Tours of the Black Clock (14 page)

T.O.T.B.C.—7

Y
OU REMEMBER ME. THIS
is, after all, the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle, this simple afternoon you’re leaning out your window, all of fifteen years old I’d say, while below you men are scuffling in one of history’s countless shards. Now there come along some comrades of this poor pillaged soul, a platoon of bums, and for the first time I see something like resistance in this city to the blackboot boys, a vagabond war. As though it’s a battle for your benefit, you there in the window, as though history scrambles and brutalizes and bleeds for the face of you. I cannot recollect your beauty. I recollect the memory of your beauty, which we both know is not the same, because my memory made you beautiful. Whether those vagabonds think you’re beautiful too is impossible for me to guess; they never cared so much for Catherine or Lauren, who are more beautiful. Much more beautiful. Come to think of it, you may be plain as sand. Your long hair a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow, your eyes a banal mud brown. There may not be a single curve of your jaw that’s anything more than ordinary. You say nothing to the scene before you, but your face says everything, the contempt for the blackbooters not simply because they’re bullies but because they presume to hold history as their own, they act like it’s tied to the post with a collar around its neck. The vagabonds have no history, they don’t even know history. It doesn’t intimidate them in the least. And when you look up and raise your eyes across the street, and mine meet them, we follow each other’s look as I make my way past the shard of history; and you say you don’t remember. I don’t believe you. Fifty years later I don’t believe you. Seeing you haunts and binds me, and I don’t believe this defiant maybe-not-beautiful moment that razored the century lengthwise was utterly gone from you before your century had passed another five minutes.

They’re banging around in the street, the window of the candleshop explodes and wax tumbles over the sill, when a stone someone’s hurled strikes you. A moment follows in which everything almost seems to stop, and in that moment the beggars pull the old Jew from the tumult and haul him down the street. The blackboot boys are happy to pretend they’ve won the skirmish, throwing more stones in the beggars’ wake, not far or hard enough to bring them back for more; the boys don’t want more. For a minute they stand around and mark their victory with general commentary about Jews and Germany. In the window you turn as soon as the rock hits you, you raise one hand to your face. In the moment you turn I’m almost sure I can see your blood, I can see the corner of your mouth where the stone opened your flesh. We don’t see each other anymore, our mutual stare is lost in the wound, washed away with the blood of it; maybe the moment’s washed away too. You turn and without looking back once—if only you had looked once—you disappear from the window and shut it closed. The boys are singing and carrying on, and I’d stay there on the street until they’ve left, waiting for you to come back from washing your wound to stand in the window again, or to come to the door and open it, and if not I’d go to the door and knock; I’d wait, but I’m the only one left in the street with the blackbooters who are in a frenzy now, walking around swinging their fists and singing, and far up the street, slowing to a standstill, who should I see but Carl. There he is. He stops, I see him, and I wait for him to see me, and then I turn my back and walk away, and I know he’s done the same.

T
ONIGHT I RETURN TO
my room and it’s empty. Lauren and Jeanine, Catherine and Janet and Leigh are gone. They understand I no longer want them here; I can’t stand the light. I can’t stand the dark, something drunker than blood courses through me. I’m caught between the sheets of the bed; the light of bombings and parades blots the night outside my window. When it fades I sleep an hour, when I wake I sit up in bed in the dark of the room, and find that the gray Hungarian moon has dropped from the sky over the river, has moved through the circular streets of the city, up the banks of the Wien-Fluss to Dog Storm Street, and dangles now in my window like burst mutant fruit from the low limb of a tree. From some place I can’t see the moon casts a shadow on the left corner of my room and there in the shadow opens a door, and there in the door you are. We’re children. I’m twenty. Your breasts are fifteen, your legs twenty-five, your eyes and vulva ageless, neither old nor born. You’re already becoming what I remember rather than what you are. You step from the doorway of the shadow of the moon, your face only a quarter in light, and I see grow from your womb curling out the tuft of your hair a long wet vine; it precedes you, an umbilical thistle. It grows before you across the floor between us, it winds up the side of the bed. It wraps itself around my feet and up my leg, it coils around my waist and binds my erection. Dog Storm Street creaks with blue carriages, I hear the hooves of white donkeys; lakeless swans slap dead against the walls of houses. The window runs with the juice of the moon, I smell the musk of the steppes beyond the eastern hills. At the end of the long wet vine that winds from the center of you and seizes me is a black flower that grows new petals as soon as it sheds them. In a matter of moments the bed’s covered with black petals, I peel them off my thighs sticky and damp. I know you’re a virgin. I didn’t expect anything else. I didn’t expect you to come to the bed like this and prostrate your pink body across the wet black of the crumbling flower. I can already hear, fifty years from now on your Chinese island, every word of your lies. Every word. I hear them above the songs in slavic belfries, you can fill your mouth with the black flower but nothing stifles the deceit of your denial of me. The flower never stops growing. When I grab you by your wrists and shake you into looking at me, it’s as though I’ve taken a live wire: I’m stunned with your cold voltage. I want to let go but I can’t, it takes your own fingers to pry mine loose; you smile as you do it. I wake later and the bed’s soaked with the dew of the black flower. The vine’s withdrawn back into you, only its marks are left on my legs. You’ve gone back into the door of the gray Hungarian moon and closed it behind you. I sleep again and when I wake the wet of you has coated me. On the desk in the sunlight are these pages that document you were here.

I
SELL YOU TO
them. As though I’ve put chains around your feet and led you by a rope down the Kärntnerstrasse, I sell you, for the usual amount. I guess Petyr’s finally convinced Kronehelm not to come along to the rendezvous; the translator waits at the appointed time and place alone. They don’t know what they have in you. You’re worth more than any of them can pay; at the next appointment Petyr even complains. “Herr Kronehelm,” he announces coolly, “says to tell you your last chapter won’t do. It’s much too …” he looking for the word, “… elusive.”

“If it isn’t satisfactory,” I answer, “then you should find yourself another partner.” I take my money and leave.

The other day I went to find your street again. There on the edge of the Ring not far from the street where I lived seven weeks. I walked up one road and down the other, looking for the candleshop. I scoured maps, I questioned residents of the neighborhood. I mean, it’s not such a big neighborhood. It doesn’t have so many streets, and there are only so many candleshops. But I couldn’t find the candleshop, and I didn’t find your street. And I wonder if I’m really leading you by a rope, chained and enslaved, or if I’m the gateway through which you’ve escaped to other places, as though through a shadow’s door.

But you come back to me every night. Wherever else it is you go, you come to me and when we’re through with the night I sell it. By the high price they pay me, I know I love you.

W
HEN THE SUMMER’S OVER,
Carl finally leaves. His affair with the Spanish girl hasn’t gone so well lately, and I’ve been urging him to go anyway. The city’s become dangerous for him. Italy doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore either, so he takes a night train back to Paris. No way the fucking Germans are going to take over Paris, right? The Spanish girl and I see him off at the Westbahnhof, and I shake hands and then I watch his train disappear.

The Spanish girl is somber. She’s invited to a dinner hosted by a rich Scot the other Spanish girl’s been seeing, and her escort with all the languages has just vanished on a train in the distance. In lousy English she pleads that I come along, if only awhile. I don’t know if I owe it to Carl, I certainly don’t imagine I owe it to her. From the windows of the station the city is ignited by the scatter of fire and glass as though chandeliers have plunged to the streets below them.

We take a taxi to a neighborhood behind the museums of the Burg Ring. Anyone with a house in this part of town has a few extra schillings jangling in his pocket. We go upstairs in this house where there are already four or five other people, all of them young and rich and attractive. I don’t think one of them is Austrian; most are German. From the window I can see the dark dolloped trees of the Volksgarten rustling against the light that lingers in the west. Standing in the doorway is a guy in old disheveled clothes with a three-day stubble on his face drinking Scotch from the bottle, and I think to myself that one of the vagabonds has somehow wandered up; I wonder if the German guests will start thrashing him. He’s the only one who looks almost as bad as I. Turns out he owns the place.

One Spanish girl is moping about Carl, whom she’s insisted half the summer she doesn’t love anyway, and the other Spanish girl is plotting marriage with this derelict in the doorway. Everyone’s on their way out to dinner and the girls say why don’t I come along. I don’t have any money and I don’t fit in with the crowd at all, but we all pile into a couple of taxis and are on our way. We arrive at an apartment we could have walked to in six minutes, and take a lift up to a suite that would shame Doggie Hanks’ joint back in New York, an Eighteenth Century apartment facing the Inner City. The hostess is a beautiful young girl who appears to have sprained her wrist and wears it in a fashionable little sling resting below her breast. She greets everyone in a very cordial fashion until she comes to me, whom she regards rather peculiarly. It’s explained to her delicately that I’m an American.

My only recourse is to saunter over to the bar and drink something. Then I walk over to the hors d’oeuvres and wolf down about half the table. This is exactly the kind of behavior that’s expected of me. I’m regarded by the other guests, who now number twenty or thirty, with fascination; they all think I’m a direct descendant of Geronimo. Standing at the table is a plump little English girl who appears to be about four feet tall. She’s squeezed all of herself into about six inches of clothes, and she has a tiny little waist from which the rest of her bubbles out. It’s not unappealing. Her hair is a blaze of red redder than mine, and she has freckles. “Big appetite,” she observes, watching me. I stroll through the suite checking out the rooms and opening windows and emptying other people’s drinks, and finally the party decides to move again and everyone loads into half a dozen taxis and we caravan off down the Ringstrasse. We come to a dark alley near the Hofburg where the taxis can’t go and get out and march to a dark street near the center of the Inner City where all the strippers and streetwalkers live. The building looks like a warehouse. It doesn’t have a single window, and only a single door. The door opens and somebody in the shadows says this or that, and then we go inside.

We’re now in the sleekest nightclub in Vienna, maybe in the world for all I’ve seen of nightclubs. It makes the Top Dog look dull, everything’s a deep blue that’s very popular with people who can afford not to look at themselves. One of the Germans tells me it’s the most exclusive private club in Europe. I order a double bourbon on ice with no water. It occurs to me what money I have isn’t going to go very far here. The menus have no prices. But I figure I’m a guest, right? The Spanish girls are seated across the table from me with the Scottish bloke who’s tastefully discarded his bottle by now; we get to talking and he’s not a bad guy, actually, though his accent’s incomprehensible. There’s a beautiful Dutch blonde on my right and the voluptuous freckled little English redhead on my left, and we’re all talking and everything seems jake, and the people at the table now assume that if I can talk and dress and act this way and lumber around in polite society as though I don’t give a fuck about anything at all, then I certainly must be the wealthiest person in the room. They’ve decided I’m from some frontier in America with cotton or oil, a shrewd fellow who neatly sidestepped the Crash like a croquet ball. They’ve concluded I’m absolutely stinking with money and probably a regular patron here and a couple of them ask what I recommend as far as the cuisine goes. I point out this or that, whatever part of the menu my finger happens to be on, and I give them a knowledgeable wink as I do so. Pretty soon I’m ordering the wine and cheese, I’m calling out to waiters for another bottle of Chateau Whatever 1896, and everyone’s having a splendid time. These Yanks may not look like much, they’re saying to each other, but they have style. The Spanish girls are ignoring it completely, jabbering on and on about the Scot and Carl who with luck is about to Switzerland by now, and the only one who watches me intently and doesn’t look like she’s fooled for a minute is the little English pudding at my side, who seems to be having the best time of all. Her knowledgeable winks are for me.

The evening progresses, so to speak. We have a fine meal but I’m careful not to act too impressed. I tactfully but pointedly disparage the pureed carrots and look a little bored with the brandy mousse. The only thing I wonder about are the other guests in the club. Lots of men. Women with our party to be sure, but the rest of the clientele divides up into male couples, all seated at intimate tables. As I sit there listening to the voices from these other tables, I’m sure I recognize some of them. Soon I’m sure I recognize all of them. I realize I’ve talked to every one of these voices on the other side of the door in the Spanish girls’ flat where I was living not so long ago. I decide to pay no attention to this and before I know it the meal’s finished and I’m enjoying a cognac and talking with the Dutch blonde when some German two seats down from me begins to catch my attention; he’s rattling off numbers and figures and various divisions, and I look over and realize he has the
bill
. The Spanish girls want to investigate the dancehall downstairs and I interject that this sounds like an excellent idea and let’s do it
jetzt
. We get down to the dancehall and the Spanish girls disappear, and I’m hanging around biding my time until all the figuring over the bill is finished upstairs, when this guy comes up and asks me to dance. Excuse me? I say and he repeats the question and I’m shaking my head, Uh nein, nein, es tut mir leid, when some other guy comes up and he wants to dance too. Soon there are these two guys arguing over who’s going to dance with me. As fast as I can, I run back upstairs and back to the table only to find they’re just getting around to shelling out the schillings, so I beat it back downstairs where the two guys are still squabbling; moreover the more these guys talk the more familiar their voices become until I’m certain that at least one of them stood haranguing me outside my door a few months back. If I say too much now they’re going to discover I am in fact Thierry, elusive object of desire who places advertisements in newspapers as a vicious tease. I get back upstairs pronto and ease my way back into my seat at the table where everything seems to be settled. The money’s already on the tray with the bill and nobody’s too concerned with it or looking around saying where’s that cheap stinking-rich American who hasn’t paid up. The coast seems clear to me. I sit down and let the conversation wash over me like the waves of the Mediterranean, when the German two seats down who’s been tallying the score passes the tray to me and says, cool as ice, “I’m certain you would not wish to leave again without paying for yourself or the lady.”