Tours of the Black Clock (32 page)

I
’LL KILL HIM; I
mean to kill him; I’ve killed enough things to kill one more. The baby’s head fits right in the palm of my hand. Right in the palm. My fingers curl over his little skull. One small pop of his little skull, I’m black enough for that. It’s not such a difficult thing, given all the revenge that will come of it.

I
MEAN TO KILL
him; give me a moment. I promise, Megan. I promise, Courtney. Just a moment. The child, he really doesn’t look so much like her. Quite a bit like his father, quite a bit like me. Much easier to do it, then. I mean to.

I
MEAN TO: I’M
beyond the reach of mercy, assuming there was ever mercy in me. I can do it.

I
CAN: I’M SURE OF IT.

I
CANNOT.

I
DROP THE PEN.
My face falls to my empty hands. I’m weak; my heart gasps with light. Give me your kisses of fire. I’m miserable in my failures.

T
HREE DAYS LATER, GIORGIO
comes up through the floor of my room. I’m lying on my bed, my hands at my sides stale with my failure to avenge things irrefutably heinous. I lie on my bed considering all our fatherhoods. Giorgio calls me from across the room, his head poking up out of the ground. Listen my friend, he says, the regatta’s tomorrow. If you want to go, you must come with me now. I move myself with great effort to sit up, and place my feet heavily on the floor. There’s only one thing, I tell him. Of course, says Giorgio. Someone, I tell him, is coming with us.

G
IORGIO WAITS IN MY
room while I make my way down the hall. The guards are sleeping. One peers up at me half-consciously, grumbling. I’m going to see the old man, I tell him. Disgruntled, the guard says, All right. He’s talking in his sleep. Perhaps I’ll stay with him tonight, I tell him, or bring him back here. The guard nods and readjusts himself, and the other guard sleeping close by protests the volume of our discussion. I move down the hall and across the larger open hallway that divides my part of the city from the client’s. Some of the lanterns in the hollows of the walls are burned out. At his room I find him sitting in the dark in his same chair, neither asleep nor awake. When I speak to him he responds with an incoherent mumble; he holds the pages I’ve written for him in his arms, presses them to himself. He begins to talk with some excitement; he originally thought he’d name the child August, after his only childhood friend. But recently he’s begun to lean toward Petyr. I lift him by his arms; he’s confused, but then everything confuses him. This isn’t going to work, I’m thinking, they’re watching me. But I bring him with me out into the hallway and we slowly head back to my room, the white pages curled in his fists.

O
NE BY ONE I
blow out the lanterns that still burn, casting his hallway into pitch black. The blue hall that divides his from mine is now the dark deep blue of night; when we reach its mouth there’s a sudden pandemonium of wings, the old feeble birds of the city panicked and thunderous. The old man’s eyes fly around maniacally at this. We get to my hallway, a dim gold from the last lanterns burning; I blow them out too. The guards stir and groan in disorientation, and then settle back to sleep. I push open the door of my room. Giorgio’s there waiting. For a moment I fear Giorgio will recognize him. He’ll recognize him and hate me, and they’ll all hate me, all the Giorgios and Brunos and Marias who treated me as though I belonged among them. They’ll hate me as they have a right to hate me: this is what I’m thinking there in the doorway of my room. What will the discovery of my deceit do to their village and life, I’m thinking, how will anything ever be the same for them again. In this moment, standing in the doorway of my room, I believe I’ve made a terrible mistake, I believe that once again I’ve corrupted something, when I should simply have said to Giorgio’s offer of escape, Leave me. But Giorgio looks at Z and sees only what in fact Z is, only an old man; and the fisherman helps me set him on the bed where he can rest. Giorgio has brought a brown cloak for me but we wrap it around Z. He’s very old, Giorgio says, it could be a difficult trip for him. But I understand, he adds, that you cannot possibly leave him. We’ll do our best. I nod humbly. We’ll get you another cloak out on the boat, Giorgio says. After the old man has rested a few minutes Giorgio says, with great apology in his voice, It’s important we leave right now. I nod again, silently and we lift the old man up, and Giorgio lowers himself into the tunnel. The old man goes next, and then I follow.

T.O.T.B.C.—15

B
Y NOW THEY KNOW
we’ve gone. By this morning, when they came to my room and then his, they knew we’d disappeared. Perhaps they’ve scoured the city for us, perhaps they’ve searched the room to find the tunnel. At any rate we’ve left the city, on the afternoon the fishermen’s regatta takes place. With the spray of the lagoon now in my face, I gaze around from my place in the boat, and there are around me several boats, and then I see tens of them, and then hundreds. The city with the blue roof floats in the lagoon behind us. The Adriatic glistens to the east of us. Overhead swirl the German helicopters, I keep glancing up at them. Don’t look at them, Giorgio calls to me through his fixed smile from the other end of the boat. Any moment he’s going to understand about the old man. Sooner or later the word will be out, a manhunt will be underway, underway at this very moment by the helicopters above us. The fishermen were right. There are too many boats for the Germans; the lagoon’s filled with them. I’m overwhelmed by the sight of them. I hunch down in the boat, and at my feet, lying in the boat’s bottom, wrapped in the brown cloak, Z shivers from the cold of the sea, befuddled by the very blueness of a sky that’s bluer than any blue ceiling. I look up from the old man to Giorgio, who smiles. I look around at all the other Giorgios sailing on all sides of me. The boats dazzle the lagoon with colored flags that fly from their masts; the white of the swept water erupts in the air. I can’t bring myself to look back at the blue city again, I expect it to have sunk altogether now that we’ve gone, that if I look back once more there’ll be only a huge silver bubble rising from beneath the sea. I’m a little queasy from the boat and the panic. The end of the regatta and the Italian mainland are in sight. On the mainland they’ll certainly capture us; I’m thinking how I’ve used all the Giorgios and Brunos to smuggle out of exile the most evil man in the world. With the mainland just moments away, and with the sight of German soldiers lining the shore, Giorgio now says to me, When we reach the shore we won’t have time to say goodbye. So goodbye now. Goodbye, I say to him. I look around at the fishermen on the other boats, and the colors of the regatta flags; they’re all looking back at me, even fishermen I’ve never seen, fishermen who seem to have come out of nowhere, out of unseen islands. They’re all smiling goodbye.

Z
AND I ARE
not arrested at the mainland. I pull the old man up from the boat’s bottom and we climb out, trying to lose ourselves among the hundreds of Italians milling around under the eyes of the Germans on the ridge of the banks. The old man and I are wearing brown cloaks and hoods like two monks, one small and shriveled and the other oversized and lame; we’re surrounded by fishermen, the same ones who smiled at me from their boats, who now take no notice of us at all. Everyone begins to head into the town on the mainland. Z and I travel with them, soldiers watch us as we pass. At the mainland station I pull from my cloak a wad of the Eurodeutsch currency Giorgio’s put there for us; it takes most of it to buy two tickets for the train. The station’s swarming with German soldiers. The whole thing seems ridiculous, it’s obvious we’ll be arrested any moment. We climb onto the train heading for Milan and, beyond Milan, the territories that were formerly France. The train’s packed. Someone gives up a seat for the old man; I set him there with his train ticket sticking out of his coat pocket underneath the cloak. In his hands he still holds pathetically the last pages I wrote before leaving the sinking city, the ink on them having long since run in wet indecipherable streaks. I take my own place out in the car’s aisle. After thirty minutes there’s a shudder beneath our feet and the station, with its platforms full of German soldiers, begins to drift past us. In another thirty minutes the lagoon is far behind us. Halfway to Milan a conductor wanders up the car and punches our tickets without a second look or thought.

In Milan we don’t get off the train. I find a window seat for the old man. He’s dazed, stupid with silence; he stares straight ahead. From the window of the train I buy some bread and wine from one of the passing food vendors. After a little less than an hour we pull out again. At the border they’ll take us, I know that. I have my eye out at all times for the officials. No one carries passports anymore within Greater Germany but at the territories someone will no doubt want to see our identification. Occasionally one soldier or another comes through the car looking us over. Two hours outside Milan, the train’s full again, and the conductor and a train official and two guards come down the aisle. With them is also a German lieutenant; the passengers watch him with fear. Everything’s routine until our cabin, where the conductor asks Z for his identification. Z sits in stunned incomprehension. The lieutenant with the conductor and train official and two guards is considering me rather closely. The conductor and official begin to berate the old man; then the lieutenant says to me, Are you with this old man? There’s no reason for him to assume I am, since Z is sitting in the car and I’m standing in the aisle. No one has told him, as far as I know, that I’m with the old man. After a moment I say, Yes, I’m with the old man. The conductor and the official turn to me and ask me for my papers, and after another moment I tell them I don’t have my papers. He doesn’t have his either, I say, nodding at my client. The conductor and the official take great indignant satisfaction in this news and the guards seem about to arrest me, when the lieutenant raises his hand and says to me, Where did you get on this train? Thinking about it, I’m prepared to say Milan, but instead I decide to astonish him with the truth. He nods at this, looks at the old man, looks back at me. Then he signals the conductor, train official and guards to move on to the next cabin. Dumbfounded, they compose themselves and comply. The five of them pass by me; I’m a bit dumbfounded myself. I’m trying to study the face of the German lieutenant for an answer, but he never looks my way again.

I
N NICE, I USE
the rest of Giorgio’s money to get us a small room in the back of a kitchen run by Original Germans. The room’s on the upper floor; it’s bare and shabby but we have our own stairway leading down to an alley. In the mornings for breakfast there’s bread and coffee; I have to feed him. I constantly ask him if he needs to go to the toilet since I don’t want to change him or clean him. Sometimes we walk along a street that leads to the beach, where the cafes are filled with Original Germans attended to by New Germans who used to be French. The vineyards in the hills sixty kilometers from here were scorched years ago in order to build the camps, and the French say that there’s been this smell in the air ever since. One tastes it in the food and wine. I don’t know what we’re doing here except that I’m compelled by something, I guess I’ve been compelled since I stopped writing in the blue sinking city. We’ve been released, the two of us, by the birth: there’s nothing more for me to write, there’s nothing more for him to read. We’re left to flee what I wrote and he read. Quickly I’ve run out of money and have asked the German who runs the kitchen if I can work off the fare of our room. I’m sure in other circumstances, when rooms in Nice have been at a premium, he’d have thrown us out, but the fact is no one likes the way the wine tastes anymore, the taste of the camps, the taste of vineyards scorched twenty years ago. The German is a short man with curly gray hair and a bushy mustache. He figures he might as well get something out of the room, so he hires me but only on the condition the old man works too. The old man can’t go to the bathroom by himself, I tell the German, what do you expect him to do around here? He can wipe off tables, the German answers, it’s the easiest thing in the world, to run a wet rag over a table. He asks us if we’re original or new. I’m new, I tell him. He considers this and asks, The old man? He’s original? Yes, I almost answer, the original Original, but I remember this isn’t really so. Austrian, I tell the German. The German puts me to work washing dishes and Z stands in a soiled apron staring at tabletops with the brown water of a dirty rag running down his fingers. The German screams at him and the tourists eating their lunch laugh until the old man loses control of himself, which makes the German rail all the more. Fucking Austrian, he shouts. I take the old man upstairs and change him and lay him on the bed. You’re going to get us thrown out, I tell him. He clutches my arm from the side of his bed asking, And my son is well? He says it as though he means me.

We live in the room above the German kitchen through the following winter. The city doesn’t go untouched by war; there are American submarines off the coast, and sometimes everyone’s put on alert. The Germans, not so entirely in control of matters, have problems with looters, and there’s a mass escape from one of the camps north of here. A number of the prisoners are picked up outside of town. On my days off from washing dishes I take the old man with me down to the beach where he sits on a low wall that runs around the bay. The palms and the Mediterranean sky are gray with silt like an African crater. I walk along the water, every once in a while gazing over my shoulder to make sure the old man’s still there on the wall. This one particular time I see him stumbling across the rocks toward the water in his usual trance; I have to catch him so he doesn’t walk right into the ocean. “Come on,” I tell him, taking him by the arm and leading him back across the rocks. Who knows what it is he thinks he sees out there in the ocean? “Just sit here,” I say, putting him down on the wall again, “what did you think was out there, Russia? Do you think we’re in Berlin, with the crowds ecstatically crying your name? No one’s ecstatically crying your name anymore, so just sit down here.” He sits; his feet don’t even touch the ground. His eyes and nose run with the cold of the air. “Did you think,” I say to him, “you’d take a little swim perhaps? A little swim in the sea to make you young again? Did you think you could wash something off?” I stand there in front of him with my hands in my pockets while his face runs. German soldiers walk along the promenade of the city; no one pays any attention to us. “You can’t wash anything off, you old idiot,” I say to him, “there’s nothing you can wash off. You old shit. Do you think you’re deserving of kindness now, because you’re old and pitiful? You’re an old pitiful shit.” He doesn’t register anything I say. Sometimes he’s about to answer, but it’s hardly ever comprehensible, and I have no reason to suppose it has anything to do with what I say to him. “Did you rack your brains,” I ask him after a bit, “did you and the boys rack your brains at night there in the Chancellery, trying to figure out just how evil you could be? You must have racked your brains. You couldn’t have just been born with such abysmal visions, is that possible? Racked your brains and when you came up with something terrible, you must have all said, But no, that just isn’t quite terrible enough. Certainly we can think of something even more terrible than that. All the generals and bureaucrats and scientists racking their brains to think of things even evil incarnate would find freakish, even the Beast would cower before. Something with a modern touch.” I shake my head. “Well somewhere out there,” I say to him, nodding at the gray sea and the gray sky beyond it, “somewhere out there is a Twentieth Century that crushed you. Somewhere out there is a Twentieth Century that wouldn’t abide you. That reached out of the hole, the collapsed center of its clock, and struck at you and pulled you down. So humiliated you that you felt no choice but to leap into the hole and fall forever. Somewhere that didn’t care that it had devoured past and future, that didn’t believe time and history and destiny could hold goodness hostage. You and me, old buddy,” I say, “we’re going to find that place. The Twentieth Century that doesn’t exist, except in the sense that one needs to believe in it, as one once used to believe in God, that’s where we’re going. Pack your bag. We’re going there, old man. You piece of old shit. You slime, piece of excremental slime. Bloody fucking piss-blasted fart from the intestines of history, you—” I stop, sputtering, breathing heavily, and look at him. I lean over and spit right in his face. He doesn’t even blink. A big gob right in his eye; he doesn’t even meet my gaze. He doesn’t even feel my spit running down his cheek, it doesn’t matter, his whole face is wet with cold, the tears and snot of him. “Shit,” I can only say, and take his handkerchief from his pocket and wipe him. I lift him by the arm and we go back to our room; it takes us a long while to make our way up the street. In the dark of the room I carry him to his bed.