Tours of the Black Clock

89

SHE WAS RARE COLOR against the toneless chalk of the crater, a tawny blot snatched from the genes of her father’s younger years. All the other people of the colony were the white and gray of Europeans or the black of her mother’s hair or her brother’s or Reimes from Germany, or the deep gray of African flesh, the natives venturing into the crater only when the religious dictates of the moon allowed it since they believed the Pnduul was in fact a patch of the moon that had fallen to earth and therefore not to be trespassed casually. Against the bleached whirling rim of the crater anyone could see her dance. Her father brought her when she was six to a Frenchman with aristocratic pretensions who taught ballet in Paris before becoming ensnared in whatever particular disgrace brought him here. The Frenchman considered the Russian and his dirty little girl to be beneath him. “She moves around so damn much,” the Russian said, “see if she can dance,” as though the one was the logical extension of the other.

Well it’s impossible clearly, the Frenchman said to himself an hour later, as little Dania postured around the stick he perched between two stones out in the middle of the plain. She has no balance, look there! He wanted to laugh out loud. He could hardly wait to show the presumptuous father. The silt of the crater blew over them in the afternoon, sometimes so dense the girl was only gold flint in the white air. The Frenchman peered over his shoulder to see if the father was watching in the distance. Good, he thought, she’ll fall over any moment and he’ll see for himself. She did not fall over. The wind that whipped the rim of the crater rose and fell; even in the wind she didn’t topple. I don’t understand, the Frenchman said to himself, it’s clear she has no balance, look at the way she teeters in relationship to the ground. But the girl wasn’t moving in relationship to the ground, she moved in relationship to the moment. From each moment in which she was destined to topple she danced away. She had no particular grace, she had no rhythm anyone would identify as such. She didn’t move or dance like any little kid the Frenchman had seen. He fumed. It enraged him, the impertinence of her not falling.

Meanwhile the little blond girl was squinting at the Frenchman through the dust. He’s waiting for me to fall over, she said to herself. Occasionally, just to make him a little crazy, she’d wobble in a particularly precarious fashion before pulling herself back from the future. “What did I tell you?” the Russian said to the Frenchman. “She’s going to be beautiful too, anyone can see that.” The ballet teacher would have considered it small consolation to know that while the girl might be destined to dance, she was not destined to be beautiful, if there was such a thing as destiny.

After the young German doctor came to the colony she danced for him, dirty auric in the white crater. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him standing off in the trees watching her against his will. She found him one night in her father’s tent when no one else was there. “Are you lost,” she said, and he whirled to the sound of her voice behind him, “did you wander off by mistake?” In the dark of the tent she thought she could summon up the beauty she didn’t have; if there’d been room she’d have danced him into submission. It was too dark to see if he blushed.

He put his hand out to her and pulled it back; she could almost hear him thinking, My God, she barely bleeds yet. “It’s blood enough,” she muttered in the dark, “in the jungle it doesn’t take so much blood.” He began crashing wildly around the tent where not long before she’d found her father reading his blue map. “So what kind of doctor is it,” she taunted him as he finally bumbled his way out, “who’s afraid of the sight of blood?” After a moment she stood there alone. Or is it just my blood, she asked herself, lamenting her plainness.