Tours of the Black Clock

73

1939. LOVE RAGES. IT cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more. These German nights we sit at the bottom of the well joined and impulsed, in the mornings I climb up the rope of my love to the light, where my child waits. Megan grows sadder. Her parents resume the stipend, inspired by the grandchild, and she gives up her life of crime; but the days are still, disquieting. Austrian papers scream of “the Polish provocation,” Swiss papers tell it differently. In September the British declare war and Megan’s sorrow spreads like her hair on the pillow behind her head. All touch is lost with her nation and people: We’re at war, I say to you. The happy delirium on your face at this news is unmistakable, you coo for defilement. “Is he watching?” you mutter beneath me; I look for his form in the shadows of the room. The heat inside you detonates me. By the end of the year, people in the street are certain the war will be a short one. When Holtz visits I can tell he isn’t so sure; he’s dazed that events have gone this far. Many more Germans soon, Danes, Belgians, Dutch. One afternoon in the autumn of 1939 I’m standing in the Volksgarten with my little girl, now almost one and a half years old; she teeters precariously on her little legs; and as we’re watching the Viennese strolling in the unnerved hours I gaze around and I’m in a boat. The boat is on water with a thousand other small boats around us, a city floats in a lagoon behind us, the Adriatic Sea glistens to the east of us. A fisherman at the other end of the boat watches me knowingly. Everything in me aches; I’m old. I have a beard. It’s thirty years from now, and lying in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in a brown cloak, is a very old man, white thin hair and dead eyes, gazing up at me. It’s not a vision I’m having, or a dream. I feel the boat rocking as surely as anything I’ve ever felt. I look at the old man trying to remember who he is, because I know I’ve seen him; and then I have this distant memory of thirty years before, when I caught his eye for several seconds through the hotel doorway.