Tours of the Black Clock (19 page)

“I’ll think of something especially good for tomorrow night,” I offer.

He narrows his eyes. He’d advise or threaten me at this moment if he could think of anything that would do either one. I thought he’d never leave, you say when he’s gone.

Courtney, freckletot. Even you could not redeem this.

1941. BARBAROSSA’S CALLED OFF.
When Holtz tells me, I can see he thinks it’s a good thing for Germany but maybe not so good for him. There’s relief and wrath in Berlin, eye to eye across the political barricades; Holtz runs low, crossfire flashing above his head. Fifteen years the client’s dreamed of making Russia German; now cronies despair at his wandering nights. I’ve saved Russia, I laugh to you, I’ve saved the world. You squeeze me in your palm, fondle me. “What a very good boy you are then,” you answer. We celebrate. Your legs shine like your eyes. Guys hack tubercular on the stairs outside, there are sounds in the woodwork and the sink pipes rumble like the streets. Russian whispers rise to a wail from the Danube. “Is he here?” you ask, and when I look, sure enough, he is. I guess I never believed he’d come. I know you said it all along; I guess you were right. Do you want him? You look up at him; he rustles in the corner, shrinking away into the dark: “He’s rather a puny one, isn’t he?” Yes. I’ve seen him before: he isn’t much. “Is he as big as you?” Of course not, I laugh. What a question. I push myself into you; he holds the corner of the wall so hard I can see the blood fall from his fingers. Geli, Geli. “Oh my God, my God, my God, my God,” you’re nearly screaming it. To me, though; not him.

M
ARCH 1942. I’VE SAVED
Russia but doomed England. The invasion of the island began today, the German frenzy that’s been building Russiaward now unleashed across the Channel. Japan that was once tempted to strike in the Pacific now becomes attentive to the British colonies in Asia. America that was being gradually drawn into the war only months ago is now forced to wait for England’s fate. Megan twists painfully in the silence from home, phone communication impossible. Sometimes I feel I have this clarity, sometimes I think I see it all rather lucidly. I look around my flat on Dog Storm Street and there’s no one there at all, I tell myself. In the streets of the city people anticipate news of surrender any moment; there are also uneasy rumors of conspiracies in the Chancellery. Something’s happening, people tell me. I have to restrain myself from explaining: He’s gone, you see, they can’t find him. I have to hold myself back from telling them, He isn’t in the Chancellery anymore, he’s here in Vienna; he lives in my flat. He stands in the corner and watches me with the woman both of us love.

Sometimes I’m sure I view it all without obstruction, the Twentieth Century sighted from my window. Today, with news coming in over the radio, I saw it for instance: I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that’s been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. This was the river of the Twentieth Century that was forked at that very moment I saw you in the window of your house across from the candleshop, when the melee was taking place before you in the street; this Twentieth Century I saw from my own window today was the one in which I never saw you at all. In which I never saw you and never wrote of you, and your invention never came to the attention of special clients. In which no evil mind was ever distracted by the reincarnation of a past obsession, no Barbarossas were suspended and therefore evil came to rule the world; or else such suspended invasions were the catastrophe Holtz predicted, and evil therefore collapsed altogether. I longed for this century, seeing it from my window, because I was absolved in it of some of my monstrousness; but I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century, because this is the century in which another German, small with wild white hair, has written away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside. It just couldn’t have been, that’s all. It’s nice to think so, to think evil remains collapsible. But I saw you in that window and the true Twentieth Century found itself, and abandoned the lie it might have chosen to live if you hadn’t been there.

There’s a camp west of here at Mauthausen on the lovely shores of the Danube. I can see the smoke from the rooftop where I hang Courtney’s washed clothes. I remember his name now: Carl. Every day trains come from Switzerland with escaped Jews, the Swiss sending them reliably back.

Holtz has a plan tonight. In the four and a half years since he first came to this flat he’s aged twenty, continental cordiality falling away from his face in chunks. His eyes are debauched by terror, his flesh yellow. His hair drops out in tufts, cigarettes are killing him. There are rumors in the street. “Kill her,” he says. What? “Kill her.” I won’t, I answer. If you want, I’ll stop. Get me and my family passage out of the country, and I’ll just quit. “And where will you take passage to?” he asks in a deathly croak. “Where are you beyond his reach except perhaps America? You can’t go back to America.” He looks at me. “We know about you and America.” He’s sitting on the edge of the bed; his eyes don’t quite focus. “The translator’s under house arrest,” he finally says, “every new chapter is now delivered under armed guard. This is what it’s come to. Z waits pacing in his suite.” I saw a blond woman there that night in the hotel four years ago, I say. “She’s nothing to him,” Holtz answers, “she’s not the one he cares about. It’s the one you’ve brought to him he cares about. Kill her.” Neither of us speaks for several minutes and finally I just say to him, Let the translator do it, but I won’t. He nods as though he knew all along, that even if I had agreed, nothing can now be turned back. For the first time I feel a little badly for him, he’s in way over his head. Me too probably. Look out that window, I say to him; and we both sit in the dark looking out the window onto the empty street. I want to show him the other century, when none of this happens, and when all he has to think about is his place in the kingdom or the death of his country. I don’t think he can see it, though.

Y
OU AND I DISTANT.
Lately we argue; I suppose we’re arguing about him. He just sits in the corner. It isn’t that we’re bored, the three of us. Rather the math of our evil is constrained by the math of our bodies. I find myself missing my little daughter, and America. I return to Megan sooner and sooner each night; she sinks drowsily deeper and deeper into her sadness. She no longer looks at me when I get home. I pull her to me and lie that there will always be an England.

A
UGUST 1942. ENGLAND FALLS.
The invasion has been a savage four months and has cost the Germans, but this is the end. London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh are all gone, only the seaport of Glasgow holds out besieged. The news comes over the radio this evening as I hold you by your ankles and feed on you, you bursting at my lips rapid-fire. The Germans, knowing what it will be, have not jammed the broadcast but rather pick it up from London and send it out to all Europe; it’s the prime minister. “We survive bombs,” he says, “we may survive tanks. We survive the blade, and bullets. We survive history of a thousand years, the caprices of political tempests. But defeat, that we choose not to survive. It finishes, countrymen. I’m sorry. If the damnation of an eternity for whatever follies I’ve committed would spare my nation this, I would with gratitude be so damned. As it is, damnation is insistent with no exchange for it. God save the King. God save the Empire.” There’s a moment of black quiet and then a muffled pop; the weight of him can be heard thudding against the microphone. The ooze of him can be heard this thousand miles. In that black quiet perhaps he snickered to know that where he once thought lay the century’s conscience there’s only a oneliner, a vaudeville smirk. I leave you to your spasms. When you ask, “Why are you going?” I answer, To Megan; I have to. “Don’t leave,” you say. Don’t leave, he calls from the corner. You bastard, I answer him. Halfway down the stairs you ask me one last time.

I
N THE MERE MOMENTS
since the broadcast the streets have filled with people, shouting and cheering and embracing that the war in Europe is over. Some wonder out loud whether the Germans will now declare war on America. I run the whole way to Megan and Courtney, dodging revelers and honking cars, civil guards posted on the corners who are hailed as though they just got back from England in the last five minutes. On the quays of the Wien-Fluss small victory parades are taking place spontaneously. From Megan’s street I can see the light in our flat, it seems a silent light in the middle of the din.

I run up the stairs, every flight. At the top the door stands ajar and I know something’s wrong.

All the lights are on, everything’s in its place. I go from room to room; I don’t call her name but say it normally, just to confirm to myself it won’t be answered: Megan. It isn’t answered. There’s no sign of Courtney.

I’m thinking, It’s such a hot night, and there’s much ruckus in the street; they went out. I think it but I know it isn’t so. I sit in the flat ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that ache in their passage. I look up finally to see one of the neighbors in the doorway, an old man from the flat below. He darts away. By the time I’ve chased him downstairs he’s got his room closed and locked; I bang on the door for him to open. I’m shaking it by the knob and about to rip it off the wall when the neighbor across the hall protests.

“What’s happened to my family,” I say.

“Soldiers,” she says.

I go back down into the street. People are running up and down the sidewalks swilling beer and shouting. On the other side is a man I know is a spy. I’ve never seen him before but I know because he looks like every other spy who’s tailed me over the last five years. I walk across the street to him. Like all these other very subtle spies he looks away from me as though he doesn’t notice me at all; when I get right up to him he’s still pretending he doesn’t see me. I hold him by the waist and lift him over my head and hang him on one of the streetlamps. I slap him and tell him, “Get Holtz.” Some other people gather around in the throes of their jubilation; they’ve decided this must be political in the way everything is now. “Get Holtz,” I say again, and no one likes my accent much. Maybe one of them wants to hit me in the head with a shovel, maybe another would as soon shoot me. “Leave him be!” the spy is screaming at them; I guess I must be the most invulnerable man in the world at this moment.

I take him off the streetlamp and put him on the ground. “I’ll be across the street,” I say. I return to the flat.

Holtz is there in about forty minutes. He looks terrible. Things don’t improve when he sees me. He comes into the flat, I’m sitting in the same place I’ve been since I got here; he looks around the flat and knows what’s happened. Something in me sinks to see him as surprised as I am. I understand now that he’s not in control of the situation. “They’re gone,” I say from where I sit.

He doesn’t say anything at first; for a man whose country has just taken over the English empire, he doesn’t appear enthusiastic. “Banning,” is all he can muster. It was a poor precedent, ever allowing him to call me that. I’ve set another precedent tonight: the lights are on. “Banning.” He shrugs pathetically.

“Tell them,” I say, “tell them I want to make the swap tonight.”

He looks utterly befuddled. “The swap?”

“That, or I’ll kill him. Tell them. I won’t wait.”

He’s still doing his befuddled act. “What are you talking about?”

I shake my head. “I won’t wait. Z for my family, in an hour.”

“Z?” It’s a good act, I give him credit. “Banning, you’ve …You’re disturbed at this moment, I think.” He says it slowly, as though gingerly handling a grenade where the pin is loose. “Z’s in Berlin, Banning. Berlin. We’ve conquered England this evening.”

He doesn’t understand the true situation. I understand the true situation. “No point you and I discussing this, let’s take matters up with the big boys. Whoever’s in Vienna now that can handle it.” I get up from my seat. “I’ll be at the other flat. You tell them we swap tonight, that I won’t wait.” I walk by him, our shoulders clash. Out in the street the spy’s waiting by the same lamp; he steps back at the sight of me. He looks up at the lighted window. “Back to the other flat,” I advise him. After a moment he nods.

W
HEN I RETURN TO
Dog Storm Street you’re gone.

It isn’t that you’ve taken all your things and left, because you had no things, really. A stick of lip rouge, you must have thrown that away. Perhaps you took a coat of mine and now you walk in the streets with it wrapped around your shoulders.

He’s still in the corner. If I move toward him he just pulls back. “Haven’t you heard,” I tell him, “your war’s over.” I sit in my chair and wait. “Keep your shirt on.”

After an hour and a half I think I hear the car amidst all the other racket down below. Then I know I hear the door, but doors after all have been opening and closing all night now. There’s no mistaking the steps on the stairs, though; Holtz’s knock is rude and impatient.

He doesn’t wait for me to get the door, which is all right since I have no intention of getting it anyway. But when he turns on the light, he isn’t Holtz.

Soldiers in the doorway raise their guns.