Tours of the Black Clock (22 page)

It wasn’t until a number of years later, running alone through the nightstreets of New York, the frantic large lumbering sound of her lover behind her, that in the middle of her fear she questioned the exile of her childhood. From Paris and Madrid and Brussels, writers and geologists and dull bureaucrats had left their homes and come to the colony when one intrigue or another was about to catch up with them. There was a young doctor from Berlin who arrived in her thirteenth year. It took her about a day and a half to fall in love with him. He was in his late twenties with black hair like her mother’s and blue eyes; what crime brought him to the East Sudan was unclear. It was possible he was a missionary who’d come to live with the savages: I’m a savage too, she insisted to him. The doctor watched her with genuine longing but kept his distance. He wants to be respectable to me, she thought disgustedly, like an uncle or older brother. His name was Reimes. Good day Dr. Reimes, she said when they passed, the word doctor spat out in acidic irony. She despised the fact he was such a gentleman. On a train in Russia years before, her mother had decided in the course of an evening to go with her father to Africa; it was the thing about her mother the girl came to remember most vividly, as though she’d been there herself, and admire most fervently, as though her mother had never done anything else so remarkable.

She came to understand that her father’s flight to the Sudan had to do with the blueprint he kept rolled in an old saddlebag that no one else ever knew. She saw it one night when they were living on the western curve of the crater as the face of the crater revolved beneath them. Her father laid it out on the table under the lamp that swung from the top of the tent; five or ten minutes she stood in the shadows watching the light sway back and forth across his hair the gold of which had become distinctly wan over the recent years. He was intent enough studying the blueprint that even when she took a step from the shadows it was a moment before he noticed, and he was more violently startled than she’d ever seen him. “Is it a map?” she said to him. He sagged a bit and smiled. Yes, he said, it’s a kind of map. She stepped forward a little closer and looking at the blueprint more closely asked, “Is it a house?” Yes, he answered, it’s a kind of house. On the blueprint she could see the general living area, a dining area, the bedrooms and the toilet. There was an attic and basement. There were two passages that ran secretly in the walls from the downstairs entryway to one of the upstairs bedrooms, and from the basement straight up to the attic somehow without passing any of the floors in between. Overlaying the blueprint were several other sheets, fine and nearly transparent, with other lines, but years later when she examined the plan more carefully she could never get the lines of one overlay to correspond with those of the other, or with those of the original blueprint. She began to understand it wasn’t quite a house at all. I said it was a
kind
of house, he explained without explaining, I said it was a
kind
of map. “Is it,” she asked on this particular night when she saw the blueprint for the first time, “where we’re going to someday live?” Her father’s face, now lined in a way she’d never seen short of the light of the lamp swaying from the top of the tent, broke into a sad smile and answered, But we live there already, my girl.

S
HE WAS RARE COLOR
against the toneless chalk of the crater, a tawny blot snatched from the genes of her father’s younger years. All the other people of the colony were the white and gray of Europeans or the black of her mother’s hair or her brother’s or Reimes from Germany, or the deep gray of African flesh, the natives venturing into the crater only when the religious dictates of the moon allowed it since they believed the Pnduul was in fact a patch of the moon that had fallen to earth and therefore not to be trespassed casually. Against the bleached whirling rim of the crater anyone could see her dance. Her father brought her when she was six to a Frenchman with aristocratic pretensions who taught ballet in Paris before becoming ensnared in whatever particular disgrace brought him here. The Frenchman considered the Russian and his dirty little girl to be beneath him. “She moves around so damn much,” the Russian said, “see if she can dance,” as though the one was the logical extension of the other.

Well it’s impossible clearly, the Frenchman said to himself an hour later, as little Dania postured around the stick he perched between two stones out in the middle of the plain. She has no balance, look there! He wanted to laugh out loud. He could hardly wait to show the presumptuous father. The silt of the crater blew over them in the afternoon, sometimes so dense the girl was only gold flint in the white air. The Frenchman peered over his shoulder to see if the father was watching in the distance. Good, he thought, she’ll fall over any moment and he’ll see for himself. She did not fall over. The wind that whipped the rim of the crater rose and fell; even in the wind she didn’t topple. I don’t understand, the Frenchman said to himself, it’s clear she has no balance, look at the way she teeters in relationship to the ground. But the girl wasn’t moving in relationship to the ground, she moved in relationship to the moment. From each moment in which she was destined to topple she danced away. She had no particular grace, she had no rhythm anyone would identify as such. She didn’t move or dance like any little kid the Frenchman had seen. He fumed. It enraged him, the impertinence of her not falling.

Meanwhile the little blond girl was squinting at the Frenchman through the dust. He’s waiting for me to fall over, she said to herself. Occasionally, just to make him a little crazy, she’d wobble in a particularly precarious fashion before pulling herself back from the future. “What did I tell you?” the Russian said to the Frenchman. “She’s going to be beautiful too, anyone can see that.” The ballet teacher would have considered it small consolation to know that while the girl might be destined to dance, she was not destined to be beautiful, if there was such a thing as destiny.

After the young German doctor came to the colony she danced for him, dirty auric in the white crater. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him standing off in the trees watching her against his will. She found him one night in her father’s tent when no one else was there. “Are you lost,” she said, and he whirled to the sound of her voice behind him, “did you wander off by mistake?” In the dark of the tent she thought she could summon up the beauty she didn’t have; if there’d been room she’d have danced him into submission. It was too dark to see if he blushed.

He put his hand out to her and pulled it back; she could almost hear him thinking, My God, she barely bleeds yet. “It’s blood enough,” she muttered in the dark, “in the jungle it doesn’t take so much blood.” He began crashing wildly around the tent where not long before she’d found her father reading his blue map. “So what kind of doctor is it,” she taunted him as he finally bumbled his way out, “who’s afraid of the sight of blood?” After a moment she stood there alone. Or is it just
my
blood, she asked herself, lamenting her plainness.

A
FTER TWENTY YEARS OF
exile in the Sudan, Dania’s father decided it was time to take his family back to Europe. To the alarm of his wife, he made arrangements in Vienna. “Vienna’s right under their noses!” she cried, to which he answered, “Exactly right.” He reasoned they wouldn’t be looking for him right under their noses. “Paris or London they’d expect, why, they’d nab us off the streets the first week we arrived.” After twenty years of wanting to leave Africa, Dania’s mother now dreaded the escape. “Vienna, Vienna,” she whispered to herself over and over. But Dania’s father proceeded with the plans, which would take them up out of the jungle through Egypt, from where they would sail to Italy.

For the last five years the colony migrated the rim, Dania saw a cave in the northwestern pocket of the crater. It stood at the top of a small slope that funneled out into the crater’s dish, and the fourth year she and her brother made their way to the cave and stooped in its mouth, out of which came an inexplicable blast of arctic cold. They gaped into the black of the cave waiting for a light from some other end. Even then she swore she heard the rumbling of hooves. The boy and girl ran down the slope sliding part of the way and then scrambled up the rocks to the plateau where the colony was camped. Nothing came out of the cave that year. Nearly twelve months later, the crater having turned its full circle, they saw the cave again on a mild African winter day when the light on the edge of the earth was tarnished the color of her hair. They hadn’t even reached the crater’s bottom when the buffalo flooded out the lightless doorway. They came in a hundred herds, all together. She would have thought the whole Sudan heard and felt them. Their hair was short and glowed a strange silver; all the more curious was that even from the distance of the cliffs some twelve feet above, even in their relentless rampage across the hot desert, Dania could plainly see on their hides the white patches of unmelted snow. She had never seen snow. When the children returned to the tents they were dismayed to find that no one else in the colony heard or felt the buffalo. Her father went with them out to the cliffs to see for himself but not even the clouds of the silver stampede were left.

It’s not long after this, as her family spends its last days in the Pnduul back on the southern rim by the trees, that Dania wakes one night hearing and feeling the buffalo. They’re nearly here, she says to herself in horror. She jumps from her bed and stands in the opening of the tent; in the camp, everyone sleeps. If I wake them for no reason I’ll appear ridiculous, she considers to herself, and looks back into the tent at her sleeping little brother. She wants him to wake now and hear and feel the buffalo too. She keeps peering out into the flat night and walks past the dead campfires to the tent of her mother and father where she stops because she can hear them inside. What a time for love, she thinks to herself. She’s only turned back to her own tent for a moment when there’s a sound like the earth splitting. She spins to the abyss of the crater only to see the night suddenly bled of color. The buffalo come so quickly there isn’t time for anyone to scream; they flash silver in the night. Dania’s paralyzed with the choice of running to her parents or her brother or the trees for safety. The animals rip through the camp pitilessly, tearing through the tents and emerging with the gray canvases sheathing them like ghosts. The sound and smell of them overwhelm her; on all sides of her are the gutted flapping tents hurled into the air. When the buffalo have disappeared as quickly as they came, the tents float down from the sky like parachutes. She’s appalled by the way everything, the running buffalo and the descending gray tents, seems to have happened around her as though to deny she’s a part of it. There isn’t any sound at all now. In shock she stumbles over to where her own tent had been. Several feet from it she finds either her brother’s bedding or her own, she can’t be sure which. The bodies of other people lay in the dirt as though they never woke, only the contortions of their sleep and the way their mouths are open tell her it’s not sleep at all. She finds the body of the French ballet teacher. Twenty feet from him she finds her little brother. She kneels over him and begs him to be alive, she beats him furiously for his deadness. Only when she begins to cry does a sound rise collectively from the trampled village like the sound of birds when they fall to earth, manic and mournful, not a sound of the throat but beneath the heart, life not immolated but made a vicious sizzle. She’s still beating her little brother for his deadness when her father’s hands pull her from the small body. The two of them stagger through the camp together. Vienna, Vienna, her mother cried when she was on top of her father, as though to love the Vienna right up out of him; seconds later the buffalo came through the tent and dragged her into the campfire embers. The stunned fading life of her trickles out in whispers of Vienna as Dr. Reimes tries frantically to keep the life in her, to no avail. Dania’s mother and brother are buried with the other members of the devastated colony the next day below an African rain, a score of natives witnessing the funeral somberly from atop the crater’s rim. Afterwards Dania runs into the trees hurling herself from trunk to trunk to knock the last of the white leaves to the ground. She buries herself in the leaves and lies silently as though to affect death itself, while, her father wanders the groves calling her name.

L
YING HERE IN THIS
particular burial, she is at once in three separate moments. She’s lying beneath the leaves of the Sudanese forest, she’s lying in her bed in Vienna, she’s lying in the bottom of a rowboat on the shores of Davenhall Island. She’s not asleep or dreaming, she’s perfectly wakefully aware and conscious. She remembers. She remembers last night the shorthaired silver buffalo, she remembers this afternoon the riot in the street outside her window, she remembers running to the beach in the early hours of morning to see the small wooden shack burning on its pillars over the river. In each of these moments she’s waiting for a lover. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the jungle, Dr. Reimes. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the city, a dancer by the name of Joaquin Young. She’s waiting on the island for the man who’s always loved her across time and space. The rain beats down on the African leaves, on the Austrian rooftop, on the tarpaulin that shields the boat. It’s the same rain in three different moments, all of which she lives in at once. Her head pounds. It aches with the thunder of buffalo from the night before. It aches from the stone that struck her in the window this afternoon. It aches from the guilt and confusion of a woman old before she’s thirty, in the chinatown on the other side of the river Rubicon that has no other side. She can’t stand it anymore and sits up in her bed. Outside her window she watches the lights of Vienna. Her father snores like an old man in the other room. She feels the side of her face, thinking the swollen pain is what’s awakened her. Had she not turned from the stone when she did, it would have struck her in the mouth and broken the flesh; she might have lost a tooth or even scarred her lip. She would have at least bled. She’s thinking these things, believing they’re what have awakened her, when she realizes these are not the things that have awakened her, she realizes it’s something else. She realizes someone is here in the room. She looks for him in the dark, she’d call to him if she knew what to call. She doesn’t believe she’s imagining it, she can practically see him. He’s big. He’s very big. He makes her shiver with the way he looms. He’s not any lover she would have expected. She cannot decide whether to rebel against the anonymity of this first lover or revel in it. She isn’t sure she’s ready for him. He tears into her. She hasn’t even had time to grab tight the knobs of the bedposts, she’s gasping from the presence of him up inside her before she completely understands what’s happening. He fucks her till she’s ripe with him; holding onto the bedposts she never gets the chance to touch his face, so that she might know what he looks like. In the morning when she wakes she would almost believe she’s dreamed it except for the way she’s torn and the way her thighs are crusted with her blood and the glue of him. She’ll wash herself before her father awakes. In her Viennese bed among the dishevelment she’s amazed to find the white leaves of the Pnduul Crater, as though she grew them herself in uterine savagery.