The streetlights are on. You look up and down the Nirgendsgasse. Perfectly deserted. In a way it would look odd if anyone were visible, even now, on New Year's Eve – this is a street that seems earmarked for desertion, expressly designed for it. Like a set in a film or a stage production. Deserted street in seedy outskirts of major mid-European city. The streetlights, you notice, are spaced far apart and strangely dim, as if they run on batteries that don't get changed often enough. Again you look east, toward the intersection of the Nirgendsgasse and the main thoroughfare, the tram stop at the end of the line. It stands to reason that Georg Schmidt will have gone that way. A tiny car appears, driving north along the main street, vanishing in a second. Then another, another. Something comic in the way they zip across the intersection, purposeful and manic, like little robots. They render this sidestreet even deader by contrast. New Year's Eve in Vienna and this street is quiet as the high street of your village, Craigellachie, in the early dark of New Year's morning. Surely Schmidt has gone towards that traffic, and the tram that may even now be departing towards the city's festive heart.
West up the Nirgendsgasse there is (as the street's odd name would suggest) not much: on either side, a rampart of apartments and closed or bankrupt shops darkening with dusk. In the lower sky a fading, funereal glow. Yet that's the way you find yourself walking, yes, though you're not the type to submit to intuition. Or call it an outlandish hunch. You've lived, till now, an orderly, rational life. Why did your fluent German fail you in the Czerny? The blonde waitress – proprietress – was attractive, to be sure, but you have courted attractive women before, in your systematically acquired German, and not slipped up. For a moment you wonder if you might have sustained a kind of seizure, even a mini-stroke, in the cafe. No. Simply the stress and insomnia of the last few weeks. You speed up. Suddenly it seems very important that you find Schmidt. And return to the Czerny.
On your right a small park opens up – the last thing you would have expected here. The leafless chestnut and plane trees are surprisingly large, presumably planted right after the war. In the centre of this small, chilly oasis, a lamp glows with a cold blue light. Like the glow of an ancient gaslight. In fact, the lamp seems an imitation of a gaslight. It flanks an iron bench that faces a small concrete fountain. On the bench sits a man. You squint, almost certain it's him. He gestures you over. You approach. Naturally it is Schmidt. And you know instantly – though it's irrational to be so sure – that he has been waiting for you.
'Herr Schmidt,' you hear yourself say. 'Ich habe-, ich-' Again you find yourself flailing.
'English, please,' he says, a vapour of breath wreathing his face in the cold. 'And that is not my name. Kindly sit down here.'
'But I have your wallet,' you say. 'You left it in the cafe. And the picture is of you.'
'Indeed it is. You may keep this wallet. I will not be in need of it soon.' He pronounces
his 'w's in the English way but says auf for of. He goes on: 'Auf course, to speak in the existential sense, all men can say so – that soon, they will no longer be in need auf their wallets. Nicht wahr?'
'I think I'd rather return it to you.' You're reluctant to step close enough to do so, however.
'As you wish. At all events, you will kindly join me here for a moment. You see-'
'I think I should be getting back.'
'I need to demand your help in a matter of some import.'
Afterlands, by Steven Heighton, is now out in Hamish Hamilton hardback Read more
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i - Hari Kunzru
