Tours of the Black Clock

120

THE SNOW COMES. I wake one morning to its muffled din. It falls on the city’s tarpaulin, lightly and soundlessly except that the city’s emptiness transforms even the fall of snow into an echo. I have to argue with the authorities several days in order to get some heat in my room’s radiator. What about the old man? I ask the guards. At first they don’t answer, then one of them tells me, The Leader has heat. When I see the client that afternoon, the room is cold but neither he nor Petyr seem to notice; it’s like the light through their covered window. I’m rubbing my hands together but the two of them sit the way they always do, still and sullen in the room’s center. All the old man cares about is news of the child. Oh don’t you concern yourself with that, I assure him, that’s all taken care of. Things are proceeding just fine on that score. I suppose I don’t need to worry about Z dying from cold; he’s flared with life. He lives for his son. Petyr doesn’t even look at me anymore. Perhaps he’s busy staring into the face of his own end, approaching now from not so far away with its hand outstretched. The echoes continue for a couple of weeks and when the snow stops and the sun shines down on the ice melting into the tarpaulin, the corridors and piazzas of the empty blue city fill with weird rainbows. Out of the misty colors fly flocks of birds that have been trapped under the city’s ceiling for years; they’re old and their wings flutter heavily in the wet air. Now the echoes I hear are the birds trying futilely to batter their way out.