Tours of the Black Clock

96

THE LOVERS DIDN’T COME much anymore; there was no trace of them in the mornings. Over the next few years Dania moved many places in the city, sometimes she took up with men who sheltered her, other times a friend from the school where she’d worked protected her. It may have been that police and spies were pursuing her; she was never sure. When the war turned against Germany, the soldiers in the streets became much less vigilant. Everyone in the city sensed the approaching end. By the closing months of 1944 the bombs fell regularly. Bridges on the Danube and the Wien-Fluss lay in rubble. The besieged Viennese came to be familiar, as others had, with the airborne shriek of death. One afternoon Dania pulled a small child from a black abandoned carriage just as the wind of an explosion hurled both of them into a building archway; when she looked back the carriage was gone. There was only the smoking mass of meat and wood, and a wheel that rolled down the road. All winter the people of the city warmed their hands over the ashes of their lives. When the Russians marched in the following April, Dania became yet another sort of refugee, yet another sort of unvanquished. Two weeks after that the war was over.

She was now a twenty-two-year-old woman. She returned to the apartment where she’d lived with her father, and with another woman she took the same flat. Like the other Viennese, the landlady now spoke harshly of the Germans and hailed the occupation of her city by the Russians, French, British and Americans; the apartment happened to be in a British zone, to Dania’s good fortune. Nonetheless she was careful where she walked during the day, since the zones weren’t marked and, unless one had memorized their borders, she could suddenly find herself where she didn’t want to be, which in Dania’s case was the Russian section of town. At night the Russians sent secret patrols into the British and French sections, sometimes even into the American sections, snatching people up; thus Dania didn’t go out at night at all. She spent three years trying to get out of Vienna and Austria. Only when she had a letter from Joaquin Young in London offering her a position in the new dance company he’d begun there, was she able to obtain the official papers. By then she was living alone, the other woman having married a soldier from Indiana who took her back with him. Dania packed up her few possessions and sent them on to England; she didn’t consider in the least loving Joaquin, rather what she loved was her escape from the murder and heartbreak of where she’d lived eleven years. On the last day, standing in the empty apartment gazing around her, she didn’t even think of it as a place of lovers; she thought of it as the last place her father lived. In the empty unlit flat she held her hands to her face and sobbed huge desolate sobs. Dania, she finally said, stopping herself. She went into the bathroom and ran the water in the sink and washed her face. She was too intent on washing away the tears to have ever heard the door open, had the door opened.

She was almost sure she heard, however, someone call a name, a name she might have remembered hearing once in the tall Dutch grass before the shadow of a windmill; but not her name.

When she went back out into the apartment, the shutters of the window stood wide open. For a moment, there in the window, she almost believed she saw someone.

But there’s no one there. She collects quickly her papers of transit and takes her small bag and walks out of the flat as though on her way to the market or a stroll through the Volksgarten. She runs into the landlady on the way down; the older woman averts her eyes. “Mein Fraulein,” she simply says. Dania thinks to reproach the woman for all the treachery she’s considered over the years: but there’s a difference, she tells herself, between what’s considered and what’s acted. “Auf wiedersehen,” she replies instead and continues on her way. She walks through the winding streets of the Inner City. The walls lie in piles of crushed stone and people stand in food lines; the Union Jack flies from the windows. At the train station she waits with all the other people trying to get out of Vienna and finally presents her papers to the officer in charge; when he’s stamped and returned them to her, and only when she’s located her train on the proper track and understands she’s really going, does she turn to see the city from the windows of the Westbahnhof and, overwhelmed, vanish for a moment from sight. I think she’s gone off somewhere to be alone, I can’t be sure. There are views that remain hidden, there are times one cries unseen.