Night Work by Thomas Glavinic Read Free Book Online Page B

be the bell, the passage light came on. He screwed up his eyes against the glare and raised his shotgun.
    The passage was deserted. An ordinary passage.
    He looked at the door, which had no nameplate. Like the building itself, it must have been a good thirty years old. There was no spyhole.
    He rang the bell.
    No response.
    He rang again.
    Still nothing.
    He hammered on the door with the butt of the shotgun and rattled the handle. The door was unlocked.
    ‘Anyone there?’
    He found himself in a kitchen-cum-living-room. Sofa, armchair, glass-topped table, carpet, TV, kitchen units along the back wall. The decor bore a startling resemblance to that of his own flat: parlour palm in the corner, loudspeakers on hooks on either side of the window, herbs in little pots on the radiator, full-length mirror.
    He looked at his reflection, holding the shotgun in both hands. Behind him was a sofa that resembled his own, a range of kitchen units like his own. A standard lamp like his. A lampshade like the one at home.
    The light was flickering. He wound a tea cloth roundhis hand and screwed the bulb in tighter. The flickering stopped.
    A loose connection.
    He walked round the room, touching things, shifting chairs, tugging at shelves, reading book titles, turning shoes over, removing jackets from the wardrobe. He checked the bathroom and bedroom.
    The more closely he looked, the more differences he spotted. The standard lamp was grey, not yellow. The carpet was brown, not red. The armchair was worn and threadbare, like the sofa, the decor universally shabby.
    He went from room to room once more, unable to rid himself of the feeling that he’d missed something.
    There was nobody here and no indication of when anyone had last been there. It seemed probable that the lights had been on from the first. He hadn’t noticed the flickering window before because this was the first time he’d ventured to look out at the city at night.
    An unremarkable flat. CDs lying around, washing hanging up, crockery on the draining board, crumpled paper in the waste bin. An entirely unremarkable flat. No hidden message anywhere – unless he’d failed to grasp it.
    He wrote his name and mobile number on a notepad and added his address in case the mobile network failed.
    From the window he made out a small, glowing rectangle a few hundred metres away.
    The light was coming from his own flat.
    Was everything where it should be at this moment? His cup on the sofa table? The duvet on the bed? Were the young people dancing silently on their floats?
    Or was there nothing there? Not until he returned?

5
    In the morning he checked the postbox, then drove to the city centre to look for clues and leave some behind. At lunchtime he broke into a pub and ate something. In the afternoon he went on looking. When evening came he stretched out on the sofa with a beer and watched the Berliners dancing silently. He didn’t go to the window.
    He explored almost every public building between the ring road and Franz-Josefs-Kai. He combed Vienna’s government offices, museums and banks. With the pump-action shotgun in his left hand he made his way across the stage of the Schauspielhaus, along the passages in the Hofburg and past the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History. He walked round the Albertina, the university, the editorial offices of the Presse and Standard , leaving notes bearing his address and mobile number everywhere he went. It was hot outside, cool and dim inside. Specks of dust floated in shafts of light slanting down through windows. The sound of his footsteps on the stone floors reverberated around the spacious buildings.
    Anxious to leave traces of his presence behind, he loaded a handcart with props and trundled them onto the stage of the Burgtheater. He piled them all on top of each other – costumes, plaster statues, TVs, plastic hammers, flags, chairs, swords – and pinned a businesscard, medal-fashion, to the chest of a dummy soldier.
    He visited