Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

THE GERMAN WHO RUNS the kitchen is constantly harassing us about the room and our work. Once, in the dead of winter, before a table of soldiers, he fires me and orders the old man and me to vacate the premises by nightfall. When night comes around, however, as I’m sitting there in the room trying to figure out what we’re going to do next, there’s a knock on the door and it’s the German; he seems very strange. He says that he’s changed his mind and we can stay if we want; the next day I’m back to the dishes. By the end of winter, I’m trying to figure out how to get the two of us out of Europe altogether. The captain of a steamer docked in Marseilles happens to come through one day and discreetly I take him aside and ask if we can ship out with him the next time he leaves. We haven’t any money to speak of, I tell him, but perhaps we can work off the fare. He laughs in my face. But the next day he comes back to the restaurant; he seems to have returned for no reason other than to speak with me, though while he’s at it he orders lunch. His demeanor has changed completely since the day before, though this isn’t to say he’s friendly; he says he’s got a pal sailing for Mexico out of Wyndeaux, a small seaport on the western coast of France. I can leave that way if I choose, the captain says, but I have to take the old man with me. That’s what he says. “You have to take the old man with you.” Then he gives me two train tickets. I’m so surprised that all I can tell him, straight out, is that I’m not so sure we can get as far as Wyndeaux, the old man and I. Complications with the authorities, I blurt. The captain says, Oh I don’t think you’ll have any problem. He wipes his mouth with his napkin, and gets up and leaves, half his lunch still on the plate.

THE TRIP TO WYNDEAUX takes two nights, and except for the fact I must constantly care for the old man, it remains uneventful. No one on the way asks about identification or papers. We arrive at the Wyndeaux train station the morning of the next day. Wyndeaux is a medieval city as blue as the one we left sinking in the Italian lagoon. In a beach cafe that glows like a lantern, I hunt up the captain who’s going to sail us to Mexico. He’s no more moved by our arrival than the German in Nice was by our departure, but he already understands the situation and has arranged things. We sail in forty-eight hours; until then, we’re on our own. But we have no place to stay, I tell him; that’s your problem, he answers. So we wander around the village streets half the day until I see the captain coming up the road toward us, to tell us we can stay with him. As with everyone else, there’s no accounting for whatever’s changed his mind. The morning we’re to disembark, the old man and I are sitting on the docks waiting to board the ship when we’re accosted by some soldiers who ask us what we’re doing and who we are and whether we have papers. They start interrogating the captain, who makes it clear he’d be just as happy to leave us right there on the docks. This goes on a few minutes until a German officer of some rank shows up; as with the lieutenant on the train from Milan to Nice, he interjects himself. What’s this all about, he demands of his soldiers. These old men don’t have any papers, one of the soldiers exclaims, pointing to us. They don’t have any papers! the ranking officer cries in mock alarm. But this can’t be, he says, why, I’m certain Germany cannot survive such a thing. He’s ridiculing the soldiers, who are baffled and flustered; he’s hardly given me a glance. Let’s say we not worry so much about old men without papers, the officer says. Let’s say we find more significant ways to serve Germany and the Leader. The soldiers look at me and at each other, and salute the officer and leave. Only when they’ve walked away does the officer peer over his shoulder in my direction, and then at the ship’s captain. The captain furiously gestures at us to get on his boat. We sail before the sun has crossed our heads.

WE LIVE IN THE cargo hold of the ship the entire voyage. It seems like a much longer voyage than the one that brought me over thirty years ago. It seems as though the sea’s become much wider or the world more distant from itself, or perhaps it’s that home, or anything resembling home, must, in my return to it, seem more unapproachable. Maybe it’s just from living down in the cargo hold where there’s no night or day. At first I’m afraid Z’s not going to survive the voyage, but the cargo hold is quite warm, one of the boat’s engines is just behind the next wall, and the food is better than the bread and coffee we’ve been living on in Nice for eight months. The old man doesn’t get seasick either; he lives below the watermark of nausea. His own watermark, I mean. He’s still among the living, or some kind of living anyway, the April night the captain calls me up on deck to point out, across the Caribbean before us, the harsh shores of the Yucatan.

WE GET ASHORE AND there are more German soldiers waiting for us. No officer of rank needs to interfere, the soldiers just wave the old man and me on by. For a few days we live in a small abandoned hut on the northern outskirts of the port. A dirt road runs from the port up our hill and right past the hut. At night the old man crosses the road and sits on the edge of the cliffs watching and listening to his war taking place before him, up and down the coast of the Quintana Roo. In his face the sea flashes the green of coral and the red of bombs, and his eyes are still filled with the mad swirl of ancient birds in the hallways of the lagoon’s sinking city. I’m not sure what to do next except try to get further into the Yucatan to Progreso, a large seaport that’s divided between German and Mayan control. Each day a black cab drives up the road past us, the same guy at the wheel; sometimes he looks my way and waves. After a week I go down to the port to beg some food and see if I can find the black cab. I manage to talk the driver into taking the old man and me up the coast. I don’t really trust him. I’ve seen him around the base transporting German officers and sailors here and there, and I don’t understand why he would do this for me. I’ve made it clear I can’t afford to pay him. But I’m thinking perhaps he’s a spy for the guerrillas; he isn’t Mexican but he isn’t German either, Brazilian perhaps, latin but fairer than the Indians of the area. In other words, a German’s idea of an acceptable latin. I sit in the front of the car, Z in the back. We drive slowly up the winding coast. I don’t know where we’re going and the driver doesn’t either though he seems perfectly willing to take us there. I watch the Caribbean through the splattered insects on the windshield and after a while I fall asleep as the twilight rushes in from the western hills. When I wake, the driver’s just sitting there in the same place, with his eyes open and a line of blood written across his throat as black as the cab itself; he doesn’t look so fair now. The car’s parked off the road among a circle of trees, and standing around are a lot of people with guns who definitely don’t look like Germans.

THE GUERRILLAS LIVE IN an old Indian ruin that lies hidden in a mahogany forest at the tip of the peninsula. The old man and I stay through the early weeks of summer, which is when it rains in the Yucatan. The ruins are carved out of gray limestone and not much is left except the walls. The guerrillas sleep in hammocks strung high above the ground, under the hot rain of the skies above them; parapets have been constructed nearby. The woman in command, around twenty-eight years old, was born in the city of Merida and trained in America; she’s hard and determined, and her name is Lucia. The guerrillas from the first regard me with extreme suspicion. They don’t understand what two old men were doing in the company of a driver who was known to work for the Germans, in a car that was heading up the coast. There’s continual discussion, even a month after we’ve been here, of whether I’m a German spy using a senile old man as a cover, and what should be done with me. I have no explanation other than that we’re Austrian refugees who escaped through Italy and France; it only sounds more preposterous to them. My American English is all the more unsettling. When I tell them I want to get to America they only shrug, But you’re already in America.