finding #49
TIME DOES NOT DIVIDE EVENLY. SOME INTERVALS ARE TRICKY.
NO MECHANICAL FAULT HAS BEEN FOUND.
Mornings were usually quiet. She liked waking very early and making coffee in her little red enamel pot. She had had it for so long that it seemed to have always been there in the kitchen. The enamel had chipped near the handle and a black crescent of metal showed through. Vasile had bought it the year they got married. At least she thought he had. Some mornings she remembered buying it herself in Brașov. Memory had become unreliable in small, unimportant ways since he died.
At six she drank the coffee at the kitchen table.
At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.
At six-thirty the cat left.
At seven she opened the door to Vasile’s workroom.
No one remembers exactly when Elena became a watchmaker.
This is already strange, because everyone in the village remembers when Vasile became one.
It was in the winter of 1987, according to Petru, although Leana insists it was the following spring. Marin claims to possess a watch repaired by Vasile in 1985, which would settle the question if the inscription on the back did not bear the date 1991.
Such discrepancies are common in matters concerning watches.
What is certain is that Vasile repaired them.
He repaired alarm clocks, pocket watches, cheap Russian wristwatches, a Swiss watch that belonged to the pharmacist’s father, and once, according to a story no one entirely believes, the clock in the church tower.
Whenever a watch stopped, they came to him. And they were always pleased when, two or three days later, Vasile handed it back across the table and said in his slow, gentle voice:
“It’s done. Works fine. There was nothing wrong with it.”
And invariably:
“You don’t owe me anything.”
People protested, and he waved them away. In the end, something from somebody’s garden always appeared on the porch: a basket of tomatoes, two bunches of onions, a pumpkin in the fall, a jar of jam. She would make him one of the sour soups he liked, using whatever happened to come their way, and everyone was happy.
Vasile had been dead for a year, and she still hadn’t managed to really go into the room with the watches. Now and then she had opened the door, just to look, perhaps to take something, but she always closed it again quickly.
Then, one morning in April, she carried her coffee there in the small red enamel pot.
Everything was still in the same place: the magnifying lenses, the tiny screwdrivers, the tweezers, the little boxes of gears, springs, and screws. And the watches, of course, the ones Vasile had begun collecting over the years. He found some at flea markets and others were given to him by people who no longer wanted them. Some he had repaired and they still worked. Others looked as though they had never worked at all.
At first, she went in only to tidy up. But every time, the hours passed and she was still there.
She turned the tools over in her hands, trying to remember what Vasile had used each one for. She opened watches and followed the tiny gears without understanding much. Sometimes she picked up one of the lenses, fitted it to her eye, and stared. Still, none of it made much sense.
Until one day she opened a watch and, for the first time, knew where to look.
Slowly, little by little, she learned how to take them apart and put them back together. Then she discovered which gear was supposed to touch which, and how very little force could already be too much. Eventually she learned how to clean a mechanism without hurting it, how to straighten a spring, how to recognize a worn tooth.
And, perhaps hardest of all, how not to rush into doing something simply because she could not immediately find the problem.
She learned to wait.
Vasile had once told her that people broke most things because they had no patience. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she was beginning to understand.
After a few months she no longer had to look twice to know whether a piece had fallen properly into place. Sometimes she could simply feel it under her fingers.
With time, she began to hear the watches differently too and realized that not all ticking sounded the same.
Some watches ticked in a hurry even when they kept perfect time, while others always sounded tired. Some had a round, peaceful ticktock. Others scratched at your ears even after you stopped them.
Vasile’s watch did not make any sound at all.
She left it where it was.
By June, the room with the watches had become part of her mornings. One day, after making coffee in the red enamel pot, she turned on the radio and found the station Vasile used to listen to, the one that played old Romanian romances.
She carried her coffee into the room and looked at the table where Vasile’s watch was still waiting. She pulled it closer, picked up the magnifying lens and started to investigate the mechanism.
A song she knew came over the radio and she began to hum.
The mechanism was immaculate. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing. Every wheel meshed perfectly with the next. The spring held tension, the balance moved freely. Still, it wasn’t ticking. Or was it?
She put it back on the table, turned off the radio and listened.
There were five watches on the table and another seven clocks on the walls. They weren’t ticking together. That was normal. But she realized that every few minutes all stopped at the same instant and the silence lasted perhaps a second. Then they continued.
She listened for a while. It happened eleven times. She wrote the times down.
7:17.
7:26.
7:31.
7:37.
7:52.
8:01.
8:16.
8:28.
8:33.
8:44.
8:57.
There was no pattern she could see.
She decided it was best to stop now. She had to go to the grocery store anyhow and maybe visit Tina on the way back.
The next morning, she looked at the paper again.
There were twelve times written on it.
The last was:
9/19
She was certain she had not written it.
For a while she stood at the table with the paper in her hand. Then she looked at the clocks on the walls, at the watches scattered among the tools, at Vasile’s watch lying open on the table.
It was still silent.
She thought about crossing it out.
Instead, she made coffee.
At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.
At six-thirty the cat left.
At seven she opened the workroom.
She worked as usual.
A little after nine she found herself looking at the clock on the wall.
9:03.
She went back to the watch in her hands.
At 9:08 she looked again.
Then at 9:11.
This annoyed her.
She put down the tweezers.
“Ridiculous,” she said.
Still, she waited.
At 9:19 every clock in the room stopped.
Not gradually.
Together.
The silence was so complete that she could hear a truck changing gears somewhere on the road and, farther away, someone shaking a rug from an upstairs window.
Then, from the table came a single tick.
Vasile’s watch was still lying open in the corner of the table.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
She waited for the second hand to move.
It didn’t.
Outside, the truck she had heard earlier disappeared down the road. Someone closed a gate. A dog barked and another one answered, then a third dog answered that one, farther off, and then a fourth, and the sound kept going out across the village without arriving anywhere. A bicycle went by the house. Another passed behind it. Somewhere a woman called a child’s name twice and got no answer.
Vasile’s watch kept ticking, its hands motionless.
She looked at the wall clock.
9:19.
Then at the little alarm clock on the shelf.
9:19.
The coffee beside her had gone cold.
When she looked up again, the wall clock said 9:20.
The other clocks had started too. She had not heard them begin.
Next Tuesday morning she ran into Petru outside the grocery store. He was carrying milk, bread and a plastic bag of tomatoes.
He looked tired.
“You look terrible,” she said.
Petru sighed.
“I have to go all the way to Mocănești, and God knows when I’m supposed to find the time.”
“What happened?”
“My father’s watch broke. That old one, you know it. Means a lot to me. I heard there’s a good watchmaker in Mocănești.”
He sighed again.
“God rest your Vasile. I could really use him now. I barely have time to breathe, never mind going all the way to Mocănești and back, then making the trip again to pick the thing up. I just hope that fellow is half as good as Vasile was and can figure it out.”
She looked at him.
Petru was sixty-one years old.
As far as she knew, he had no job that required being anywhere at a particular hour. His children had moved away. His wife had been dead six years.
“What are you doing with all your time?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
This seemed to trouble him.
“Bring me the watch.”
Petru stared at her.
“I thought Vasile fixed watches.”
“Vasile is dead.”
“I know.”
It was too difficult to explain. In truth, she would not have known exactly what to explain. Perhaps Vasile had taught her, and she simply hadn’t known it. She had been beside him all those years, watching him bent over the table, listening to a watch before he opened it.
“Bring it,” was all she said.
Petru came that evening.
“I won’t make it to Mocănești before the end of the week anyway. Keep it a few days. If you figure it out, send word. You’d save me that whole trip. I’m so busy these days, the last thing I need is to waste time on the road.”
He left the watch on the table and went home.
It was an old watch, with a yellow face and a brown leather strap that had been replaced many times.
At dawn the next morning, she got to work.
Before opening the watch, she held it to her ear.
Nothing.
After a few moments, she put it down.
“Strange,” she said.
It didn’t seem broken.
She opened it carefully and began cleaning the little gears. After a while she realized she was humming.
She stopped, her mouth slightly open.
She had not sung in many years.
The song was one her grandmother had taught her. It was not a lullaby, not a song of sorrow, nor one for dancing and celebration. It was all of those things together without quite being any of them, a song that emptied your heart and filled it again and somehow left you clean.
She worked on the watch for several hours, slowly, with the song inside her.
She found nothing wrong.
After cleaning the mechanism, she put most of it together and went to make herself a coffee. She left the watch on the table, the face still open.
Petru will have to go to Mocănești after all, she thought. I don’t know what possessed me to think I could repair watches now.
When she came back, she put the face back on and wound the watch.
It began to tick.
She gave the watch back to Petru the next day.
“You fixed it!”
A broad smile spread over his surprised face.
“There was nothing to fix,” she said, a little embarrassed. “I cleaned it, that’s all. If it stops again, I’m afraid you’ll still have to go to Mocănești.”
A few days later, on her way back from the market, she saw Petru standing at the corner talking with some neighbors.
“Good day! The watch is working beautifully! I’m telling everyone about you!”
“Don’t. There’s no need. I told you, I didn’t even repair anything. I barely know what I’m doing. Don’t go sending people to me.”
Petru laughed.
But he did tell everyone about her.
A few weeks later, Leana appeared at her gate with a small watch on a gold-colored bracelet. Her son had bought it for her birthday.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It runs fast. Keeps fooling me. I look at it and panic because I think I’m late again.”
“How fast?”
“I don’t know. Five minutes, ten. Maybe more. I don’t know anything anymore.”
She sat down with a sigh.
“My son keeps asking me to come to the city.”
“So why don’t you go?”
Leana began listing everything she had to do. The chickens, the garden, the beans that needed picking, the jars she had to put up for winter. She certainly didn’t have time to go to the city. Besides, she felt bad telling her son that the watch he had bought her no longer worked properly. Perhaps she had broken it somehow.
The watch was, indeed, running a little fast.
The watchmaker opened it, cleaned it, and adjusted the mechanism.
A fine rain fell outside that day, and she worked for a long time with the window open. She liked the smell of wet earth.
When she put the watch back together, she held it to her ear for a while.
The ticking was quiet, like the rain falling in the yard.
Leana came for it the next day.
“I managed to fix it. It keeps time now.”
“Thank God. The last thing I needed was a watch making things worse.”
A couple of weeks later, Leana’s house stayed locked for several days. The neighbors said she had taken the bus into the city to visit her son.
When Leana came back, she stopped by with a box of chocolates from town.
“I hadn’t been to see him since spring,” she said. “I kept saying I’d go when I finished everything.”
“And did you?”
Leana laughed.
“No. The beans are still unpicked and the jars still empty.”
She shrugged.
“And nobody died.”
After Leana, others began to come.
At first there was one every few weeks, then more and more often. A watch that ran slow, one that stopped at night, another that worked perfectly for several days and then suddenly began rushing ahead.
At first, they came because Petru or Leana had sent them, but slowly word spread that Vasile’s widow had started repairing watches.
She protested every time that she was no real watchmaker and that anyone with a serious problem would be better off going to Mocănești.
But people insisted she try first. If she couldn’t fix it, they would somehow find the time to get to Mocănești.
Slowly, she became less “Vasile’s widow” and more and more “the watchmaker.”
That was how Marin arrived at her gate.
He came into the yard in a hurry and, before even saying good morning, took the watch off his wrist.
“I heard you know what you’re doing.”
“Not really. People talk too much.”
“Maybe so. Still, have a look at it.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it stop?”
“No.”
“Run slow?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Fast?”
Marin thought about it.
“No. Not that either.”
“Then why did you bring it?”
He stood there for a moment, thinking, then said quietly:
“Because there isn’t enough time in a day.”
“There’s as much as there ever was,” she said.
She laughed.
“I repair watches, Marin.”
“I know. But people say...”
“People should mind their own business.”
She took the watch anyway.
She opened it twice and found nothing wrong. She left it on the table until the next morning.
Some children were playing outside in the street. They ran around and shouted and laughed loudly.
The watchmaker worked with the window open.
When she put Marin’s watch back together, its tick was short and lively, almost as if it jumped.
She listened for a while.
“Strange,” she said quietly. “I could swear you sounded different yesterday.”
Marin came that evening.
“There was nothing wrong with it.”
“But you opened it?”
“Yes. Opened it, cleaned it.”
She handed it back.
“And now?”
“Still nothing wrong with it.”
A few weeks later she found Marin at the edge of the road with three children gathered around him. He was showing them how to make a whistle from a small branch, and they were watching every movement of his hands.
“Marin, don’t you have work to do?”
“I do.”
He scraped a little more bark from the branch and held it up to the light.
“But I’ll show them this first.”
She started to leave when she heard him call after her:
“You were right, you know! There was nothing wrong with the watch!”
All the way home, she thought about Marin.
She went directly into the room with the watches.
The paper from June was still there, with its eleven times and the twelfth she had not written. She looked at it for a while, then moved it aside.
Vasile’s watch was lying open in the corner of the table. She fitted the magnifying lens to her eye and examined it again.
The balance. The spring. The gears. Every tooth exactly where it should be.
Nothing.
She turned it over in her hands and looked at it once more.
Still nothing.
“There is nothing wrong with it,” she said.
The words sounded familiar.
Vasile had said them hundreds of times.
There was nothing wrong with it.
Elena looked at his watch for a long time.
Then she closed the case.
Perhaps he had simply been telling the truth.