed, after all. He looked at the two TV screens. One showed a camera with the red light blinking and, in the background, part of the bed in which he’d slept for years, the other the top of a chest of drawers surmounted by some framed embroidery.
Apart from the red flashes, both pictures were without movement.
The square was silent save for the hum of the cameras and an occasional puff of wind that stirred the trees.
The very first photograph showed him as a boy with his father, half of whose head was missing, needless to say. His father had draped his left arm round Jonas’s shoulders and was gripping the boy’s wrists in his right hand, as if the two of them were tussling. Jonas’s mouth was open, as if he were squealing.
Those hands, his father’s hands. Big hands, they were. He remembered how often he’d nestled against them, those big, rough hands. He felt the roughness of that skin, the strength in those muscles. He even caught a momentary whiff of his father’s smell.
Those hands in that photo had existed. Where were they now?
The picture he was seeing wasn’t just a snapshot taken by his mother. What he was seeing was what his mother had seen at the instant she took it. He was seeing with his mother’s eyes. Seeing what a long-dead person had seen at a particular moment many years ago.
He still had a vivid recollection of the phone call. He was sitting in his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment, into which he’d moved a short while before, doing a difficult crossword puzzle. He’d opened a can of beer and was looking forward to a quiet evening when the phone rang. His father said, with uncharacteristic bluntness: ‘If you want to see her alive one more time, you’d better come at once.’
She’d been ill for ages, so they all knew it would happen. Even so, that sentence rang in his ears like a thunderclap. He dropped the ballpoint and drove to Hollandstrasse. The hospital had taken his mother home at her own request.
She was past speaking. He took her hand and squeezed it. She didn’t open her eyes.
He sat down on a chair beside the bed. His father sat on the other side. He reflected that he’d been born in this room, this bed, and now it was his mother’s deathbed.
It happened in the small hours. They both knew exactly when. His mother heaved a loud, stertorous sigh and fell silent. Silent and still.
It occurred to Jonas that, if people’s accounts of near-death experiences were to be believed, she was hovering overhead, looking down at them. Looking down at what she was leaving behind. At herself.
He stared at the ceiling.
He waited for the medical officer to come and certify her death. He waited for the men from the Municipal Funeral Service. There was a dull thud as they were placing the corpse in the metal coffin, as if her head had struck the side. He and his father winced. The men didn’t turn a hair. They were the most aloof and taciturn individuals he’d ever come across.
He helped his father with the formalities, which entailed registering the death certificate in a gloomy government office and applying for a cremation licence. Then he drove home.
Back at his flat he recalled the previous day, when she’d still been alive — when he’d still been ignorant of what was to come. He walked around, looking at various objects and thinking: the last time I saw this, she was still alive. He thought this while looking at the espresso machine, the kitchen stove, the bedside light. The newspaper, too. He went on doing the crossword puzzle, looking at the letters he’d written in the night before and remembering.
A before. And a now.
*
Towards midnight Jonas felt hungry. He daubed some slices of pumpernickel with jam in the semi-darkness of a supermarket aisle.
*
The screens were displaying their usual images. He had switched the cameras to repeat, so this was their third showing of the camera in the mirror and the room with no one in it. His back was stiff. He stretched, grimacing with pain, then lay down on the bed and took out the newspapers.
He remembered this typeface and layout. This was what the Kurier had looked like when he was a boy.
He read the articles in his birthday edition without really taking them in. It fascinated him to think that he was reading what people had read on the day his mother brought him into the world. This was what they had held in their hands at that time.
He perused the next day’s paper even more closely. After all, it reported what had happened on his birthday. He learnt that Americans had demonstrated against the Vietnam War, that Austria was in the grip of election fever, that a drunk had driven his car into the Danube without injuring anyone, and that the open-air swimming baths had been besieged because of the glorious weather.
That had been his birthday. His first day on earth.
*
In the morning he turned off all the spotlights and dunked the torches in a bucket of water. They hissed, sending up clouds of steam. Having got hold of a video recorder from an electrical shop on the way, he connected it to a TV. He put in the tape of his drive to Schwedenplatz, which he hadn’t watched after editing it.
He sat down on the bed and pressed ‘Play’.
He saw the Spider coming towards him. It rounded the bend and headed towards the bridge. Drove along the Heiligenstädter embankment and past the Rossbauer Barracks to Schwedenplatz. Drove across the bridge and along Augartenstrasse to Gaussplatz, where it had an accident.
The driver got out, walked unsteadily to the back of the car and reached into the boot. Got in again and drove on.
Jonas turned off the recorder.
*