Tours of the Black Clock (33 page)

Before I get a chance to turn on the light, I know there’s someone else in the room. Who is it? I say in the dark. I turn on the light and there are three of them, hunkered down in the corner. They don’t have to say anything, I know they’re Jews who broke out of the camp where the escape was yesterday. A boy and girl in their late teens who might be either siblings or lovers; there’s an older man with them, about my age, perhaps a little younger though he looks older. We’ll only stay tonight, the boy finally says, without explanation because he knows I don’t need one. His mind’s racing, trying to think what he’ll do if I say no or try and turn them in; he knows they’ve put me in a bind, that I could get myself shot for keeping them. He knows that while he’s much younger than I, he’s nowhere as big, if it should come to that. I look at them and then over at Z on the bed; they look at the bed too. We all watch Z on the bed for a minute before I say, All right. I get this crazy idea in my head for a moment about the third, older man: I had a friend once, I say, who went to Paris. But the older man isn’t Carl. That night I smuggle in some food for them. You’ve very brave and kind to do this, the girl tells me. Please don’t say that, I ask her. After we eat, the girl goes over to Z and lifts him and begins to help him eat. I can’t stand to see it. Please, I say, don’t do that, don’t help him like that. But he’s an old man, the girl says. He’s a piece of shit, I tell her. All of them now look at me in silent, hurt shock. Reproachfully, the girl continues to feed Z in defiance. No one speaks anymore of my kindness or courage, and in the pit of early morning, before dawn, the three are gone.

T
HE GERMAN WHO RUNS
the kitchen is constantly harassing us about the room and our work. Once, in the dead of winter, before a table of soldiers, he fires me and orders the old man and me to vacate the premises by nightfall. When night comes around, however, as I’m sitting there in the room trying to figure out what we’re going to do next, there’s a knock on the door and it’s the German; he seems very strange. He says that he’s changed his mind and we can stay if we want; the next day I’m back to the dishes. By the end of winter, I’m trying to figure out how to get the two of us out of Europe altogether. The captain of a steamer docked in Marseilles happens to come through one day and discreetly I take him aside and ask if we can ship out with him the next time he leaves. We haven’t any money to speak of, I tell him, but perhaps we can work off the fare. He laughs in my face. But the next day he comes back to the restaurant; he seems to have returned for no reason other than to speak with me, though while he’s at it he orders lunch. His demeanor has changed completely since the day before, though this isn’t to say he’s friendly; he says he’s got a pal sailing for Mexico out of Wyndeaux, a small seaport on the western coast of France. I can leave that way if I choose, the captain says, but I have to take the old man with me. That’s what he says. “You have to take the old man with you.” Then he gives me two train tickets. I’m so surprised that all I can tell him, straight out, is that I’m not so sure we can get as far as Wyndeaux, the old man and I. Complications with the authorities, I blurt. The captain says, Oh I don’t think you’ll have any problem. He wipes his mouth with his napkin, and gets up and leaves, half his lunch still on the plate.

T
HE TRIP TO WYNDEAUX
takes two nights, and except for the fact I must constantly care for the old man, it remains uneventful. No one on the way asks about identification or papers. We arrive at the Wyndeaux train station the morning of the next day. Wyndeaux is a medieval city as blue as the one we left sinking in the Italian lagoon. In a beach cafe that glows like a lantern, I hunt up the captain who’s going to sail us to Mexico. He’s no more moved by our arrival than the German in Nice was by our departure, but he already understands the situation and has arranged things. We sail in forty-eight hours; until then, we’re on our own. But we have no place to stay, I tell him; that’s your problem, he answers. So we wander around the village streets half the day until I see the captain coming up the road toward us, to tell us we can stay with him. As with everyone else, there’s no accounting for whatever’s changed his mind. The morning we’re to disembark, the old man and I are sitting on the docks waiting to board the ship when we’re accosted by some soldiers who ask us what we’re doing and who we are and whether we have papers. They start interrogating the captain, who makes it clear he’d be just as happy to leave us right there on the docks. This goes on a few minutes until a German officer of some rank shows up; as with the lieutenant on the train from Milan to Nice, he interjects himself. What’s this all about, he demands of his soldiers. These old men don’t have any papers, one of the soldiers exclaims, pointing to us. They don’t have any papers! the ranking officer cries in mock alarm. But this can’t be, he says, why, I’m certain Germany cannot survive such a thing. He’s ridiculing the soldiers, who are baffled and flustered; he’s hardly given me a glance. Let’s say we not worry so much about old men without papers, the officer says. Let’s say we find more significant ways to serve Germany and the Leader. The soldiers look at me and at each other, and salute the officer and leave. Only when they’ve walked away does the officer peer over his shoulder in my direction, and then at the ship’s captain. The captain furiously gestures at us to get on his boat. We sail before the sun has crossed our heads.

W
E LIVE IN THE
cargo hold of the ship the entire voyage. It seems like a much longer voyage than the one that brought me over thirty years ago. It seems as though the sea’s become much wider or the world more distant from itself, or perhaps it’s that home, or anything resembling home, must, in my return to it, seem more unapproachable. Maybe it’s just from living down in the cargo hold where there’s no night or day. At first I’m afraid Z’s not going to survive the voyage, but the cargo hold is quite warm, one of the boat’s engines is just behind the next wall, and the food is better than the bread and coffee we’ve been living on in Nice for eight months. The old man doesn’t get seasick either; he lives below the watermark of nausea. His own watermark, I mean. He’s still among the living, or some kind of living anyway, the April night the captain calls me up on deck to point out, across the Caribbean before us, the harsh shores of the Yucatan.

W
E GET ASHORE AND
there are more German soldiers waiting for us. No officer of rank needs to interfere, the soldiers just wave the old man and me on by. For a few days we live in a small abandoned hut on the northern outskirts of the port. A dirt road runs from the port up our hill and right past the hut. At night the old man crosses the road and sits on the edge of the cliffs watching and listening to his war taking place before him, up and down the coast of the Quintana Roo. In his face the sea flashes the green of coral and the red of bombs, and his eyes are still filled with the mad swirl of ancient birds in the hallways of the lagoon’s sinking city. I’m not sure what to do next except try to get further into the Yucatan to Progreso, a large seaport that’s divided between German and Mayan control. Each day a black cab drives up the road past us, the same guy at the wheel; sometimes he looks my way and waves. After a week I go down to the port to beg some food and see if I can find the black cab. I manage to talk the driver into taking the old man and me up the coast. I don’t really trust him. I’ve seen him around the base transporting German officers and sailors here and there, and I don’t understand why he would do this for me. I’ve made it clear I can’t afford to pay him. But I’m thinking perhaps he’s a spy for the guerrillas; he isn’t Mexican but he isn’t German either, Brazilian perhaps, latin but fairer than the Indians of the area. In other words, a German’s idea of an acceptable latin. I sit in the front of the car, Z in the back. We drive slowly up the winding coast. I don’t know where we’re going and the driver doesn’t either though he seems perfectly willing to take us there. I watch the Caribbean through the splattered insects on the windshield and after a while I fall asleep as the twilight rushes in from the western hills. When I wake, the driver’s just sitting there in the same place, with his eyes open and a line of blood written across his throat as black as the cab itself; he doesn’t look so fair now. The car’s parked off the road among a circle of trees, and standing around are a lot of people with guns who definitely don’t look like Germans.

T
HE GUERRILLAS LIVE IN
an old Indian ruin that lies hidden in a mahogany forest at the tip of the peninsula. The old man and I stay through the early weeks of summer, which is when it rains in the Yucatan. The ruins are carved out of gray limestone and not much is left except the walls. The guerrillas sleep in hammocks strung high above the ground, under the hot rain of the skies above them; parapets have been constructed nearby. The woman in command, around twenty-eight years old, was born in the city of Merida and trained in America; she’s hard and determined, and her name is Lucia. The guerrillas from the first regard me with extreme suspicion. They don’t understand what two old men were doing in the company of a driver who was known to work for the Germans, in a car that was heading up the coast. There’s continual discussion, even a month after we’ve been here, of whether I’m a German spy using a senile old man as a cover, and what should be done with me. I have no explanation other than that we’re Austrian refugees who escaped through Italy and France; it only sounds more preposterous to them. My American English is all the more unsettling. When I tell them I want to get to America they only shrug, But you’re already in America.

The guerrillas are traveling to Progreso too, where they’ll blow up the railroad that links the seaport to German Merida. We travel at night, negotiating the underground pools and long mean swatches of jagged coral on my crippled feet, crossing the dark smoking henequen fields that have been strafed by German Stukas overhead. The ruins and abandoned Spanish plantations of the countryside are the bastions of the Mayan Resistance. Lucia says, The Americans bring in their own troops sometimes but the truth is they don’t understand the territory much better than the Germans. Better, she says, that they airdrop the supplies and guns, or ship them across the gulf, and let us do the fighting. Let the Yanquis worry about defending Des Moines. I think she’s trying to make an impression on me, so that if I am a German spy I’ll understand that no matter how many Germans there are, or how big the guns and planes, or how many miles of the peninsula the Germans believe they control, there will always be the Mayans who know the Yucatan better and will engage the Germans until the last one’s sealed up in a Viennese wall or has returned to Berlin to get drunk in his favorite beer garden. Sometimes I want to tell Lucia that my mother was an Indian; but there aren’t many Austrian refugees with American Indian mothers, and I don’t want to get caught in even the most harmless lie. During our time with the guerrillas, the old man and I live through two battles and several skirmishes. Z sits in a gully watching me load weapons for the purpose of shooting his army. Often I’m shaken awake in the night and must arouse the old man so we can pull out because a German patrol is close by. It’s the guerrilla strategy to retreat whenever possible, never to be drawn into a battle for which the guerrillas themselves didn’t plan and prepare. We wind our way though the forests across the limestone flats, always to another crumbling palace where we meet up with other rebels. Few of them ever speak to me, though they’re always kind to the old man, feeding him soup and finding him the softest and most secure hammock. They blame me for having brought him into the situation, and of course they don’t understand when I almost beat him to death one night in a small devastated village half a day south of the railway that runs to the sea.

I
T’S THE SIGHT OF
the little girl that does it. We come into the village late at night, past midnight; a mile outside, the rebels know something’s wrong. There’s an odor in the air and a low din, which turns out to be the flies. The flies are everywhere in the village; the bodies of the villagers are black with them. Even for the guerrillas who’ve seen such atrocities, it’s shocking; but for me it’s more, the manifested vision of everything I’ve known but never had to see. The guerrillas stealthily sweep the village to make sure Germans aren’t waiting. Lucia must decide whether to burn the village and the bodies or take the time to bury them. She opts to bury them. She sends a two-man scouting party on to the next village to see if there’s a priest. It’s as the men are digging that I come across the dead little girl. I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t want to tell what they’ve done to her. I … it’s enough to explain that someone has pinned to her a note, which says, as far as my own German can translate, “Another virgin for the Leader.” The girl, she must be all of eight. She’s small enough that it’s not so difficult imagining Courtney that age, if she’d lived a little longer to become that age. I turn my back on the girl. I can’t even bring myself to remove the note, to pick her up and carry her in my arms to the graves. I turn my back on her and go out beyond the houses of the village to where I’ve left the old man lying in a clearing. Another virgin for the Leader, is all I keep saying to myself; I guess I’m still saying it when I find him lying there in the clearing. Silently, without a word, I just begin to beat him. I beat him and he’s staring up at me with his eyes popping out, and the guerrillas come along and pull me off him when I’m within an inch of his life. They pull me off and it’s clear that, in their own rage over the village, I’ve become to them the German who murders old people and children. You vicious bastard, Lucia says to me, while the others hold me back and someone tends to the old man. Another of the guerrillas, a short stocky Mayan who’s second in command and hasn’t spoken a word of English the entire time I’ve been around, speaks it quite well now. He says now, This man’s like the rest of them. They stare at me; if they’ve ever considered shooting me, it’s never seemed a more reasonable solution than at this moment. The old man lies at my feet bleeding from his nose and ears. For a moment I’m about to tell them. I’m about to tell them who he is, whether they’ll believe it or not, and I don’t suppose they would, but I’m about to tell them because I’ve been waiting to tell someone. And then I know I won’t tell them. I won’t because I believe it’s better they villainize me, a big violent man my whole life, than an old weak sick man. Because there’s always the one awful chance that they will believe me, that they’d look into his face and eyes and see that it’s true, at which point the pure righteous wrath of their fight would have to accommodate the humanity of his evil. They’re fighting for an age in which the heart and consciousness have not been stripped of the reference points that have become denied to time and space: they’ve stared into the bloody rorschach of the Twentieth Century and seen the budding of a flower. You can’t do that to them, I say to myself. If you do one good thing in your life, I say to myself, let it be this, that you leave them their faith, that in your monstrous form you reaffirm their vision of what’s monstrous, and what’s therefore to be defeated; and that in his weak helpless form you reaffirm their vision of what’s weak and helpless, and therefore to be defended. With one shudder from my torso up, I retrieve what havoc I need to shake the guerrillas free of me, and hope that in the process I provoke them to shoot me. They almost do. But Lucia barks a command within an inch of my own life, and instead throws me a shovel. With the others I return to the village to dig. I remove the note from the little girl’s body before anyone can see it, and bury her myself.