Tours of the Black Clock

68

THE CLIENT CAME TODAY.

His troops marched down the Ring. The Austrians canceled the election and conceded the issue: they will be Germans. All the parks were filled with New Germans. From my flat with Megan I heard the fall of the soldiers’ feet like the gunfire of steady executions; as I walked to the Inner City the thunder of it grew. Half a mile away I could feel the earth shake from it. Traffic came to a stop, the newsstands were emptied of papers, the beerhalls and cafes emptied of people who flooded the Volksgarten, the Burggarten, to watch his troops pour into the Ring from all the boulevards leading into the city. Against the blue and silver sky the mean granite sliver of the Rathaus stood like a frozen white flame from which you could hear the whimper of someone burning. At the top of the steps of one of the Hofburg buildings I could see nothing but soldiers for as far as the Ring curved; around me men were hoarse with liquor and adrenaline. Women lined the porticos of the theaters, pressed against the stone walls along the street. Some dark shiny ecstasy rushed out from the middle of them at the sight of him; when they moved from the walls they left round wet spots behind them. Sometimes they fainted and crumpled to the ground, and all along the road women were lying in the street while on the walls above their heads were the wet exclamations of subjugation. In the empty alleys of the Inner City herds of dogs met up with each other, all of Old Vienna left to them. Not a vagabond or gypsy or Jew to be seen. A thousand front pages floated down from the cathedral towers.

The client was in a reviewing stand on the other side of the Burg Ring. I couldn’t see him as clearly as I wanted. He appeared slightly paunchy, with scrawny forearms, but I couldn’t see the eyes, where they say the power lies. Someone next to me said, He’s a god, and everyone murmured assent. I laughed. They turned and looked at me and I laughed again, slapping my leg. Everyone watched me with hate and horror.

Well I’m the one who’s resurrected your god’s greatest obsession, I said to them. So what sort of god does that make me?

I’m back on Dog Storm Street now.

Revelry and fury in the city. The night passes, we spend it quietly. You suck me toward midnight, into the new day, but nothing comes. I watch the ceiling and run my fingers through your hair, it’s nearly time to return home when the car arrives. I didn’t expect it so soon, his first night here.

A soldier waits for me at the door. He orders me to follow him, and I guess I have to; we’re in Germany now. We go downstairs, the landlady’s peering from a black crack in the door. I’ll have to tell Holtz to talk to her so she doesn’t evict me. I get in the car waiting outside and soon we’re at the Ring just a few blocks from the Opera. I’m taken through a side door of the Hotel Imperial and up through a side lift. We probably go something like fourteen or fifteen levels until we’re near the top. The door of the lift opens and the same German soldier who came to get me waits for me to step out.

The hallway’s dark. A small light at the end reveals a sitting room, the double doors of the suite are closed. I decide I’ll wait here in one of the chairs on the other side of the room.

After twenty minutes the door opens and someone’s back is to me. He’s giving the German salute, beyond him the room is only dimly lit. There are voices, the German of Germans, harder than the German of Austrians, at least until today. I have confidence the New Germans will find the requisite measure of brutality inside themselves somewhere.

The man in the door turns and it’s Holtz.

He closes the door behind him and walks with quiet care across the sitting room; he extends his hand to me. We’ve never shaken hands and on Dog Storm Street I would ignore it, but here it seems a good thing to do. Now the door opens again and several other German officers come out. At first they ignore us completely, but then they look again, and they look at each other as they walk down the hall. Way down the hall they’re still looking over their shoulders at me.

“Hello, Banning,” Holtz is saying. Along with the handshake it’s also the first time he’s called me this; I call him colonel. “Sorry to bring you here in the middle of the night,” Holtz says; he’s practically whispering. “The client would like to meet you,” he says, very carefully and pointedly; and I can see in his face what’s unspoken, he’s saying, We’re both sitting on dynamite here. You can treat me like manure, he’s saying, but this is the client. I just nod and he nods and we both stand here nodding at each other. I say something like he must be busy, maybe we can do this another time; and then the fear passes to a realization, and then rage: I never wanted to have to know this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he was never supposed to be anything more than an unseen unheard client, Client Z. He was never supposed to have a name or face, particularly not this name or face; I don’t want to have to live with it.

“It’s impossible,” I suddenly blurt out.

Holtz is holding me by the arm. He can barely get his hand around my arm, and he’s a good half-foot shorter than I, but he’s got my arm in a clamp and I can see now he’s shitless terrified, just out of his mind with terror. He’d like nothing better than for this to have never come to pass. “Don’t move, don’t speak,” Holtz rasps, “when you wake up tomorrow you can pretend it was all a dream if you like. But right now. …” He looks at the door. “I have to go back in. Sit and wait and don’t try to leave, the guards will stop you anyway.”

Holtz disappears back into the room and I sit and wait like I’ve been told. I’m not sure of the time but it must be around two in the morning, perhaps later. It seems to me I’m waiting the rest of the night, though later I realize it’s only about an hour and a half. More officers come in and out of the suite. Most of them are looking at me when they do, it’s difficult to know whether they watch me in mystery or informed fascination. I must assume it’s the former, though the next several years will give way to the latter. Then the traffic ceases altogether and I’m left sitting in the dark. Holtz does not reappear for a long time. Not a single sound comes from behind the door; for all I know whoever’s in that suite has slipped out through another exit. The daybreak may come and I’ll be shot as an intruder, I muse without anger. I study the room awhile. Baroque tapestries hang from the walls, scenes of Metternich and Mozart, one Hapsburg or another being enthroned or entombed. It’s warmer here than at either of my flats, and I sink further into the chair, suspended and patient.

Holtz finally comes out, once again opening and closing the door as though not to wake someone. He does it so tentatively the door doesn’t really catch behind him. He comes over and I stand up; he looks relieved. “I’m sorry,” he says crisply, quietly, “it can’t be tonight. The … the client is leaving Vienna.” But he just got here, I think to myself. “He’ll be back in a week or so, there’s going to be a new election. Perhaps then.” Perhaps not, he adds without saying it. His face sags from the tension. I just nod all right. Behind us the door that didn’t quite catch closed drifts partly open.

For just a moment I look and, in the faint light of the suite beyond the door, the client looks back.

He’s standing over a desk, both hands flat on the desk as he leans over the papers scattered before him. To one side is a half-finished plate of food; it looks like it may have been sitting there all night, eaten from erratically. On a couch behind him I can barely see a blond woman, pretty in a very ordinary way; she’s curled up asleep, or partly asleep. Maybe she’s waited for him to come to bed, maybe she’s been waiting for a sign it matters to him whether she goes ahead to bed or not. When I look through the door he looks up from his papers, his hair falling in his face; he looks first at the affront of the open door, and then at Holtz, and then at me. At each stage of this small act his face slowly changes; at the sight of me he goes white. His mouth falls slightly open. In his eyes is no power at all. When we look into each other’s eyes, his beg to be conquered in the way he’s conquered this very city on this very day; there’s the fear and hope that I’m as merciless as he. I can imagine that he’s sat behind this door all evening picking at his food and glancing distractedly at his papers, wondering what he would say to me; when the nerve finally failed him, he couldn’t go through with it. My anonymity to him is no less compelling than his to me: this has all been a mistake.

Holtz follows my line of vision, turns to peer over his shoulder at the open door. He blanches. He races to the door and, muttering profusely through it, closes it. Z never turns away from me, nor I from him, until the door shuts us off from each other for thirty years to come. In thirty years, when I’m an old man and he’s an ancient living in a basement in Italy, I’ll wonder if he remembers this moment, or if he remembers ever seeing me at all.

Holtz walks me to the lift and sees me off without a word. He’s still standing at the door when it slides closed; he has a funny look on his face. The car’s waiting for me, and I let it take me back to Dog Storm Street. I have a pact with Megan to be there in the morning, but I don’t want the Germans to know where she lives, and I’m not finished at the other flat besides. You didn’t finish me earlier this evening and now I’m ready for you. I have to unbutton my fly on the way up the stairs, I’m that urgent; I can only hope the landlady isn’t watching.

You’re putting on lipstick when I come in. You stand naked at the sink, studying your mouth in the mirror. What did he say? you ask, and I answer, He begged us. You touch yourself reflexively, unaware you’ve even done it.

At the window something’s coming out of me, it doesn’t sound so much like laughter except that you begin to giggle, so it must be laughter. I seem to be shaking with this sound, there in the window; it fills the room and runs out the window. Down on the street by the corner is a man smoking a cigarette; I notice he’s looking up at my room. I think he may have been there when I drove up in the car; I believe he’s a German tail. Not one of the New Germans born today but an Original German. Even now he pretends to be casual but the sound that comes from me moves up the street toward him, and he lights another cigarette nervously and discards it quickly, pulling his coat up around his neck. A woman in the belfry across the way opens her window in alarm. Other windows open up and down the street; it’s still an hour before daybreak. The sound keeps coming and if it’s laughter it’s of a different virus, not like when I used to laugh in the windows of New York with the other girls. The landlady downstairs in her room is making noise. You sit on the bed giggling your lipstick into a smear, and then laughing louder the more I laugh.

The level of it rises in the city. Doormen posted outside the pensiones leave their places, chairs tip over in the gutters. Midway through it people are erecting barricades outside their doors and boarding up their windows, I can hear the fall of hammers and the searing of steel down the block. The landlady’s hurling herself furiously from wall to wall in the room below, lights come on in one window after another all over the neighborhood until the laughter obliterates them one by one in turn. A woman with an open shirt moves into the streetlamp below, her mouth streaked with butter; the doormen are replaced with other doormen, keys jangle from their belts large and white like bones on a ring. In the window I take off my clothes. I don’t even need to call you to me, you know to come. You stand against me embracing me from the back, we can barely hold each other in the mutual convulsion. The sound of me dies and only the convulsion’s left, but the sound of you never stops. Reaching around in front you seize me with your hand; the sound in me’s dead: Don’t laugh, I say. You take me in your hand and still laugh; with your other hand you reach around and hold all of me; you laugh into my back. You can barely get your thin pink arms around me. Don’t laugh, I say. The more I say it, the more you laugh; the more you laugh, the wilder you caress and thrash me. My love explodes in the snow on the sill. Just don’t laugh anymore, I groan in the window, sinking to the floor beneath it. With your hair you tie yourself to the bed and begin to sing.