Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  “Where are we?” he wants to know.

  “Linz,” I say. Actually this is the first moment I understand he’s an American.

  “Linz?” he repeats, baffled. He peers around at the Spanish girls and the Austrian woman and then back at me. “Isn’t this train going to Italy?”

  “Vienna.”

  “Vienna!” Something about him sags. He turns to the Austrian woman and speaks to her in German; she confirms the bad news. He slumps into his seat, disgusted but, more than that, shaken. He planned to go to Italy where the winter would be milder; there’s a wire with some money waiting for him. In the meantime he’s spent his last money on the wrong train. But it’s more than that, I just don’t see it yet. I haven’t gotten to the point yet where I see from the window of my train, or any window, the time to come. I don’t see the Jews on their hands and knees cleaning the cracks of the Kärntnerstrasse with toothbrushes while Austrian society ladies kick them with pointed yellow shoes and spit on the finished spots. Actually, not only do I not see this before it happens, I don’t see it so well as it happens. Like a lot of people I guess. But Carl, crumpled into his seat at this moment on the train, sees it already. His mistake already seems so vast that he must ask himself whether he’s really done it on purpose.

  “Supposed to be a nice place, Vienna,” I shrug.

  We don’t arrive until nearly dusk, a five hour trip prolonged to ten by winter. For only thirty or forty minutes a silver and red sun reveals itself to our backs, and the snow of the steppes glitters in the Balkan twilight that first nibbles, then swallows whole our train and the entrails of track it leaves behind us. The sky smells of ash and animals, it swims behind itself like a black lake behind the gray ice that freezes over it. The Spanish girls stand in the aisle of the train leaning out the windows; the Austrian woman doesn’t so much as quiver in her place. Rumbling into the Westbahnhof we pass the city in a fog, a thousand balconies clutching at their windows like old severed hands. Mongolian domes swoop nightward. Gypsy flutes blow from the watery halls of the Wien-Fluss and as the train curses to a halt we’re overcome by the hordes who’ve been waiting for us, Asian beggars and Aryan elite, Greek tailors and Milanese bankers and mountain nomads, a jangle of life like I’ve never seen. In no time I’ve lost sight of Carl and the Spanish girls; at some point on the platform of the station I look back to see only the Austrian woman in the door of our car, picking her way among the rabble. Outside the station I catch a trolley to the outskirts of the Inner City where I’m left in the vicious shadows of the Rathaus, reading Kronehelm’s address by the light of the sparks from the trolley’s departure.

  49

  ALL NIGHT I WANDER the Ring of the Inner City looking for the address Kronehelm’s given me. The streets are hard with ice and in the waning hours as it begins to snow the squares scurry with people in red capes. The Ring’s circular passages fill with the orange lights of taxis and the yellow windows of carriages that gasp along at the clip of the horses pulling them. A caravan passes me through the archways of the Hofburg and the passengers gaze at the way I affront the grandeur of their obelisks. Two in the morning I’m shuddering beneath a footbridge. The naked vines of dead autumn ivy snap at my eyes. By three I’ve found an open door on the east side of St. Stephen’s; at the core of the cathedral sleeps an encampment of bums and cripples and vagabonds. We all stumble out at dawn. When I see Vienna in the cold sun, the buildings white and chiseled, I understand how the city laughs in its rituals of humiliation and how this lot of riffraff accepts their state of prostration with gratitude. They’d prefer to bleed into their own seats or piss into their own mouths before wringing so much as a drop on the snowy gown of bridal Vienna. The gutters of the Danube run silverpure while the beggars eat their own scum.

  I wind up on the river’s edge of the Ringstrasse. In the east, at the very stitching of history where Europe is sutured to Asia, the ferris wheel of the Praterstern spins empty in the wind. The rattle of its cages is brittle beneath the bellow of Hungary. My destination turns out to be a small sidestreet off the main boulevard below the canal, a block away from the Ring. In the window of Kronehelm’s address sits a guy probably not much older than I at a desk, I can see him writing in a ledger as I cross the street. His face is a bloodless pallor; he looks up from his ledger and, when he sees me, waves. Nothing in his face changes, he waves at me like I’ve been walking up this street to this building every morning for years. I’ve never seen him in my life but he waves, he’s waiting for me, just sitting there at this ledger patiently filling it in until I show up. There’s no doubt in his mind who I am. When I get to the door he’s come downstairs to open it. He doesn’t smile and his handshake is perfunctory. Herr Jainlight, he calls me; his name is Petyr. He introduces himself as my translator, though he looks to me more like an accountant. We go upstairs to an apartment that might as well have been flown in from Gramercy Park, where the curtains have all been drawn except for the window where Petyr’s been watching for me.

  Petyr and I don’t have much to say. I’m cold through and through, disgusted with everything. I want to eat and sleep, or maybe sleep and eat, and only after I’ve folded myself into a hot bath half my size. The morning’s passed before I’m finally warm, and when I sleep I dream that I’m cold, I dream that I’m walking in Vienna’s circles. When I wake I have the sense it’s night, though with the curtains drawn in my room there’s no way to be sure. But a light is on by my bed, and I’ve turned over and over about eight times before I notice Petyr’s sitting there looking at me, from the chair in the room’s corner. He has his hands folded in his lap and it looks utterly unnatural. In the same way he sat in his window waiting seven weeks for me to show up, he now sits waiting for me to wake up. “It’s an honor to be your translator,” he finally says when he’s sure I’m conscious enough to understand him. His English is good.

  I sit up in the bed and make some polite retort about the honor of being translated, and wonder what in the world I’m talking about. Petyr just nods, his pale face never cracks for a moment, and then he taps something on the desk; squinting into the dark I do believe I see a typewriter. I do believe I see a stack of paper, and several black pens lined up like muskets for the cavalry. “Everything’s ready for you,” he says. That’s swell, I tell him, and lie back down to go to sleep: We’ll get to it in no time. April, say. I doze off for a bit, maybe twenty minutes or so, and when I wake again he hasn’t moved, he’s still sitting there. “Yes,” he says, “it’s all ready for you,” in a voice no louder than the snow on the roof, and only when I don’t jump up and run across the room and start typing does he finally add, “But I suppose you’d like some time to rest from your travels.” Now I have to sit up and take a good long look at this character. Finally I just cancel the light by the bed and leave him there in the dark. I never hear him move, so it’s a relief to find him gone in the morning.

  50

  IT MUST BE THAT Petyr looks like an accountant only because he is one. Not only does he translate what I write but handles the business end of it as well. Over the next week, watching him at his desk by the window, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s diddling Amanda or decimals; his face never changes. I can’t imagine what my writing must read like as interpreted by this manager of numbers, though it’s possible he’s perfect for the job, leaving the passion to me and claiming only precision for himself. What a team, Petyr and Amanda and Molly and I.

  Kronehelm wired a week ago to say he’ll be here in four or five days. There’s a fairly unveiled hint that I’m expected to make up for lost time. The clients in Vienna and Munich and Berlin wait with great anticipation for my new adventures. In the first week I find it impossible to get much done, though thinking about the Spanish girls on the train from Paris opens up a couple of inspiring possibilities. Petyr’s disappointed though. The clients don’t want Spanish girls from Paris, he reminds me, they want Americana—gangsters and Indians. He tells me Client X has a particular penchant for Az
tec mysticism, so I cook up some stories involving conquistadors. Client X isn’t to be underestimated, a very big shot in the German government. Neither Petyr nor Kronehelm says much about him but it doesn’t take long to figure out they’re scared to death. One afternoon I overhear Kronehelm make some reference to “the little cripple,” and there’s a moment of silence that’s palpable even in the next room; both he and Petyr hold their breaths as they ponder the recklessness of the remark and wait for the consequences of its indiscretion, as though any second German police are going to come through the windows.

  This goes on a month or two. In a quarter of this time I reach a breaking point. I can’t stand to stay in the flat and I can’t bear the idea of facing either Vienna or its winter again. I’m fucking cooked, that’s all, stuck here stewing in my juices. Petyr’s such an unsettling little worm that the day Kronehelm arrives I’m almost happy to see him slither in with his trunks and crates and immediately pull the curtains even tighter so not the thinnest slice of dank gray European light can come through. Kronehelm throws his arms around me and begins to cry with joy; I guess he figured I’d never actually show up. After a few more days I know something’s got to give, what with three freaks waddling from one dark room to the next publishing obscene books for the private collections of deformed midgets in Berlin five hundred kilometers away. You just know that kind of enterprise is going to have one or two pressure points somewhere. When I’ve been in Vienna eight weeks, spring begins to slip into the city like a refugee, and I, also like a refugee, am looking to slip away.

  51

  MARCH 1937. THE SNOW melts and the ice breaks in the gutters, and people hustle up and down the Kärntnerstrasse from one coffeehouse to the next, painters set up their easels around St. Stephen’s with little fires to keep the colors from hardening in the chill. Every once in a while a palette gets too close to a flame and you can hear little pops of ignition and hue all over the square. There’s the smell of sugar, cologne, cabbage. The Hofburg rises at the middle of the Ringstrasse like a mountain range that’s ripped itself loose from the ocean bottom and floated to the surface; through the streets wild dogs run in herds. Political bombings set off peals of giddiness among the cafe crowd. Phony military guys in high black boots and brown uniforms march back and forth between the fountains.

  I try to write in the mornings before Kronehelm wakes. Petyr seems never to sleep at all and almost any time I look up, he’s sitting on the other side of the room watching me. Both of them literally sit and wait for me to deliver another chapter. I can’t take much more of it, I keep telling myself they need me more than I need them. Petyr translates faster than I can write and Kronehelm’s off to Deutschland with it and back before I’ve figured out another escapade. Lately there’s been someone coming by the flat to pick up the material; he wears a long gray coat and his face is pasty-white like Petyr’s and scarred by acne. He’s surly and officious and thinks he’s quite an important fellow running back and forth as errand boy for this Client X. Kronehelm always collapses at the man’s feet and grovels an hour or two. The emissary’s a little surprised to meet me and I don’t blame him, I don’t much look like the dashing figure who tweaks the libidos of the high and mighty in the Chancellery. Between us Kronehelm, Petyr and I have maybe enough worldly experience to fill the closing hours of a slow night in Salzburg. We must look like frauds which, of course, we are. Anyway the flunky in the gray coat takes the new stuff and, as he’s leaving, gives the German salute, which both Kronehelm and Petyr return with shitlicking haste. I just look at the three of them standing there with their arms in the air and I start to laugh and can’t stop. I can’t help it. I laugh like the night I set my father’s house on fire, it’s that funny. The errand boy gets so mad his head looks like a tomato that’s going to pop, and I think Kronehelm’s going to start sobbing in terror any second. “Say, I didn’t mean anything,” I try to assure them, “sure, you go right ahead if you like. Look here,” and I start at it, walking around the room shooting my arm out here and there, then collapsing on the furniture laughing, then jumping back up and saluting some more. I throw the windows open and salute the whole fucking city. It’s the only good afternoon I’ve had since I got here.

  When I leave a few minutes later, Kronehelm’s in quite a state. Petyr’s running back and forth with hot tea or something, any moment he’s going to start measuring Kronehelm’s pulse and peering under his eyelids. I’m in too upbeat a mood to let this nonsense undo it, and I just walk out the door leaving the two of them in each other’s care. It’s a fine afternoon and I decide to take a walk over to the Volksgarten and then cut up through the palace over to the Karlsplatz, see who’s being burned in effigy this afternoon or beaten to a mush before the general bloodlust of the Fräuleins in the coffeehouses. Sure enough it turns out the episode with the errand boy from Berlin is only an omen of better luck to come, because I’m walking along the outer wall of the Hofburg when I hear someone shouting from across the street. Galoot! he’s calling, and I look over and there in the doorway of the Cafe Central is Carl. I haven’t seen him since the night I arrived in Vienna. There he is now waving at me and then I hear a pounding on the window of the cafe and look over, and there are two of the Spanish girls waving as well. I cross the street and Carl and I shake hands, we go into the Central and the Spanish girls jump up and embrace me. Actually I don’t remember us ever being that friendly but it turns out they have grateful recollections of huddling against me in the cold of that train. I’m almost speechless with happiness to see the lot of them, to know someone in this city besides the two loonies I’ve been living with. I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting beneath the arched ceiling of the Central with Carl and the Spanish girls and the rest of the clientele, revolutionaries and journalists and Italian tourists, and waiters running up and down the wide marble stairs in their white jackets.

  Carl, it turns out, is still not happy about being in Vienna, but I gather that at least one of the girls has taken him under her wing in more ways than one, and so it isn’t the worst situation he’s ever been in. He’s still trying to get his money from American Express so that he can get to Italy. The two of us sit at the table opening all the sugar cubes while the waiter ignores us. With his command of foreign languages Carl negotiates the conversations. Without going into a long story I explain to the three of them my own insane arrangement with Kronehelm and Petyr. “For God’s sake, come live with us,” Carl says, just like that, and then he turns to the girls and lays it out for them in Spanish and German, and they agree that living with them is the sensible solution. I don’t even want to ask if they really have the room for me because I don’t care; I don’t want to know what their place is like or whatever reasons there might be I shouldn’t go. The only question in my mind is how I’m going to break the news to Kronehelm without him putting a gun in his mouth and painting the walls of his flat with the slush of his brains.

  I decide I need to spell it out for him this very night. Carl and the girls come with me and wait out in the street while I go upstairs and wake up Kronehelm, who’s retired early. “Say, mein Herr,” I start talking as soon as I see his eyes flicker, “I’ve reached a business decision here, I’m leaving,” and he’s still rubbing his face getting himself oriented, looking at me, saying to himself, What’s happening? “I’m taking a powder residencewise, I think it’s best,” and now he’s shaking his head as though to clear it out, “but I’ll be in touch with you very soon because we’re still partners, partner,” and now he’s finally starting to get it, “I just don’t think this is a good idea my being here, it, uh, well it ebbs the creative flow you know, it uh, well, let’s just say,” and he’s shaking his head but I bull my way through, “let’s just say that if I stayed here another night, another minute, I’d probably, you know, kill you. Probably. Because you drive me fucking crazy. But the business, that’s still on, I mean I’ve got the goods and you’ve got the market, so let’s not worry about it, I’ll probably write ev
en bigger and better, look at it that way,” and now, as I feared, he’s starting to clutch at my clothes. No no no no, he’s starting, first quite low and calm really, just No no no no, and then when I take his hands and try to pry them finger by finger from my coat he just starts screaming. He’s raving about Client X this and Client X that, and I realize that given the little party we had with the German flunky this afternoon and all that saluting we did together, this is probably not timed absolutely the best it could be, but there’s no going back now, if I stay Kronehelm and Petyr will be up all night plotting strategy how to keep me. They’ll bind me to the damn typewriter, glue my fingers to the keys. So I’m going now. Client X, Client X, Kronehelm keeps choking; he’s holding my ankles and letting me drag him across the floor as I walk to the door. It’s appalling. Then he’s slipped out of his bathrobe and I’m dragging him across the floor naked. This old man with half-finished flesh like the tissue of a fetus, sliding across the floor on my ankles. Petyr stands in one of the doorways staring at us. Finally I just kick him loose; he shudders there at my feet and, as though to mercykill something that’s just been delivered up between birth and stillbirth, I raise my foot over his head and am ready to bring it down. And Petyr, without a sound, screams. He screams without a sound, his whole body’s racked with it, though nothing comes out. The white of his pallor has turned blue. I bring the foot down but not on Kronehelm and just lean into the doorway breathing hard; none of us moves until finally I say, “I’ll send word in a couple of days,” to Petyr, and then stumble out into my life.