Tours of the Black Clock

76

MARCH 1942. I’VE SAVED Russia but doomed England. The invasion of the island began today, the German frenzy that’s been building Russiaward now unleashed across the Channel. Japan that was once tempted to strike in the Pacific now becomes attentive to the British colonies in Asia. America that was being gradually drawn into the war only months ago is now forced to wait for England’s fate. Megan twists painfully in the silence from home, phone communication impossible. Sometimes I feel I have this clarity, sometimes I think I see it all rather lucidly. I look around my flat on Dog Storm Street and there’s no one there at all, I tell myself. In the streets of the city people anticipate news of surrender any moment; there are also uneasy rumors of conspiracies in the Chancellery. Something’s happening, people tell me. I have to restrain myself from explaining: He’s gone, you see, they can’t find him. I have to hold myself back from telling them, He isn’t in the Chancellery anymore, he’s here in Vienna; he lives in my flat. He stands in the corner and watches me with the woman both of us love.

Sometimes I’m sure I view it all without obstruction, the Twentieth Century sighted from my window. Today, with news coming in over the radio, I saw it for instance: I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that’s been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. This was the river of the Twentieth Century that was forked at that very moment I saw you in the window of your house across from the candleshop, when the melee was taking place before you in the street; this Twentieth Century I saw from my own window today was the one in which I never saw you at all. In which I never saw you and never wrote of you, and your invention never came to the attention of special clients. In which no evil mind was ever distracted by the reincarnation of a past obsession, no Barbarossas were suspended and therefore evil came to rule the world; or else such suspended invasions were the catastrophe Holtz predicted, and evil therefore collapsed altogether. I longed for this century, seeing it from my window, because I was absolved in it of some of my monstrousness; but I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century, because this is the century in which another German, small with wild white hair, has written away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside. It just couldn’t have been, that’s all. It’s nice to think so, to think evil remains collapsible. But I saw you in that window and the true Twentieth Century found itself, and abandoned the lie it might have chosen to live if you hadn’t been there.

There’s a camp west of here at Mauthausen on the lovely shores of the Danube. I can see the smoke from the rooftop where I hang Courtney’s washed clothes. I remember his name now: Carl. Every day trains come from Switzerland with escaped Jews, the Swiss sending them reliably back.

Holtz has a plan tonight. In the four and a half years since he first came to this flat he’s aged twenty, continental cordiality falling away from his face in chunks. His eyes are debauched by terror, his flesh yellow. His hair drops out in tufts, cigarettes are killing him. There are rumors in the street. “Kill her,” he says. What? “Kill her.” I won’t, I answer. If you want, I’ll stop. Get me and my family passage out of the country, and I’ll just quit. “And where will you take passage to?” he asks in a deathly croak. “Where are you beyond his reach except perhaps America? You can’t go back to America.” He looks at me. “We know about you and America.” He’s sitting on the edge of the bed; his eyes don’t quite focus. “The translator’s under house arrest,” he finally says, “every new chapter is now delivered under armed guard. This is what it’s come to. Z waits pacing in his suite.” I saw a blond woman there that night in the hotel four years ago, I say. “She’s nothing to him,” Holtz answers, “she’s not the one he cares about. It’s the one you’ve brought to him he cares about. Kill her.” Neither of us speaks for several minutes and finally I just say to him, Let the translator do it, but I won’t. He nods as though he knew all along, that even if I had agreed, nothing can now be turned back. For the first time I feel a little badly for him, he’s in way over his head. Me too probably. Look out that window, I say to him; and we both sit in the dark looking out the window onto the empty street. I want to show him the other century, when none of this happens, and when all he has to think about is his place in the kingdom or the death of his country. I don’t think he can see it, though.