Tours of the Black Clock

70

THE SUMMER PASSES. WE have no money, Megan’s parents having cut off her stipend in retaliation. The arrival of the granddaughter may yet alter this course, but for the moment we live off what Megan’s saved, and what little I’ve saved from the work that I no longer do. I stay home with the child while Megan looks for work; it’s unconventional but I can’t be walking around the streets of the city in broad daylight, Holtz and the boys are out looking for me. I wish we could get out of Vienna but if we tried I’d be arrested. Megan asks no questions. She’s happy to have all of me even on mysterious terms. She’s taken to theft; she shoplifts food, silverware, furniture, books. She comes home with dressers, beds, sofas. I hear the sound of the day’s crime in the stairwell, and go down the stairs to find a table or trunk perched on the back of her four-foot-eleven frame. Our apartment is lavishly furnished by the finest shops in Vienna. She made the decision to resort to a life of crime easily enough, but the Anschluss didn’t hurt. She’s not stealing from Austrians after all, but Germans now. Think of it as a political act, she explains; but I won’t demean it that way. I seem to spend most of my days washing clothes, dragging them up to the top of the roof where I’ve strung a line. From up there I can see the Westbahnhof less than a mile away; I scheme all the time, to no avail.

Go away.

Sometimes I’ll see someone watching me from a window across the street, and I think it’s a spy. A spy for them, a spy for you.

The Czechoslovakians will be Germans soon, too, all of us touched to Germanlife by the god who loves you.

Courtney lives on my shoulders. It’s the only place high and right enough for her, every other place too close to the ground. On the rooftops now, to the witness of spies, I toss her into the sky, she laughs and laughs. She folds her little hands, each the size of my eyes, across my face and challenges me to live in the black world of her creation. I cry out in mock alarm and she laughs some more. When I hear her I clutch her to my chest and keep her tight to me; I see something. I clutch her so as to make her part of my bigness, which will protect her. I see something horrible. It glints sharply across my vision and then vanishes. She protests the chest and demands the bird’s-eye view from my back. For just a moment I refuse her and hold her anyway; something in me, at the sight of something I cannot or will not keep in my mind’s eye, drops away, as though what’s below my waist is only a dream, and I’m really a tree rooted to a void.