Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban Page B

mind, he said, took his hoplites out for a walk on the embankment where he did his morning running.
    Brown and yellow leaves lay heaped against the parapet. Winter coming, darkness in the light. Grey river, grey sky, quiet men black against the grey with shovels and yellow sand, levelling up the paving stones. A gilt-faced statue of Thomas More. A string of motor cruisers, heavy with the responsibilities of pleasure, moored to orange buoys. A dredge bucketing up the river bottom. A green bronze statue of a naked girl. The greyness around her quivered in its stillness, held its breath. What if the great towering wave stops rushing forward, thought Kleinzeit. What then?
    A tremendous lorry came to a stop beside him and stood there puttering. ‘How do I get to your place?’ said the driver.
    ‘What for?’ said Kleinzeit.
    ‘Blimey, I’ve got to deliver this lot, haven’t I?’
    ‘What is it?’ said Kleinzeit.
    ‘What’s it to you?’
    ‘Don’t think I’m just going to accept any shipment that comes along.’
    ‘You the one that’s waiting for it then?’
    ‘Depends what it is,’ said Kleinzeit.
    ‘Mortal terror,’ said the driver. The lorry was about a quarter of a mile long, had a sign on its rear end, LONG VEHICLE.
    ‘Right,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Turn left over the bridge, second right before the lights, second lights after the left, third roundabout after the diversion, first left right after
The Green Man
on the corner.’ That should lose him nicely in Battersea, thought Kleinzeit, give me at least an hour’s start.
    ‘Would you mind going through that again?’ said the driver.
    ‘I’ll do my part again if you do yours,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What was the first thing you said?’
    The driver looked at Kleinzeit carefully, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. ‘I said how do I get to Moor Place.’
    ‘And you said you were delivering … ?’
    ‘From Morton Taylor. You some kind of inspector or something?’
    ‘Sorry,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘I hear funny.’ He sneaked a look at the side of the lorry. There was the name in letters three feet high, harmless enough: MORTAL TERROR. ‘Moor Place is somewhere in the City,’ he said. ‘You have to turn round and go back the way you came, right along the embankment past Blackfriars Bridge and into Victoria Street, then ask from there.’
    ‘Cheers,’ said the driver. The lorry moved on.
    ‘My pleasure,’ said Kleinzeit. He walked on past the landmarks of his running, past the bridge, the telephone kiosk, the traffic lights, to the street that led to a pharmaceutical garden. There he turned and went back, thinking Athenian, paragraph, and key. In the distance ahead, through the brown leaves and the yellow, phantom children no longer his walked away. That’s how we do it, said Memory. Everybody walking away.
    I forgot how things wait by the river in the mornings, said Kleinzeit. He quickly thought as Athenian as possible,formed his hoplites into a thin red line ahead of him, marched home, had breakfast, took his chair pad, glockenspiel, Thucydides, yellow paper, poems and paragraph, put the key in his pocket and went into the Underground.
    In the train he read about the siege of Plataea, the Peloponnesians building a mound on the outside, the Plataeans raising the wall on the inside. No cowards in those days, thought Kleinzeit. And they weren’t even Athenians.
    At his place in the corridor he taped his two poems to the wall and wrote two new ones: a green bronze girl poem and a Morton Taylor poem. He rather fancied the last two lines of the second one:
    Walk in danger, walk in error,
Walk ahead in Morton Taylor.
    Esoteric, thought Kleinzeit. Keep them guessing. While he was sitting cross-legged writing on the yellow paper a young couple stopped in front of him. Great big orange back-packs, jeans, ankhs hanging from their necks, shoes for walking across continents.
    ‘Do you tell fortunes?’ said the girl.
    ‘All the time,’ said Kleinzeit.