Tours of the Black Clock

54

YOU REMEMBER ME. THIS is, after all, the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle, this simple afternoon you’re leaning out your window, all of fifteen years old I’d say, while below you men are scuffling in one of history’s countless shards. Now there come along some comrades of this poor pillaged soul, a platoon of bums, and for the first time I see something like resistance in this city to the blackboot boys, a vagabond war. As though it’s a battle for your benefit, you there in the window, as though history scrambles and brutalizes and bleeds for the face of you. I cannot recollect your beauty. I recollect the memory of your beauty, which we both know is not the same, because my memory made you beautiful. Whether those vagabonds think you’re beautiful too is impossible for me to guess; they never cared so much for Catherine or Lauren, who are more beautiful. Much more beautiful. Come to think of it, you may be plain as sand. Your long hair a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow, your eyes a banal mud brown. There may not be a single curve of your jaw that’s anything more than ordinary. You say nothing to the scene before you, but your face says everything, the contempt for the blackbooters not simply because they’re bullies but because they presume to hold history as their own, they act like it’s tied to the post with a collar around its neck. The vagabonds have no history, they don’t even know history. It doesn’t intimidate them in the least. And when you look up and raise your eyes across the street, and mine meet them, we follow each other’s look as I make my way past the shard of history; and you say you don’t remember. I don’t believe you. Fifty years later I don’t believe you. Seeing you haunts and binds me, and I don’t believe this defiant maybe-not-beautiful moment that razored the century lengthwise was utterly gone from you before your century had passed another five minutes.

They’re banging around in the street, the window of the candleshop explodes and wax tumbles over the sill, when a stone someone’s hurled strikes you. A moment follows in which everything almost seems to stop, and in that moment the beggars pull the old Jew from the tumult and haul him down the street. The blackboot boys are happy to pretend they’ve won the skirmish, throwing more stones in the beggars’ wake, not far or hard enough to bring them back for more; the boys don’t want more. For a minute they stand around and mark their victory with general commentary about Jews and Germany. In the window you turn as soon as the rock hits you, you raise one hand to your face. In the moment you turn I’m almost sure I can see your blood, I can see the corner of your mouth where the stone opened your flesh. We don’t see each other anymore, our mutual stare is lost in the wound, washed away with the blood of it; maybe the moment’s washed away too. You turn and without looking back once — if only you had looked once — you disappear from the window and shut it closed. The boys are singing and carrying on, and I’d stay there on the street until they’ve left, waiting for you to come back from washing your wound to stand in the window again, or to come to the door and open it, and if not I’d go to the door and knock; I’d wait, but I’m the only one left in the street with the blackbooters who are in a frenzy now, walking around swinging their fists and singing, and far up the street, slowing to a standstill, who should I see but Carl. There he is. He stops, I see him, and I wait for him to see me, and then I turn my back and walk away, and I know he’s done the same.