Tours of the Black Clock (16 page)

“No, he hasn’t died,” Holtz says, lighting another cigarette. I get up from my chair and open the window for some air. Leaning out I can see there’s someone by the door downstairs as I figured. When I sit back down the colonel says, “But you’re not working for Client X now.”

I laugh, “I never figured I was. I figured he was working for me.”

After a moment Holtz laughs too. “Let’s say,” he continues, “you have a new client. All right? Let’s call him Client Z.”

“Z? Maybe you ought to discuss this with X. Before the secret police show up and discuss it with you. Are you trying to cut yourself in on some action, is that it? Maybe X doesn’t like this new arrangement. Maybe X doesn’t like Client Z so much either.”

“Client X,” Holtz answers calmly, “understands the arrangement perfectly. Client X,” he adds, “serves at the pleasure of Client Z.”

In this first moment, when he says it, I’m not sure I understand. Something in the back of my mind must understand, I guess, because for the first moment, and then the second, and then the third, I don’t say anything at all. And then I can only repeat it: “Client X,” as much to myself as to him, “serves at the pleasure of Client Z?”

“That’s right,” Holtz answers, in the same calm way he first said it. He reaches over and takes the coffee cup and puts out the second cigarette. He’ll sit and wait all night for me to say something, before he says another word.

“And Client Z,” I finally ask him, “at whose pleasure does he serve?”

Holtz hands me back the coffee cup, full of ashes. “Client Z,” he answers, rising from his chair, “serves at the pleasure of history.”

I
DON’T BELIEVE HIM
.

A
ND IN THAT MOMENT
I’m blinded by the gray Hungarian moon moving toward me up the Wien-Fluss and I forget everything. I notice I’m sitting there with the lights off, and I think to myself, Why are the lights off? I notice the window that I opened for some air and I think, Who opened the window? I notice the other man in the room who moves from his chair to his coat without saying anything and I think, There’s someone else here?

“I don’t believe you,” I think I finally say to him when he’s in the doorway.

Opening the door he tells me, “But it doesn’t matter, sir. It may be better that you don’t believe me. Let’s say, if you wish, that I haven’t told you anything new at all. Let’s say, if you wish, that nothing I’ve said in these last moments means anything. All that matters is the work, after all. A client is a client.”

He leaves me in the dark, where I thought I was on my own terms.

N
OTHING HE’S SAID MEANS
anything. At the pleasure of history? We all serve at the pleasure of history. It doesn’t concern me; all that matters is the work. I’m an American; a client is a client.

The window remains open; the car below leaves. I’m left alone. Comes the moon to my street.

T.O.T.B.C.—8

“T
HERE MAY BE SOMEONE
new now,” I finally say it, “a new client.” You hoist yourself up onto me. “A new friend.” You take my face in your hands and move it till it’s caught in the web of what you see and know. I keep trying to look away. Don’t you think I understand this, you laugh, don’t you think I understand everything? “Don’t laugh,” I insist. You lunge at my mouth with yours.

If he serves at the pleasure of history, you answer, then history serves at the pleasure of us.

Y
OU AND I TOGETHER.
A day passes, two, a week passes since Holtz came. I leave the flat only to walk three doors down the street for a meal. I keep thinking, Someone’s going to miss me. I keep thinking, There’s a rendezvous I’ve failed to keep. But there’s no one who misses me, there’s no one for me to meet. Every contact with my life up until this week has been broken, all the moments that have sailed behind the present in a single line scatter to new winds. The common compass spins wildly to no north. Somewhere far away is the moment I stand on the corner at Jerry’s newsstand and covet the pulps on his rack. Further is the moment Henry stands at my bedside and wakes me to follow him and Oral out to the Indian shacks. I don’t know if I actually see these moments or if the glare of the sea on which the present moment sails plays tricks on my eyes. Now we wait for the new client, the new friend. I guess I already know he won’t simply buy you like the others. I guess I already know you’re not simply to be sold to him like the others. At the end of the week I’ve decided a client is just a client, or did I decide that before? I decided before but this time I make myself half-believe it. That’s it. I’d breathe a sigh of relief except that to breathe anything at all connotes life, and the life I’ve carried almost twenty-one years in me has now scattered to another wind as well. An entirely different kind of ghost lives in me now, you and it together.

F
IVE WEEKS PASS. IT’S
autumn in Vienna, frayed and hushed. I go to see her. I wait for her to come home, plump little anglosaxon dumpling bouncy and wild. It’s dusk, she unlocks the door and I come up behind her. The shadow overwhelms her; she turns where she stands and drops the key. I retrieve it. “Hello,” I tell her. She’s breathing heavily and in the light her face is as red as her hair. It might be she’s going to say to me, How are you? or, You just left me that night, or Go away. Instead she says, “I’m pregnant,” and no sooner has she said it than she bitterly resents the desperation it betrays. I won’t insult either of us by pretending to wonder if it’s mine. “I’ll marry you,” I say, and am horrified by the way it sounds: “Marry me,” is the way I rephrase it. She laughs shortly in the doorway, still bitter, then just smiles to herself, melancholy, and for a moment she’s only going to take the key, put it in the lock, open the door and shut herself away from me. In the next moment she’s sprung at me, to the place where I’ve backed away from her so I don’t loom so large, and she’s pounding me, beating my chest with her fists, wailing furiously. On the other side of the street people stop to look; I’m holding her by the wrists and she begins kicking and I pull her to me to make her stop. She sobs into my shirt. “Megan,” I whisper, “Megan. It’s for me.” I whisper, “It’s for me I’m asking it. I know you don’t need pity from me. It’s for me because … everything’s gone wrong lately. This is my conscience throwing me a line, this is one little bit of decency in the middle of. …There are many things I can’t explain. Just let me have this little normal decent thing that tells me not everything I do is corrupt.” We stand in the street several minutes and finally go up to her apartment. I stay with her on into the night, and leave about eleven. In her sleep I promise I’ll return by dawn. Under the moon of madness I cross a bridge at the Wien-Fluss; thirty-five years from now I step onto the old man’s ferry and he sails me to your island. There’s a moment, between the island and the boathouse on the shore, when neither’s in sight.

W
INTER COMES LIKE GRAMERCY
Park, irrational and overnight. I strain to remember the winter of Gramercy Park, three or four winters ago I keep thinking, until I remember it was only last year. Megan and I marry nearly as suddenly. There’s a last moment flurry of activity by the shipbuilder and Megan’s mother to thwart things; the mother hurries to Vienna to approve. She’s aghast at the sight of me. I think all the more highly of her for it. “Oh Mama, go bloody
home
then,” Megan tells her. When they threaten to cut off her money she only says, “You ought to have done it years ago.” The wedding takes place on a Saturday morning before a vaguely denominational minister who’s nearly as little as Megan; I’m Gulliver in matrimony, yet barely large enough for the occasion. Megan wears a peach dress with a small veil. She’s sweet and the awe she shows in her eyes is humbling. When we leave the wind rips the veil from her head and hurries it over the rooftops where it passes out of sight beyond a post office spire. We take a new flat upstairs from where she’s been living, somewhat smaller actually except that it has an extra room. A stairway leads from right outside our door up to the top of the building where another door’s unlocked by the same key that unlocks ours. At night we fall asleep to the roar of rallies in the hills. People talk of nothing but Germany, and by the end of winter the government calls an election in which Austrians will decide whether to be Austrians. Only Austrians would need an election to know such a thing. Only Germans would be enraged by the temerity of it, or would call it temerity. I pull Megan’s voluptuous little body close to my head and place my ear to the core of her, where I hear redemption growing inside her. When her water breaks in seven months I’ll let it splash on my head as baptism. We both know it’s a girl and have named her Courtney. “Oh big boy,” Megan whispers in my hair, “love me just a little.” I hold her hard. I’ve kept the place on Dog Storm Street, I go there each twilight. To work, I tell her. Discreetly, fearfully, she doesn’t ask where or what. My part of the bargain is that when she opens her eyes in the morning, she’ll find me next to her.

I
WORK THROUGH THE
winter. Once a week the car pulls up the street and stops at my building, and someone comes to my door with an envelope of money in exchange for a folder of finished pages. I’ve had to protest being paid in Deutschemarks. The middleman’s been eliminated, though sometimes I wonder if Petyr’s been eliminated as well; someone’s translating the work after all. I can picture him as he sits before the pages incensed with Kronehelm’s betrayal; what white rage is he bringing to these scenes? He’s sabotaging me with politically incorrect interpretations of the way I love you. We’re in his hands, the temptation must drive him crazy, restrained only by the possibility that another translator could discover his deceit at any moment.

It’s early March when Holtz comes again.

I know it’s something extraordinary because it’s not the night the car usually comes; I think it’s a Wednesday. I hear the car outside and sit waiting for the knock on the door; I just reach over and turn off the light on the desk and wait. Finally he opens the door himself and steps into the dark room. He stands for a moment waiting for me to say something. “Mr. Jainlight,” he finally breaks the silence. “I apologize for disturbing your work.” I finally turn in my chair. He closes the door behind him; I’ve already opened the window. He comes in and takes the same chair he sat in the last time. He’s as composed and cordial as the last time. “How does it go for you,” he asks, the first of several questions I won’t answer. He notices that the room is cold, and touches the radiator. “They don’t give you much heat here,” he says, “I’ll attend to that. It must be difficult to work when your hands are cold.”

“Lots of things are difficult when your hands are cold.”

He nods. “I hope the arrangement’s been satisfactory so far,” he says, “if there’s anything that—”

“I don’t like being paid in Deutschemarks.”

“Would you rather American dollars? It’s no problem.”

“Austrian schillings are fine.”

He waves it away. “Whatever.” He rubs his hands together; he’s kept on his long coat this time and now fumbles inside it for his cigarettes. “I want you to know, Mr. Jainlight,” he begins, “I’ve been instructed to convey to you the great enthusiasm our client has for your recent work.” He shakes his head emphatically. “Very delighted about what you’ve done. Deeply moved. As an artist himself, our client is in a position to understand its worth.”

“Horseshit.”

“He wants you to know, it’s important to him that—”

“Why are you here?”

Finally he finds his cigarettes. In the cold of the room he has difficulty lighting one; he keeps looking at the window, wishing it were closed, but not, I think, for the weather. “I believe,” he says, “the work has taken a new turn over the last six months.” He motions with his cigarette.

“Why are you here.”

“Well, Mr. Jainlight.” He keeps looking at the window. “I’m here to talk about that work, to offer some of the client’s comments, from one artist to another so to speak. Specifically, I’m here to talk about her.”

“Her?”

“It’s nothing of import,” he says dismissively, shaking his head, having just traveled all the way from Berlin to say it, “very small details, a few adjustments to reinforce the client’s boundless enthusiasm for what you’ve done. Of course we could make the changes on our end, if it came to it, or if you wanted to proceed that way, but … but my sense … well, I couldn’t in all conscience tamper with an artist’s vision without—”

“This is all complete horseshit.”

“The eyes, for instance,” Holtz says. “The eyes should be blue, not brown. The hair. The hair’s to be a bit more golden. Like spun sunlight, perhaps.”

“Spun sunlight?”

“Whatever.” He sits puffing on his cigarette.

“Why don’t you just find another person who will do the work the way the client prefers it.”

After a moment Holtz says quietly, “No, sir.”

“Maybe this is a case of mistaken identity. Maybe we’re not talking about the same girl.”

“No, sir,” he says, “we’re talking about the same girl.” He licks his lips, I can see him do it in the dark. He looks at the window once more and says, “The only girl he ever loved,” and gets up from the chair and walks to the window and closes it. It’s not the weather. He goes to the door and opens it, and says something to the guard outside who goes downstairs. He closes the door and returns to the chair, and turns it so that he’s straddling it with his arms rested on the back.

He takes a long puff on his cigarette and then puts it out in the same coffee cup he used three months ago. “The only girl he ever loved, Mr. Jainlight,” he says again. I unnerve him when I don’t say anything, but he’s getting used to it. “Now, what I’m about to tell you, well, I suppose it’s something of a secret to those whose memories are short. Which, fortunately, in the case of the client, happens to be most everyone. But the fact is that ten years ago it wasn’t such a secret at all. It was rather well known in the party, and in Munich, where the affair took place.”