Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

When she woke she guessed she’d slept a quarter of an hour. She was still folded across the red velvet seat in the dark; she could smell him running out of her, and his sweat on her back. She untwisted herself and burned anew. The train was somewhere in Belgium. She slowly dressed and went down to the end of the car to use the bathroom and wash her legs; she slumped against the toilet gasping. Back outside she stood staring out the window. Dutch rivers fled across her vision. After some time the train came to a station; it was possible she was now in Holland. She took her one small bag and left the train, walking across the dissipated light of the platform. She walked through the station and out into a small Flemish village. She walked down the one road and within minutes she was out by the tall grass where the little houseboats could be seen bobbing on the river. A windmill stood against the night. She turned to look over her shoulder once and then walked out through the grass under the moon; she heard the train pulling out and for ten minutes she walked slowly amidst the grass toward the river, listening to the train disappear toward Amsterdam. The clouds tumbled above her. She whistled a song she’d heard some of the other women sing in the office at the school. At the end of the tall grass she could see a wooden fence that ran along the river; over to the south were the houses of the village, dark but for a single light each one burned for a stranger lost on a hot night in Holland. She pulled her torn dress closer to her when she looked over her shoulder again. For a moment she had the sinking feeling there was no one there at all, but she reassured herself. The small boats were drifting on the river a few meters before her; unlike the village houses they burned no lights. The smell of the grass and the water mixed with the smell of him and she liked it. At the fence her feet sank into water. She continued watching out over the river even when he came up behind her; she didn’t turn to him. Her ragged dress blew around her. As he separated her, she leaned her body over the rail of the fence; her hair fell into her face and brushed the tall grass. He reached in front of her and held her breasts. She moaned into the grass, her ragged dress caught on the fence; her hair was tousled in the wind. He was talking to her and she wanted him to be quiet. She didn’t move from the fence while he had her, she only brushed her hair away. The sails of the windmill were full, drifting on the field of grass a few meters from them. She didn’t move until she simply couldn’t stand the sound of him anymore, and the things he said to her. “You bastard,” she finally turned to him furiously, spitting in his face, “my eyes are brown not blue, and that’s not my name.”

SHE FOUND HIM LIVING on a houseboat in Amsterdam one canal north of the Dam Rak. He was surprised to see her, as was the woman with the flurry of black hair who emerged from the boat’s cabin with him. Joaquin stood on deck silently buttoning his shirt as Dania waited on the edge of the canal; he was trying to decide if he was happy to see her this soon, or happy to see her at all. Perhaps what he loved was the act of calling her to him, rather than the act of her coming. He spoke in broken Dutch to the blackhaired girl who climbed off the boat and brushed past her new rival as though rivalry meant nothing to her. Joaquin didn’t explain the girl to Dania and Dania didn’t ask him to. They went and had dinner in a restaurant. All around them was nothing but talk of Germany and all the Germans who were trying to get out. It bored him. He was nothing like in his letter to her; she now felt young beside him. He explained he was going to start his own dance company: It’ll be, he offered, for those who want to dance as you do, willfully and enraged. What are we enraged at? she asked, and he looked at her dumbfounded and blank.

In the hungry light of the houseboat he could see the fiery ravishment of her legs and belly; he could smell the other man, and her devourment of him. They’d walked through the streets halfdrunk back to the boat but now the moment sobered him enough that when the boat weaved with the water he couldn’t quite weave with it, pliant. But I believed you’d never been had, he said in almost a cry; when you knew me, she replied coolly, I hadn’t. The boat rocked and he toppled into her; he regarded the proximity aghast. He flew back from her. Don’t tell me your other girlfriends have all been virgins, she said. He neither denied nor affirmed it; he wasn’t angry so much as wounded. Sex abandoned him. If she touched him it only seemed to make matters worse. They slept unconsummated and the next day she put her things together to go. Don’t go, he said; after a moment he said, No, go. He walked with her to the train station. Inside she felt dead, she wanted only to be on the train as soon as possible in a cabin that was all hers in the bright light of day, so that she could cry. Halfway to the station anger finally came to him; when he pushed her he was like a child, she even laughed, though nothing about it was funny. She just walked on and didn’t look back to see if he was standing there watching her go. She read her ticket in the station as though on it was written: None of these men is worth the impulse of a true heart. Beyond Joaquin Young and Dr. Reimes, she wasn’t sure whom she meant.

Two days later in Vienna her father, older by the minute, staggered into the flat with a loaf of bread to find, astonishingly, his daughter returned. She was tottering in the middle of the room with a bottle of vodka. What is it? he asked, rather than, When did you return? She answered drunkenly, I’m plain. I’ll never waste the time regretting it again, that I’m plain, I’m going to get it all out of my system tonight. I’m plain, I’m plain. Girl, he said, how many men already love you? None, she answered. That’s not true, her father said, I didn’t ask how many love you perfectly or well, or nobly or without selfishness. I asked how many love you at all; I know myself of at least two. All right then, she said. Two. She thought about it a moment. All right then, she said: three. She thought again. Four. She sat down hard with the vodka and her father came and took it from her. He set it on the dresser. He put the bread on the table, he bent over to look into her eyes and make them smile. But looking at her closely, his own eyes narrowed. With a finger he touched her lips. But girl, he asked with a frown, where did you get this scar? She sat in the vodka daze for a moment before making her fragile way to the bathroom where she gazed into the mirror; there, as her father had done, she raised her fingers to a small white scar at the corner of her mouth where there’d never been one before. It shone in the light of the bathroom like a diamond in her tooth. But I never bled, she thought to herself in confusion. It’s my heart, she called to her father, the words it doesn’t know catch in the cracks of my face, I wear the words I can’t spit free. Not until later, after she’d slept some hours, did she wake in bed with the question that the receding tide of vodka left beached on her brain. “Four?”

A YEAR LATER THEY were living in a country that no longer was. For a year after that he lived with the fear the Germans would seize his daughter in all her mother’s slavic heat and send her to the camps with the other slavs and gypsies and Jews. If anyone asked he claimed for her the purest Russian bloodlines, a strategy that might have held faint possibilities of survival until still another year passed and against the expectations of the world Germany and Russia signed an alliance. Dania quit the school, no longer trusting those she worked with. She and her father remained in the flat most of the time, believing that if they were caught the Germans would return the exiles to the homeland that hounded them. Her father despaired that they hadn’t remained in Africa, he despaired that Dania hadn’t remained in Amsterdam. Dania believed the Russians weren’t after them at all. She believed no one had spent a quarter of a century trying to find the floorplan of the Twentieth Century. Over this time her lover came to her like clockwork and she became only vaguely aware he was there at all; sometimes he brought a friend. She came to sleep through their visits, the dawn’s semen the only manifestation of the night’s memory. Sometimes the lover and his friend were already there when she came to bed, waiting for her, sometimes they acted as though they lived there. On those nights she would take him: she was Lilith to history, coming to history on the night he feels most abandoned and alone. She’d straddle him and let his years erupt into her. On these occasions she told herself that if there indeed was a floorplan to the Twentieth Century with a secret room, then it was not a room in which the conscience dwelled but rather this room here, hidden in the capital of a country that no longer was, where she fucked history and owned him. That was when she scoured the room on her hands and knees looking for the secret way out of the century marked on her father’s blueprint. She looked beneath the bed and behind the bed’s headboard, she pried loose the tiles of the bathroom floor and ran her fingers over the walls. She moved pictures this way and that, as though they were secret controls.