Tours of the Black Clock

90

AFTER 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.