The Silence That Belongs to a Clock

There is a particular silence that belongs to a working clock.

Mara had spent two months in Lucerne learning it. Not the ticking — the ticking is only the clock speaking. The silence is what happens between the words: the held breath of the escapement, the pause before the strike, the three full seconds the tower keeps every hour, while the whole old town stops to listen to something it has never been told.

She had come to Lucerne to repair a clock. That was the whole of it, and it had been, for eleven months, the whole of her life. Since her mother's house in the south of France, since the letters that stopped coming, since the summer she had learned that a person can be a mechanism, and that the mechanism can go on after the person is gone — she had taken to clocks the way other women take to wine: steadily, and for the company.

The workshop belonged to a man named Keller, who was eighty-one and deaf in one ear and kind in the way of old men who have outlived their opinions. It stood under the roofs of the old town, behind a door with a painted face, and it smelled of brass and oil and the cold river light that came through the high window in the afternoon.

It was in the fourth week that a young man began to come in.

He came in with rain on his jacket, and out again with it, and he was carrying, every time, something small and broken that belonged to someone else — a watch for his sister, a pocket watch for his grandfather, a music box that had stopped on the second note of a song. He did not know what was wrong with any of them. He did not know how to wind them. He set them down on the bench between the counter and the workbench with the unselfconscious trust of a man who has never once been lied to about a thing, and said, in careful, half-practised German: Is it bad? How much? When?

And Mara, who had eleven months of silence in her, and nothing left to spend it on, said: Show me what it does.

That was how it began. Not with a question about her — he never asked about her, not then. With a question about the thing. What it did. What it wanted. She would open it, and he would sit on the stool by the bench and watch, and she would talk — about the mainspring, about the pallet, about the small brass tooth that had worked itself free and gone to sleep in the gear-train — and he would listen the way the tower listens: completely, and without an intention.

She did not know, until the seventh week, that she was doing it for the listening.

The town in September was itself a kind of mechanism. The river ran under the bridge in its green quiet, and the Chapel of St. Anne stood on its island with the light going into its windows at four in the afternoon, and the chapel bells came over the water in pairs, and the whole old town kept time with them, the way a congregation keeps time with a hymn. Mara would stand at her window in the evenings and watch the light go out of the town one street at a time, and feel, for the first time in a year, that the silence between the words was not empty. It was kept.

He was there the night of the bells. She had not meant to be at her window. She had meant to be at the counter, closing up, counting the day's small broken things into their boxes. But the bells had come, and she had gone to the window, and the light was going out of the street below in its long slow way, and she stood there with her hands in her cardigan pockets and her breath going into the cold, and did not know that she had stopped wanting to be alone in it.

"Keller lets me keep the last hour," he said, from the doorway, with a cup of something warm in his hands. "So I come up after. I don't know why I've started coming up after."

She turned. The workshop was dark except for the bench lamp, and the two hundred clocks in it were keeping their kept silence, and he stood in the doorway with the rain still going down his jacket and his hands full of the warm cup, and looked at her the way the tower looks down at the town: patiently, and as if she were worth the hour.

"What do you want?" she asked. She did not know why she had asked it. She had not been asked, in eleven months, and the question had gone rusty, and it came out wrong, and then she understood what it had meant to mean, and could not put it back.

He did not answer at once. That was the thing. Everyone else had answered at once.

"I want you to close up," he said, finally. "I want to carry your tools down for me. No — for you." He laughed, a small unsteady sound, and set the cup on the bench between them. "I want to know what the thing is that you've been fixing for eleven months, that you've told me is a watch and isn't. And then — I want to sit where I am now, and you want to sit where you are now, and neither of us wants to be anywhere else. That's all. That's the whole of it."

The bells were over. The silence after them was the longest silence she had ever stood inside, and it was not empty; it was full, the way a struck bell is full, going on and on in a shape no one could see.

She crossed the room to the bench, and sat down beside him on the stool, and put her hand over his hand where it lay flat on the bench, palm up, the way a man lays down a thing he means to keep. They sat there. The two hundred clocks kept their kept silence above them. The street below went out, lamp by lamp. He did not take her hand. He did not have to. She was already there, and where she was, she meant to stay.

"Tell me what it does," he said.

So she told him. About the mainspring. About the pallet. About the small brass tooth that had worked itself free and gone to sleep in the gear-train. He listened the way the tower listens: completely, and without an intention. And when she had finished, and the silence had come back into the room, he took her hand — not in the way she had feared, or hoped, but in the way you take up something that has been set down — and held it, and said, very quietly: "Wind it tomorrow."

She kissed him then. Briefly, once, the way you touch a thing you've decided to keep. He went still under it, and the silence that came back into the room was hers.

In the morning the rain was over, and the light came down the river in its green quiet, and the two hundred clocks were keeping their kept silence, and there was nothing broken on the bench between the counter and the workbench.

She wound it. He sat beside her and watched, and the silence between the words was not empty; it was kept.

And the bells, over the water, went on.