Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  There’s a camp west of here at Mauthausen on the lovely shores of the Danube. I can see the smoke from the rooftop where I hang Courtney’s washed clothes. I remember his name now: Carl. Every day trains come from Switzerland with escaped Jews, the Swiss sending them reliably back.

  Holtz has a plan tonight. In the four and a half years since he first came to this flat he’s aged twenty, continental cordiality falling away from his face in chunks. His eyes are debauched by terror, his flesh yellow. His hair drops out in tufts, cigarettes are killing him. There are rumors in the street. “Kill her,” he says. What? “Kill her.” I won’t, I answer. If you want, I’ll stop. Get me and my family passage out of the country, and I’ll just quit. “And where will you take passage to?” he asks in a deathly croak. “Where are you beyond his reach except perhaps America? You can’t go back to America.” He looks at me. “We know about you and America.” He’s sitting on the edge of the bed; his eyes don’t quite focus. “The translator’s under house arrest,” he finally says, “every new chapter is now delivered under armed guard. This is what it’s come to. Z waits pacing in his suite.” I saw a blond woman there that night in the hotel four years ago, I say. “She’s nothing to him,” Holtz answers, “she’s not the one he cares about. It’s the one you’ve brought to him he cares about. Kill her.” Neither of us speaks for several minutes and finally I just say to him, Let the translator do it, but I won’t. He nods as though he knew all along, that even if I had agreed, nothing can now be turned back. For the first time I feel a little badly for him, he’s in way over his head. Me too probably. Look out that window, I say to him; and we both sit in the dark looking out the window onto the empty street. I want to show him the other century, when none of this happens, and when all he has to think about is his place in the kingdom or the death of his country. I don’t think he can see it, though.

  77

  YOU AND I DISTANT. Lately we argue; I suppose we’re arguing about him. He just sits in the corner. It isn’t that we’re bored, the three of us. Rather the math of our evil is constrained by the math of our bodies. I find myself missing my little daughter, and America. I return to Megan sooner and sooner each night; she sinks drowsily deeper and deeper into her sadness. She no longer looks at me when I get home. I pull her to me and lie that there will always be an England.

  78

  AUGUST 1942. ENGLAND FALLS. The invasion has been a savage four months and has cost the Germans, but this is the end. London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh are all gone, only the seaport of Glasgow holds out besieged. The news comes over the radio this evening as I hold you by your ankles and feed on you, you bursting at my lips rapid-fire. The Germans, knowing what it will be, have not jammed the broadcast but rather pick it up from London and send it out to all Europe; it’s the prime minister. “We survive bombs,” he says, “we may survive tanks. We survive the blade, and bullets. We survive history of a thousand years, the caprices of political tempests. But defeat, that we choose not to survive. It finishes, countrymen. I’m sorry. If the damnation of an eternity for whatever follies I’ve committed would spare my nation this, I would with gratitude be so damned. As it is, damnation is insistent with no exchange for it. God save the King. God save the Empire.” There’s a moment of black quiet and then a muffled pop; the weight of him can be heard thudding against the microphone. The ooze of him can be heard this thousand miles. In that black quiet perhaps he snickered to know that where he once thought lay the century’s conscience there’s only a oneliner, a vaudeville smirk. I leave you to your spasms. When you ask, “Why are you going?” I answer, To Megan; I have to. “Don’t leave,” you say. Don’t leave, he calls from the corner. You bastard, I answer him. Halfway down the stairs you ask me one last time.

  79

  IN THE MERE MOMENTS since the broadcast the streets have filled with people, shouting and cheering and embracing that the war in Europe is over. Some wonder out loud whether the Germans will now declare war on America. I run the whole way to Megan and Courtney, dodging revelers and honking cars, civil guards posted on the corners who are hailed as though they just got back from England in the last five minutes. On the quays of the Wien-Fluss small victory parades are taking place spontaneously. From Megan’s street I can see the light in our flat, it seems a silent light in the middle of the din.

  I run up the stairs, every flight. At the top the door stands ajar and I know something’s wrong.

  All the lights are on, everything’s in its place. I go from room to room; I don’t call her name but say it normally, just to confirm to myself it won’t be answered: Megan. It isn’t answered. There’s no sign of Courtney.

  I’m thinking, It’s such a hot night, and there’s much ruckus in the street; they went out. I think it but I know it isn’t so. I sit in the flat ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that ache in their passage. I look up finally to see one of the neighbors in the doorway, an old man from the flat below. He darts away. By the time I’ve chased him downstairs he’s got his room closed and locked; I bang on the door for him to open. I’m shaking it by the knob and about to rip it off the wall when the neighbor across the hall protests.

  “What’s happened to my family,” I say.

  “Soldiers,” she says.

  I go back down into the street. People are running up and down the sidewalks swilling beer and shouting. On the other side is a man I know is a spy. I’ve never seen him before but I know because he looks like every other spy who’s tailed me over the last five years. I walk across the street to him. Like all these other very subtle spies he looks away from me as though he doesn’t notice me at all; when I get right up to him he’s still pretending he doesn’t see me. I hold him by the waist and lift him over my head and hang him on one of the streetlamps. I slap him and tell him, “Get Holtz.” Some other people gather around in the throes of their jubilation; they’ve decided this must be political in the way everything is now. “Get Holtz,” I say again, and no one likes my accent much. Maybe one of them wants to hit me in the head with a shovel, maybe another would as soon shoot me. “Leave him be!” the spy is screaming at them; I guess I must be the most invulnerable man in the world at this moment.

  I take him off the streetlamp and put him on the ground. “I’ll be across the street,” I say. I return to the flat.

  Holtz is there in about forty minutes. He looks terrible. Things don’t improve when he sees me. He comes into the flat, I’m sitting in the same place I’ve been since I got here; he looks around the flat and knows what’s happened. Something in me sinks to see him as surprised as I am. I understand now that he’s not in control of the situation. “They’re gone,” I say from where I sit.

  He doesn’t say anything at first; for a man whose country has just taken over the English empire, he doesn’t appear enthusiastic. “Banning,” is all he can muster. It was a poor precedent, ever allowing him to call me that. I’ve set another precedent tonight: the lights are on. “Banning.” He shrugs pathetically.

  “Tell them,” I say, “tell them I want to make the swap tonight.”

  He looks utterly befuddled. “The swap?”

  “That, or I’ll kill him. Tell them. I won’t wait.”

  He’s still doing his befuddled act. “What are you talking about?”

  I shake my head. “I won’t wait. Z for my family, in an hour.”

  “Z?” It’s a good act, I give him credit. “Banning, you’ve …You’re disturbed at this moment, I think.” He says it slowly, as though gingerly handling a grenade where the pin is loose. “Z’s in Berlin, Banning. Berlin. We’ve conquered England this evening.”

  He doesn’t understand the true situation. I understand the true situation. “No point you and I discussing this, let’s take matters up with the big boys. Whoever’s in Vienna now that can handle it.” I get up from my seat. “I’ll be at the other flat. You tell them we swap tonight, that I won’t wait.” I walk by him, our shoulders clash. Out in the street the spy’s waiting by the sam
e lamp; he steps back at the sight of me. He looks up at the lighted window. “Back to the other flat,” I advise him. After a moment he nods.

  80

  WHEN I RETURN TO Dog Storm Street you’re gone.

  It isn’t that you’ve taken all your things and left, because you had no things, really. A stick of lip rouge, you must have thrown that away. Perhaps you took a coat of mine and now you walk in the streets with it wrapped around your shoulders.

  He’s still in the corner. If I move toward him he just pulls back. “Haven’t you heard,” I tell him, “your war’s over.” I sit in my chair and wait. “Keep your shirt on.”

  After an hour and a half I think I hear the car amidst all the other racket down below. Then I know I hear the door, but doors after all have been opening and closing all night now. There’s no mistaking the steps on the stairs, though; Holtz’s knock is rude and impatient.

  He doesn’t wait for me to get the door, which is all right since I have no intention of getting it anyway. But when he turns on the light, he isn’t Holtz.

  Soldiers in the doorway raise their guns.

  “You don’t want to hurt me,” I explain to them, “your boy here wouldn’t like it.” I gesture at the corner where he’s been so many nights now, and it’s empty.

  Sometimes I have this clarity, sometimes I see it all rather lucidly. On the way to the hotel people are pounding on top of the car; the Germans in the car accelerate and people in the street leap out of their way. It remains to be seen to what extent the Austrians will share the fruits of victory. We get to the Hotel Imperial where I’m taken through the side entrance I was taken four years ago. We go up the lift and get off at a floor near the top of the building. The soldiers lead me into a suite.

  I have this clarity, this lucidity. Right now the only thing I remember that seems real is a Christmas Day I tended to the horses in my father’s stable. Now I’m at the far end of this suite and a huge window with a small footrest at the other end opens over Old Vienna, St. Stephen’s lodged in the night like a dagger. The window’s open, the August heat’s overwhelming. There’s another door in the other wall, several sofas and chairs, and a desk. Seated in the sofas and chairs are three or four military officers of an unusual rank, given affairs in England tonight, and behind the desk is a small dark man at least seven years older than the pictures of him in the papers. Once he was a client of mine. Once he worked for me. He limps around to my side of the desk.

  He stops half the room away from me; he doesn’t want to get so close because standing next to me will only emphasize how little he is. He raises one finger and, his black eyes tiny and still like dead insects, says only, “It’s not jealousy.” He keeps holding up the one finger to make the point. It’s several moments before he lowers his hand and paces staggeringly to and fro, thinking. He stops and says, “Permit me to introduce you,” and then names off the generals, and adds, “Of course you know Colonel Holtz.” He indicates behind me and I turn to see Holtz sitting in a chair. For a moment Holtz looks a bit odd, and then, transfixed, I see his blue fingers, and his eyes that never move or blink, and his mouth that’s open for the flies. Less than an inch over his right eye is a black hole; the ink of his brains cries down his forehead to his nose. There’s a tittering behind me from the other generals, although not from X, who regards Holtz almost squeamishly.

  “It’s not jealousy,” X says again, emphatically. “I admit she had great appeal to me. But,” he says, on the other side of the desk, leaning into it, “what I felt for her can never match the way I love him. If she made him happy, no one would have been happier than I. Even having her myself could not have made me happier.” He pauses. “Do you understand?” I don’t answer and he doesn’t care. He goes to the window and stares out over the city. “Look,” he exclaims with some enthusiasm, “isn’t that the big wheel,” pointing toward the Praterstern. He’s talking to the generals now. “I took my children on the wheel … last year, I believe. Last year or the year before. Some were too small but the ones who were a little older found delight in it.” Limping back toward me, he smiles, “Children. My wife and I just had our sixth.” He stops; he’s become braver about being closer, almost as though he now taunts the way I’m so much larger and more helpless. “Daughters,” he smiles.

  The city raves up from beneath us; I can’t sit or quite stand. I feel sick.

  “I learned long ago,” he’s saying, through the hiss of blood in my head, “that his will is an inviolate thing. One doesn’t toy with it.” The generals are making an effort not to let their attention wander; they move in their chairs. There’s a sound behind me, and the others look; I think Holtz has slipped where he’s propped. I can’t bring myself to check. X doesn’t notice at all. “I’m ashamed to say,” he goes on, “that I learned this the hard way, almost twenty years ago, when as a very intemperate young man I made an effort to oppose him in the party on a particular issue. It says something about the magnitude of the man that he embraced me in his victory and my defeat. Do you know what the issue was, Herr Jainlight?”

  “No,” I finally say. I barely have the voice for it, but I’ll answer anything he asks now.

  “Russia, Herr Jainlight,” he says. I’m too confused to know exactly what it means, but I nod. He shrugs. “What to do with her,” he’s saying, “which is to say, what to do with you.” He moves around to his seat and sits; his head doesn’t even rise above the back of the chair. He rubs his face with his hands. I’m looking at the window, the generals, the soldiers at the door.

  “I’ll go away,” I whisper. Tentatively, afraid to even say their name, I add, “My family and I.”

  “No no no no, Herr Jainlight,” he answers, with great annoyance that such a foolish thing could even be proposed. “That’s no solution at all. How would I explain it to him? ‘We let them go’? And where will you go, where is left? Do you really want to go to Russia? He’d have you sent back here. America?” He shakes his head. “Nor, frankly, can I shoot you.” He shakes his finger at me, “You should appreciate that someone else probably would. But you know, Germany rules half the world today for one reason more than any other. And that is that we seized control of people’s myths. The myths they believed meant one thing, we persuaded them they meant something different. And the problem with shooting a myth is that it freezes its meaning in death.”

  “I’ll change the myth.”

  He’s utterly annoyed with my lack of sophistication; he literally throws up his hands. “Mein Herr, don’t you suppose we’ve thought of that?” He says furiously, “Do you suppose the idea here is to trick him? Do you suppose I’m another one of these traitors who conspire against him? I can show you motion pictures of the traitors we’ve hanged from butcher’s hooks with the wire from pianos, I’d wrap the cord around my own forsaken throat before I betrayed him! Do you suppose,” he demands, struggling for control, “that this is your myth? It’s not your myth, Herr Jainlight, you didn’t create it. It’s his myth. It’s slept somewhere in his dreams every night of the eleven years since she died, it’s slept in the dreams of our history, our time.” He falls back into the chair. “You tripped into it while you were stumbling in the dark like the overgrown American oaf you are, you woke it. You keep waking it. I can’t shoot you, I can’t send you away. I have to break your legs, your arms, your tongue, not literally—my God it’s a new gloryday, when barbarism is of a newer and more glorious sort as well—I mean I have to break the legs and arms, the tongue, that walk and reach and talk in the place where his myth lives. I have to make you the saddest man alive. A dead man caught in the body of a living one.”

  If you take the hands, it’s simply a serious mistake not to take the stumps. And when does it end then? “Just do it to me,” I whisper. “Whatever it is, please do it to me.”

  He’s silent long enough I believe he hasn’t heard me. “Russia, that was the issue,” he finally says. “Almost twenty years ago he argued that we would have to take Russia. I thought it wa
s … a mistake. He was right, I was wrong. But now we don’t have Russia, his inviolate will violated. Now instead we have this uneasy alliance on our eastern border, which it may be too late to do anything about. We would rule not only Europe but Asia at this moment, perhaps with Japan … perhaps without. The American solution would be self-evident.” He says, “Of course I won’t do it to you mein Herr, you just haven’t been listening.” Drumming his fingers on the desktop for a moment, he turns to the guard by the door and gives a signal. The door opens and after a moment the soldier brings into the room my wife and child.

  I can’t say anything. Megan looks at me stunned, the color has run even from the freckles. Courtney has the insolent courage of four-year-old girls; she keeps looking up at the soldier waiting for him to explain himself. Megan pulls her into her skirt. I would abandon all of my moments before or after this if I could only remove the two of them from this one. But it’s too late for that now. One’s no longer young when he understands some things are irrevocable. The little crippled man hobbles over to Megan and Courtney; he doesn’t look at Megan but only Courtney; he rubs his hand in her hair. He turns his back on them and the soldier rips Courtney from her mother. He pushes her onto the footrest before the window and then up onto the windowsill. Megan wails with horror. “Daughters,” X mumbles to himself, shaking his head. Courtney on the windowsill turns and looks at me, and we hold between us the moments I dangled her from rooftops, all the high places she lived and owned. The soldier pushes, and she steps out.

  All my moments, if only to cut this one out of time. It seems to hold in place. In it, Megan, four-foot-eleven, takes, in the last moment I’ll ever know her, command in a room full of Germans not entirely unlike the way she commanded the first night I knew her. She tears herself from any attempt to stop her and leaps through the window before the moment is out; and with what’s left of this part of time, she spins Courtney in midair and pulls her to her chest. There’s no question, you know, of retrieving her. There’s no question of rescue. Megan knows this, everyone knows it. It’s only so the freckletot will not take the long ride down all by herself. It’s only so that however extended this moment will be after only a brief four years of them, it won’t be so utterly lonely, out there in the black Vienna night, with all that night beneath her little feet. In the last bit of this moment Megan turns and looks at us with defiance. The moment joins itself to every other one I will know, all the ones I cry out in my head to exchange. I carry it everywhere, Megan clutching our daughter to her and the two of them seeming to hang there in the window.