Tours of the Black Clock

49

ALL NIGHT I WANDER the Ring of the Inner City looking for the address Kronehelm’s given me. The streets are hard with ice and in the waning hours as it begins to snow the squares scurry with people in red capes. The Ring’s circular passages fill with the orange lights of taxis and the yellow windows of carriages that gasp along at the clip of the horses pulling them. A caravan passes me through the archways of the Hofburg and the passengers gaze at the way I affront the grandeur of their obelisks. Two in the morning I’m shuddering beneath a footbridge. The naked vines of dead autumn ivy snap at my eyes. By three I’ve found an open door on the east side of St. Stephen’s; at the core of the cathedral sleeps an encampment of bums and cripples and vagabonds. We all stumble out at dawn. When I see Vienna in the cold sun, the buildings white and chiseled, I understand how the city laughs in its rituals of humiliation and how this lot of riffraff accepts their state of prostration with gratitude. They’d prefer to bleed into their own seats or piss into their own mouths before wringing so much as a drop on the snowy gown of bridal Vienna. The gutters of the Danube run silverpure while the beggars eat their own scum.

I wind up on the river’s edge of the Ringstrasse. In the east, at the very stitching of history where Europe is sutured to Asia, the ferris wheel of the Praterstern spins empty in the wind. The rattle of its cages is brittle beneath the bellow of Hungary. My destination turns out to be a small sidestreet off the main boulevard below the canal, a block away from the Ring. In the window of Kronehelm’s address sits a guy probably not much older than I at a desk, I can see him writing in a ledger as I cross the street. His face is a bloodless pallor; he looks up from his ledger and, when he sees me, waves. Nothing in his face changes, he waves at me like I’ve been walking up this street to this building every morning for years. I’ve never seen him in my life but he waves, he’s waiting for me, just sitting there at this ledger patiently filling it in until I show up. There’s no doubt in his mind who I am. When I get to the door he’s come downstairs to open it. He doesn’t smile and his handshake is perfunctory. Herr Jainlight, he calls me; his name is Petyr. He introduces himself as my translator, though he looks to me more like an accountant. We go upstairs to an apartment that might as well have been flown in from Gramercy Park, where the curtains have all been drawn except for the window where Petyr’s been watching for me.

Petyr and I don’t have much to say. I’m cold through and through, disgusted with everything. I want to eat and sleep, or maybe sleep and eat, and only after I’ve folded myself into a hot bath half my size. The morning’s passed before I’m finally warm, and when I sleep I dream that I’m cold, I dream that I’m walking in Vienna’s circles. When I wake I have the sense it’s night, though with the curtains drawn in my room there’s no way to be sure. But a light is on by my bed, and I’ve turned over and over about eight times before I notice Petyr’s sitting there looking at me, from the chair in the room’s corner. He has his hands folded in his lap and it looks utterly unnatural. In the same way he sat in his window waiting seven weeks for me to show up, he now sits waiting for me to wake up. “It’s an honor to be your translator,” he finally says when he’s sure I’m conscious enough to understand him. His English is good.

I sit up in the bed and make some polite retort about the honor of being translated, and wonder what in the world I’m talking about. Petyr just nods, his pale face never cracks for a moment, and then he taps something on the desk; squinting into the dark I do believe I see a typewriter. I do believe I see a stack of paper, and several black pens lined up like muskets for the cavalry. “Everything’s ready for you,” he says. That’s swell, I tell him, and lie back down to go to sleep: We’ll get to it in no time. April, say. I doze off for a bit, maybe twenty minutes or so, and when I wake again he hasn’t moved, he’s still sitting there. “Yes,” he says, “it’s all ready for you,” in a voice no louder than the snow on the roof, and only when I don’t jump up and run across the room and start typing does he finally add, “But I suppose you’d like some time to rest from your travels.” Now I have to sit up and take a good long look at this character. Finally I just cancel the light by the bed and leave him there in the dark. I never hear him move, so it’s a relief to find him gone in the morning.