The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel

by Justin Go

  —I don’t know the name, she says, but Ms. Östberg might be able to help you. Perhaps I could wake her. It would be a shame for you to miss her, since you’ve come so far. We seldom have visitors.

  The caretaker excuses herself and goes down the hall. The librarian turns to me, his eyes large and shining.

  —I don’t think you should go in there. Even if it’s really her, you’ll never get the money. Let’s get out of here—

  The caretaker comes back into the room.

  —Ms. Östberg is awake. You can see her now, but she’d prefer if you spoke in her bedroom.

  I stand, glancing at the librarian, but he only shakes his head slightly, a strange expression on his face.

  —Her English is quite good, the caretaker adds, so you won’t need anyone to translate. It’s the door at the end of the hallway.

  I thank her and begin toward the corridor. The woman stops me with a wave.

  —I forgot to tell you. The lock on her door is broken. You need a key to open it from the outside.

  The caretaker draws an iron key from the front of her apron and hands it to me. It is an old barrel key, as wide as my hand with a long shaft and a tooled bit at the end. A length of ribbon is tied to its eyelet.

  I walk down the dark hallway. The wooden floorboards are worn smooth and shiny. I pass closed doors on both sides of the corridor until I reach the door at the end. The key is in my hand.

  I hesitate at the door. Then I see the shaft of light on my shirt, a small yellow beam. I wave my hand out of the shadows and the beam fixes on my wrist. It’s coming through the keyhole. I put the key in the metal fitting and turn it, feeling the bolt swing smoothly. Not any more, I think, or any less.

  I walk in.

  23 June 1924

  Schöneberg, Berlin

  She watches the shadow of the streetcar glide past on the sidewalk, steel clattering upon iron as the wheels roll over a junction in the grooved tracks. The streetcar halts. The woman studies the white placard displaying the number 8.

  She breaks into a jog, pushing down the crown of her hat. A leather portfolio is tucked under her arm; the camera slung over her shoulder bobs against the small of her back. The conductor watches the woman climb onto the streetcar and lean her portfolio against the wooden paneling. She draws out her purse, offering a coin inquiringly.

  —Fährt dieser Straβenbahn nach der Auguste-Viktoria-Platz?

  The conductor takes the woman as French on account of her accent and her strange clothing. He does not care for the French, but he tells the woman the streetcar does stop at Auguste-Viktoria-Platz. He tells her the fare. The conductor is used to telling passengers the fare, for only a year ago under the old Papiermark the fare had climbed to 150,000 marks.

  The woman pays the conductor and moves down the aisle, grasping a handrail above her head. An old man stands and doffs his homburg, offering his seat.

  —Bitte nehmen Sie Platz.

  She smiles, explaining she would prefer to stand. The old man does not believe her, but he taps his hat low over his forehead and sits back down. The woman turns and shifts her weight onto the handrail, staring at a young girl on the seat across from her. The girl wears a white frock, its rounded collar tied by a long blue ribbon; she holds a porcelain doll in her arms, the paint rubbed off entirely from its face. The woman guesses at the age of the child, but in the end she realizes she has no facility for this judgment.

  She frowns and looks out the window, studying the faces of the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Her mind returns to the old question of the Teutonic features. Is it only their expressions that make them severe? The Germans remained an enigma to her, and in years past she had considered them a species apart, a people with some anatomical divergence of nerve or gland that accounted for their facility with the problems of this world, the way they systematically solved every obstacle that came along, even the impossibility of their present hardship. She had long admired them for this, differing as they did from her. But was it true? Perhaps there was hardly any difference, perhaps she only imagined how these faces differ from those she might see in Copenhagen or Rotterdam. Her eyes follow the back of a man walking briskly on the sidewalk. Was he a German, and could she tell from the back? There is something familiar in the roundness of his shoulders; the angle of his gray trilby, ever misshapen; the curious rigidity of his gait. Could it be Anton? Of course it could not, for the last she had heard Anton was in Brazil.

  She lowers her gaze in distress, studying the cuff of a young man’s trousers, the greased crow-black boots of the conductor. She imagines the tram passing the figure on the sidewalk; she pictures the familiar body growing closer, the closest it had been in years and now passed, the distance only gaining between them. Now she is regretful, almost shameful. There was nothing so hateful to her as the fragility of human relations, and love most of all. She had always felt so. As a girl she had never understood the affairs of others, those who had lain with lovers for months and years only to part bitterly, only to pass each other on the street as mere strangers. That was not love, she had felt. That was caprice; that was whimsy. It was not love.

  But later it had happened to her too. She had lain with them; they had held each other and promised all they could promise, the past and future alike. And now they were nothing to each other, or as little as two people were who would never speak again. How little remained from such episodes, dimming memories vouchsafed only by scraps of evidence unearthed years later: a visiting card dropped behind a chest of drawers; a pair of earrings in their silken gift box, never worn. She was still fairly young, and yet the affairs of her youth were things hardly remembered, unfocused images she had blurred by trying to picture the same scenes too often. Anton had never been her lover, but she felt the same discomfiture at his mirage, the inevitable embarrassment of the meeting of two people who had once been close but no longer were.

  The memories were all that remained. Her life now was an apartment of rented furniture, where even the pictures on the wall were unfamiliar, rented pictures, portraits of dead Junker families and landscapes of the Sächsische Schweiz, a place she had never visited. She had not even a suitcase of mementos to carry with her through the world. But all this was as she had wanted it. It was the life she had chosen.

  She had always told herself it would be worse to stay in touch, to trivialize love into trifling acquaintance, where years passed and the letters became fewer and more superficial. Still there were moments of terrible doubt. She woke sometimes from dreams of perfect clarity, trysts with spectral lovers who promised that all histories had been smoothed away, all obstacles removed so that at last they might meet again for all time. These were dreams so perfect in the dreaming that they became nightmares upon waking, for in the morning, in her bedroom, she recognized at once the stark feebleness of her present life. She would be seized by the need to find this specter, to dash to the post office and send a telegram, to board any train or ship or airplane to meet him. She must find him.

  Yet in the end she could never do this. There were reasons why they lived apart and the reasons had not dissolved with the years. Besides this, there was always the caprice of human affection: the other people who would come between them, or those who would come in the future if their attachment waned. She could write, at least, a few lines to say she had thought of him. But the only fitting reply to love was equal love; once that was gone, all that remained was the trivial and the tragic. It was better not to write at all, better to remember him only in their finest moment—that interlude where the gilded spotlight had lingered upon them. And so she labored to shake off the dream, passing the day in a haze of murky sadness, waiting for the small but certain pleasures that would reconcile her to this life. Until the dream would come again.

  The conductor taps the woman on the shoulder. She looks up and sees the tall spire of the Gedächtniskirche; they have reached Auguste-Viktoria-Platz. The woman snatches up her portfolio, pushing her way off the streetcar onto
the square.

  She crosses toward the café on the eastern side, weaving among the traffic of motorcars and pedestrians and bicycles. A grimed youth selling bootlaces arrests her on the sidewalk, hoisting his selection before her eyes. The laces are waxed and shiny, in flat or round varieties and varied shades of black or brown.

  —Nur zehn Pfennig, he pleads.

  The woman shakes her head, but the boy persists until she chooses a pair of laces. She has only a fifty-pfennig coin. The boy claims he has no change and in the end she buys five pairs of laces, asking if she can take a photograph of the boy in return. She unslings the camera from her shoulder and the boy asks how he should pose. The woman smiles and tells him not to pose at all.

  She extends the leather bellows of the camera and turns a small key to advance the film. Guessing at the distance, she slides the focusing scale to two meters and checks the shutter speed and aperture, screwing her face up to the sun. Plenty of light. The woman holds the camera at her waist and cocks the shutter lever, eyeing the spirit level. In the little viewfinder there is a reversed image of the boy hefting the bootlaces. She fires the shutter.

  The woman smiles and thanks the boy, folding the camera as she crosses the street to the café terrace. Under the long awning the morning chill has not yet lifted. The waiters are spraying down the tiled terrace with long hoses, arranging the bentwood chairs and round marble tables. She pushes through the revolving door into the café. A waiter greets her and seems to recognize her, pointing to a man seated alone at a table, his back to the vast mirrored wall that rises to a sculpted ceiling.

  The woman hangs her coat on a rack. A disheveled newspaper waiter passes her with his cargo attached to long wooden rods. The woman asks which French papers he has, but he has only Le Temps and she shakes her head politely.

  She goes to the man seated alone. He is reading a newspaper he must have brought with him, for it is not on a wooden rod. He does not see her until she is pulling out a chair.

  —Tu m’as trouvé, he says, grinning.

  The man wears a high-buttoned suit jacket of an unusual cut, the lapels very narrow. His bow tie is knotted into two symmetrical triangles, his blond hair slicked back with brilliantine. The woman smiles and tosses the bundle of bootlaces on the table. The man shakes his head.

  —Tu n’as pas une seule paire de bottes.

  The woman smiles and says she has several pairs somewhere, though it is a long time since she saw them. The waiter comes to take the woman’s order. She asks for a black coffee, then changes her mind and orders a café au lait instead. The man nods toward the portfolio propped against a chair. He asks if he can see the prints.

  —Oui, she says. Juste après le café.

  The man agrees that perhaps it is a little early. The waiter sets a white cup and saucer before the woman. With a pot in each hand he pours the steaming coffee and milk in proportion. The woman urges the man to continue reading. He lifts the newspaper again.

  The woman takes a small sip of her coffee. She picks up one of the flat bootlaces, tying it into an ornate bow. The man glances at the bow and smiles. He lifts his newspaper and refolds it, punching it flat in the center.

  As she drinks the woman reads the back of the man’s newspaper, a copy of yesterday’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Her eyes pass over an article and she averts her face toward the café terrace. A waiter in a black tie and long white apron is pushing a wide broom across the floor. The woman looks back at the paper, grasping the sheet with one hand to steady it. She tells the man not to turn the page. Her eyes are wet now and she has trouble reading the tightly set Gothic text across the table. She releases the sheet.

  —It’s no mistake.

  The man asks what she said, but the woman says she was only talking to herself. The man folds the newspaper ostentatiously and sets it on the table.

  —You wish to speak English?

  —No, she says. I’d rather not.

  —Do you never miss it?

  —Of course I do.

  The man frowns. He summons the waiter and orders a second coffee. The woman stares at the folded newspaper, but she does not pick it up. When the man notices her tears he rises and offers his handkerchief. The woman refuses.

  —Here, he says. You are making your hand wet.

  The woman shakes her head, turning her face to the terrace. The man stands uncertainly for a moment, then returns to his seat. The waiter pours another coffee from the two pots. He notices the woman is crying and looks away, taking the pots back to the bar.

  The woman stands as if to go. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, but she cannot stop the tears. The two waiters whisper behind the zinc bar, stealing glances at the couple. The woman picks up her portfolio. The man speaks to her in a soft voice, stopping to glare at the gawking waiters. The woman bites her lip. As the man talks, the woman stares absently toward the plaza. Finally the woman sits down again.

  —Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas? the man asks. Il faut me dire.

  The woman takes the man’s cigarette case from the table and opens it. She lifts the sprung silver bar and puts a cigarette in her mouth. The man moves to pick up his lighter, but she reaches it first and lights the cigarette and draws a little smoke. She holds the cigarette before her, studying her hand. Her ivory skin is streaked with moisture, a shining droplet in the hollow between her thumb and index finger.

  —It’s nothing, she says.

  THE AIRPORT

  The day the estate passed I was on the southbound highway out of Djúpivogur, kicking rocks off the asphalt and pacing in circles to keep warm. By the time the sun came overhead it had been three hours since I’d seen a car.

  I tried not to think about the money. My shoulders ached from my heavy backpack, so I set it down on the roadside and watched the white seabirds to pass the time. My mind kept going back to my grandmother and my mother. I wondered if people with a hundred million dollars died of cancer as easily as everyone else. Maybe they did. I picked a piece of lava off the roadside and threw it hard toward the ocean.

  In the afternoon it grew cloudy and I walked down to the fjord below the highway and ate a lunch of cheese and stale bread from my pack. I lay on the black sand and stared up at the clouds. It was 1:50 now. That made it 2:50 in London. Maybe the estate had passed on at midnight. Or maybe at that moment Prichard was on the phone with a banker in the City, telling him go ahead with the transfers. I thought about Ashley and Imogen seeing each other across a room in 1916, and the letter he wrote her two months later saying that everything he had or ever would have was hers. Soon all that money that had been waiting for eighty years would get mixed up with other money until no one could tell the difference. Soon there would be no reason for anyone to think of either of them again.

  I shut my eyes and slept until wind began to rise.

  There were no more southbound cars that afternoon. At dusk I went into the village and found a small hotel by the harbor. I asked for the cheapest room and they gave me the key to a dormitory on the top floor with six bunks under a sloping roof. The restaurant downstairs was closed, but I didn’t have the money to eat there anyway. With my pocketknife I opened a can of beans I’d bought in Reykjavík and ate them cold, sitting on the bottom bunk and looking out the small window.

  I took my notebook from my backpack, hoping that if I read about all the people I’d met in Europe I might understand what I’d been doing here. I wanted to remember Karin and Christian, Mohammed and Desmarais, even the manager at the Berlin post office. Most of all I wanted to remember Mireille. I went through the pages slowly. There was hardly mention of any of them. The entries were about Ashley and Imogen, lists of questions and research topics, the times of trains or planes, the addresses of libraries and archives. I flipped to the day after I met Mireille.

  Sept 4

  Paris

  Found the painting yesterday—an abstract piece of nothing. Can’t stand to think about the wasted time.

  Bought a ticket to Amiens,
then wandered the city for one last night. At a bar in the Latin Quarter met a girl named Mireille. Stayed up all night with her and her friend—evidently in French this is called “une nuit blanche.” Today we are taking the 1pm train to Picardie together. If she shows up.

  One thing bothers me most—I still have no idea why Imogen came to France.

  I shut the light off and got in bed. I knew I had to let go of everything, but the more I tried the tighter I held on. I kept thinking about the week after my mother’s funeral, when my father gathered her clothes to offer to his sisters, and how they all went to the closet and looked at the shoes and coats and handbags, but none of them took anything. I remember picking up a pair of shoes and looking at them. They weren’t even real leather.

  It was after two when I got out of bed. I turned on the light and pulled out the plastic file with Imogen’s letters and my research photocopies and the papers they’d given me at Twyning and Hooper. I took a cigarette lighter from the lid pocket of my pack and went into the tiny bathroom. I put my notebook and all the papers in the sink. The lighter was in my hand. The envelopes were getting wet from the damp porcelain.

  After a minute I put down the lighter. I sat on the tile floor and cried.

  Later that night I dreamt I was in Paris. I was meeting Mireille at a museum where her art class was sketching in an atrium filled with marble sculptures. I got there early and saw Mireille at the far end of the atrium, sitting on a bench beside Claire with a large sketchbook in her lap. I decided to walk around the museum until her class was over.

  In a dark gallery upstairs there were long rows of portraits where everyone looked familiar, though some of the paintings were hundreds of years old. At the end of the corridor there was a picture of a woman I’d never seen before. I recognized her at once. I looked at the picture for a moment, then I walked downstairs. Mireille’s lesson was over.