Tours of the Black Clock

112

IT’S YOU, THE YOUNGER one repeated to me. He wore a dark gray coat, like me he was in his middle years. He was thin and soft, except his eyes, which watched me with hate. Like the old man he seemed attached to where he sat, as though nothing of him was alive beneath his neck; he was made forceful, for the first time in his life, by his hatred. He had a presence the old man seemed to have transferred to him long ago. In Petyr’s eyes at this moment was exactly the power I’d always heard was the client’s, in Petyr’s eyes at this moment was the power to rule Germany. At this moment he was struggling to some point rational enough for killing me, some point not so distant from his hate that he would lose its strength but distant enough for calculating the schematic of murder. In the same way the client had mourned Geli and his kingdom all these years, in the same way I’d mourned Megan and Courtney and my conscience, Petyr had mourned Kronehelm, I suppose. He’d been translating a long time. He’d translated always with the same precision; if he’d ever subverted or deformed the translations there wouldn’t now be in his eyes the force of this livid hatred, rather I’d see his guilt and deceit. All this was happening the first time I stumbled on them in their little room; we all watched each other with hate and fear and amazement. Though my feet were growing gradually but surely lame, my hands were still capable of the good old things; I could break Petyr in his wormful wrath, and then throttle the old man. I could speak Megan’s name as I did so, I could speak Courtney’s. I could speak all their names, from Warsaw to London, from Treblinka to Mauthausen. And yet I knew that even if I could kill the old man for that long, before the soldiers burst in and shot me down, that even if I could kill him long enough to speak the names of the six million, or ten or twelve, or however many flesh markers he lay down in the pages of time to gauge his evil, in the end there’d only be one little old throttled life to pay for it. That wasn’t revenge enough. If I could find my way into this room every night for another thirty years and kill him little by little each night, it was still just the small miserable life of an old senile memoryless man to whom his own evil no longer meant anything even if I snarled the name of every victim into his wrinkled little face. What’s the revenge of killing a man who’s forgotten his own evil? I left the two of them that first time, I turned my back on Petyr’s eyes in the same way the soldiers show contempt for my own harmlessness. I came back several nights later, and then every night after that. It’s crossed my mind that someone meant this to happen; it’s crossed my mind that if I were to kill Z, soldiers might not burst in at all. Rather they might be watching it all from somewhere secret. Rather they might let me kill him as they may have allowed me to kill X that night in the Hotel Imperial. Still, each night I considered it. Each night my hands felt fit for it. Petyr’s hate, seething and never acted upon, came to bore me. Before my hate came to bore Z, in the depths of whatever fog he now lived, I’d find a revenge to catch his attention.