Tours of the Black Clock (23 page)

T
HEY’D LIVED IN VIENNA
a month, in an apartment building on the edge of the Inner City across from a candleshop, when Dania found a job. Her father, devastated in spirit by the loss of his family, and without resources, attempted only feebly and uselessly to stop her. Dania was now fifteen. She knew four languages fluently and her command of two others was fair; in the jungle over the years all the languages of the colony had woven into something like one. While her first job at the dance school on the other side of the Karlsplatz was menial, her linguistic skills soon landed her an office position. After six or seven months she summoned the nerve to audition before the school’s entrance committee. The committee was embarrassed by her. It was also a source of some exhilarated satisfaction that the Russians, who’d once produced the greatest dancers in the world, were now spitting out grubby little refugees like this one. One of the young dancers of the school was a man in his early twenties by the name of Joaquin Young. Young was a star pupil who taught one or two classes during the school year; the Italian son of an English father and given a Spanish name, the boy had come to the school from Rome eight years before as a prodigy. The school doted on him. They beseeched him to accept Austrian citizenship; he declined though for reasons that had nothing to do with anything as politically prophetic as the fact that only a year hence Austria would no longer exist. It was rather because of the obstinacy and disgust Young felt for the way the school supposed it might use him, when it was clear to Young that it was he who would use the school. In the same way he became legendary for having declined just eight months before a position with the Vienna Ballet, Young made it clear that while he may have passed the ballet’s audition, it failed his. He didn’t want to dance as he would have if he had been born a hundred years before.

When Joaquin Young watched Dania dance he understood, though he might not have identified it in this way, how she danced against history. She danced against it in the way her father crossed its irrevocable hour on horseback twenty years before in pursuit of the train that would take him out of Russia, in possession of the blueprint that the forces of history wanted so badly. She danced her moments so as to own them for herself. He understood that if she was as bad as the instructors and professors on the committee claimed, then there were a hundred misturns, missteps and misgestures she would have made that she did not. By intuition she didn’t strive to control her body but to risk losing control every place she took that body, every place in her own psyche that thundered with gleaming buffalo. “But there’s no structure to her form,” one of them argued, or perhaps he said there was no form to her structure. Young laughed, “She’s inventing her own structures, can’t you see?” He detested the way they supposed that the structures they didn’t recognize weren’t structures at all. This argument raged as the blond girl stood there in the middle of the floor with her head bowed, arms folded in determination, seething; raged as though she wasn’t there at all. Young was overruled, but the committee was unnerved. Days afterward people were still talking in the halls about Dania dancing. What now? he said, the first thing he spoke to her, since he hadn’t actually spoken to her in the audition. I go back to translating letters in the main office, I imagine, she answered, to which he replied, Then your imagination’s limited. Yours, she said back, has danced away with you. That night she returned to the floor where she’d danced for them and pondered the meaning of her own steps.

They didn’t speak again until some months later, when Young caught up with her in the street to tell her he was leaving Vienna. It seemed to her she’d spent enough time pining for young Dr. Reimes back in the jungle and that there was no call now to pine for Joaquin Young. Three weeks after he’d gone she got a letter from Amsterdam. He asked her to come to him. This was the plan all along, she considered, to make me come to him; he didn’t, after all, take me with him. He didn’t say three weeks ago in the street, Come with me. He said goodbye so that he could write three weeks later, Come to me. She put the letter under her pillow and went to the window where she was still thinking about it as the scuffle broke out in the street below her. I’ll go to him, she decided almost defiantly only a moment before she turned away and the stone grazed her face. The next day she still had a large bruise there beneath her eye; she was barely aware of it, conscious only of the way she was enflamed between her legs from the lover who had come that night. “My God,” croaked her father at the sight of her face. She told him about the fight in the street the day before.

Her father didn’t seem so much now like the dashing rider who outraced history outside St. Petersburg back before she was born. He lowered his eyes and when he began to cry, she began to cry. “Oh father,” she ran to him, holding his hand. I’ve cost my family everything, he said. I had it in my head that coming to Vienna was shrewd and look what it’s cost. It’s my mother he means, she thought. He means that if he hadn’t said Vienna she wouldn’t have been on top of him that night, going Vienna Vienna over and over as though to draw the doom of it right up out of him into her. She would have been below him as usual and he’d have sheltered her from the silver buffalo. “I thought,” he said bitterly now, “we’d live under the very nose of history. Rather we’ve jumped into its mouth. And for what?” It was then he drew closed the shutters as though all Vienna was looking in on them, and pulled up one of the floorboards and lifted out in a cloud of African dust the old saddlebag and took from the bag the old blueprint and unrolled it across the table. For a moment he only stood there above the open blue map and shuddered, hacking African dust in his lungs. She held him by the shoulders until the attack ended. In the following silence he ran his hand across the print, lost in thought until she finally asked, “What is it, father?” At first he didn’t seem to hear.

“It’s the map of the Twentieth Century,” he finally answered. He began poring over the blueprint. “There’s a secret room I can’t find.” He shook his head in consternation. “I’ve looked a long time,” he said, “it’s here somewhere.” He flipped through the overlays, he ran his finger along all the lines. “It’s not in the passages or the halls, the likeliest places,” he said, raising the tracing finger emphatically, “not in the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the bedrooms. I would have thought maybe the attic. The basement,” he rubbed his chin with his hand, “well, the basement doesn’t make sense. Where can a secret room lead from the basement? A secret room from the attic might at least go outside.” Outside the Twentieth Century? she thought, terrified for him. “But what’s in the secret room,” she said gently, and after a moment he only answered, “The conscience.” She slowly ran her own hand over the forehead of her old father, wiped from him the dust from the crater which he wore in the same way she secretly wore the leaves of its forest. Tenderly she gazed upon her father’s madness. For twenty years, she told herself, he’s believed this is the floorplan of the Twentieth Century, with a hidden room that is its conscience. She wondered if those who had pursued him were as mad, or whether anyone had ever really pursued him at all.

Take it with you when you go to Amsterdam, he said, and she gave a start; she hadn’t said anything to him of Amsterdam. I didn’t mean to read the letter, girl, he said quietly, I was making up the room while you were at the school today. If he’d seen the blood and white leaves of the sheets as well, he said nothing; he would not be the sort of father, now that he’d lost everyone else, to so abhor his daughter’s womanhood simply because he always wanted her for himself. I won’t take it, she answered, because I’ll be back. He didn’t believe her. I’ll be back, she said, and we’ll find the secret room together. We’ll find it and I’ll dance there, if there’s space for a dance.

T.O.T.B.C.—11

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
she arrived in Amsterdam the lover came again. It was her second night on the train, past one in the morning; they’d just pulled out of Paris. Her father begged her not to go by way of Munich and so the trip had taken nearly a day longer than it might have otherwise. She’d just returned from the dining car where she had a sandwich and some wine, sitting alone at a table as the bottle bounced nervously on the cloth to the clatter of the tracks. The wine left little red droplets on the cloth before her. The old bartender sat beneath one thin light reading a newspaper; he offered it to her when he finished and she took it. The train passed several villages where men swung lanterns from the station platforms. She finally rose from the table and returned to her car; a mother and daughter who’d been in her compartment were no longer there and she had the cabin to herself. She stood in the aisle of the empty train snaking through Europe at two-thirty in the morning and the cold air through the open window blew against the part of her face that was slightly yellow from the fading bruise. A lantern clamped to the wall of the train jiggled wildly. When her face was cold she returned to her seat and lay there some time underneath the newspaper before she slept.

Because she slept, she’d say to herself, while it was happening, It’s a dream. But she never really believed that, not from the first moment when she found herself startled to attention by the realization that, as in her room in Vienna, someone was there in the compartment. It was dark but not that dark; she saw the looming form of him above her. “What are you doing here?” she actually said; he stopped for a moment, as though he might try and explain. Then she heard a sound like something ripped, and understood the fabric of the dress had torn around her thighs; she heard another rip and flinched. She sat upright as though to hold him off. The buttons of her dress scattered across the floor; she scrambled to her feet only to realize in the cold air that came through the windows of the aisle outside her cabin door that he’d pulled everything off her. Her bare body fell against the window. The heat of it sent the cold of the glass running down the wall. She had one foot on the floor and the other knee on the seat, and held her arms to her breasts; perhaps she believed something might yet be protected. Take your arms away from your breasts, he said to her. She rose to him in the frosted glow of the compartment. The definition of his eyes bled into two sightless blazes of glass through which she could see the night beyond him. Through his glass eyes she could see the passing small fences and blue silos and little houses in the distance with lights; when the lids of his eyes fell shut she felt the top of her legs glisten. He put his mouth there and held her ankles to the red velvet seat; she flailed at the seat in the cold of the moonlight. He pulled her down and she clutched the armrest as she’d clutched the bedposts; amidst the thump of the train she felt him enter her. She kept expecting him to dim and die with some rush of light. It was like waking in the night to find some part of her numb, feeling as though she didn’t have an arm or leg, and waiting for the feeling to come back slowly in a warm throb. She let go of the armrest. The newspaper rustled beneath her chest. When she pounded at the glass he took her hands in his. He flooded the center of her and she screamed into the seat, opening up to him again.

When she woke she guessed she’d slept a quarter of an hour. She was still folded across the red velvet seat in the dark; she could smell him running out of her, and his sweat on her back. She untwisted herself and burned anew. The train was somewhere in Belgium. She slowly dressed and went down to the end of the car to use the bathroom and wash her legs; she slumped against the toilet gasping. Back outside she stood staring out the window. Dutch rivers fled across her vision. After some time the train came to a station; it was possible she was now in Holland. She took her one small bag and left the train, walking across the dissipated light of the platform. She walked through the station and out into a small Flemish village. She walked down the one road and within minutes she was out by the tall grass where the little houseboats could be seen bobbing on the river. A windmill stood against the night. She turned to look over her shoulder once and then walked out through the grass under the moon; she heard the train pulling out and for ten minutes she walked slowly amidst the grass toward the river, listening to the train disappear toward Amsterdam. The clouds tumbled above her. She whistled a song she’d heard some of the other women sing in the office at the school. At the end of the tall grass she could see a wooden fence that ran along the river; over to the south were the houses of the village, dark but for a single light each one burned for a stranger lost on a hot night in Holland. She pulled her torn dress closer to her when she looked over her shoulder again. For a moment she had the sinking feeling there was no one there at all, but she reassured herself. The small boats were drifting on the river a few meters before her; unlike the village houses they burned no lights. The smell of the grass and the water mixed with the smell of him and she liked it. At the fence her feet sank into water. She continued watching out over the river even when he came up behind her; she didn’t turn to him. Her ragged dress blew around her. As he separated her, she leaned her body over the rail of the fence; her hair fell into her face and brushed the tall grass. He reached in front of her and held her breasts. She moaned into the grass, her ragged dress caught on the fence; her hair was tousled in the wind. He was talking to her and she wanted him to be quiet. She didn’t move from the fence while he had her, she only brushed her hair away. The sails of the windmill were full, drifting on the field of grass a few meters from them. She didn’t move until she simply couldn’t stand the sound of him anymore, and the things he said to her. “You bastard,” she finally turned to him furiously, spitting in his face, “my eyes are brown not blue, and that’s not my name.”

S
HE FOUND HIM LIVING
on a houseboat in Amsterdam one canal north of the Dam Rak. He was surprised to see her, as was the woman with the flurry of black hair who emerged from the boat’s cabin with him. Joaquin stood on deck silently buttoning his shirt as Dania waited on the edge of the canal; he was trying to decide if he was happy to see her this soon, or happy to see her at all. Perhaps what he loved was the act of calling her to him, rather than the act of her coming. He spoke in broken Dutch to the blackhaired girl who climbed off the boat and brushed past her new rival as though rivalry meant nothing to her. Joaquin didn’t explain the girl to Dania and Dania didn’t ask him to. They went and had dinner in a restaurant. All around them was nothing but talk of Germany and all the Germans who were trying to get out. It bored him. He was nothing like in his letter to her; she now felt young beside him. He explained he was going to start his own dance company: It’ll be, he offered, for those who want to dance as you do, willfully and enraged. What are we enraged at? she asked, and he looked at her dumbfounded and blank.