Tours of the Black Clock

51

MARCH 1937. THE SNOW melts and the ice breaks in the gutters, and people hustle up and down the Kärntnerstrasse from one coffeehouse to the next, painters set up their easels around St. Stephen’s with little fires to keep the colors from hardening in the chill. Every once in a while a palette gets too close to a flame and you can hear little pops of ignition and hue all over the square. There’s the smell of sugar, cologne, cabbage. The Hofburg rises at the middle of the Ringstrasse like a mountain range that’s ripped itself loose from the ocean bottom and floated to the surface; through the streets wild dogs run in herds. Political bombings set off peals of giddiness among the cafe crowd. Phony military guys in high black boots and brown uniforms march back and forth between the fountains.

I try to write in the mornings before Kronehelm wakes. Petyr seems never to sleep at all and almost any time I look up, he’s sitting on the other side of the room watching me. Both of them literally sit and wait for me to deliver another chapter. I can’t take much more of it, I keep telling myself they need me more than I need them. Petyr translates faster than I can write and Kronehelm’s off to Deutschland with it and back before I’ve figured out another escapade. Lately there’s been someone coming by the flat to pick up the material; he wears a long gray coat and his face is pasty-white like Petyr’s and scarred by acne. He’s surly and officious and thinks he’s quite an important fellow running back and forth as errand boy for this Client X. Kronehelm always collapses at the man’s feet and grovels an hour or two. The emissary’s a little surprised to meet me and I don’t blame him, I don’t much look like the dashing figure who tweaks the libidos of the high and mighty in the Chancellery. Between us Kronehelm, Petyr and I have maybe enough worldly experience to fill the closing hours of a slow night in Salzburg. We must look like frauds which, of course, we are. Anyway the flunky in the gray coat takes the new stuff and, as he’s leaving, gives the German salute, which both Kronehelm and Petyr return with shitlicking haste. I just look at the three of them standing there with their arms in the air and I start to laugh and can’t stop. I can’t help it. I laugh like the night I set my father’s house on fire, it’s that funny. The errand boy gets so mad his head looks like a tomato that’s going to pop, and I think Kronehelm’s going to start sobbing in terror any second. “Say, I didn’t mean anything,” I try to assure them, “sure, you go right ahead if you like. Look here,” and I start at it, walking around the room shooting my arm out here and there, then collapsing on the furniture laughing, then jumping back up and saluting some more. I throw the windows open and salute the whole fucking city. It’s the only good afternoon I’ve had since I got here.

When I leave a few minutes later, Kronehelm’s in quite a state. Petyr’s running back and forth with hot tea or something, any moment he’s going to start measuring Kronehelm’s pulse and peering under his eyelids. I’m in too upbeat a mood to let this nonsense undo it, and I just walk out the door leaving the two of them in each other’s care. It’s a fine afternoon and I decide to take a walk over to the Volksgarten and then cut up through the palace over to the Karlsplatz, see who’s being burned in effigy this afternoon or beaten to a mush before the general bloodlust of the Fräuleins in the coffeehouses. Sure enough it turns out the episode with the errand boy from Berlin is only an omen of better luck to come, because I’m walking along the outer wall of the Hofburg when I hear someone shouting from across the street. Galoot! he’s calling, and I look over and there in the doorway of the Cafe Central is Carl. I haven’t seen him since the night I arrived in Vienna. There he is now waving at me and then I hear a pounding on the window of the cafe and look over, and there are two of the Spanish girls waving as well. I cross the street and Carl and I shake hands, we go into the Central and the Spanish girls jump up and embrace me. Actually I don’t remember us ever being that friendly but it turns out they have grateful recollections of huddling against me in the cold of that train. I’m almost speechless with happiness to see the lot of them, to know someone in this city besides the two loonies I’ve been living with. I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting beneath the arched ceiling of the Central with Carl and the Spanish girls and the rest of the clientele, revolutionaries and journalists and Italian tourists, and waiters running up and down the wide marble stairs in their white jackets.

Carl, it turns out, is still not happy about being in Vienna, but I gather that at least one of the girls has taken him under her wing in more ways than one, and so it isn’t the worst situation he’s ever been in. He’s still trying to get his money from American Express so that he can get to Italy. The two of us sit at the table opening all the sugar cubes while the waiter ignores us. With his command of foreign languages Carl negotiates the conversations. Without going into a long story I explain to the three of them my own insane arrangement with Kronehelm and Petyr. “For God’s sake, come live with us,” Carl says, just like that, and then he turns to the girls and lays it out for them in Spanish and German, and they agree that living with them is the sensible solution. I don’t even want to ask if they really have the room for me because I don’t care; I don’t want to know what their place is like or whatever reasons there might be I shouldn’t go. The only question in my mind is how I’m going to break the news to Kronehelm without him putting a gun in his mouth and painting the walls of his flat with the slush of his brains.

I decide I need to spell it out for him this very night. Carl and the girls come with me and wait out in the street while I go upstairs and wake up Kronehelm, who’s retired early. “Say, mein Herr,” I start talking as soon as I see his eyes flicker, “I’ve reached a business decision here, I’m leaving,” and he’s still rubbing his face getting himself oriented, looking at me, saying to himself, What’s happening? “I’m taking a powder residencewise, I think it’s best,” and now he’s shaking his head as though to clear it out, “but I’ll be in touch with you very soon because we’re still partners, partner,” and now he’s finally starting to get it, “I just don’t think this is a good idea my being here, it, uh, well it ebbs the creative flow you know, it uh, well, let’s just say,” and he’s shaking his head but I bull my way through, “let’s just say that if I stayed here another night, another minute, I’d probably, you know, kill you. Probably. Because you drive me fucking crazy. But the business, that’s still on, I mean I’ve got the goods and you’ve got the market, so let’s not worry about it, I’ll probably write even bigger and better, look at it that way,” and now, as I feared, he’s starting to clutch at my clothes. No no no no, he’s starting, first quite low and calm really, just No no no no, and then when I take his hands and try to pry them finger by finger from my coat he just starts screaming. He’s raving about Client X this and Client X that, and I realize that given the little party we had with the German flunky this afternoon and all that saluting we did together, this is probably not timed absolutely the best it could be, but there’s no going back now, if I stay Kronehelm and Petyr will be up all night plotting strategy how to keep me. They’ll bind me to the damn typewriter, glue my fingers to the keys. So I’m going now. Client X, Client X, Kronehelm keeps choking; he’s holding my ankles and letting me drag him across the floor as I walk to the door. It’s appalling. Then he’s slipped out of his bathrobe and I’m dragging him across the floor naked. This old man with half-finished flesh like the tissue of a fetus, sliding across the floor on my ankles. Petyr stands in one of the doorways staring at us. Finally I just kick him loose; he shudders there at my feet and, as though to mercykill something that’s just been delivered up between birth and stillbirth, I raise my foot over his head and am ready to bring it down. And Petyr, without a sound, screams. He screams without a sound, his whole body’s racked with it, though nothing comes out. The white of his pallor has turned blue. I bring the foot down but not on Kronehelm and just lean into the doorway breathing hard; none of us moves until finally I say, “I’ll send word in a couple of days,” to Petyr, and then stumble out into my life.