Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I wind up on the river’s edge of the Ringstrasse. In the east, at the very stitching of history where Europe is sutured to Asia, the ferris wheel of the Praterstern spins empty in the wind. The rattle of its cages is brittle beneath the bellow of Hungary. My destination turns out to be a small sidestreet off the main boulevard below the canal, a block away from the Ring. In the window of Kronehelm’s address sits a guy probably not much older than I at a desk, I can see him writing in a ledger as I cross the street. His face is a bloodless pallor; he looks up from his ledger and, when he sees me, waves. Nothing in his face changes, he waves at me like I’ve been walking up this street to this building every morning for years. I’ve never seen him in my life but he waves, he’s waiting for me, just sitting there at this ledger patiently filling it in until I show up. There’s no doubt in his mind who I am. When I get to the door he’s come downstairs to open it. He doesn’t smile and his handshake is perfunctory. Herr Jainlight, he calls me; his name is Petyr. He introduces himself as my translator, though he looks to me more like an accountant. We go upstairs to an apartment that might as well have been flown in from Gramercy Park, where the curtains have all been drawn except for the window where Petyr’s been watching for me.

Petyr and I don’t have much to say. I’m cold through and through, disgusted with everything. I want to eat and sleep, or maybe sleep and eat, and only after I’ve folded myself into a hot bath half my size. The morning’s passed before I’m finally warm, and when I sleep I dream that I’m cold, I dream that I’m walking in Vienna’s circles. When I wake I have the sense it’s night, though with the curtains drawn in my room there’s no way to be sure. But a light is on by my bed, and I’ve turned over and over about eight times before I notice Petyr’s sitting there looking at me, from the chair in the room’s corner. He has his hands folded in his lap and it looks utterly unnatural. In the same way he sat in his window waiting seven weeks for me to show up, he now sits waiting for me to wake up. “It’s an honor to be your translator,” he finally says when he’s sure I’m conscious enough to understand him. His English is good.

I sit up in the bed and make some polite retort about the honor of being translated, and wonder what in the world I’m talking about. Petyr just nods, his pale face never cracks for a moment, and then he taps something on the desk; squinting into the dark I do believe I see a typewriter. I do believe I see a stack of paper, and several black pens lined up like muskets for the cavalry. “Everything’s ready for you,” he says. That’s swell, I tell him, and lie back down to go to sleep: We’ll get to it in no time. April, say. I doze off for a bit, maybe twenty minutes or so, and when I wake again he hasn’t moved, he’s still sitting there. “Yes,” he says, “it’s all ready for you,” in a voice no louder than the snow on the roof, and only when I don’t jump up and run across the room and start typing does he finally add, “But I suppose you’d like some time to rest from your travels.” Now I have to sit up and take a good long look at this character. Finally I just cancel the light by the bed and leave him there in the dark. I never hear him move, so it’s a relief to find him gone in the morning.

IT MUST BE THAT Petyr looks like an accountant only because he is one. Not only does he translate what I write but handles the business end of it as well. Over the next week, watching him at his desk by the window, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s diddling Amanda or decimals; his face never changes. I can’t imagine what my writing must read like as interpreted by this manager of numbers, though it’s possible he’s perfect for the job, leaving the passion to me and claiming only precision for himself. What a team, Petyr and Amanda and Molly and I.

Kronehelm wired a week ago to say he’ll be here in four or five days. There’s a fairly unveiled hint that I’m expected to make up for lost time. The clients in Vienna and Munich and Berlin wait with great anticipation for my new adventures. In the first week I find it impossible to get much done, though thinking about the Spanish girls on the train from Paris opens up a couple of inspiring possibilities. Petyr’s disappointed though. The clients don’t want Spanish girls from Paris, he reminds me, they want Americana — gangsters and Indians. He tells me Client X has a particular penchant for Aztec mysticism, so I cook up some stories involving conquistadors. Client X isn’t to be underestimated, a very big shot in the German government. Neither Petyr nor Kronehelm says much about him but it doesn’t take long to figure out they’re scared to death. One afternoon I overhear Kronehelm make some reference to “the little cripple,” and there’s a moment of silence that’s palpable even in the next room; both he and Petyr hold their breaths as they ponder the recklessness of the remark and wait for the consequences of its indiscretion, as though any second German police are going to come through the windows.

This goes on a month or two. In a quarter of this time I reach a breaking point. I can’t stand to stay in the flat and I can’t bear the idea of facing either Vienna or its winter again. I’m fucking cooked, that’s all, stuck here stewing in my juices. Petyr’s such an unsettling little worm that the day Kronehelm arrives I’m almost happy to see him slither in with his trunks and crates and immediately pull the curtains even tighter so not the thinnest slice of dank gray European light can come through. Kronehelm throws his arms around me and begins to cry with joy; I guess he figured I’d never actually show up. After a few more days I know something’s got to give, what with three freaks waddling from one dark room to the next publishing obscene books for the private collections of deformed midgets in Berlin five hundred kilometers away. You just know that kind of enterprise is going to have one or two pressure points somewhere. When I’ve been in Vienna eight weeks, spring begins to slip into the city like a refugee, and I, also like a refugee, am looking to slip away.

MARCH 1937. THE SNOW melts and the ice breaks in the gutters, and people hustle up and down the Kärntnerstrasse from one coffeehouse to the next, painters set up their easels around St. Stephen’s with little fires to keep the colors from hardening in the chill. Every once in a while a palette gets too close to a flame and you can hear little pops of ignition and hue all over the square. There’s the smell of sugar, cologne, cabbage. The Hofburg rises at the middle of the Ringstrasse like a mountain range that’s ripped itself loose from the ocean bottom and floated to the surface; through the streets wild dogs run in herds. Political bombings set off peals of giddiness among the cafe crowd. Phony military guys in high black boots and brown uniforms march back and forth between the fountains.

I try to write in the mornings before Kronehelm wakes. Petyr seems never to sleep at all and almost any time I look up, he’s sitting on the other side of the room watching me. Both of them literally sit and wait for me to deliver another chapter. I can’t take much more of it, I keep telling myself they need me more than I need them. Petyr translates faster than I can write and Kronehelm’s off to Deutschland with it and back before I’ve figured out another escapade. Lately there’s been someone coming by the flat to pick up the material; he wears a long gray coat and his face is pasty-white like Petyr’s and scarred by acne. He’s surly and officious and thinks he’s quite an important fellow running back and forth as errand boy for this Client X. Kronehelm always collapses at the man’s feet and grovels an hour or two. The emissary’s a little surprised to meet me and I don’t blame him, I don’t much look like the dashing figure who tweaks the libidos of the high and mighty in the Chancellery. Between us Kronehelm, Petyr and I have maybe enough worldly experience to fill the closing hours of a slow night in Salzburg. We must look like frauds which, of course, we are. Anyway the flunky in the gray coat takes the new stuff and, as he’s leaving, gives the German salute, which both Kronehelm and Petyr return with shitlicking haste. I just look at the three of them standing there with their arms in the air and I start to laugh and can’t stop. I can’t help it. I laugh like the night I set my father’s house on fire, it’s that funny. The errand boy gets so mad his head looks like a tomato that’s going to pop, and I think Kronehelm’s going to start sobbing in terror any second. “Say, I didn’t mean anything,” I try to assure them, “sure, you go right ahead if you like. Look here,” and I start at it, walking around the room shooting my arm out here and there, then collapsing on the furniture laughing, then jumping back up and saluting some more. I throw the windows open and salute the whole fucking city. It’s the only good afternoon I’ve had since I got here.