Tours of the Black Clock

65

FIVE WEEKS PASS. IT’S autumn in Vienna, frayed and hushed. I go to see her. I wait for her to come home, plump little anglosaxon dumpling bouncy and wild. It’s dusk, she unlocks the door and I come up behind her. The shadow overwhelms her; she turns where she stands and drops the key. I retrieve it. “Hello,” I tell her. She’s breathing heavily and in the light her face is as red as her hair. It might be she’s going to say to me, How are you? or, You just left me that night, or Go away. Instead she says, “I’m pregnant,” and no sooner has she said it than she bitterly resents the desperation it betrays. I won’t insult either of us by pretending to wonder if it’s mine. “I’ll marry you,” I say, and am horrified by the way it sounds: “Marry me,” is the way I rephrase it. She laughs shortly in the doorway, still bitter, then just smiles to herself, melancholy, and for a moment she’s only going to take the key, put it in the lock, open the door and shut herself away from me. In the next moment she’s sprung at me, to the place where I’ve backed away from her so I don’t loom so large, and she’s pounding me, beating my chest with her fists, wailing furiously. On the other side of the street people stop to look; I’m holding her by the wrists and she begins kicking and I pull her to me to make her stop. She sobs into my shirt. “Megan,” I whisper, “Megan. It’s for me.” I whisper, “It’s for me I’m asking it. I know you don’t need pity from me. It’s for me because … everything’s gone wrong lately. This is my conscience throwing me a line, this is one little bit of decency in the middle of. …There are many things I can’t explain. Just let me have this little normal decent thing that tells me not everything I do is corrupt.” We stand in the street several minutes and finally go up to her apartment. I stay with her on into the night, and leave about eleven. In her sleep I promise I’ll return by dawn. Under the moon of madness I cross a bridge at the Wien-Fluss; thirty-five years from now I step onto the old man’s ferry and he sails me to your island. There’s a moment, between the island and the boathouse on the shore, when neither’s in sight.