Tours of the Black Clock (29 page)

G
IORGIO IS THE FISHERMAN
who brought me the television. He’s fair like many northern Italians, and his very round face beams red like the twilight sun. He literally came up through my floor, in a tunnel the Germans don’t know about. The tunnel leads out to the edge of the city emerging on a deserted piazza that faces the lagoon. Apparently there are hundreds of these tunnels the Germans don’t know. The fishermen laugh at the Germans. The idea of the Germans ruling the world is preposterous to them, since the fishermen come and go in the lagoon as they choose, to the Germans’ general befuddlement. Giorgio and the others warmed up to me when they learned I’m an American. I can’t tell them what I’m doing here, and I won’t allow them to believe I’m a political prisoner; it would be more hypocritical than I could stand. Through this tunnel Giorgio and his friends have brought me food and televisions and company. They could easily take me out with them to the islands, there’d be nothing to it. I protest that the Germans would be sure to find me, and that Giorgio and his friends would suffer the consequences. I argue that the Germans would only move me somewhere else in the city where there’d be no tunnel coming up through the floor and I’d never see Giorgio and the fishermen again. Giorgio disagrees heatedly but also accepts my argument as some kind of inarguable sign of my nobility. It’s almost unbearable to let him attribute such a fine quality to me. I’m a man the Twentieth Century can’t redeem, I try to explain to him. The truth is that if I were to escape I wouldn’t know how to live free of her. Later, it’s the revenge that keeps me here. Still, I can’t resist the opportunity to go out with Giorgio and the fishermen on their boat, and at night sometimes I lower my old arthritic hugeness into the floor and follow them out to the deserted piazza where we sail the lagoon for thirty minutes, round and round in the black water under the stupid wandering searchlights of the Germans who never see anything. I sit on the front of the boat. There the amber lights of a hundred piers circling the lagoon surround me; I listen to the mosquitoes and the wind, and for a moment again own no memory. After a while we return to the room and that night in my sleep I’m laid out on the wet bow of the lagoon itself, in a place where memory owns me. I wake in the dark, a sailor marooned on his own life.

I
DON’T INTEND TO
try and redeem my infidelity. I haven’t come to redeem anything. Rather I ride history like a wild horse that’s pursued redemption into a century where redemption is replaced by revenge. I knew two women, I’m sorry I was so weak as to need them both. I understand that if I hadn’t betrayed her for my wife, then my wife may not have had to pay betrayal’s price, clutching in her arms against the Vienna night the child of redemption’s and infidelity’s liaison. I would only add one thing now. I say it not for the sake of what one thinks of me, I say it for them, I say it because it’s so. I’d only add that while perhaps, in the eyes of infidelity, what I had with one was supposed to render counterfeit what I had with the other, in fact what I had with each was true unto itself. I don’t expect anyone to despise me less for this. I don’t expect anyone to regard my fingers as less marked by blood. Though the century disgraces the words innocence and honor, I won’t do so by supposing those words could ever apply to me. My daughter, alive today, would be thirty years old, with a hundred undiminished sins of her own.

T
HIS IS WHERE I’VE
lived years and years, then, in this little room with no windows and the hum of the sea in its walls. I think after a while everyone’s come to forget what it is I’m here for. The guards aren’t particularly friendly or attentive, but neither are they unreasonably harsh. They don’t pay much attention to me one way or the other, and in the last year they’ve begun wandering off at times without locking my door behind them. At first I took it as a sign of their contempt for me, that I was so harmless as to warrant such casual surveillance. They didn’t imagine I’d have the nerve to open the door and just walk out. But now I’m fairly certain that, well, they did imagine it, they in fact presumed it. Now I’m fairly certain in retrospect that everything which has happened they’ve meant to happen. The first couple of times, the guards caught up with me right way, since I don’t move so quickly these days; I hadn’t even gotten down the hall and around the corner. But eight months ago, by accident or intention, they didn’t. I pushed open my door one afternoon and stepped into the hall and shuffled down the other direction from where I’d gone before. I expected to shuffle right into one guard or another. Now I realize that the guards caught up with me those first couple of times because I was just going in the wrong direction. I moved down the hall now, it became darker. After five minutes I found a hallway where lanterns burned in the hollows of the walls. I felt overwhelmed not so much by the exertion of the walk as the thick air of the corridors. I came out into another hallway of blue light; I looked up to the city’s tarpaulin above me. Any minute I figured one of the guards would be retrieving me; I even stopped awhile to wait for him. I never figured on getting this far. I had no interest in getting this far, I’d been out of my room ten minutes now. Then I heard a voice in German, and only after I’d stood there leaning against the hallway wall awhile, listening to the foreign words, did they not seem so foreign; my own German was proficient enough to finally recognize that I was listening to a translation of the very words I’d written this morning. I followed the voice. Up half a flight of stairs, after the blue corridor led back into a black one like my own, I came to the room where the old man and the younger one were living.

T
HEIR ROOM ISN’T MUCH
larger than my own, and no less spare. But it’s high enough to have a window near the top; water seeps in around the window’s edges and its smell is occasionally obnoxious. While nothing can really be seen from the window, it still lets in light. I envy their light. They don’t seem to notice it. For a long time I began coming to their room regularly; the two of them always sat in the same place, the old man at the table in the middle, slumped in his chair and staring straight ahead as the other read to him. The old man always wears the same black suit. He’s around eighty, his hair’s thin and white. The mustache is so white and scraggly it’s hardly there at all. I don’t think he recognizes me; he’s only actually seen me once before, after all. I didn’t recognize him until after I saw the picture. Like all old people he’s surrounded by his mementos, as with all old Germans I assumed at first they were the mementos of his Germanness. Pictures of him in his uniform, leading armies, posturing with statesmen, shouting at the people who worshipped him. Only after a while did I realize this wasn’t just another old German with pictures of his god, this was the god with pictures of himself. But it was the other picture that told me, the only picture that wasn’t of him. It stood alone on a small table by his cot, a dead brown flower crumbling from the photo’s heavy brass frame. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. At first it was just a picture of a girl I’d never seen before. But then I saw the inscription, and her name, and I remembered perfectly: I remembered perfectly that this was her: Yes, I told myself, this is exactly what she looks like. I remember exactly the eyes of blue and the hair of spun sunlight. When I picked up the photo that first time in their room, to look closely for something in the corner of her mouth, he became alarmed. As with all helpless old men he no longer could find the words for alarm, the alarm was all in his eyes. And then I realized. I put the picture down. It’s you, I said to him.

I
T’S YOU, THE YOUNGER
one repeated to me. He wore a dark gray coat, like me he was in his middle years. He was thin and soft, except his eyes, which watched me with hate. Like the old man he seemed attached to where he sat, as though nothing of him was alive beneath his neck; he was made forceful, for the first time in his life, by his hatred. He had a presence the old man seemed to have transferred to him long ago. In Petyr’s eyes at this moment was exactly the power I’d always heard was the client’s, in Petyr’s eyes at this moment was the power to rule Germany. At this moment he was struggling to some point rational enough for killing me, some point not so distant from his hate that he would lose its strength but distant enough for calculating the schematic of murder. In the same way the client had mourned Geli and his kingdom all these years, in the same way I’d mourned Megan and Courtney and my conscience, Petyr had mourned Kronehelm, I suppose. He’d been translating a long time. He’d translated always with the same precision; if he’d ever subverted or deformed the translations there wouldn’t now be in his eyes the force of this livid hatred, rather I’d see his guilt and deceit. All this was happening the first time I stumbled on them in their little room; we all watched each other with hate and fear and amazement. Though my feet were growing gradually but surely lame, my hands were still capable of the good old things; I could break Petyr in his wormful wrath, and then throttle the old man. I could speak Megan’s name as I did so, I could speak Courtney’s. I could speak all their names, from Warsaw to London, from Treblinka to Mauthausen. And yet I knew that even if I could kill the old man for that long, before the soldiers burst in and shot me down, that even if I could kill him long enough to speak the names of the six million, or ten or twelve, or however many flesh markers he lay down in the pages of time to gauge his evil, in the end there’d only be one little old throttled life to pay for it. That wasn’t revenge enough. If I could find my way into this room every night for another thirty years and kill him little by little each night, it was still just the small miserable life of an old senile memoryless man to whom his own evil no longer meant anything even if I snarled the name of every victim into his wrinkled little face. What’s the revenge of killing a man who’s forgotten his own evil? I left the two of them that first time, I turned my back on Petyr’s eyes in the same way the soldiers show contempt for my own harmlessness. I came back several nights later, and then every night after that. It’s crossed my mind that someone meant this to happen; it’s crossed my mind that if I were to kill Z, soldiers might not burst in at all. Rather they might be watching it all from somewhere secret. Rather they might let me kill him as they may have allowed me to kill X that night in the Hotel Imperial. Still, each night I considered it. Each night my hands felt fit for it. Petyr’s hate, seething and never acted upon, came to bore me. Before my hate came to bore Z, in the depths of whatever fog he now lived, I’d find a revenge to catch his attention.

S
O THERE WERE THE
three of us, the hellgod of history, his dreamwriter and his translator, aging crippled and insane and unseen in a damp Italian basement. What came to repulse me most was how time made the client’s evil so feeble and therefore shredded the illusion that his evil was inhuman. It was utterly human. I saw the humanity the day the doctor came and changed Z’s clothes and cleaned him from his fouling himself. His fouling himself was specific to his oldness, but not to his evil. His shit stank, but it stank human, not evil. In the way time and age broke him down, it broke down his vicious godliness, his distinct monstrousness. He lived in abject fear of both of us, Petyr and me. He lived with the pain of his slipping life and approaching confusion. He was afraid and sore enough of life that it was all the more reason not to kill him. I’d hit him sometimes, though. I couldn’t stop myself. I hit him to test the situation, to see if whoever watched us in secret sent in the troops to stop me. His blood stank too, enervated and toxic. When I hit him, Petyr forgot himself for a moment and smiled. Go on, I said to Petyr, nodding at the old man, take a shot. Petyr did, in his impotent fashion. When the old man’s face burst with blood and his confused pitiful cry at the blows, Petyr shrank back, but not I think from having struck the ruler of the world. Rather I think from having allied himself with me; he hated me all the more then for having seduced him. As time passed Z became more rank to see and smell. I tried hard to believe it was the smell of his soul rising up through the body, but his fragility denied this pretense. I didn’t understand how history would bear this evidence of humanity, or how anyone could ever believe in redemption again, since the protest of history had so long been that all men were redeemable. This was a man who could not be redeemed. In my memory of what had been, I was now more him than he was. So here were two men, incontrovertibly human in their foulness, who in all their humanity could not be redeemed. History, clutching to redemption, might insist we were monsters, but the god has human shit in his shorts when the doctor comes to change him. The doctor says nothing, however, of Z’s swollen face, where I hit him. He says nothing of the blood. This is how I’ve come to realize Z is mine to do with as I choose. The followers cannot bring themselves to kill their god, they’ll let his own god do it for them.

F
OR MONTHS, REVENGE COMMENSURATE
and fitting eluded me. I lay thwarted in the dark. Then last night it came to me, on my bed. I woke to it with clarity; for a moment I couldn’t believe it. I mustered my strength to raise myself and get to the desk. It took thirty seconds to do it; I didn’t precede it with an act of pleasure. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of pleasure even if his eighty-year-old body was capable of knowing it. I’d never given him the pleasure of her before, after all, other than his witness from the corner of our room on Dog Storm Street. Because I’m the god’s god, no act of pleasure is necessary: I can touch the egg of her without a penis or its pollen. I can touch the egg of her with my pen, with a sentence: Life is committed at the core of her, I write, nine months short of creation.

W
HEN THEY COME THE
next day for the work, I inform them I intend to deliver it personally. The guards make a token display of disbelief, claiming such a thing’s impossible, though my door’s been unlocked eight months now. Then I have nothing to give you today, I answer. There’s a conference and one of the guards leaves to discuss the matter with an unknown authority; he returns after several moments. He explains I’ll be escorted under guard to Z’s room.