Tours of the Black Clock

53

AMANDA AND MOLLY AND I become just friends. They stand me up routinely, they have dangerous adventures they never tell me about. Our relationship is strained, they’re no longer at my beck and call when I need them. I don’t laugh anymore with them, though Kronehelm hardly seems to notice. Client X’s satisfaction supersedes all other considerations. Living with the Spanish girls in their crazy flat with all the crazy people coming and going doesn’t help either; Amanda and Molly don’t care for their company. By now it’s the summer of 1937. The news from Spain casts a pall. I have some money saved from what I’ve written and sold to Kronehelm over the last six months, and decide to take a room of my own. When I ask Carl to go in on it with me he only seems vexed, he knows he has to leave soon; as a Jew, it doesn’t make sense for him to stay any longer. He keeps asking if he should leave and I keep lying, but I’m at the point I can’t lie any more. He’s managed to get some of the money from Italy, and when he’s ready to go, if he needs it, I’ll give him the rest. There’s a bombing every other day now somewhere in the city. People in the cafes wager as to the day and hour the current chancellor of the country goes the way of his predecessor, who had his head blown off in his office three summers ago by the blackboot boys. If that happens the Germans will come, which seems fine with the Viennese; they practically start fondling themselves at the thought of it. For me the bombing has ceased to be such a jolly business. Let’s say it’s a distraction. From a political standpoint I couldn’t care less; for all I care the Viennese can blow themselves off the planet. But it scares away the girls, you know, the ones who might replace Amanda and Molly. I look for a quiet place a quarter of an hour by trolley from the Inner City and find one on a street with a long name that translates roughly as “storm of dogs.” It’s a small single room with a toilet down the hall and a couple of large windows that open onto the street three floors below me. Here, alone and celibate on Dog Storm Street, I hear the girls knock on my door, sometimes they’re waiting for me when I come home. I don’t see them so well at first, but after a while they come closer. I know nothing of their backgrounds and don’t want to know. They are Lauren and Jeanine, Janet and Catherine and Leigh. They do whatever I want which is the way I like it — none of this willfulness I got from Amanda and Molly. A whole new crew, I break them in my way, right from the start, not repeating the mistakes of the past. Outside my windows are the vagabonds of Vienna. They’re not much interested in Lauren or Catherine, but since the first dawn I stumbled out of St. Stephen’s with them, they seem to be everywhere; one can escape the bombs but not the vagabonds. Vagabonds and beggars and cripples run, hobble, crawl and roll amok in Vienna. Every amputee, every blind tramp, every mutilated visage is a citizen of the world and they’ve all beaten a path to the city of the fucking good life; it’s a rich disgusting joke. You can’t miss a single spasm or tic in the glare of the bombs, you can find them basking and warming their deformities in the glow of Vienna’s toniest society spots. The whole damned city’s overrun with them, and the best any one of them can hope for is that the next person who kicks him wears a soft shoe. I look out my window and see them everywhere; they’re well mobilized, women in rags and waifs without eyes and men who have nothing to show for their lives but the puddle they’re sitting in, guys in boxes, the Ring littered from one end to the other with the wayward, the unsheltered, the stinking. They’ve mapped out the territory, they’ve cut off all means of retreat. They lie in wait to ambush me. I know I’d never have the nerve to ask anyone for a schilling, such shamelessness demands more backbone than I’ve got; I’m sure I’d steal something before I begged someone for a break. Begging for a break is too profound a step toward one’s own humanity, I can’t walk that far. I recognize this and these people know I recognize it and now they’re after me. Now every time I leave my room, I must look both ways to make sure someone isn’t coming toward me on little wheels. I know one morning I’ll walk out into Dog Storm Street and there they’ll be, an army of human wrecks at my feet. There are only two things that will resolve this, of course. One is time. Live here long enough and one learns how to stop the bleeding. I’m happy to say the process is already beginning to work. I’m happy to say I’m becoming better and better at passing more and more vagabonds without feeling anything at all. Oh, sometimes in a weak moment I’ll muster up an expression of sympathy for a particularly hopeless excuse of a human being; but a good night with Catherine or Lauren will fortify the meanness in me, and if it doesn’t bring out a real strong throaty horselaugh, like I haven’t had in a while now, then it’s at least good for a chuckle or two. I can throw open the windows and give out a good chortle for the palsied little boy who’s sleeping in the garbage around the corner from the fruit stand. The other thing that resolves my contest with the cripples, as I walk along the Danube and the dreamlike quays of night and gangrene, is the realization that once, among these very vagabonds in this very city, roamed the most evil man in the world. Twenty-five years ago he wandered these streets with these vagabonds and beggars and cripples and fed on the slime of his own evil, sitting in the Karlsplatz drawing pathetic little pictures of the cathedral. And the world, feeding on the slime of its evil, knew a kindred spirit when it saw one; now he throws athletic galas in Berlin and builds himself cities, and plots the new millennium. He’s the evil that doesn’t devour the child in one gulp but first licks its hand like a puppy, then nibbles at it as it shudders into shock. Then the world licks the blood from his hand. Soon he’ll come back to the vagabonds, maybe next year or next month or next week; he’ll come back to look at his youth, and he’ll eat it. His blackboot boys have already begun the work, they’re going through the streets and pummeling the youth of their leader into grit and guttermeal, so that not one trace of the original moment that bore him and all his evil is left to be seen. When I see the vagabonds of Vienna I see two men in each of them: one is the Leader, and the other is me. Every day I walk the streets of Vienna with one consort or another, Catherine or Lauren, whichever one suits me at the particular moment, thinking about the things we will do when we get home, and invariably I stumble onto one scene or another when the blackboot boys are having at it with some poor ruin of a human being who is irrefutable evidence of another beast loosed and rapturous in God’s universe other than the one who intends to rule the world from the shithole that calls itself Germany, and it’s one such afternoon, not far from the corner of the Ringstrasse where I came my first night in Vienna, and it’s one such melee, when they’re beating an old Jew outside a candleshop, that I happen to look up and, in a window above the street, watching me, I see you.

T.O.T.B.C.—7