Fiction from Web Del Sol
THE CLOCK-WINDER OF GLANZ Patrick Keppel
Continued ...
Was I afraid exactly where I would be spat out? A man out of time as I was is never exactly afraid, unless you want to argue that as the product of his deepest fears he is always afraid, is fear itself. But it was from this time on that I began to see events and details in a different light, I mean with a sense of deep recognition, and this, I admit, if not exactly frightening, was often bewildering.
For instance, my passport. When I picked it up at the passport office, I stood in the corridor and stared at it a while, a little stunned to be holding in my hand anything that dared claim I existed. I brushed my fingertips over Artemus Mittach's face, so that's where he'd gone, then scanned the numbers at the bottom; someone had once told me these gave the authorities a concise summary of your entire life, 2=opposed war, 8=threw watch in canal, and I couldn't help but wonder which ones indicated that the bearer of this document was a man out of time. Then as though in unconscious response, my eyes shot up an inch or so, and to my astonishment there it was, the proof: the passport listed its year of expiration as OO, which is to say the notion of expiration was irrelevant in the case of Artemus Mittach, because for all practical purposes he had already expired, or rather was always and forever expiring. I was so astounded by this discovery that I rushed back to the counter, I wanted them to tell it to my face. I fully expected the clerk would take one look and say as calmly as she could, "Yes, well--evidently you've had a little trouble lately, Mr. . . . " But instead she just frowned, said she wasn't sure what it meant, there must be some mistake, then asked someone else who snapped impatiently, "It's nothing, it's just the year two thousand--Jesus!"
I accepted this explanation--Yes, the year two thousand, it's closer than you think, and if you don't believe people are slaves to their own invention, just wait and see how they bow and scrape before their clocks when they begin to hear the thunderous final ticks of the millennium. But at the same time I found it impossible to dismiss the other explanation, the real one as far as I was concerned. That is, I "recognized" the OO, I saw in it a reflection of what I truly was at that point--not a body, not an assemblage of arms and legs, ears and eyes, nor a person, a unique conglomeration of diverse characteristics, but rather a set of meanings. In other words, from this point on I began to live in a world filled with signs that not only explained or shaped my life, but that simply were my life. Not that I could go around looking for these signs; to the contrary the moment I tried to see them I would often sense with great dismay that anything that might have been there had vanished, perhaps forever.
So while I seemed from that time on to be on some path, the moment I tried to find my way along it I stumbled along like a blind man and felt certain I was lost. This was literally the case the day I arrived in the Burgenland town of Kern and set out on foot in search of Sepl Maurer's aunt's house, behind which the property in question lay. He'd sent me a crude map that didn't seem too hard to follow, just four turns over two kilometers--but was a bend a turn, and what about this unmarked fork, that nameless crossing? Sometimes I would choose one path and then when it started to dissolve to dirt and grass decide that it couldn't possibly be the right way and turn back, and stand there frustrated for a moment in the early summer heat, fatigued from jet lag, my body still throbbing with the old time, still confused as to why last night the darkness never fell. Going on seemed impossible and a little pointless besides, so I'd rub my eyes and gaze absently though the bright afternoon haze, lose myself in the endless racks of grapevines pouring down the hillslopes, the plush yellow beds of mustard, the slow ripples swimming across the fields of hay. And then perhaps I'd look down and notice two tiny figures on opposite hills slowly approaching one another down steep, silver ribbons of road, at last disappearing from view for what seemed an eternity, perhaps they met and talked or fought or made love, until suddenly the head of one would come bobbing to the surface up toward me, and finally the head of the other rolling up and away. Then at last a cat would appear out of the vines or the shrubs in front of a house and rub its chin against my trousers to claim me as part of its world, and after allowing itself to be stroked would wander off down one of the roads in front of me, then stop and look back, well, what are you waiting for? and suddenly I could go on, there was a reason to follow, and it was always, always the right way to go.
The people were the same way, first the immediate claiming and then the mysterious leading, as though they all knew me better than I myself did, as though they recognized me right away. Sepl and Rosi were at the door waiting for me when I arrived, hugged me like a long lost son and brother, then took me back at once to see the property for sale. The old cottage had been vacant for a number of years; a good six inches of it had sunk into the grassy earth, and its paint had been mostly absorbed deep into the grains of the wood, so that it was now a chalky grey. Inside the rooms were small and dim, just a simple kitchen with a brick oven and two large washtubs, buckets and brushes, and two rooms on opposite sides of a short corridor, one lined with jars of nails and screws and the other with old saws and scythes, all wrapped in a downy grey blanket of dust and cobwebs. At the end of the corridor was a heavy wooden door that opened onto the other half of the house, an empty barn more recently vacated and so still thick with the humid smell of cows and damp straw. We passed silently through the barn door, scattering several eavesdropping chickens, and wandered through the spacious, grassy backyard, which was dotted with fragrant fruit trees and honeysuckle bushes and patched with vegetable gardens. When we reached the edge of the rolling fields, Sepl waved his hand along a line of trees in the distance, then cut back down toward our left with two fingers, carving out about six acres in all.
I gazed out at the scene as though it hung before me on a canvas, first from a great distance and then gradually moving in closer and closer. Hours might have passed; perhaps this is when I watched those two figures approaching one another from opposite hills, disappearing in the valley. Finally it seemed as though I was entirely inside the picture, physically absorbed in it, a man in the foreground staring out.
I took a step back, startled. I mumbled something under my breath in German, I believe I was trying to say "I could just live here," but I chose the verb lie instead of live and a syntax which implied that "I could just break down here, like a car." After a short pause Rosi laughed, and Sepl explained the mistake, which was doubly funny because in their dialect the word mittach meant "clumsy," they didn't know why. So then I too laughed, and Sepl slapped me on the back hard and led me down to his aunt's wine cellar, mine too if I liked, to get a half-dozen liters of wine.
We passed the late afternoon in Rosi's warm kitchen, eating and drinking and toasting one another. Rosi was a stout woman with a body that bent at the hip like an old, wide river and a bright, round face like a pressed flower. She was rather reserved at first, but then I happened to mention that I was the youngest in my family and that all of my brothers and sisters were born four years apart except me, and all of a sudden she lit up, her face bloomed; from then on she wanted to sit right next to me, Tante Rosi, she corrected me, Tante Rosi. Sepl, on the other hand, was a determined host right from the start; whenever my glass was even the slightest bit empty, he would refill it to the brim, pound his sturdy chest once, and say, "Drink up, it's good for the blood," or "Drink up, it's good like blood," I could never tell exactly which. He was simple and straightforward, the only man I'd ever met who was exactly what his name said he was, a bricklayer. If a fly was bothering him or me, he'd just snatch it out of the air and toss it aside. He had a harelip that sometimes garbled his words and so would either speak in a deep bellow or bring his big red face right up to mine to mutter pledges of eternal friendship directly into my ear; more than anything he wanted to be understood, he said so constantly, and to my surprise I really had no problem. Before I'd come over I'd had little hope of communicating with my hosts; I knew only the vague outline of their language and was told besides they spoke in a thick dialect that not even their relatives up north could understand. But perhaps I'd heard this dialect in my infancy, perhaps even from the ninety-year-old lips of John Mittach himself, who came from the nearby village of Glanz, or maybe it was just the wine, because to my astonishment I soon found I could easily understand and say all I needed to understand and say.
Every so often a few more people would drop by, more cousin's cousin's cousins, and Sepl or Rosi, Tante Rosi, would introduce me, "He says he could here break down (like a car)!" and the newcomers--solid old men and women with faces and hands like red clay, spidery, violet veins bursting through the skin on their cheeks and noses; and their grown children, just starting to ripen into their parents, their broad, plain faces smooth and apple red--would laugh and squeeze around the kitchen table for still more food and more liters, more toasts to the visitor, long already their good friend and, they hoped with a laugh, their new neighbor, each one of them awakening still more new words in my language, they were in a way like the words themselves, Maher, Mahler, Maler, so that I felt at every moment, with every new sentence I spoke, that I was drawing nearer to the point at which I would fully recognize them as well, laughing along with them--yes, it was hilarious, a man out of time and yet already the lord of the manor, of that house right there fading into the twilight just outside the window, and all without even having to say the word, without even having been quoted a price!
When the darkness finally fell, our group peeled away in threes and fours and reconvened at a tavern where the flow of red wine continued unstaunched, and where a traveling band of musicians and singers, sleight-of-hand artists and storytellers, were performing in celebration of the summer solstice. Of course--relentless those signs that were shaping and explaining my life--it seemed me they were welcoming as well, but this time I sensed something more behind it. Between the acts I scanned the room, stealing glances at the faces occasionally stealing a glance at me, because as time went on I had the powerful sensation that I'd been there before--the plain, square brown room, the six long tables, the curious faces, that face there, those knotted hands. And though I couldn't quite put my finger on a particular memory, I finally decided that I must have happened upon a similar place, a similar time, in some small village in Ireland, if only because the people of Kern apparently shared the same ideas as the Irish about time. On the wall in the main room of the tavern was a clock that ran backwards, hands and numbers both circling counterclockwise, so that if toward the end of the evening when it was getting time to go home you glanced at it quickly, the position of the hands would lead you to believe it was earlier than it really was, eleven o'clock, not one; and perhaps then you would see that it "really" was eleven, that a good time with your close friends is not bound by the clock. Of course, the men of Kern willfully misunderstand this; they take it literally and try to make the night go on forever, which is not at all the same thing as the infinite, and after downing rows and rows of schnapps, each one sworn to be the last, end up entwined in a swaying circle, their heads rolling like rocks atop their buttery bodies, absurdly insisting it's only a quarter to nine, while the women shake their heads, point to the clock's more truthful twin in the mirror opposite, and keep trying to pull them out the door. I admit I was one of these swayers; I didn't care about the infinite, I just didn't want the evening to end, not ever. I was elated when Sepl invited me in for just one more glass and I saw on the wall of his kitchen a clock purposely stopped at five minutes before eleven. "So, you're in on it too," I said, laughing. "Here will it never time to go be."
Sepl nodded and grinned, then poured me a glass, looked at me in earnest, and said softly that he hoped it was so. I fell silent; it was the second time that evening Sepl had used this softer, more serious tone. The first time was back at the tavern when the professional musicians had taken a break and the room was filled with such a sleepy murmuring that Sepl had charged out of the tavern and returned with an accordion, which he kept in the trunk of his car for just this kind of emergency. Often while he played I noticed he was looking right at me with an unshakable intensity, as though he were reading the music off my face. After one of his songs he'd leaned in close and pledged eternal friendship, as he'd already done countless times that evening, but then suddenly he drew back, studied my face, and said softly that music was his life--did I understand what he meant? For a long moment I paused and stared deeply into that red face, which seemed almost to be pleading with me, then at last I nodded. "You have to me a part of your life given," I said, and Sepl beamed, wrapped me tightly in his thick arms, and poured me another glass of that wine that was good for your blood, or else was good because it was like blood.
I mention this exchange here because it perhaps influenced the way I perceived what happened as I was leaving Sepl's house that night. Going back to the inn was out of the question; everyone I'd met that night had offered me a bed to sleep in, but in the end I'd naturally taken Tante Rosi's keys. Her house was just about a mile up the hill from Sepl's, and though Sepl offered to run me up there in his car, I insisted I wanted under the stars to walk, or something like that. I stumbled up from the table, knocking over my glass and the empty bottle, then staggered off to the doorway where I ran smack into a yelp that turned out to be Sepl's daughter, Heli. I'd met her at the tavern; she was no more than eighteen and very much stood out among the other young women of Kern. She was much smaller and thinner, and her face was not nearly so plain and blotched but rather more angular and pale. Her blond hair was cut into short, soft spikes, except for three thin braids that dangled the length of her back and which she occasionally wore coiled around her neck like a rope necklace. Seeing her now in a loose red smock flecked with paint, the braids wrapped tightly around her scalp like a hairband, I realized how jarring it was to see her here at all; she looked more like someone one would see at a university cafe in New York or even New Jersey.
We untangled ourselves and mumbled apologies, then Heli slipped on by to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water. Her alarm had gone off, she said with a light laugh, she didn't know why. But what a strange dream she'd had--she was painting a self-portrait, then her eyes went dark and suddenly she was being painted, felt the brushstrokes against her neck, was anxious for the eyes to get done so she could see who the artist was--all very odd but not unpleasant, not a nightmare. Made her very thirsty though.
Sepl pointed to a picture hanging on the wall just behind my head--the sharp, black figure of a man in a derby and suit against an unfathomable sky blue, a thin moustache creasing his pinkish face that faded around the eyes to small, cloudy white disks. "Now you know how he feels," he laughed.
Heli smiled, shrugged. "Yes, but you should have seen the looks he was giving me," she said in English.
I turned and stared silently at the picture, absorbed by that awful white erasure, nothing but the infinite canvas beneath. Then Sepl and Heli both laughed to bring me back to their company, and oh, I beg your pardon, yes, those eyes, ha, fell right in. Sepl explained proudly that when she wasn't teaching in the elementary school Heli spent most of her time painting in her basement room, often deep into the night. Then he grabbed my arm and escorted me all around the house to see more of her work, mostly experiments in the styles of the modern masters; I believe the first, the man with eyes of no eyes, was some version of Magritte. I imagine they were technically flawed, but in this context, on the walls of a house in such a rustic village, they were like little revolutions, stunning works of art: a Picasso blue, the nude figure of a woman curled up in a ball in the murky wedge of a wine cellar, purple bottles clustered in one corner, a pile of gold and violet apples tumbling down from the other; a Cezanne landscape, an old house in a wash of cold autumn, greyish reds and orange, the wood dissolving to a grainy cloud; a perspective in the slashing, ambiguous style of Van Gogh, a dancing, twisting parade of telephone poles marching in from the horizon up and down hills and across fields, the connecting filaments widening at last into a thick serpent's neck, the head boring into whatever lay just above and to the left of the frame; and a portrait of Bessie Smith in the vibrant manner of Toulouse-Lautrec, the rich reds, browns, and blues of her broad, smiling face blossoming above a swirling boa of violet, pink and tiny threads of sea green, which was the color of her brilliant, flashing eyes. I say "Bessie Smith" now as though it were nothing--sure, why not do a portrait of such a great singer? But it took me a remarkably long time to recognize her; that whole life, in which I occasionally stared at the ceiling and listened to Bessie Smith records, seemed so distant from me now, seemed a century ago. And when I finally did recognize her--I even knew the photograph Heli had used--I was astounded. "Not Bessie Smith!" I said.
"Yes!" Sepl burst out, equally amazed, "You know her?"
Heli laughed. "Papa!" she said, then looked at me and shrugged. She said I shouldn't worry about sparing her feelings; she knew the paintings weren't really any good, I didn't have to like them. I shook my head vigorously, mumbled that to the contrary I thought they were remarkable, I liked them all very much. Yes, of course, she was still very young, she'd certainly much better get. "I just didn't expect . . . that is, they reminded me . . . " I rubbed my forehead, trying to squeeze out the words, but it was impossible. "Tomorrow I will . . . more of them . . . see," I said, "and then . . . more to say. But now . . . all that wine . . . so hard to think . . . yes, time to go."
Heli laughed, I'm not sure she understood a word I'd said; probably I'd woven some garbled, hybrid language. Then she and Sepl led me out the door into the starry night, stopped at the road leading up into the black toward Rosi's. Sepl grasped my soft hand hard between both of his, an ooze of mortar between bricks, and gazed at me for a long moment in great earnest. "We are now your friends," he said, "Next time, any time at all, you are welcome our home to share." I mumbled something in response, yes of course, same goes for you, but then Sepl looked confused, swung his arm around his daughter, and repeated what he'd just said, adding softly and gravely as he had in the tavern, "Do you understand?" Again as before I paused and stared deeply into his red, pleading face, looked at Heli too tucked under his arm; certainly she understood, her careful gaze patiently fixed on me, though I was swaying to and fro. I believe I too understood already, but perhaps because I was so slow to respond Sepl moved her slightly into the moonlight, there that's better, as though he were presenting her to me, as though he were saying, "Yes, it is clear to me too, I would have to be blind not to see it; just look at her, a part of my life, yes, but I'm no fool, there's no one else here, no one but you, and a good match it is too, because maybe together you can start something new, some new way of looking at things. Yes, the moonlight makes it obvious, you can easily see she does not belong here, not in this old century; no, clearly she belongs in yours."
III
I woke up the next morning in a bed of damp, musty straw. The dream was over, I was lying in a cow barn, my whole body throbbing with pain and nausea. Only with extraordinary effort did I manage to recall where on earth I was, the endless chain of circumstances that led me to these incredible depths, this fetid little bed of straw. I remembered reeling away from Sepl and his daughter, my young braided betrothed, spiraling uphill like a balloon let go into the dark cloud at the center of the road, a steep black tunnel formed by the trees arching above from either side. As Sepl had instructed, I counted the shrines in front of the houses, life-size crucifixions which lined the road like Spartacus' defeated slaves, how awful to see the next pale body emerging out of the distant gloom, rested and then pushed off against their bloody feet until at last I reached the sixth, which stood guard at Rosi's. I was about to enter, but then I figured I might as well go see my property one more time, I don't think I said "one last time," though surely I already knew that it was. I remember scraping open the door, stepping into the darkness, and then hearing a loud groping and stumbling about from room to room, a banging of metal and glass breaking, as though it weren't me absurdly looking for a lightswitch but someone else making all that noise, as though I'd surprised an intruder in my apartment and he was struggling to get away. Then in the middle of all this confusion it somehow occurred to me that maybe this wasn't my apartment, and so I was the intruder, and I believe I was about to try to apologize for the mistake, yes I'd pay for everything, just send me the bill, but then all of a sudden there was this other door, and I fell heavily into an impenetrable silence, buried in a sleep as deep as a hundred years.
So--the dream was over, I was lying in a cow barn, my whole body throbbing with pain and nausea. There was nothing left to do but give my regrets, say my goodbyes, and then, make a brief pilgrimage to Glanz to snap a photo of the old Mittach homestead, as I'd promised my brother I would; Peter was suffering from acute nostalgia these days, I believe he was either going to have the house blown up and framed for my father's birthday or have it printed on t-shirts at the next family reunion. Then back to the States for my beheading, everyone at work so excited to see me, crowding all around, "Well, what did they want for it?" and I'd probably have to smile, because in its way it was a little funny: "Um, I never found out--it's a long story." But if there's one thing I've learned it's that people have no patience for long stories, no matter how intriguing they are, stories that begin, "For instance, my passport. When I picked it up at the passport office . . ." And one by one or maybe just all at once, the silent, grim faces would slowly turn away, and the gears, there would be no stopping them now, they'd rapidly grind out my last days of public life, and then what, go back home, I guess, founder in my old room, languish in professional counseling, people mechanics, probably very useful in many cases but not in mine, and soon I'd just get it over with and disappear into vagrancy, not exactly what I'd had in mind at Rutgers but surely the correct career option for a man out of time.
I got up, brushed the straw from my clothes, but the smell, I wondered if it would stay with me even after I'd bathed, because at customs they would want to know if I'd been on any farms, near any animals, we don't want any parasites coming in here, and if I still smelled they'd never believe me when I said, "Me on a farm? Certainly not, someone else maybe, but not me," which wouldn't be too far from the truth. Finally I emerged into the hazy morning light, stumbled through the squawking chickens to Rosi's. As soon as she let me in, I could tell she knew the game was up, knew that I was an impostor. "You slept in the barn," she said with a quiet laugh, then retreated into the cool reserve she'd had on when I'd first arrived--no longer my Tante Rosi, but a woman kindly obliged to tend to my breakfast and coffee.
Sepl, however, did not want to give up on me so easily. Smelling of soap and neatly combed, he bounced into the kitchen with the same ardor he'd shown all the previous night. He laughed off my deplorable condition and was even elated when Rosi informed him I'd spent the night in my cow barn, evidently it was a rite of passage. After breakfast the liters came out once again, and Sepl would not take no for an answer. I appreciated his effort and even forced down a couple of glasses in the faint hope that they might rekindle some of the old feeling. But now that local Rotwein tasted cloudy and sour, and whenever Sepl stuck his big red face right up into my neck to mutter his usual pledges, I bristled and instinctively drew back, I felt as though he were milking a cow. Finally I asked him to take me to my inn so I could get cleaned up before I went to Glanz. He happily agreed, but on the way we had to make stops at still more of his friends' and relatives', all of whom insisted we make brief visits to their wine cellars. After a while it was intolerable, I had to resort to wandering away from the little gatherings to a spot where, under the pretense of taking in the marvelous views of the vineyards, I could spill the bloody stuff on the ground. No, the hourglass was dry, had not been turned over; my family had hardened into the cement of New Jersey, and I had little in common with those they'd left behind, except maybe for Heli, the only person within a hundred miles or more who had even heard of Bessie Smith. Well, then, let her come to New York, I thought, plenty of art schools there, thousands of cafes, though she'd probably just disappear in such a place, think it dirty and crowded and all that, miss the simple beauty of home. No, though clearly an anomaly in Kern, Heli hadn't struck me as all that restless or desperate to leave it, not even for Vienna.
I couldn't even understand them any more, literally I mean. Overnight I'd lost the language almost entirely, so that I couldn't help but wonder if I'd ever had it to begin with; that is, as the day with Sepl and his friends dragged on and on, I began to entertain the notion that all this was a set-up, an elaborate performance everyone was in on, even the professionals at the tavern, to make sure I bought the property--surely some of you suspected this too. Why not, maybe they were just doing what we were told to do at the agency, not just wining and dining the client but also making him feel as though, business aside, he was really a terrific guy, someone they were really lucky to have met. In fact, for the really big deals, and may we roast in hell for it, we used to pay off in advance every incidental person we would come in contact with that evening, waiters and coat-checkers and the like, who would laugh at our client's jokes even when he hadn't made any. True, my hosts probably had a much better reason for the deception than we ever did; maybe someone needed an expensive operation, maybe Tante Rosi, which would explain her proud distance. Or perhaps later that day as I was leaving without having made a commitment, saying I'd sleep on it and get back to him, Sepl would take me aside and confess in perfect English, "I didn't want to mention it, but it's true, and there's no use denying it--Heli, my daughter. . ." and at last all the signs would be explained and verified. Of course, I'd be suitably moved and would gladly give them everything I had, what's money to a man out of time?
But that is an ending to another story, perhaps it is the ending to "The Clock-Winder of Gloureen." There was a moment when I thought it would be the ending to this story, when Sepl and I were sitting in the tavern at my inn having one last drink together. I'd had a bath and felt I'd left most of the cow barn around the sides of the tub, so I told him straight out that I was leaving right after my visit to Glanz, that I probably wouldn't see him again. Sepl looked stunned, asked me to repeat what I'd said, and when I did, this time thanking him for his warm hospitality and promising to write as to my decision on the property, his harelip began to flutter, I could almost see the first words of the above confession forming on the fissure. But then all at once he smiled broadly and shrugged. "Well, you will back-come," he said. I indulged this last wish--who knew but that in my next life as a vagrant I would happen to pass through again, though it was doubtful whether by then I'd be able to recognize the place, or it me. So we drank one more toast to returning, and then it was time to go.
Out in the late afternoon sun, Sepl guessed that I preferred to walk to Glanz alone and so just pointed out the road, an easy two kilometers, no turns or forks. We shook hands, embraced. I was not too far away when I began to hear music and turned around to see Sepl gazing out at me, playing me off on the accordion as is customary to do in Kern for departing visitors and brides on their wedding days. . . .
I entered the town of Glanz just before dusk and wound to a stop just in front of the church. You won't find Glanz on any map, even when you're in it you can barely see it; it's just a little speck on the face of the earth, a tiny huddling of social animals against the elements--a church, a village green, a cemetery. I looked up and down the road; sometimes when you enter a strange town you feel the houses have eyes, but the town of Glanz seemed totally deserted, the houses vacant for years. Not that it was overgrown; to the contrary, it was meticulously scrubbed and trimmed, preserved like a museum-town, and this is where they lived. All was perfectly still and silent, even the church clock seemed stuck at a few minutes before six. I felt as though I could stand there forever before even one single thing would happen. Then at last I felt a light breeze, and far down the road the opposite direction from which I'd come a splotch of dark green appeared. It seemed like nothing more than a small shrub, but then gradually the color receded in places to reveal two hands and a face. It was an old peasant woman in a long drab dress and kerchief; she was carrying a bag of something, I saw a splash of spring green. Slowly I began to walk toward her, picturing myself as she must have--a splotch of blue, pale hands and a face, a stranger, perhaps lost, in any case a man with a question, a man who simply was a question.
At last we met. She paused, waited. In her bag were heads of lettuce. I greeted her politely; if I'd had a hat I'd have raised it a couple of inches. I told her I was a relative of someone who had lived here once, John Mittach was his name--had she heard of him? I don't know why I asked this; I suppose I was just accustomed to living in a world where everyone knew and revered the name of John Mittach. But since he'd left Glanz in 19OO, she would have had to have been at least ninety-five or a hundred. Her face went blank; for a moment I feared I'd insulted her.
"There was a Mittach here," she began at last, then gazed off down the road, back toward the church. "But his name was never John, it was something else. He was blind and used to wind the clock. We used to see him walking up and down this street to the church, many times day and night. The people that took care of him made him live in the basement of his own house. It was amazing--always the right time."
I glared at her, repeated her words to make sure I'd understood. She echoed each phrase, punctuating them with slow, careful nods. I turned toward the church and gazed up at the pale yellow tower, its black and gold clockface topped by a red steeple that seemed soft and baggy like a fool's cap. I found it hard to believe that my family, so careful in recording its history, could have missed so important an entry, but when I asked the old woman if perhaps some other Mittachs had lived here too, she stared back at me as though she found the question utterly incomprehensible. They were all gone now, she muttered, perhaps a little vexed. She didn't know what happened to them, they weren't even in the cemetery.
"I see," I said, then mumbled a vague apology and fingered the camera in my back pocket. Well, anyway, this clock-winder--did she know where he'd lived?
The woman seemed surprised or confused, then all at once her leathery face split open in a wide grin. "Right there," she said, pointing, "It's right behind you!"
I whirled around. Behind me was a squarish, yellow house sitting stolidly atop a low, grassy terrace. It was an odd structure in that its door, if indeed it had one, didn't face the road. The broad side facing was slivered with four narrow, arched windows like a church or a prison; above each was an identical marble frieze, two cherubs on either side of something that seemed part man or bird, fish or frog, as though the twins were still in the process of sculpting it. I turned back to the woman; I felt as though I wanted to ask a hundred more questions, but I couldn't come up with a single one. So I simply thanked her, and she and her lettuce waddled off down the road.
I stood awhile gazing at the house. Like the others in the town, it seemed strangely vacant, but perhaps because it didn't appear to have a door, its emptiness seemed by contrast remarkably dense; the longer you stared at it, the more you thought that all that nothing was about to explode. And then all at once it made perfect sense that we knew nothing of this brother. Like most people my family was only interested in the part of the history where they came into it; anything that came before seemed distant and hard to grasp and even disturbing, because you could keep going back forever and find you were related to just about everyone, and then what was the point? No, it was better to draw a line and forget all those people on the other side of it, because then it was easier to forget that someday you too would be forgotten, since you hadn't done anything worth recording, not even move to New Jersey from Glanz.
I shook my head, sighed. It was getting late, the last light; my shadow lay stretched across the road, across the grass, was peeking in one of the windows. I figured I should be going if I wanted to make it back to my inn before dark, so all at once I whipped out my camera and snapped the picture, stuffed the camera back into my pocket. I started to walk off down the road, then turned around for one last look. I took another picture, but that wasn't enough either. I had to see the inside of the place, if possible I had to see that basement.
I unlatched the gate of an old green fence that ran along both sides of the house and stepped cautiously onto the lawn within. The side, or rather the real front, was completely bare and white except for two tiny windows at the top set close together like eyes, and at the far corner, a small black door. For a long moment I just stood there at the threshold, my fist poised to knock, rehearsing what I would say. I wished I'd thought of this before the old woman had left; she might have known who lived here now, maybe she'd have been kind enough to introduce me. I almost ran after her, but she'd already dissolved back into the dark green shrub on the horizon.
Finally I just went ahead and knocked; to my surprise the door cracked open. I pressed my face to the slit and peered in, but it was so dim inside I brought my hands up to shade my eyes, and of course this gesture pushed the door further ajar. I knocked again, called out, half my body in now, hello, hello? and then all but one foot. I took in the place quickly; it was not someone's residence but a hall of some kind, lined with several rows of long tables and folding chairs. Finally I slipped all the way in, my measured footsteps echoing softly off the floorboards. The room was dim and almost airless, the walls faded to a soft grey and completely bare, so as I walked up an aisle between two of the tables I felt as though I were wading through a thin fog. At the far end of the room where the tables ended was a low platform or stage, a thin slab of wood with a square opening in the center, a trap door. I crept over and peered over the edge; four stone steps vanished into a fluid darkness, like that at the bottom of a well.
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