Tours of the Black Clock

92

THEY’D LIVED IN VIENNA a month, in an apartment building on the edge of the Inner City across from a candleshop, when Dania found a job. Her father, devastated in spirit by the loss of his family, and without resources, attempted only feebly and uselessly to stop her. Dania was now fifteen. She knew four languages fluently and her command of two others was fair; in the jungle over the years all the languages of the colony had woven into something like one. While her first job at the dance school on the other side of the Karlsplatz was menial, her linguistic skills soon landed her an office position. After six or seven months she summoned the nerve to audition before the school’s entrance committee. The committee was embarrassed by her. It was also a source of some exhilarated satisfaction that the Russians, who’d once produced the greatest dancers in the world, were now spitting out grubby little refugees like this one. One of the young dancers of the school was a man in his early twenties by the name of Joaquin Young. Young was a star pupil who taught one or two classes during the school year; the Italian son of an English father and given a Spanish name, the boy had come to the school from Rome eight years before as a prodigy. The school doted on him. They beseeched him to accept Austrian citizenship; he declined though for reasons that had nothing to do with anything as politically prophetic as the fact that only a year hence Austria would no longer exist. It was rather because of the obstinacy and disgust Young felt for the way the school supposed it might use him, when it was clear to Young that it was he who would use the school. In the same way he became legendary for having declined just eight months before a position with the Vienna Ballet, Young made it clear that while he may have passed the ballet’s audition, it failed his. He didn’t want to dance as he would have if he had been born a hundred years before.

When Joaquin Young watched Dania dance he understood, though he might not have identified it in this way, how she danced against history. She danced against it in the way her father crossed its irrevocable hour on horseback twenty years before in pursuit of the train that would take him out of Russia, in possession of the blueprint that the forces of history wanted so badly. She danced her moments so as to own them for herself. He understood that if she was as bad as the instructors and professors on the committee claimed, then there were a hundred misturns, missteps and misgestures she would have made that she did not. By intuition she didn’t strive to control her body but to risk losing control every place she took that body, every place in her own psyche that thundered with gleaming buffalo. “But there’s no structure to her form,” one of them argued, or perhaps he said there was no form to her structure. Young laughed, “She’s inventing her own structures, can’t you see?” He detested the way they supposed that the structures they didn’t recognize weren’t structures at all. This argument raged as the blond girl stood there in the middle of the floor with her head bowed, arms folded in determination, seething; raged as though she wasn’t there at all. Young was overruled, but the committee was unnerved. Days afterward people were still talking in the halls about Dania dancing. What now? he said, the first thing he spoke to her, since he hadn’t actually spoken to her in the audition. I go back to translating letters in the main office, I imagine, she answered, to which he replied, Then your imagination’s limited. Yours, she said back, has danced away with you. That night she returned to the floor where she’d danced for them and pondered the meaning of her own steps.

They didn’t speak again until some months later, when Young caught up with her in the street to tell her he was leaving Vienna. It seemed to her she’d spent enough time pining for young Dr. Reimes back in the jungle and that there was no call now to pine for Joaquin Young. Three weeks after he’d gone she got a letter from Amsterdam. He asked her to come to him. This was the plan all along, she considered, to make me come to him; he didn’t, after all, take me with him. He didn’t say three weeks ago in the street, Come with me. He said goodbye so that he could write three weeks later, Come to me. She put the letter under her pillow and went to the window where she was still thinking about it as the scuffle broke out in the street below her. I’ll go to him, she decided almost defiantly only a moment before she turned away and the stone grazed her face. The next day she still had a large bruise there beneath her eye; she was barely aware of it, conscious only of the way she was enflamed between her legs from the lover who had come that night. “My God,” croaked her father at the sight of her face. She told him about the fight in the street the day before.

Her father didn’t seem so much now like the dashing rider who outraced history outside St. Petersburg back before she was born. He lowered his eyes and when he began to cry, she began to cry. “Oh father,” she ran to him, holding his hand. I’ve cost my family everything, he said. I had it in my head that coming to Vienna was shrewd and look what it’s cost. It’s my mother he means, she thought. He means that if he hadn’t said Vienna she wouldn’t have been on top of him that night, going Vienna Vienna over and over as though to draw the doom of it right up out of him into her. She would have been below him as usual and he’d have sheltered her from the silver buffalo. “I thought,” he said bitterly now, “we’d live under the very nose of history. Rather we’ve jumped into its mouth. And for what?” It was then he drew closed the shutters as though all Vienna was looking in on them, and pulled up one of the floorboards and lifted out in a cloud of African dust the old saddlebag and took from the bag the old blueprint and unrolled it across the table. For a moment he only stood there above the open blue map and shuddered, hacking African dust in his lungs. She held him by the shoulders until the attack ended. In the following silence he ran his hand across the print, lost in thought until she finally asked, “What is it, father?” At first he didn’t seem to hear.

“It’s the map of the Twentieth Century,” he finally answered. He began poring over the blueprint. “There’s a secret room I can’t find.” He shook his head in consternation. “I’ve looked a long time,” he said, “it’s here somewhere.” He flipped through the overlays, he ran his finger along all the lines. “It’s not in the passages or the halls, the likeliest places,” he said, raising the tracing finger emphatically, “not in the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the attic. The basement,” he rubbed his chin with his hand, “well, the basement doesn’t make sense. Where can a secret room lead from the basement? A secret room from the attic might at least go outside.” Outside the Twentieth Century? she thought, terrified for him. “But what’s in the secret room,” she said gently, and after a moment he only answered, “The conscience.” She slowly ran her own hand over the forehead of her old father, wiped from him the dust from the crater which he wore in the same way she secretly wore the leaves of its forest. Tenderly she gazed upon her father’s madness. For twenty years, she told herself, he’s believed this is the floorplan of the Twentieth Century, with a hidden room that is its conscience. She wondered if those who had pursued him were as mad, or whether anyone had ever really pursued him at all.

Take it with you when you go to Amsterdam, he said, and she gave a start; she hadn’t said anything to him of Amsterdam. I didn’t mean to read the letter, girl, he said quietly, I was making up the room while you were at the school today. If he’d seen the blood and white leaves of the sheets as well, he said nothing; he would not be the sort of father, now that he’d lost everyone else, to so abhor his daughter’s womanhood simply because he always wanted her for himself. I won’t take it, she answered, because I’ll be back. He didn’t believe her. I’ll be back, she said, and we’ll find the secret room together. We’ll find it and I’ll dance there, if there’s space for a dance.

T.O.T.B.C. — 11