Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

She was now a twenty-two-year-old woman. She returned to the apartment where she’d lived with her father, and with another woman she took the same flat. Like the other Viennese, the landlady now spoke harshly of the Germans and hailed the occupation of her city by the Russians, French, British and Americans; the apartment happened to be in a British zone, to Dania’s good fortune. Nonetheless she was careful where she walked during the day, since the zones weren’t marked and, unless one had memorized their borders, she could suddenly find herself where she didn’t want to be, which in Dania’s case was the Russian section of town. At night the Russians sent secret patrols into the British and French sections, sometimes even into the American sections, snatching people up; thus Dania didn’t go out at night at all. She spent three years trying to get out of Vienna and Austria. Only when she had a letter from Joaquin Young in London offering her a position in the new dance company he’d begun there, was she able to obtain the official papers. By then she was living alone, the other woman having married a soldier from Indiana who took her back with him. Dania packed up her few possessions and sent them on to England; she didn’t consider in the least loving Joaquin, rather what she loved was her escape from the murder and heartbreak of where she’d lived eleven years. On the last day, standing in the empty apartment gazing around her, she didn’t even think of it as a place of lovers; she thought of it as the last place her father lived. In the empty unlit flat she held her hands to her face and sobbed huge desolate sobs. Dania, she finally said, stopping herself. She went into the bathroom and ran the water in the sink and washed her face. She was too intent on washing away the tears to have ever heard the door open, had the door opened.

She was almost sure she heard, however, someone call a name, a name she might have remembered hearing once in the tall Dutch grass before the shadow of a windmill; but not her name.

When she went back out into the apartment, the shutters of the window stood wide open. For a moment, there in the window, she almost believed she saw someone.

But there’s no one there. She collects quickly her papers of transit and takes her small bag and walks out of the flat as though on her way to the market or a stroll through the Volksgarten. She runs into the landlady on the way down; the older woman averts her eyes. “Mein Fraulein,” she simply says. Dania thinks to reproach the woman for all the treachery she’s considered over the years: but there’s a difference, she tells herself, between what’s considered and what’s acted. “Auf wiedersehen,” she replies instead and continues on her way. She walks through the winding streets of the Inner City. The walls lie in piles of crushed stone and people stand in food lines; the Union Jack flies from the windows. At the train station she waits with all the other people trying to get out of Vienna and finally presents her papers to the officer in charge; when he’s stamped and returned them to her, and only when she’s located her train on the proper track and understands she’s really going, does she turn to see the city from the windows of the Westbahnhof and, overwhelmed, vanish for a moment from sight. I think she’s gone off somewhere to be alone, I can’t be sure. There are views that remain hidden, there are times one cries unseen.

SHE WASN’T TO BE in London more than ten months. The city in its victory was indistinguishable in its destruction from Vienna in its defeat. Joaquin Young greeted her arrival with the same astonishment he’d shown the afternoon she appeared in Amsterdam; he’d written the letter without any idea it would even reach her. More than this she was quite grown up, the years between fifteen and twenty-five even more profound than his between twenty-two and thirty-two. She was chagrined to find herself still excited by him. She’d thought that the night she blew a hole through Dr. Reimes she exiled herself from the caprices of attraction in the same way she’d been exiled from so much of life. “I’ve no consideration in the least of loving you,” she told him; in a more insolent moment he would have laughed at her. Eleven years however he’d lived with the impotence of his one night with her on the houseboat, and the mark of her other lovers.

Between this time that she arrived in London and the morning ten months later that the Joaquin Young Dance Company sailed for New York, she met another dancer named Paul and thus slept with a man for the first time since the end of the war. Paul was innocent and fragile in the way Young was arrogant and scheming, a dark French boy two years younger than she. They walked along the collapsed tunnels of the underground and slept with their hands full of shillings next to a heater that had to be fed coins every twenty minutes. Because Joaquin didn’t think Paul warranted competition, he was somehow all the more incensed by Dania’s affair with him; Paul may have been half the charismatic figure Joaquin was but it could be presumed that with a woman at night his body was at least adequate to the task, and that his heart was true enough neither to see nor care about the traces of other men on her. “Then don’t love me,” Joaquin told Dania, “with or without consideration. Just dance the way I watched you dance before.” With this declaration, and fully intending to win her back whether she wanted it or not, he wrote a dance especially for her.

SHE DANCED AND MEN DIED. They died across New York City, sometimes in penthouses and sometimes in bachelor’s flats where the beds lowered from the walls. They died as strangers in their middle years, grown comfortably into nerveless resignation, men who might never have thought her beautiful on the street but would be transfixed by her dance, if they ever saw her dance. They didn’t have to see her dance. Just the fact that she danced was, somewhere in the middle of a turn, enough to send them miles away slumping to the floor as though from a poison in their wine that was this moment hissing its way into their bowels and blood. They lay in large purple circles on their rugs. Empty goblets rolled listlessly around their heads. She left a trail of middleyeared strangers in large purple circles though she didn’t know it, not until the investigator told her in the middle of the fog of Davenhall Island, where neither the destination nor the point of departure could be seen.

This was two years after she’d been in America, this time when she danced. This was two years after she forgot the lover who’d always followed her. This was two years during which she came to realize that having survived the war and having freed herself of jungles of exile and cities for fugitives, the lover was following her again. She could feel the cast of his shadow in a way she never had before, even when he’d taken her; it was a large shadow. By then there was trouble with Joaquin and Paul. Sometimes she convinced herself she wasn’t really certain who the shadows belonged to anymore. One night she left the theater where the company danced, and stopped for a sandwich at the corner of Bleecker and Seventh; there for the first time in two years she felt the shadow. It began walking after her down Seventh toward Houston where she thought she might more easily find a cab that would take her back uptown; she adjusted her pace. She dropped the rest of her sandwich a block later. She peered around to see if there was anyone who could help her, if it came to that. She knew as soon as she ducked into the old vacant building that it was a mistake: Not much chance of catching a cab here, she thought ruefully. Rushing through the building and up the stairs, she cornered herself further and further until she ran out of corners. It was on an upper floor of the building, where glassless windows watched out on the city, that she turned another corner and remembered for a split second that her father once turned a corner like this and never another. At that moment someone stepped out of the dark there on the vacant floor and spoke to her, an eerie and lost hello. For the only time in her life she fainted deadaway. When she woke it was in the early hours of the morning under a very bright streetlight, on a bench way up on Riverside Drive not so far from where she lived. The strange coat of an unknown man was wrapped around her. It was a large coat.