Tours of the Black Clock

117

I ALLOW SEVERAL DAYS to pass in which I don’t leave my room. The guards are perplexed and even distressed by this. At night I can hear him, from far away, howling like a lonely dog. When I finally go to see him, his eyes beseech me. In the days that have passed since I first saw him, doubts as to the joyous news have begun to grow in his head. I put them to rest. Day after day Petyr reads to him while I sit listening to make sure nothing’s amiss in the translations. Petyr fumes, caught as he is. Z has actually begun to open up and talk a little, in his crazy fashion, small words here and there, a phrase or two of the future. Plans to take his boy up to his retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where everything as far as anyone can see is under his rule. That sort of thing. I feel immense satisfaction to see the past and its memories flood back into his face, to have him remember bit by bit who he is and what he’s done. It’s as though the past and its memory grow in his head in symbiosis with his future and child growing in her, until the two grow to the present that emerges from between her legs. He flourishes as time passes, he occasionally even does respectable imitations of what he used to be, giving forth with this ridiculous statement or that about things of which he never knew anything. We joke together sometimes in the way a grownup jokes with a child or plays with a pet, dangling a string before its claws. In such a way I dangle before him the heartbeats and kicks of the life inside her, and like a small animal he frantically reaches for what I dangle until I snatch it away, laughing. Petyr has sunk so far into the force of his hate for me that his eyes have almost become dull with it, the power frustrated into seething languish. The weeks pass and then the months. The days I spend with the client and our translator, the nights I sail with Giorgio in the lagoon; soon, I tell Giorgio, I’ll go with you to the islands. You come, Giorgio says, they’ll never find you.

T.O.T.B.C. — 14