Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

On the first summer night of the year 1941, her father prepared to leave the flat. He’d made many daring journeys in his life, crossing thousands of kilometers over three continents; this journey, the most daring, would take him across town. For three years the old Russian and his daughter had survived the Germans, and for two years the alliance. He knew the landlady had many times considered reporting them; he could see by the way she looked at him. That she hadn’t done it yet only meant she feared making trouble for herself. Now, the course of the war convinced him he could no longer count on her timidity; little did he know that within forty-eight hours Germany would invade Russia in an operation called Barbarossa and everything would change. He didn’t tell Dania he was leaving the flat or about the arrangements he’d made to have the blueprint smuggled to England and then America. He slipped out in the middle of the night while she slept. He made his way into the core of the Inner City and then cut up through the alleys that ran behind the Hofburg Palace. He felt fortunate that the evening was so mild; yet halfway to his destination he was already exhausted. He remembered how the horse he had ridden across the steppes of St. Petersburg had pushed itself beyond endurance to cross that hour that defied crossing between his past and his future, between the history that was determined and the history that could be undone by a single man if he chose to undo it. As he turned a corner behind the palace, not far from the Cafe Central, history chose to undo him back.

She’d been lying in her bed finishing with her lover when she heard her father leave. She threw back the sheets threw on her clothes and ran from the room; down the moonlit streets of Vienna the hot seed ran from her and left its trail. It didn’t take any time to catch sight of her father; she kept her distance all the way through the city until that final corner where she watched him die. At first, from where she stood, since she could only see him and not the other one, she didn’t understand the gunshot was a gunshot, and only after she saw her father hurled backward by the force of the shot did she understand that what her father reached for in the old saddlebag was the gun with which he’d almost shot her mother on a train twenty-four years before. The gun, as old as the saddlebag if not the man, jammed and didn’t fire. He lay there in the street. All the windows above remained conspicuously empty. She only faltered a moment at the sight of her father shot down, and then continued walking toward the body. The blood was black in the moonlight. It was then she saw come into view the other man with his own gun smoking in his hand; her father’s gun lay a meter and a half from his dead open fingers. She focused on nothing but that gun; the other man was going through the saddlebag and found the blueprint. In the moonlight he unrolled it and studied it, excited. She walked up to her father’s gun and picked it up; only then did he glance up at her. His face was stricken by the sight of her; she suspected he’d longed for her after all, watching her dance as a bit of dirty gold in the pale ash of the Pnduul Crater. She held the gun up to him. “And here I thought you were afraid of the sight of blood,” she said. His eyes were as brilliant as ever.

He stood up with the blueprint. A streetlamp burned above him and at the end of the street the night opened up behind him. He looked very sad, not so much, she guessed, at killing her father but that she should know it was he. For her part she was as cool as the wind off the Danube. The rage she felt at her father’s murdered body was held far at bay for this moment; for this moment she regarded events with as little humanity as her humanity would allow. She kept switching the gun from hand to hand. “It doesn’t work, Dania,” Reimes finally choked, “it’s an old gun. I didn’t want to shoot him, if he hadn’t reached for the gun I wouldn’t have—”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “The idea was always to kill him, we both know it.”

“What do you know about it,” he said angrily, “be a young girl awhile longer before you presume to know the things young girls can’t know.” He watched her switch the gun from hand to hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, softening, “it was my political role.” For the Russians or Germans? she began to ask, but it didn’t matter. He thought for a moment and added hastily, “It doesn’t mean I didn’t want you, you know.” He saw the look forming on her face when he said this and, misunderstanding it, went on. “When you found me that night in the tent, it’s true I was looking for this,” he gestured with the blueprint, “but it’s also true that on another such night I would have looked for you. You can believe that.”

“Is that what you think,” she said, “I’m angry that it was the map you wanted and not me? We stand here over the body of my father you just murdered and that’s what you think?” Rage wasn’t so far at bay now.

“Dania.” He pointed with the hand holding the blueprint, at her hand that held the gun. “It’s an old gun, Dania.” Coaxing her. “It’s broken. It doesn’t work. It’s out of date .”

“Oh?” she said, and blew a hole right through him.

She heard the plop of something several feet behind him, his insides flying out the back of him onto the round cobblestones of the street. His look became befuddled, as though he was still listening to the sound of her gun much as she had listened to the sound of his, which lay with the saddlebag beside her father’s legs; as though he was still figuring out the sound for himself, not willing to take the gun’s word for it. Then he looked down. He could see the hole in him but not quite so clearly as she saw it; she could see through him the Vienna night at the end of the street, as though a part of the black sky and the stars it held were lodged there in the middle of him. He had the night for a stomach. It was like when she’d been on a train to Amsterdam and looked into the open eyes of the lover she otherwise couldn’t see, and saw in those clear blazes the small fences and silos and houses passing her by. Reimes staggered in the street a moment; he said over and over, “I feel …I feel …” and could never quite finish it. Behind him his insides on the street began to lose their form and dissolve. Reimes turned a moment to the window of a shop; in the reflection of the window he could see in the middle of him the reflection of another window of another shop behind him. “I feel …” He pitched forward. The shatter of the window was much louder than that of the gun with which she’d killed him. She dropped the gun, walked briskly to his body; the rage was a good deal nearer now. She unclasped the blueprint from his hand which now stuck wedged to a piece of glass. I must get this from his hand, she told herself methodically, and away from here before it comes; it was the rage that was coming. She took the map and was going to turn once and look at her father, and thought better of it. She walked determinedly but not hurriedly away from there, toward the end of the street where the night without a country had shone to her moments before beneath the heart of the first man she loved.

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.