Tours of the Black Clock

52

I MOVE INTO THE Spanish girls’ flat and stay awhile. In almost no time it takes on an utter familiarity — books and empty wine bottles in the corner and wooden chairs that are broken and old family photos on the wall, and pictures of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, revolutionary tracts under the table and antique clocks stuck at five minutes before two, a small fish tank beneath a window. The Spanish girls live the free life. A whole entourage of people constantly pass through, conversationalists and exlovers on leave from psychiatric wards, philosophers on the make and female Dutch photographers who shoot nude selfportraits, bartenders from Brussels and a plumber who brings a bottle of French champagne every time he fixes the hot water because he wants to make a celebration of it and listen to Bessie Smith records. They all jabber away at the same time and eat roast rabbit, doze off for an hour and wake up midsentence finishing the conversation they began before others coopted it, have violent quarrels and rearrange their lives before my eyes. They tend to have a lot of cockeyed ideas if you ask me. Absolutely everyone smokes and the ash of their cigarettes always grows to about three inches long before it falls to the floor at which point they grind it into the carpet. The world is their ashtray, and soon I notice that the city itself has begun to take on a dinge since I got here, until even the sky is the color of cold cinders.

Most of them consider themselves Trotskyite bandits of a sort who get by through various means. Each day the three Spanish girls leave me careful instructions about cops, tax collectors and utility inspectors who come knocking at the door to inquire about forged papers, back taxes and the meters that have been jammed to keep the bills down. The flat is something of a way station for lots of shady characters, in whose ranks I suppose I must be included. The guy who was here before I arrived was a homosexual who placed an advertisement in a Viennese homosexual newspaper a couple of months ago. The advertisement has appeared since his departure and I now get many letters, wires, secret codes and even personal interviews on the other side of the door. Sultry male voices whisper Guten Tag or deliver rasping promises or sobbing accusations. Thierry? they call. Thierry no longer lives here, I answer. There’s silence and then they either disappear or make their pitch anyway. Bitte, bitte, they moan, and scratch at the door. In other words, these people are all slightly cracked. I’m regarded as a naif and puritan because I don’t fuck every casual acquaintance three seconds after they blow through the doorway. I suppose I might be less inhibited if the population of the place wasn’t on the scale of India. They know I’m a writer but not the exact nature of what I write; they’d probably be amused but who can be sure. As proletarian rebels go they’re a highly refined lot. They eat the best, drink the best, buy expensive objets d’art and wouldn’t be caught dead riding the streetcars. There’s nothing quite as screwy as a bunch of revolutionaries zipping around Vienna in taxis, unless of course it’s Kronehelm and Petyr goosestepping around the suite with dirty books in their arms.

After a week I send a note to Petyr to meet me at the northeastern corner of the Karlsplatz at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. I have some new work to deliver: Don’t, I tell him, bring Kronehelm. On Friday afternoon Petyr brings Kronehelm. Kronehelm wears a huge coat that overwhelms him, a hat and dark glasses; in such a defined and dramatic costume his person looks less formed than ever. It’s also the first time I’ve seen him outside and I swear I can see the sun setting right through him. He’s whimpering before I’m even close. “Oh Banning, please,” he’s saying, and then gurgles a little unformed sob, “please.” Petyr glowers with hate, at me for abandoning his mentor, and at his mentor for caring. “Stop blubbering,” I snap, “if you don’t, I’ll leave at this moment and you’ll never, ever see me again.” Kronehelm holds his face in his hands, I push the work into Petyr’s arms. “We’re still in business,” I continue, though I can’t bring myself to be soothing about it, I’m so fed up with them. What else, after all, am I going to do? I’m stuck, I’m not going back to America, and nothing else here is going to pay off like this; lately it’s all I can do to write anything. “I’ll send word in a week when I have more,” I say, and turn on my heels and walk away quickly. I have this horror that any minute I’m going to feel an unformed man clutching at my ankles again, I’m going to drag him naked across the Karlsplatz. I keep walking and don’t look back until I’ve turned at least four corners. Then I double back to the Cafe Central where I sit until ten at night with pen and paper waiting for Amanda and Molly. They never show.