Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  52

  I MOVE INTO THE Spanish girls’ flat and stay awhile. In almost no time it takes on an utter familiarity—books and empty wine bottles in the corner and wooden chairs that are broken and old family photos on the wall, and pictures of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, revolutionary tracts under the table and antique clocks stuck at five minutes before two, a small fish tank beneath a window. The Spanish girls live the free life. A whole entourage of people constantly pass through, conversationalists and exlovers on leave from psychiatric wards, philosophers on the make and female Dutch photographers who shoot nude selfportraits, bartenders from Brussels and a plumber who brings a bottle of French champagne every time he fixes the hot water because he wants to make a celebration of it and listen to Bessie Smith records. They all jabber away at the same time and eat roast rabbit, doze off for an hour and wake up midsentence finishing the conversation they began before others coopted it, have violent quarrels and rearrange their lives before my eyes. They tend to have a lot of cockeyed ideas if you ask me. Absolutely everyone smokes and the ash of their cigarettes always grows to about three inches long before it falls to the floor at which point they grind it into the carpet. The world is their ashtray, and soon I notice that the city itself has begun to take on a dinge since I got here, until even the sky is the color of cold cinders.

  Most of them consider themselves Trotskyite bandits of a sort who get by through various means. Each day the three Spanish girls leave me careful instructions about cops, tax collectors and utility inspectors who come knocking at the door to inquire about forged papers, back taxes and the meters that have been jammed to keep the bills down. The flat is something of a way station for lots of shady characters, in whose ranks I suppose I must be included. The guy who was here before I arrived was a homosexual who placed an advertisement in a Viennese homosexual newspaper a couple of months ago. The advertisement has appeared since his departure and I now get many letters, wires, secret codes and even personal interviews on the other side of the door. Sultry male voices whisper Guten Tag or deliver rasping promises or sobbing accusations. Thierry? they call. Thierry no longer lives here, I answer. There’s silence and then they either disappear or make their pitch anyway. Bitte, bitte, they moan, and scratch at the door. In other words, these people are all slightly cracked. I’m regarded as a naif and puritan because I don’t fuck every casual acquaintance three seconds after they blow through the doorway. I suppose I might be less inhibited if the population of the place wasn’t on the scale of India. They know I’m a writer but not the exact nature of what I write; they’d probably be amused but who can be sure. As proletarian rebels go they’re a highly refined lot. They eat the best, drink the best, buy expensive objets d’art and wouldn’t be caught dead riding the streetcars. There’s nothing quite as screwy as a bunch of revolutionaries zipping around Vienna in taxis, unless of course it’s Kronehelm and Petyr goosestepping around the suite with dirty books in their arms.

  After a week I send a note to Petyr to meet me at the northeastern corner of the Karlsplatz at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. I have some new work to deliver: Don’t, I tell him, bring Kronehelm. On Friday afternoon Petyr brings Kronehelm. Kronehelm wears a huge coat that overwhelms him, a hat and dark glasses; in such a defined and dramatic costume his person looks less formed than ever. It’s also the first time I’ve seen him outside and I swear I can see the sun setting right through him. He’s whimpering before I’m even close. “Oh Banning, please,” he’s saying, and then gurgles a little unformed sob, “please.” Petyr glowers with hate, at me for abandoning his mentor, and at his mentor for caring. “Stop blubbering,” I snap, “if you don’t, I’ll leave at this moment and you’ll never, ever see me again.” Kronehelm holds his face in his hands, I push the work into Petyr’s arms. “We’re still in business,” I continue, though I can’t bring myself to be soothing about it, I’m so fed up with them. What else, after all, am I going to do? I’m stuck, I’m not going back to America, and nothing else here is going to pay off like this; lately it’s all I can do to write anything. “I’ll send word in a week when I have more,” I say, and turn on my heels and walk away quickly. I have this horror that any minute I’m going to feel an unformed man clutching at my ankles again, I’m going to drag him naked across the Karlsplatz. I keep walking and don’t look back until I’ve turned at least four corners. Then I double back to the Cafe Central where I sit until ten at night with pen and paper waiting for Amanda and Molly. They never show.

  53

  AMANDA AND MOLLY AND I become just friends. They stand me up routinely, they have dangerous adventures they never tell me about. Our relationship is strained, they’re no longer at my beck and call when I need them. I don’t laugh anymore with them, though Kronehelm hardly seems to notice. Client X’s satisfaction supersedes all other considerations. Living with the Spanish girls in their crazy flat with all the crazy people coming and going doesn’t help either; Amanda and Molly don’t care for their company. By now it’s the summer of 1937. The news from Spain casts a pall. I have some money saved from what I’ve written and sold to Kronehelm over the last six months, and decide to take a room of my own. When I ask Carl to go in on it with me he only seems vexed, he knows he has to leave soon; as a Jew, it doesn’t make sense for him to stay any longer. He keeps asking if he should leave and I keep lying, but I’m at the point I can’t lie any more. He’s managed to get some of the money from Italy, and when he’s ready to go, if he needs it, I’ll give him the rest. There’s a bombing every other day now somewhere in the city. People in the cafes wager as to the day and hour the current chancellor of the country goes the way of his predecessor, who had his head blown off in his office three summers ago by the blackboot boys. If that happens the Germans will come, which seems fine with the Viennese; they practically start fondling themselves at the thought of it. For me the bombing has ceased to be such a jolly business. Let’s say it’s a distraction. From a political standpoint I couldn’t care less; for all I care the Viennese can blow themselves off the planet. But it scares away the girls, you know, the ones who might replace Amanda and Molly. I look for a quiet place a quarter of an hour by trolley from the Inner City and find one on a street with a long name that translates roughly as “storm of dogs.” It’s a small single room with a toilet down the hall and a couple of large windows that open onto the street three floors below me. Here, alone and celibate on Dog Storm Street, I hear the girls knock on my door, sometimes they’re waiting for me when I come home. I don’t see them so well at first, but after a while they come closer. I know nothing of their backgrounds and don’t want to know. They are Lauren and Jeanine, Janet and Catherine and Leigh. They do whatever I want which is the way I like it—none of this willfulness I got from Amanda and Molly. A whole new crew, I break them in my way, right from the start, not repeating the mistakes of the past. Outside my windows are the vagabonds of Vienna. They’re not much interested in Lauren or Catherine, but since the first dawn I stumbled out of St. Stephen’s with them, they seem to be everywhere; one can escape the bombs but not the vagabonds. Vagabonds and beggars and cripples run, hobble, crawl and roll amok in Vienna. Every amputee, every blind tramp, every mutilated visage is a citizen of the world and they’ve all beaten a path to the city of the fucking good life; it’s a rich disgusting joke. You can’t miss a single spasm or tic in the glare of the bombs, you can find them basking and warming their deformities in the glow of Vienna’s toniest society spots. The whole damned city’s overrun with them, and the best any one of them can hope for is that the next person who kicks him wears a soft shoe. I look out my window and see them everywhere; they’re well mobilized, women in rags and waifs without eyes and men who have nothing to show for their lives but the puddle they’re sitting in, guys in boxes, the Ring littered from one end to the other with the wayward, the unsheltered, the stinking. They’ve mapped out the territory, they’ve cut off all means of retreat. They lie in wait to ambush me. I know I’d nev
er have the nerve to ask anyone for a schilling, such shamelessness demands more backbone than I’ve got; I’m sure I’d steal something before I begged someone for a break. Begging for a break is too profound a step toward one’s own humanity, I can’t walk that far. I recognize this and these people know I recognize it and now they’re after me. Now every time I leave my room, I must look both ways to make sure someone isn’t coming toward me on little wheels. I know one morning I’ll walk out into Dog Storm Street and there they’ll be, an army of human wrecks at my feet. There are only two things that will resolve this, of course. One is time. Live here long enough and one learns how to stop the bleeding. I’m happy to say the process is already beginning to work. I’m happy to say I’m becoming better and better at passing more and more vagabonds without feeling anything at all. Oh, sometimes in a weak moment I’ll muster up an expression of sympathy for a particularly hopeless excuse of a human being; but a good night with Catherine or Lauren will fortify the meanness in me, and if it doesn’t bring out a real strong throaty horselaugh, like I haven’t had in a while now, then it’s at least good for a chuckle or two. I can throw open the windows and give out a good chortle for the palsied little boy who’s sleeping in the garbage around the corner from the fruit stand. The other thing that resolves my contest with the cripples, as I walk along the Danube and the dreamlike quays of night and gangrene, is the realization that once, among these very vagabonds in this very city, roamed the most evil man in the world. Twenty-five years ago he wandered these streets with these vagabonds and beggars and cripples and fed on the slime of his own evil, sitting in the Karlsplatz drawing pathetic little pictures of the cathedral. And the world, feeding on the slime of its evil, knew a kindred spirit when it saw one; now he throws athletic galas in Berlin and builds himself cities, and plots the new millennium. He’s the evil that doesn’t devour the child in one gulp but first licks its hand like a puppy, then nibbles at it as it shudders into shock. Then the world licks the blood from his hand. Soon he’ll come back to the vagabonds, maybe next year or next month or next week; he’ll come back to look at his youth, and he’ll eat it. His blackboot boys have already begun the work, they’re going through the streets and pummeling the youth of their leader into grit and guttermeal, so that not one trace of the original moment that bore him and all his evil is left to be seen. When I see the vagabonds of Vienna I see two men in each of them: one is the Leader, and the other is me. Every day I walk the streets of Vienna with one consort or another, Catherine or Lauren, whichever one suits me at the particular moment, thinking about the things we will do when we get home, and invariably I stumble onto one scene or another when the blackboot boys are having at it with some poor ruin of a human being who is irrefutable evidence of another beast loosed and rapturous in God’s universe other than the one who intends to rule the world from the shithole that calls itself Germany, and it’s one such afternoon, not far from the corner of the Ringstrasse where I came my first night in Vienna, and it’s one such melee, when they’re beating an old Jew outside a candleshop, that I happen to look up and, in a window above the street, watching me, I see you.

  T.O.T.B.C.—7

  54

  YOU REMEMBER ME. THIS is, after all, the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle, this simple afternoon you’re leaning out your window, all of fifteen years old I’d say, while below you men are scuffling in one of history’s countless shards. Now there come along some comrades of this poor pillaged soul, a platoon of bums, and for the first time I see something like resistance in this city to the blackboot boys, a vagabond war. As though it’s a battle for your benefit, you there in the window, as though history scrambles and brutalizes and bleeds for the face of you. I cannot recollect your beauty. I recollect the memory of your beauty, which we both know is not the same, because my memory made you beautiful. Whether those vagabonds think you’re beautiful too is impossible for me to guess; they never cared so much for Catherine or Lauren, who are more beautiful. Much more beautiful. Come to think of it, you may be plain as sand. Your long hair a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow, your eyes a banal mud brown. There may not be a single curve of your jaw that’s anything more than ordinary. You say nothing to the scene before you, but your face says everything, the contempt for the blackbooters not simply because they’re bullies but because they presume to hold history as their own, they act like it’s tied to the post with a collar around its neck. The vagabonds have no history, they don’t even know history. It doesn’t intimidate them in the least. And when you look up and raise your eyes across the street, and mine meet them, we follow each other’s look as I make my way past the shard of history; and you say you don’t remember. I don’t believe you. Fifty years later I don’t believe you. Seeing you haunts and binds me, and I don’t believe this defiant maybe-not-beautiful moment that razored the century lengthwise was utterly gone from you before your century had passed another five minutes.

  They’re banging around in the street, the window of the candleshop explodes and wax tumbles over the sill, when a stone someone’s hurled strikes you. A moment follows in which everything almost seems to stop, and in that moment the beggars pull the old Jew from the tumult and haul him down the street. The blackboot boys are happy to pretend they’ve won the skirmish, throwing more stones in the beggars’ wake, not far or hard enough to bring them back for more; the boys don’t want more. For a minute they stand around and mark their victory with general commentary about Jews and Germany. In the window you turn as soon as the rock hits you, you raise one hand to your face. In the moment you turn I’m almost sure I can see your blood, I can see the corner of your mouth where the stone opened your flesh. We don’t see each other anymore, our mutual stare is lost in the wound, washed away with the blood of it; maybe the moment’s washed away too. You turn and without looking back once—if only you had looked once—you disappear from the window and shut it closed. The boys are singing and carrying on, and I’d stay there on the street until they’ve left, waiting for you to come back from washing your wound to stand in the window again, or to come to the door and open it, and if not I’d go to the door and knock; I’d wait, but I’m the only one left in the street with the blackbooters who are in a frenzy now, walking around swinging their fists and singing, and far up the street, slowing to a standstill, who should I see but Carl. There he is. He stops, I see him, and I wait for him to see me, and then I turn my back and walk away, and I know he’s done the same.

  55

  TONIGHT I RETURN TO my room and it’s empty. Lauren and Jeanine, Catherine and Janet and Leigh are gone. They understand I no longer want them here; I can’t stand the light. I can’t stand the dark, something drunker than blood courses through me. I’m caught between the sheets of the bed; the light of bombings and parades blots the night outside my window. When it fades I sleep an hour, when I wake I sit up in bed in the dark of the room, and find that the gray Hungarian moon has dropped from the sky over the river, has moved through the circular streets of the city, up the banks of the Wien-Fluss to Dog Storm Street, and dangles now in my window like burst mutant fruit from the low limb of a tree. From some place I can’t see the moon casts a shadow on the left corner of my room and there in the shadow opens a door, and there in the door you are. We’re children. I’m twenty. Your breasts are fifteen, your legs twenty-five, your eyes and vulva ageless, neither old nor born. You’re already becoming what I remember rather than what you are. You step from the doorway of the shadow of the moon, your face only a quarter in light, and I see grow from your womb curling out the tuft of your hair a long wet vine; it precedes you, an umbilical thistle. It grows before you across the floor between us, it winds up the side of the bed. It wraps itself around my feet and up my leg, it coils around my waist and binds my erection. Dog Storm Street creaks with blue carriages, I hear the hooves of white donkeys; lakeless swans slap dead against the walls of houses. The window runs with the juice of the moon, I smell the musk of the stepp
es beyond the eastern hills. At the end of the long wet vine that winds from the center of you and seizes me is a black flower that grows new petals as soon as it sheds them. In a matter of moments the bed’s covered with black petals, I peel them off my thighs sticky and damp. I know you’re a virgin. I didn’t expect anything else. I didn’t expect you to come to the bed like this and prostrate your pink body across the wet black of the crumbling flower. I can already hear, fifty years from now on your Chinese island, every word of your lies. Every word. I hear them above the songs in slavic belfries, you can fill your mouth with the black flower but nothing stifles the deceit of your denial of me. The flower never stops growing. When I grab you by your wrists and shake you into looking at me, it’s as though I’ve taken a live wire: I’m stunned with your cold voltage. I want to let go but I can’t, it takes your own fingers to pry mine loose; you smile as you do it. I wake later and the bed’s soaked with the dew of the black flower. The vine’s withdrawn back into you, only its marks are left on my legs. You’ve gone back into the door of the gray Hungarian moon and closed it behind you. I sleep again and when I wake the wet of you has coated me. On the desk in the sunlight are these pages that document you were here.