On the first summer night of the year 1941, her father prepared to leave the flat. He’d made many daring journeys in his life, crossing thousands of kilometers over three continents; this journey, the most daring, would take him across town. For three years the old Russian and his daughter had survived the Germans, and for two years the alliance. He knew the landlady had many times considered reporting them; he could see by the way she looked at him. That she hadn’t done it yet only meant she feared making trouble for herself. Now, the course of the war convinced him he could no longer count on her timidity; little did he know that within forty-eight hours Germany would invade Russia in an operation called Barbarossa and everything would change. He didn’t tell Dania he was leaving the flat or about the arrangements he’d made to have the blueprint smuggled to England and then America. He slipped out in the middle of the night while she slept. He made his way into the core of the Inner City and then cut up through the alleys that ran behind the Hofburg Palace. He felt fortunate that the evening was so mild; yet halfway to his destination he was already exhausted. He remembered how the horse he had ridden across the steppes of St. Petersburg had pushed itself beyond endurance to cross that hour that defied crossing between his past and his future, between the history that was determined and the history that could be undone by a single man if he chose to undo it. As he turned a corner behind the palace, not far from the Cafe Central, history chose to undo him back.
She’d been lying in her bed finishing with her lover when she heard her father leave. She threw back the sheets threw on her clothes and ran from the room; down the moonlit streets of Vienna the hot seed ran from her and left its trail. It didn’t take any time to catch sight of her father; she kept her distance all the way through the city until that final corner where she watched him die. At first, from where she stood, since she could only see him and not the other one, she didn’t understand the gunshot was a gunshot, and only after she saw her father hurled backward by the force of the shot did she understand that what her father reached for in the old saddlebag was the gun with which he’d almost shot her mother on a train twenty-four years before. The gun, as old as the saddlebag if not the man, jammed and didn’t fire. He lay there in the street. All the windows above remained conspicuously empty. She only faltered a moment at the sight of her father shot down, and then continued walking toward the body. The blood was black in the moonlight. It was then she saw come into view the other man with his own gun smoking in his hand; her father’s gun lay a meter and a half from his dead open fingers. She focused on nothing but that gun; the other man was going through the saddlebag and found the blueprint. In the moonlight he unrolled it and studied it, excited. She walked up to her father’s gun and picked it up; only then did he glance up at her. His face was stricken by the sight of her; she suspected he’d longed for her after all, watching her dance as a bit of dirty gold in the pale ash of the Pnduul Crater. She held the gun up to him. “And here I thought you were afraid of the sight of blood,” she said. His eyes were as brilliant as ever.
He stood up with the blueprint. A streetlamp burned above him and at the end of the street the night opened up behind him. He looked very sad, not so much, she guessed, at killing her father but that she should know it was he. For her part she was as cool as the wind off the Danube. The rage she felt at her father’s murdered body was held far at bay for this moment; for this moment she regarded events with as little humanity as her humanity would allow. She kept switching the gun from hand to hand. “It doesn’t work, Dania,” Reimes finally choked, “it’s an old gun. I didn’t want to shoot him, if he hadn’t reached for the gun I wouldn’t have—”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “The idea was always to kill him, we both know it.”
“What do you know about it,” he said angrily, “be a young girl awhile longer before you presume to know the things young girls can’t know.” He watched her switch the gun from hand to hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, softening, “it was my political role.” For the Russians or Germans? she began to ask, but it didn’t matter. He thought for a moment and added hastily, “It doesn’t mean I didn’t want you, you know.” He saw the look forming on her face when he said this and, misunderstanding it, went on. “When you found me that night in the tent, it’s true I was looking for this,” he gestured with the blueprint, “but it’s also true that on another such night I would have looked for you. You can believe that.”
“Is that what you think,” she said, “I’m angry that it was the map you wanted and not me? We stand here over the body of my father you just murdered and that’s what you think?” Rage wasn’t so far at bay now.
“Dania.” He pointed with the hand holding the blueprint, at her hand that held the gun. “It’s an old gun, Dania.” Coaxing her. “It’s broken. It doesn’t work. It’s out of date.”
“Oh?” she said, and blew a hole right through him.
She heard the plop of something several feet behind him, his insides flying out the back of him onto the round cobblestones of the street. His look became befuddled, as though he was still listening to the sound of her gun much as she had listened to the sound of his, which lay with the saddlebag beside her father’s legs; as though he was still figuring out the sound for himself, not willing to take the gun’s word for it. Then he looked down. He could see the hole in him but not quite so clearly as she saw it; she could see through him the Vienna night at the end of the street, as though a part of the black sky and the stars it held were lodged there in the middle of him. He had the night for a stomach. It was like when she’d been on a train to Amsterdam and looked into the open eyes of the lover she otherwise couldn’t see, and saw in those clear blazes the small fences and silos and houses passing her by. Reimes staggered in the street a moment; he said over and over, “I feel …I feel …” and could never quite finish it. Behind him his insides on the street began to lose their form and dissolve. Reimes turned a moment to the window of a shop; in the reflection of the window he could see in the middle of him the reflection of another window of another shop behind him. “I feel …” He pitched forward. The shatter of the window was much louder than that of the gun with which she’d killed him. She dropped the gun, walked briskly to his body; the rage was a good deal nearer now. She unclasped the blueprint from his hand which now stuck wedged to a piece of glass. I must get this from his hand, she told herself methodically, and away from here before it comes; it was the rage that was coming. She took the map and was going to turn once and look at her father, and thought better of it. She walked determinedly but not hurriedly away from there, toward the end of the street where the night without a country had shone to her moments before beneath the heart of the first man she loved.
96
THE LOVERS DIDN’T COME much anymore; there was no trace of them in the mornings. Over the next few years Dania moved many places in the city, sometimes she took up with men who sheltered her, other times a friend from the school where she’d worked protected her. It may have been that police and spies were pursuing her; she was never sure. When the war turned against Germany, the soldiers in the streets became much less vigilant. Everyone in the city sensed the approaching end. By the closing months of 1944 the bombs fell regularly. Bridges on the Danube and the Wien-Fluss lay in rubble. The besieged Viennese came to be familiar, as others had, with the airborne shriek of death. One afternoon Dania pulled a small child from a black abandoned carriage just as the wind of an explosion hurled both of them into a building archway; when she looked back the carriage was gone. There was only the smoking mass of meat and wood, and a wheel that rolled down the road. All winter the people of the city warmed their hands over the ashes of their lives. When the Russians marched in the following April, Dania became yet another sort of refugee, yet another sort of unvanquished. Two weeks after that the war was over.
She was now a twenty-two-year-old woman. She returned to the apartment where she’d lived with her father, and with another woman she took
the same flat. Like the other Viennese, the landlady now spoke harshly of the Germans and hailed the occupation of her city by the Russians, French, British and Americans; the apartment happened to be in a British zone, to Dania’s good fortune. Nonetheless she was careful where she walked during the day, since the zones weren’t marked and, unless one had memorized their borders, she could suddenly find herself where she didn’t want to be, which in Dania’s case was the Russian section of town. At night the Russians sent secret patrols into the British and French sections, sometimes even into the American sections, snatching people up; thus Dania didn’t go out at night at all. She spent three years trying to get out of Vienna and Austria. Only when she had a letter from Joaquin Young in London offering her a position in the new dance company he’d begun there, was she able to obtain the official papers. By then she was living alone, the other woman having married a soldier from Indiana who took her back with him. Dania packed up her few possessions and sent them on to England; she didn’t consider in the least loving Joaquin, rather what she loved was her escape from the murder and heartbreak of where she’d lived eleven years. On the last day, standing in the empty apartment gazing around her, she didn’t even think of it as a place of lovers; she thought of it as the last place her father lived. In the empty unlit flat she held her hands to her face and sobbed huge desolate sobs. Dania, she finally said, stopping herself. She went into the bathroom and ran the water in the sink and washed her face. She was too intent on washing away the tears to have ever heard the door open, had the door opened.
She was almost sure she heard, however, someone call a name, a name she might have remembered hearing once in the tall Dutch grass before the shadow of a windmill; but not her name.
When she went back out into the apartment, the shutters of the window stood wide open. For a moment, there in the window, she almost believed she saw someone.
But there’s no one there. She collects quickly her papers of transit and takes her small bag and walks out of the flat as though on her way to the market or a stroll through the Volksgarten. She runs into the landlady on the way down; the older woman averts her eyes. “Mein Fraulein,” she simply says. Dania thinks to reproach the woman for all the treachery she’s considered over the years: but there’s a difference, she tells herself, between what’s considered and what’s acted. “Auf wiedersehen,” she replies instead and continues on her way. She walks through the winding streets of the Inner City. The walls lie in piles of crushed stone and people stand in food lines; the Union Jack flies from the windows. At the train station she waits with all the other people trying to get out of Vienna and finally presents her papers to the officer in charge; when he’s stamped and returned them to her, and only when she’s located her train on the proper track and understands she’s really going, does she turn to see the city from the windows of the Westbahnhof and, overwhelmed, vanish for a moment from sight. I think she’s gone off somewhere to be alone, I can’t be sure. There are views that remain hidden, there are times one cries unseen.
97
SHE WASN’T TO BE in London more than ten months. The city in its victory was indistinguishable in its destruction from Vienna in its defeat. Joaquin Young greeted her arrival with the same astonishment he’d shown the afternoon she appeared in Amsterdam; he’d written the letter without any idea it would even reach her. More than this she was quite grown up, the years between fifteen and twenty-five even more profound than his between twenty-two and thirty-two. She was chagrined to find herself still excited by him. She’d thought that the night she blew a hole through Dr. Reimes she exiled herself from the caprices of attraction in the same way she’d been exiled from so much of life. “I’ve no consideration in the least of loving you,” she told him; in a more insolent moment he would have laughed at her. Eleven years however he’d lived with the impotence of his one night with her on the houseboat, and the mark of her other lovers.
Between this time that she arrived in London and the morning ten months later that the Joaquin Young Dance Company sailed for New York, she met another dancer named Paul and thus slept with a man for the first time since the end of the war. Paul was innocent and fragile in the way Young was arrogant and scheming, a dark French boy two years younger than she. They walked along the collapsed tunnels of the underground and slept with their hands full of shillings next to a heater that had to be fed coins every twenty minutes. Because Joaquin didn’t think Paul warranted competition, he was somehow all the more incensed by Dania’s affair with him; Paul may have been half the charismatic figure Joaquin was but it could be presumed that with a woman at night his body was at least adequate to the task, and that his heart was true enough neither to see nor care about the traces of other men on her. “Then don’t love me,” Joaquin told Dania, “with or without consideration. Just dance the way I watched you dance before.” With this declaration, and fully intending to win her back whether she wanted it or not, he wrote a dance especially for her.
98
SHE DANCED AND MEN DIED. They died across New York City, sometimes in penthouses and sometimes in bachelor’s flats where the beds lowered from the walls. They died as strangers in their middle years, grown comfortably into nerveless resignation, men who might never have thought her beautiful on the street but would be transfixed by her dance, if they ever saw her dance. They didn’t have to see her dance. Just the fact that she danced was, somewhere in the middle of a turn, enough to send them miles away slumping to the floor as though from a poison in their wine that was this moment hissing its way into their bowels and blood. They lay in large purple circles on their rugs. Empty goblets rolled listlessly around their heads. She left a trail of middleyeared strangers in large purple circles though she didn’t know it, not until the investigator told her in the middle of the fog of Davenhall Island, where neither the destination nor the point of departure could be seen.
This was two years after she’d been in America, this time when she danced. This was two years after she forgot the lover who’d always followed her. This was two years during which she came to realize that having survived the war and having freed herself of jungles of exile and cities for fugitives, the lover was following her again. She could feel the cast of his shadow in a way she never had before, even when he’d taken her; it was a large shadow. By then there was trouble with Joaquin and Paul. Sometimes she convinced herself she wasn’t really certain who the shadows belonged to anymore. One night she left the theater where the company danced, and stopped for a sandwich at the corner of Bleecker and Seventh; there for the first time in two years she felt the shadow. It began walking after her down Seventh toward Houston where she thought she might more easily find a cab that would take her back uptown; she adjusted her pace. She dropped the rest of her sandwich a block later. She peered around to see if there was anyone who could help her, if it came to that. She knew as soon as she ducked into the old vacant building that it was a mistake: Not much chance of catching a cab here, she thought ruefully. Rushing through the building and up the stairs, she cornered herself further and further until she ran out of corners. It was on an upper floor of the building, where glassless windows watched out on the city, that she turned another corner and remembered for a split second that her father once turned a corner like this and never another. At that moment someone stepped out of the dark there on the vacant floor and spoke to her, an eerie and lost hello. For the only time in her life she fainted deadaway. When she woke it was in the early hours of the morning under a very bright streetlight, on a bench way up on Riverside Drive not so far from where she lived. The strange coat of an unknown man was wrapped around her. It was a large coat.
Like a coat too large to be grown into, the savagery she’d once aspired to in the Sudan jungle seemed too large as well, and she could never make it fit. This was difficult for her to understand since after all she had shot a man down in the streets of Vienna. For a while she spent time uptown with some of the gangs that appeared on the last dark streets
untouched by the afterglow of a war that had vanquished in a very complete and absolute way complete and absolute evil. She’d ride up and down the urban island on the back of a motorcycle with a kid who gave her a mangy tabby cat she called Dog for the way it fetched things and followed constantly at her heels. But this wasn’t savagery enough. She drank too much. The vodka bottles piled up in the corner of her apartment where she sat beneath her skylight trying to remember the Russian folksongs her father sang in the jungle. But this wasn’t anything near truly savage, and moreover she despised the phony romanticism of it in the way she despised the phony romanticism of artists. “Oh Dania, what is this?” she whispered to herself with irritation, when she found herself crying alone one night for no reason she could identify, “this isn’t about not being beautiful. This isn’t about not being loved.” Another vodka bottle for the corner. She and Dog slept curled together in the vodka stupor, as she was coming to do more and more nights. In the skylight above her, the city became a psychetecture complete with men who followed her, whom she only occasionally sensed, and men who died when she danced, whom she would have repudiated had she sensed them at all. The horizon filled with the vision of a Japanese sunflower that blossomed five years before and only now came into view. Before the flash of this flower, in the moment it lit up her corridors, she considered that the savage century was unleashed not by the act of standing in a Vienna window, but by the act of being seen there. Soon after, she left the dance company. Matters with the two men in her life had become impossible. Joaquin calculated constantly, though he had many other women at the same time; she thought to herself, He’s more tormented by his past sexual defeat than any genuine passion, a hundred other successes with all the others will never compensate for his failure with me. Paul was tormented by genuine passion and almost more unbearable for it; his adoration became oppressive. When he worshipped even the most flawed inch of her, that small flawed territory at the corner of her mouth where the scar grew whiter with the years, her affection for him surrendered to claustrophobia. “And what about this finger,” she asked him, “this one that pulled the trigger one night in Vienna, do you adore it as well?” For this adoration Joaquin threw Paul out of the company, which was petty even for Joaquin. She wearied of the havoc she wreaked. Employing the confidence of a girlfriend in the company named Ingrid, Dania gave up her apartment and moved herself and Dog into Ingrid’s place; she went to work for a bookstore in the Village. In this way she dropped out of the lives of both Joaquin and Paul as though through a trapdoor. After some time she would telephone Paul, conscientious about his fragility. He begged to see her. She refused, relented, it was a mistake, refused, refused, relented, it was another mistake, refused. She had no idea what her life was supposed to be and feared that it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be anything. There were times she’d watch the theater until everyone had left, then go through the back since she still had the key and up to the studio on the twelfth floor where the dancers would rehearse in the mornings and afternoons. One entire wall was a window that looked out on Manhattan, the opposite wall was lined with mirrors. Alone, before a hundred scarred dancers, she’d dance the dance written only for her.
Tours of the Black Clock Page 20