Tours of the Black Clock

88

BY THE TIME DANIA had lived with her family fourteen years in the middle of the Pnduul Crater, she could no longer discount the possibility that the rim of the crater was moving. Its livid ridge turned slowly but distinctly around her, traveling to the right as the black clouds above raced to the left like Dobermans. During the year, she and her father, mother and young brother would migrate with the other European exiles of the colony, following the rim of the crater to higher and lower ground depending on the rain and heat; the southern curve, where the trees stood and several wells had been dug, was best. The dusk lay low in the branches of the trees like the foliage of a thousand black trunks. In the middle of autumn she walked through the avenues of the forest while the white leaves fell from above her as though the dusk itself was dying. She lay on the ground and covered herself with the leaves and when her little brother came looking for her she leapt out in an explosion of brittle white, laughing at his little terror all the way back to the gray tents that stood invisible against the ash of the Pnduul. For days afterward her body wore against her will small bits of the white leaves as evidence of the young secret savagery inside her into which she had every intention to grow. She marked the seasons by this savagery.

It wasn’t until a number of years later, running alone through the nightstreets of New York, the frantic large lumbering sound of her lover behind her, that in the middle of her fear she questioned the exile of her childhood. From Paris and Madrid and Brussels, writers and geologists and dull bureaucrats had left their homes and come to the colony when one intrigue or another was about to catch up with them. There was a young doctor from Berlin who arrived in her thirteenth year. It took her about a day and a half to fall in love with him. He was in his late twenties with black hair like her mother’s and blue eyes; what crime brought him to the East Sudan was unclear. It was possible he was a missionary who’d come to live with the savages: I’m a savage too, she insisted to him. The doctor watched her with genuine longing but kept his distance. He wants to be respectable to me, she thought disgustedly, like an uncle or older brother. His name was Reimes. Good day Dr. Reimes, she said when they passed, the word doctor spat out in acidic irony. She despised the fact he was such a gentleman. On a train in Russia years before, her mother had decided in the course of an evening to go with her father to Africa; it was the thing about her mother the girl came to remember most vividly, as though she’d been there herself, and admire most fervently, as though her mother had never done anything else so remarkable.

She came to understand that her father’s flight to the Sudan had to do with the blueprint he kept rolled in an old saddlebag that no one else ever knew. She saw it one night when they were living on the western curve of the crater as the face of the crater revolved beneath them. Her father laid it out on the table under the lamp that swung from the top of the tent; five or ten minutes she stood in the shadows watching the light sway back and forth across his hair the gold of which had become distinctly wan over the recent years. He was intent enough studying the blueprint that even when she took a step from the shadows it was a moment before he noticed, and he was more violently startled than she’d ever seen him. “Is it a map?” she said to him. He sagged a bit and smiled. Yes, he said, it’s a kind of map. She stepped forward a little closer and looking at the blueprint more closely asked, “Is it a house?” Yes, he answered, it’s a kind of house. On the blueprint she could see the general living area, a dining area, the bedrooms and the toilet. There was an attic and basement. There were two passages that ran secretly in the walls from the downstairs entryway to one of the upstairs bedrooms, and from the basement straight up to the attic somehow without passing any of the floors in between. Overlaying the blueprint were several other sheets, fine and nearly transparent, with other lines, but years later when she examined the plan more carefully she could never get the lines of one overlay to correspond with those of the other, or with those of the original blueprint. She began to understand it wasn’t quite a house at all. I said it was a kind of house, he explained without explaining, I said it was a kind of map. “Is it,” she asked on this particular night when she saw the blueprint for the first time, “where we’re going to someday live?” Her father’s face, now lined in a way she’d never seen short of the light of the lamp swaying from the top of the tent, broke into a sad smile and answered, But we live there already, my girl.