Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Johnson’s on the dock already getting smaller. I can barely hear him over the sound of the water and the engines of the boat churning beneath me. He’s stamping his foot, any second he’s going to throw his hat on the ground and jump on it. Blaine stands behind him in the doorway of the warehouse; his hands are in his pockets and he’s not really looking anywhere at all. I stand there on the side of the ship wanting him to look my way once, wanting just to catch his eye before he’s out of sight and it’s too late.

But I won’t catch his eye, he won’t look my way. I won’t get that last chance to say something to him, he’s going to have the last word. It’s part of the price I pay that he will have the last word. He’s just a lug anyway, anyone can tell that. Not the brains of the operation.

We leave the harbor, the city lasts another hour of my life. The sea lasts a month and a half. In that time the year turns. My life to come will see it turn many times, before I see this city and this hour again.

T.O.T.B.C.—6

A VISA WAITS FOR me in Cherbourg as planned. As planned I take the train to Paris and there spend four freezing bewildered days. I don’t feel any rush to get to Vienna, at this point all these places sound the same to me: places for a tourist. “A hell of a time to be going there ,” people say to me. I don’t know what they’re talking about. “Anyway,” advises a guy I meet in the American Express, “at least go by way of Zurich. Not Munich.” Is there a difference? I ask. “Yeah,” he answers, “one of them has Germans.”

The train to Vienna by way of Zurich has no heat. I’m in a car with three Spanish girls who live in Vienna and spend Christmas in Paris with one of the girl’s families; they’re exiles at least until the civil war ends. Their families have enough money that the three girls can afford to live and look like bohemians. They speak every language within a thousand miles except English. I can’t make up my mind if I prefer their company or not, it’s just less room to sprawl. But when the cold really settles in around one in the morning, no one’s sprawling anyway. I doze fitfully, waking on and off into the night to find, around an hour before dawn, two of them huddled against me in their sleep.

In Zurich we stop long enough to get off the train fifteen minutes and have some coffee in the station. The daylight is thin like a sword. By the time it pulls out for Vienna the train’s full and two more people have gotten the last seats in our cabin. One’s an Austrian woman in her middle forties, a gray hat stabbed imperiously in her hair, who has little use for me and none for the wild Spanish girls. She doesn’t say anything for half the trip until we get to Linz. “This,” she explains in precise though accented English, nodding out the window, “is the city of the Leader’s childhood.” I accept this information respectfully, since I have no idea who the leader of Austria is. Of course she isn’t talking about the leader of Austria. Not yet anyway.

The other person in our cabin is an American about my age who waited all night in the station, having just come in from Toulouse. Later he’ll recount his futile search for Toulouse’s mythical jazz clubs. Carl’s about five and a half feet tall. He tries to sleep and I gaze resentfully at his feet that keep getting in the way of mine. Every once in a while he opens his eyes to peer out the window at the white Bavarian valleys that keep rolling out beneath us; every once in a while the train jerks to a halt so that someone can clear the snow off the tracks. The fires of the little houses burn in the hills like the red eyes of a white horse on my father’s ranch. It’s only when the Austrian woman in the gray hat makes her comment about Linz that he sits straight up, blinking at us in confusion.

“Where are we?” he wants to know.

“Linz,” I say. Actually this is the first moment I understand he’s an American.

“Linz?” he repeats, baffled. He peers around at the Spanish girls and the Austrian woman and then back at me. “Isn’t this train going to Italy?”

“Vienna.”

“Vienna!” Something about him sags. He turns to the Austrian woman and speaks to her in German; she confirms the bad news. He slumps into his seat, disgusted but, more than that, shaken. He planned to go to Italy where the winter would be milder; there’s a wire with some money waiting for him. In the meantime he’s spent his last money on the wrong train. But it’s more than that, I just don’t see it yet. I haven’t gotten to the point yet where I see from the window of my train, or any window, the time to come. I don’t see the Jews on their hands and knees cleaning the cracks of the Kärntnerstrasse with toothbrushes while Austrian society ladies kick them with pointed yellow shoes and spit on the finished spots. Actually, not only do I not see this before it happens, I don’t see it so well as it happens. Like a lot of people I guess. But Carl, crumpled into his seat at this moment on the train, sees it already. His mistake already seems so vast that he must ask himself whether he’s really done it on purpose.

“Supposed to be a nice place, Vienna,” I shrug.

We don’t arrive until nearly dusk, a five hour trip prolonged to ten by winter. For only thirty or forty minutes a silver and red sun reveals itself to our backs, and the snow of the steppes glitters in the Balkan twilight that first nibbles, then swallows whole our train and the entrails of track it leaves behind us. The sky smells of ash and animals, it swims behind itself like a black lake behind the gray ice that freezes over it. The Spanish girls stand in the aisle of the train leaning out the windows; the Austrian woman doesn’t so much as quiver in her place. Rumbling into the Westbahnhof we pass the city in a fog, a thousand balconies clutching at their windows like old severed hands. Mongolian domes swoop nightward. Gypsy flutes blow from the watery halls of the Wien-Fluss and as the train curses to a halt we’re overcome by the hordes who’ve been waiting for us, Asian beggars and Aryan elite, Greek tailors and Milanese bankers and mountain nomads, a jangle of life like I’ve never seen. In no time I’ve lost sight of Carl and the Spanish girls; at some point on the platform of the station I look back to see only the Austrian woman in the door of our car, picking her way among the rabble. Outside the station I catch a trolley to the outskirts of the Inner City where I’m left in the vicious shadows of the Rathaus, reading Kronehelm’s address by the light of the sparks from the trolley’s departure.

ALL NIGHT I WANDER the Ring of the Inner City looking for the address Kronehelm’s given me. The streets are hard with ice and in the waning hours as it begins to snow the squares scurry with people in red capes. The Ring’s circular passages fill with the orange lights of taxis and the yellow windows of carriages that gasp along at the clip of the horses pulling them. A caravan passes me through the archways of the Hofburg and the passengers gaze at the way I affront the grandeur of their obelisks. Two in the morning I’m shuddering beneath a footbridge. The naked vines of dead autumn ivy snap at my eyes. By three I’ve found an open door on the east side of St. Stephen’s; at the core of the cathedral sleeps an encampment of bums and cripples and vagabonds. We all stumble out at dawn. When I see Vienna in the cold sun, the buildings white and chiseled, I understand how the city laughs in its rituals of humiliation and how this lot of riffraff accepts their state of prostration with gratitude. They’d prefer to bleed into their own seats or piss into their own mouths before wringing so much as a drop on the snowy gown of bridal Vienna. The gutters of the Danube run silverpure while the beggars eat their own scum.