The Things We Cherished (4 page)

He pulled a business card from inside his jacket and handed it to her. “Germany. We need to go to Munich to talk to Dykmans’s attorneys.”

“Fine.” She drained her drink and stood, leaving the pad thai almost untouched before her. “See you tomorrow,” she mumbled, then started for the door. She could not bear to be the one who remained behind, watching him leave again.

BAVARIA
,
1903

Johann had worked on the clock for nearly a year. Each night after Rebecca fell asleep beside him, breathing her shallow, even breaths that deepened and slowed as she dreamt, he crept from the house and returned to the small room at the back of the barn that served as his workshop. There he labored until the stub of candle he had taken from the kitchen was gone, or sometimes when the candle was a bit longer and more resilient, until the first starlings began to call to each other over the hills, signaling daybreak. Then he would return to the cottage and slip beneath the sheets, pressing himself against Rebecca’s warmth and wrapping his hands around the growing roundness of her belly for an hour before rising again to tend to the livestock.

He had toiled all through the long bitter winter, his breath nearly freezing in the night air before him as he trudged to the barn through the hardened snow that covered the ground from October to April. As the spring rains came, turning the earth to a thick mud, he hastened his pace, trying to work longer, faster. The clock needed to be finished before planting season came and pulled him from his workshop for good.

Then the previous evening, Johann suddenly tightened the final
screw and knew that he was done. So he stowed the clock beneath the floorboards and returned to the house. He crawled into bed, trying not to disturb Rebecca, but she reached for him sleepily, urging him to make love to her in the gentle way he had learned since her stomach had grown.

Afterward, as her body rose and fell beneath his embrace, he lay awake, envisioning his masterpiece. Set on a brass plate beneath a dome of thick lead glass, the clock was just twelve inches high. It had a hand-painted face, black numbers on ivory, which offered modest cover to the bare mechanism behind. Suspended below were four curved prongs, a rounded ball on the end of each. They rotated slowly 180 degrees to the right and then, seemingly moved by an invisible hand, stopped and spun slowly in the opposite direction. Every minute, the clock let out an obliging tick, an almost-sigh, as though pushing the long hand with great effort.

It would be sold to Augustus Hoffel, the richest man in town, to sit on the mantelpiece of the elegant
Gasthaus
he ran. Or so Johann hoped. He had shown Herr Hoffel the photograph nearly a year ago and the man had seemed enthusiastic about the prospect of the clock, offered to buy it then and there. Of course he hadn’t paid a deposit, nor given Johann the money he needed for the fine metal and other parts, and Johann had not dared to ask. Herr Hoffel was known as a man of repute, doing business on credit with merchants as far away as Regensburg. Who was Johann, a humble farmer, to ask for a down payment up front? So Johann had to wait two months to barter and scrape together the materials he needed before beginning. But the clock was finer than anything he had ever made or even seen, and he felt certain that Herr Hoffel would buy it on sight, giving him without negotiation his full price, the sum he needed to buy passage to America for himself and Rebecca.

Rebecca. He stroked her raven hair, splayed across the pillow,
smiling to himself as he always did when thinking of his wife, even when she was lying just inches away. Rebecca was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and when they met, she had the eye of the rabbi’s son. Were it not for Johann, she would be living in a grand house with running water, a toilet inside. But against all odds and her parents’ virulent protestations, she had chosen him, the farmer who turned up each week at the kindergarten where she worked because she loved the children and not because she needed to, with his jokes and stories and whatever simple gift he could scrape together for a few pennies. He could not believe it when she accepted the proposal he had hardly dared to make. Rebecca’s parents, who had stopped somewhere just short of disowning her, reluctantly agreed to host the marriage ceremony in their home, but had been too embarrassed to invite their friends.

He reached down, touching her hand, feeling the calluses that had not been there when they met. Rebecca had proven to be stronger than her sheltered upbringing might have suggested. She had taken gamely to his simple life, moving into the cottage with the crude planked floors left to him by his deceased parents. Under her care, the two-room shelter became homier than it had ever been; flowered curtains now adorned the windows, and handmade pillows softened the wooden chairs. She took on without complaint, too, the tasks that filled the day of a farmer’s wife, learning to spin wool and clean and mend clothes until they were more thread than fabric, to churn butter and make meals with whatever was available, canning and storing what she could for the long winter months. She even worked beside him in the field, laughing and singing, until he insisted she stop out of fear for her condition.

Two years had passed since they stood beneath the canopy. Two years later and Johann still could not believe his good fortune
that Rebecca had chosen him as her own. As he watched her sit before the cracked mirror each evening, combing her dark tresses in preparation for bed, he sometimes wondered if it was a dream, whether if he blinked he might wake up to find it all gone.

The minutes seemed to stretch endlessly as he lay awake. Finally, he dozed off. He slept fitfully, dreaming that he went to retrieve the clock the next morning and it had disappeared, the space beneath the floorboards empty. The vision faded, replaced by another, equally disturbing, of the clock falling from his hands and shattering into a thousand pieces on the ground.

He awakened, restless and drained, to the sound of the roosters crowing to a yet-unseen dawn. After washing at the basin with greater care than he otherwise would, he put on the clean brown work shirt and trousers that Rebecca had laid out. “I’m going,
Liebchen
,” he whispered to Rebecca, breathing in the powdery scent where her neck met her ear.

“Did you eat?” she mumbled.

“Yes,” he lied, tightening his suspenders. In truth, he had been so anxious he’d forgotten about the piece of
Butterbrot
she left for him each evening.

“Check the calf.” She was referring to the two-week-old that had struggled to learn to suckle. Rebecca had spent hours each day feeding the animal from a bottle with a gentleness and patience that made Johann’s heart swell.

At the doorway, he took one last look back at his wife and was flooded with longing. A twinge of anxiety rose in him unexpectedly and he fought the urge to return and kiss her good-bye once more.

Turning away reluctantly, he walked to the door, donning his boots with the cracked soles, the brimmed hat that had been his
father’s. The smell of manure grew stronger as he made his way to the barn. There he noted that the calf slept soundly, nestled at its mother’s breast.

Then he walked to the clock shop at the back of the barn. It was nothing more than a large closet, a bench with some tools, a crude furnace for warmth. Johann’s father had started working there as a hobby, making clocks as a way to earn extra money in the harsh winter months. He taught Johann to help from the earliest years, first handing him bits of wood or letting him hold a piece in place while he fastened it. Later, Johann would make his first clumsy attempt at building his own clock, his skills growing over the years under his father’s wordless tutelage. And after his father died from an unfortunate kick by a horse, Johann continued to build clocks, the smell of the oil beneath the flickering lamplight a kind of mourning and tribute all at once. He sometimes imagined he heard his father working beside him still.

Then one day last summer when he was in town he met the American who showed him the drawing of the clock. He had gone to Teitelbaum’s, the lone mercantile shop in town, to see if the proprietor had any work for him, as he sometimes did when he had a clock that required a particularly difficult repair. Herr Teitelbaum did not pay him in cash; rather Johann bartered his skills for the coffee and other practical items they needed, and sometimes when the job was a bit more involved, some white sugar to satisfy Rebecca’s sweet tooth. There was a young man at the counter soliciting orders for various clocks and watches and other gift items from abroad that he hoped the shop might consider stocking.

“I’m afraid these are too dear for my customers,” Johann overheard Herr Teitelbaum say.

Dejected, the salesman started to put away the papers containing
images of his wares and it was then that Johann had glimpsed the anniversary clock for the first time. “May I?” he asked. The salesman shrugged and slid the paper down the counter in his direction. As he studied the intricate mechanisms and fine glass dome, Johann was instantly captivated. He asked the man dozens of questions about the timepiece, memorizing his answers, before the man seemed to grow weary of the conversation and left.

For weeks afterward, the image of the clock stayed with him. Could he replicate it? It would be extremely difficult and time-consuming, but if it was possible, it would bring in the money they needed to leave. He summoned up his courage and approached Herr Hoffel, one of the few men in town with the resources to purchase the clock, and price was discussed and agreed upon. And so he had begun to work.

Johann pulled the clock from beneath the floorboards and set it on the workbench, appraising it anew. His hand traced the shape of the dome, hovering just above the glass as he resisted the urge to touch it and leave the smudge marks that would necessitate polishing it once more. He had built the clock from memory, adding his own modest touches where he dared to try and improve the end result. This was not the simple cuckoo clock that had been made in the region for centuries, with its basic wood design and crude mechanics. The anniversary clock, as the peddler called it, was a torsion model, intricately made and designed to run for more than a year before needing to be wound. Johann could not believe he’d actually been able to make it work.

He covered the clock with a small blanket and set out walking from the barn. The journey into town was not insignificant and any other day he might have taken the wagon, but he did not want to risk jostling the clock, trying to hold it steady as he drove. Anyway, it was a fine morning in the no-man’s-land between winter
and spring, with the still-damp earth giving off a sweet smell and a gentle breeze clearing the fog.

As he ascended the hill, his eyes traveled across the rolling green earth, broken only by a stone monastery perched high in the distance. Then he looked back at the fields that fanned out below. The small but fertile plot of land, a few hectares in the lush valley nourished by the nearby river Main, had been owned by his family for generations. It would soon be time to till the soil. He would plant despite the fact that they would not be here for the harvest, hoping the promise of a late-summer bounty would raise the sale price of the land.

He shifted the clock to his other arm and looked down, concentrating on his footsteps and taking care not to stumble as the path that dropped into the forest narrowed and grew uneven. Sunlight crept through the pines, drying the needles on the ground to a brittle carpet that crackled beneath his feet.

His thoughts returned to Rebecca. The pregnancy had not come easily. Each month since their wedding there had been a hushed expectation, hope followed by disappointment. There were conversations, held only late at night in low voices though they lived alone, for who really spoke of such things at all, much less in the light of day? Whispers about what might be wrong, certain foods a woman might eat or salves she could apply that were rumored to help. But after the first year they had stopped hoping and accepted without recrimination that if God had not seen fit to bless them with a child, then the love they had for each other would be enough.