Chapter 51 The Clockmender's Room

The shop below the room had been a clockmaker's once, and had stopped keeping time when its owner did, and now stood behind a shutter of grey plywood with the name still painted on the glass in flaking gold letters that Viktor read as they crossed the street: KREJCAR, it said, and beneath the name, in smaller letters, REPAIRS DONE WHILE YOU WAIT. Seventy years, he thought, of repairs done while the city waited, and the city had never once come in to collect. The lamp at the end of the bridge went out. Somewhere behind them a tram turned the corner with a sound like paper tearing, and Nikolai glanced back the way men glance back when they have spent their lives being followed, and Hana took Viktor's hand without looking at him, and they went up. The stairs were narrow and smelled of machine oil and cold metal and, beneath those, faintly, of snow, as if winter 1947 had seeped into the plaster and never finished melting. At the top a door stood open on a room lit by a single bulb and a second lamp — an old storm lantern, brass, its glass smoked amber — standing on a table beside a watchmaker's loupe and a dish of small brass gears that caught the light like fish scales. The man who had raised the lamp stood away from the table with his hands at his sides, the way soldiers stand when they have decided not to reach for anything, and he looked at Viktor for a long time before he spoke. "You have his hands," he said. His Czech was fluent and slightly wrong, each word placed with care, the grammar of a man who had learned the language late and loved it precisely because it was not his first. "Anton Vlasak's hands. I held one of them once, across a table made of planks, in a hut that smelled of boot leather and kerosene. I was twenty-three years old. He was thirty-one. Between us lay everything the courier had carried, which is to say everything the courier had, because I took all of it." "The guard," Viktor said. "The name on my papers is Krejcar. Karel Krejcar." He said it the way a man names a coat he has worn so long it has grown into his shoulders. "It cost me everything the courier had and it was worth every crown. Sit down, reader. You crossed a bridge to hear this, and the telling does not get shorter with waiting." They sat. The old man poured tea from a chipped pot into glasses, and the tea was dark and sweet and tasted of something medicinal, and outside the window the river ran grey beneath the lamplight, patient, going about its business of carrying the city's reflections to the sea. And the guard told it. The post had stood on the western line, he said, in country where the forest came down to the water and the water froze in January into a road of its own. Two men to a tower, dogs below, orders that needed no repeating: nothing crosses. He had been on the tower the night of February the ninth, 1947, with the temperature at nineteen below and the lamp swinging on its bracket, and out of the trees, at the hour when even the dogs give up and point their noses at the moon, a man had walked onto the ice. Not running. Walking, the way a man walks to church, upright, unhurried, carrying a parcel wrapped in oilcloth against his chest, and behind him the snow filled his footprints as fast as he made them, so that it seemed less that a man was coming than that the forest had thought for a while and then produced him. "I brought the rifle up," the guard said. "I will not lie to you in my own room. I brought the rifle up, and I shouted the challenge, and he stopped, and he lifted the parcel a little, the way a man lifts a child to show it the thing it is named after, and he called out — you could hear everything across the ice that night, the cold carried sound the way the river carries boats — he called out: Comrade soldier, I am carrying the truth. And I, twenty-three years old, full of the words they had fed me since boyhood, called back the only honest question I owned: Whose truth? And he was quiet for a moment, and then he said: Everyone's. Some day. If you let it live." The old man turned his glass slowly on the table. The gears caught the light and let it go. "He walked toward the lamp. That is the part no report ever understood, because there was no report — I made sure of that later, at a price I will come to. He walked TOWARD the lamp, reader, into the light, holding his parcel where I could see it, and when he reached the post he set down everything he had on the plank table: papers, money, a wedding band of thin red gold, photographs of people whose names he would not say, and he stood straight with his empty hands at his sides and waited to learn whether he had walked all night to die at the foot of a tower. And I looked at him, and I looked at the parcel, and inside the oilcloth I could see the edge of a painting — wood panel, old, small enough to carry against the heart — and I asked him what it was. He said: A promise. I asked him how much it weighed. He thought about it, the way your grandfather thought about everything, seriously, with his head a little to one side. About ninety grams plus whoever carries it, he said. And that answer — " the old man's voice went rough, rust and river stones, " — that answer is why the two of us are sitting in this room tonight drinking bad tea while the light changes outside the window. Because a border can be paid, and a dog can be called off, but a sentence like that crosses over into you and never comes back." He let the courier through. Lowered the rifle, opened the wire, walked him two hundred paces along his own patrol line to spare him the deepest snow, and shook his hand at the far side — the handshake across the plank table had happened before, at the payment; the real one happened at the edge of the trees, brief, hard, both men gripping as if testing whether the other was made of weather. Then he walked back to the tower, and he sat down, and he began the work of erasing himself, because he understood with the clarity of the very young that a man who has let the truth walk past a rifle cannot remain the man the rifle was issued to. "They searched for a deserter," he said. "They found Karel Krejcar instead — a name I bought from the courier along with his coat, because a man crossing out of one life needs papers and a man crossing out of another needs a name, and we traded, and Anton Vlasak struck my name from every list he could reach and then, to seal the silence shut from his own side, struck out his own name too, so that no one hunting a vanished guard would ever find a founder at the bottom of the hole. I came south with the spring thaws. I learned to mend clocks, because clocks are honest machines that lie only about time, and I have been above this shop watching the bridge since the year the paint on the first wall was still wet." Viktor set down his glass. The story sat in him whole, heavy, exact, the way a finished canvas sits on a wall, and he knew already — the way he knew when a varnish had been tampered with, when a craquelure ran too regularly to be honest — that the old man had not brought them across the bridge for a story that ended in comfort. "There is more," he said. The guard looked at him, and his pale eyes — rinsed almost colourless, like light through ice — were steady. "There is more," he agreed. "You should have it tonight, while you are still standing, because it will change the weight of everything you are carrying." He reached out and touched the storm lantern, gently, the way one touches the shoulder of an old colleague. "That night, reader, on the wall, I was not alone. There was a second man. A lieutenant, twenty-three years old like me, new to the post, precise as a watch mechanism, and he kept a notebook the way monks keep hours. From the tower I watched him see everything — the figure on the ice, the challenge, the lowering of the rifle, the walking of the patrol line. I did not know then what he had written. I learned it forty years later, and I have spent the years since learning what became of the notebook. It exists, Viktor Orlov. Somewhere in this world there is a page written in a young officer's careful hand that describes the first crossing of the Artists' Line — witnessed, timed, measured, the temperature noted, the parcel described. The road you are carrying has been read before, by a man with a pencil and a duty to report it. And what he wrote has been hunted ever since — by my old service, by yours, and now, I believe, by someone new." He refilled their glasses, unhurried. "Drink. In the morning I will tell you his name."