Tours of the Black Clock (21 page)

Today I find your street.

After eleven years during which I looked for it often, only for it to have seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, today I chance upon it as though walking up to my front door. The exact same candleshop is across the street, people go in and out even now. The shutters of the window where I saw you are pulled closed, and after I’ve stood there watching a quarter of an hour, I cross the street and knock on the door. When no one answers I open the door and walk up the stairs to the next level. At your room I pause for a moment, and walk in.

The flat is vacant. Requisite furniture; no sign of residence except the sound in the bathroom off to the right. I walk around the bed to the bathroom door; for a moment I almost believe I see someone. I almost believe there’s a reflection of someone in the mirror. But the only thing I find is the water running in the sink.

“Geli?”

In the answering silence I lift the window and push open the shutters. From this place I see the street as you saw it that day except there are no blackboot boys. They’re running banks now, or in jail, most of them.

“Mein Herr?” someone says behind me. I turn and an older woman is in the doorway. “Have you come to look at the apartment?”

“Has it been vacant long?” I ask.

“Only a few days,” she answers. “It’s not difficult these days to find a renter, especially in the Inner City. I already have several people who’ve made inquiries.” She adds, “But I can take your name if the others change their minds.”

I look around. “Who lived here?”

“My husband’s brother actually, he died several weeks ago.”

“Do you have many apartments like this?”

“Yes,” she answers, “but none is vacant presently.”

“Have you owned the building a long time?”

“Twenty years,” she says, “we bought it, my husband and I, the year before the Depression. Lucky on our part.”

“Eleven years ago a girl lived here. Probably with her family. She had hair like spun sunlight.” I stop. “I mean, dark blond. Blue eyes.” I stop again. “I mean brown.”

“I think you must be referring to the Russians,” she answers coolly.

“The Russians?”

“He was a refugee who left Russia and spent some time in Africa. Then he came to Vienna. He had a daughter, there was no wife.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s who I mean.”

She says firmly, “They were finally sent back.”

“Back?”

“About five years ago. When the new treaty was signed. The Russians wanted them back.”

“No,” I answer after a moment, “somehow I don’t think she’s in Russia.”

“I hope you weren’t attached to them.” She explains, “They were enemies of the state after all.”

“Were they?”

“I’m sure they must have been. They wouldn’t have been sent back after all if they weren’t enemies of—”

“I’m sure you’re right.” I take a last look from the window; she watches me suspiciously.

“What is your name, mein Herr,” she says, the good citizen.

“Banning Jainlight.”

“What sort of name is that?” She’s holding her hands together now.

“It’s an English name.”

“The English are Germans now.”

“I understand.”

“It’s a German name now.”

“No. It will never be a German name.” I step past her. I turn to her. “I could have this flat, you know.” I start down the stairs and at the top she gives me the German farewell, hailing his name and saluting. “To hell with the son of a bitch,” I just answer, but I feel no pleasure from her gasp of shock. I feel no pleasure in the way she’ll try to report me only to find the authorities will take no action at all. I close the door quietly behind me.

I forgot to ask if you were beautiful. I forgot to ask if she ever heard you sing.

I walk through the winding streets of the Inner City. The walls bulge with the mortified joints of fallen warriors. The black and red twisted cross of the new empire faces out from the banners that hang on every building and fly from every steeple. Most of the flags are worn, shredding. The empire becomes dilapidated. A new elevated train under construction two years ago has stopped in midair. Guards are everywhere, on every corner, but at night there are the shots of rebel groups hiding in the basements and towers. I cross the canal and walk to the amusements of the Praterstern.

The park is only partly filled today with families and couples and German soldiers on leave. German officers walk with city girls and cut in front of all the lines for the rides. There’s a funhouse with anti-American slogans painted over by anti-Berlin slogans; in some of the booths one throws a ball or shoots a gun at the face of an American president I don’t recognize. A small cinema shows footage from the Mexican Front. I buy a ticket for the ferris wheel, then on second thought go back and buy a whole roll of tickets. I get in one of the cages with several other people and the wheel begins to turn. It takes about ten minutes to go completely around, and at the bottom when the others get off I give the guy another ticket. He demands that I go through the line again. I refuse. He certainly isn’t the one who’s going to move me from where I’m sitting in the cage; he calls an officer to report me. The officer means business when he arrives; I think he’s even going to draw his gun. I quietly tell him my name is Banning Jainlight and he should speak to his superior if there’s a problem. He doesn’t need to speak to his superior. He gazes at me a moment and nods slightly; he castigates the man running the wheel. I hand the man the whole roll of tickets: I’d like the cage to myself if you don’t mind, I say to him. Flushed and angry he closes the gate. I rise into the sky that darkens. I forgot to ask if you were beautiful. I forgot to ask if she ever heard you sing. From the critical point of a fever when it either breaks or consumes you, Vienna is displayed from my feet to the west. It lies blasted by dusk and dwindling with the Danube; the palaces of the Hapsburgs rise from the edges of the Ring in fields of wind and granite. A flight of black-hooded bicyclers crosses a bridge in the south. Every window of the city stares back at me bugeyed and untold. If I turn on this wheel long enough and often enough, fast enough and forever enough, it may yet catapult me beyond my moment and yours, into the century that flows on the other side of the island, a white hot blur shot into the round woman moon.

T
HREE YEARS LATER, THE
rising moon slips out of Banning Jainlight’s Twentieth Century into the other. It flies high above the river where another large man is sleeping in a small wooden shack that stands on four wooden pillars over the water. There isn’t much in the shack but the bed, a table with a chair, an old oil lamp that still burbles fire, a small iron stove with only crumbs of dead coal. It must be past midnight. The river’s silent but for the boat which now approaches the shack, not a ferry but a rowboat; the man in the rowboat has left his ferry docked behind him in the dark. The man invests his oars with righteous stealth. In his lap sits gasoline and rags, flaming love. The large man in the shack sleeps through the sound of his demise sailing to him through the water. If the large man were to wake at this moment and make his way to the door of the riverhouse and out onto the small landing, if he were to lean over the rail of the landing and, in the pearlshattered shine of the white moon, look into the water, it isn’t even certain he would see the boat anyway, more likely he would gaze again on the afternoon that precedes him, when he stood in this place and looked into the water and saw her. Saw first her face as though it was just floating down there under the water; but it wasn’t floating, he could see her coming toward him. And just as she came up to him from out of the river, he leaned over and reached his arms to her; from out of the water she shot up. His hands caught hers and pulled her the rest of the way. He almost stumbled as he pulled her into his arms. Now he sleeps with this memory; it’s only the sound of memory if he hears in his sleep the sound of the boat coming. He won’t wake until the moon has lifted out of the doorway altogether, until he doesn’t even know there is a moon. Then he’ll smell the smoke, and wonder where all the fire came from.

Fifty-six years later, after the century has long since run out of numbers but only begins to understand it’s doomed never to die, the man whose hair has been white since the day he was born comes home for the last time. As he did many years before, on the night he exiled himself to sail between home and escape every day again and again, and as he did three years before, on the night he came to find the girl named Kara in the blue dress, he climbs the stairs of the hotel where he lived as a child. He’s lost track of how long he’s looked for the girl in the blue dress. He accepts that he’s lost track of more than just this. Climbing the stairs, the man is neither old nor young now. He doesn’t hear the voices of other men and their stories anymore. He would settle to hear his mother’s voice as it was when he was small and she read the stories that held no interest for either of them but for the sound of her reading them. Here at the top of the stairs he expects now to find the dark he was born from, which drained his hair of color. He knows the Chinese of the town are waiting to hear her call out her own name before she goes; they have a tree all ready for her. The street outside the hotel fills with Chinese and they begin to shuffle into the building downstairs, where the doors barely hang from their hinges and the windows are empty of glass, and no one else, including a manager, lives anymore. Fifty-six years the white woman has lived in the hotel, most of those years its only tenant. Like scavengers the Chinese wait to pick over not the woman’s possessions, which are worthless, but the eyes, ears, fingers attached to the mystery of who she was. He has other plans. Over my own dead body perhaps, he tells himself: but not hers. At the top of the stairs in the hallway her door stands open; for a moment he’s about to call out Mother, that she might hear him from her bed as he turns the door’s corner. Instead he calls her by her name; turning the door’s corner there’s a split second when he sees her white hair on the pillow and believes it’s his own. “Dania?” he asks.

In the final months of the year 1917, a man on a horse chases a train thirty kilometers outside St. Petersburg. The steam of the engine is silver in the night, black against the moon, and the train reliably eludes him like the hour that’s always an hour away. Behind him revolutionaries spur their own horses in pursuit. His ears are filled with their inevitability; it sounds with every passing moment as though they’ve nearly overcome him. Yet he’s already chosen to defy that inevitability they claim for themselves; he means to ride into history as the agent of chaos, believing that if history has a will at all, it’s owned by no man for more than the moment it takes to change it forever. Remembering this, he rides harder. Remembering this, he frees himself from the inevitability of their pursuit and from the way the train eludes him. He lashes his horse and screams into its mane, he reaches down to the saddlebag to confirm that what it holds is securely fastened, and he rides out of his hour and crosses it to the one that’s always an hour away. The horse rears at the track. The Russian leaps to the second from the last car of the train and mutters a prayer to the abandoned animal already disappearing behind him. The man scrambles into the car’s doorway clutching the saddlebag around him as the wind batters him at his back. For a while he just sits in the door watching the mounted revolutionary guards that have chased him from just outside the city: If they
are
the forces of history, he thinks to himself, gasping for air, they’ll catch the fucking train too. He’s trying to figure out where to stash the contents of the saddlebag should this occur. But soon it’s clear this will not occur, soon he sees them disappearing in the night as his horse did. Over the roar of the train he might almost hear their gunshots; he’s almost arrogant enough to laugh, but not quite. After a while he picks himself up and makes his way down the aisle of the dark thundering train. He finds an empty cabin and holding the saddlebag to his chest lays himself out on the seat to sleep. He keeps one hand in the bag where he holds a gun. He dozes awhile, the blond Russian, and wonders if he’ll shoot anyone this evening. It’s in the early hours of the morning that the door of the cabin slides open abruptly, and he lurches upright and nearly showers the doorway with lead; only a moment saves the woman who stands there. She’s dark in the dark, perhaps slavic or mediterranean. She’s moved from another cabin of another car. She looks at the expression on his face, the expression that immediately precedes the decision to hold his fire, though that expression gives no indication of reprieve. She looks at the saddlebag where his hand disappears; she intuitively knows her death waits there for that once in a lifetime command. When the command doesn’t come she accepts this as gracefully as if it had. She breathes deeply and takes a place on the seat across from him. He’s watched her only half a minute before somewhere in his loins rises the first smoke that, six years later, is to become his daughter.

B
Y THE TIME DANIA
had lived with her family fourteen years in the middle of the Pnduul Crater, she could no longer discount the possibility that the rim of the crater was moving. Its livid ridge turned slowly but distinctly around her, traveling to the right as the black clouds above raced to the left like Dobermans. During the year, she and her father, mother and young brother would migrate with the other European exiles of the colony, following the rim of the crater to higher and lower ground depending on the rain and heat; the southern curve, where the trees stood and several wells had been dug, was best. The dusk lay low in the branches of the trees like the foliage of a thousand black trunks. In the middle of autumn she walked through the avenues of the forest while the white leaves fell from above her as though the dusk itself was dying. She lay on the ground and covered herself with the leaves and when her little brother came looking for her she leapt out in an explosion of brittle white, laughing at his little terror all the way back to the gray tents that stood invisible against the ash of the Pnduul. For days afterward her body wore against her will small bits of the white leaves as evidence of the young secret savagery inside her into which she had every intention to grow. She marked the seasons by this savagery.