Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

Holtz is troubled. I’m watched by Germans all the time, I try to shake them when I leave the flat to return to my family. Perhaps he worries I’ll vanish again, perhaps it’s something else. Lately he comes to my room and sits in the dark for hours rambling about something he calls Barbarossa; it takes you and me away from each other. I see you tapping your foot impatiently waiting for him to leave, I watch you touching yourself and tasting it. Holtz won’t tell me about it at first. “One of the client’s lifelong dreams,” he only hints grandly. Some piece of distinctly audacious treachery, I guess.

“But. …” Holtz says.

But?

Lighting cigarettes all night, putting them out. Rising from his chair, pacing the room, sitting again. “The client’s distracted ,” Holtz says. Distracted? I laugh. Holtz hates it when I laugh. You’re distracting him, Geli. From one of his lifelong dreams. “Banning,” he says, and in this moment I know something’s wrong, “Banning.” I stop laughing and listen to him. “You have to understand what I’m trying to tell you,” he continues, “it’s deadly . The affair’s become political . He doesn’t concentrate the way he used to. Barbarossa’s critical to the war, its timing is absolutely pinpoint.” He’s pacing again. “If it doesn’t take place in the spring, if it’s delayed too long, then we must wait another spring. Worse if he decides not to wait at all, and presses forward too late. …” He stops, turning to me. “They removed her nine years ago when she became a problem for him. They’ll remove her again.”

Remove her? I blink at him in the dark. “What does it mean,” I say, “they’ll remove her?”

“It means,” he says, leaning across our bed, “they’ll remove me. It means they’ll remove you.”

“Then fire me,” I laugh. “Or rather, I’ll fire you.”

Holtz gestures in the night. “But you see,” he starts again, “you see, there are those,” and immediately I know he’s included with them, “there are those who think Barbarossa’s a potential disaster. A potential catastrophe. Who would like to see him forget about it altogether, before he pushes history farther than it can be pushed.” And now he’s rambling again, talking to himself or someone else. “Napoleon tried to push history that far, and history pushed back.” Holtz is a nervous wreck. “For some of us,” he says, “she’s the woman who will save the country. She’s the woman who will save him from himself.”

“I’ll think of something especially good for tomorrow night,” I offer.

He narrows his eyes. He’d advise or threaten me at this moment if he could think of anything that would do either one. I thought he’d never leave, you say when he’s gone.

Courtney, freckletot. Even you could not redeem this.

1941. BARBAROSSA’S CALLED OFF. When Holtz tells me, I can see he thinks it’s a good thing for Germany but maybe not so good for him. There’s relief and wrath in Berlin, eye to eye across the political barricades; Holtz runs low, crossfire flashing above his head. Fifteen years the client’s dreamed of making Russia German; now cronies despair at his wandering nights. I’ve saved Russia, I laugh to you, I’ve saved the world. You squeeze me in your palm, fondle me. “What a very good boy you are then,” you answer. We celebrate. Your legs shine like your eyes. Guys hack tubercular on the stairs outside, there are sounds in the woodwork and the sink pipes rumble like the streets. Russian whispers rise to a wail from the Danube. “Is he here?” you ask, and when I look, sure enough, he is. I guess I never believed he’d come. I know you said it all along; I guess you were right. Do you want him? You look up at him; he rustles in the corner, shrinking away into the dark: “He’s rather a puny one, isn’t he?” Yes. I’ve seen him before: he isn’t much. “Is he as big as you?” Of course not, I laugh. What a question. I push myself into you; he holds the corner of the wall so hard I can see the blood fall from his fingers. Geli, Geli. “Oh my God, my God, my God, my God,” you’re nearly screaming it. To me, though; not him.

MARCH 1942. I’VE SAVED Russia but doomed England. The invasion of the island began today, the German frenzy that’s been building Russiaward now unleashed across the Channel. Japan that was once tempted to strike in the Pacific now becomes attentive to the British colonies in Asia. America that was being gradually drawn into the war only months ago is now forced to wait for England’s fate. Megan twists painfully in the silence from home, phone communication impossible. Sometimes I feel I have this clarity, sometimes I think I see it all rather lucidly. I look around my flat on Dog Storm Street and there’s no one there at all, I tell myself. In the streets of the city people anticipate news of surrender any moment; there are also uneasy rumors of conspiracies in the Chancellery. Something’s happening, people tell me. I have to restrain myself from explaining: He’s gone, you see, they can’t find him. I have to hold myself back from telling them, He isn’t in the Chancellery anymore, he’s here in Vienna; he lives in my flat. He stands in the corner and watches me with the woman both of us love.

Sometimes I’m sure I view it all without obstruction, the Twentieth Century sighted from my window. Today, with news coming in over the radio, I saw it for instance: I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that’s been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. This was the river of the Twentieth Century that was forked at that very moment I saw you in the window of your house across from the candleshop, when the melee was taking place before you in the street; this Twentieth Century I saw from my own window today was the one in which I never saw you at all. In which I never saw you and never wrote of you, and your invention never came to the attention of special clients. In which no evil mind was ever distracted by the reincarnation of a past obsession, no Barbarossas were suspended and therefore evil came to rule the world; or else such suspended invasions were the catastrophe Holtz predicted, and evil therefore collapsed altogether. I longed for this century, seeing it from my window, because I was absolved in it of some of my monstrousness; but I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century, because this is the century in which another German, small with wild white hair, has written away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside. It just couldn’t have been, that’s all. It’s nice to think so, to think evil remains collapsible. But I saw you in that window and the true Twentieth Century found itself, and abandoned the lie it might have chosen to live if you hadn’t been there.

There’s a camp west of here at Mauthausen on the lovely shores of the Danube. I can see the smoke from the rooftop where I hang Courtney’s washed clothes. I remember his name now: Carl. Every day trains come from Switzerland with escaped Jews, the Swiss sending them reliably back.