My Father’s Books

The Family Clock

75 The Fam­ ily Clock In all our wan­ der­ ings, elud­ ing ex­ pected wars and oc­ cu­ pa­ tions, al­ ways with our books—if not all of them, then al­ ways, with­ out fail, the holy ones—as well as the bunch of keys to our aban­ doned ­ houses, their locks empty of all hope of re­ turn, we al­ ways took with us the old fam­ ily pen­ du­ lum clock, in­ her­ ited from who knows which an­ ces­ tors, the clock of all our times. When we set off, we took the clock with us, as if in car­ ry­ ing it we car­ ried all our times. When we would ar­ rive at ei­ ther our tem­ po­ rary or our final des­ ti­ na­ tion of re­ set­ tle­ ment, be­ fore any­ thing else we ­ checked to see ­ whether time still ­ passed ­ through our clock. At times we won­ dered how the ­ clock’s old, ­ rusted mech­ a­ nism was able to budge after we wound it with the old key, which was ­ rusted as well. We kept the clock in con­ stant mo­ tion, like a liv­ ing mem­ ber of the fam­ ily. And when at each hour the clock ­ marked the time in its raspy old voice, its chime al­ ways ­ struck a dif­ fer­ ent chord in us. We lis­ tened to its sound, which ­ seemed to us like the muf­ fled voice of some un­ known an­ ces­ tor. The old clock held a sac­ ro­ sanct place in the fam­ ily ic­ o­ nog­ ra­ phy even after we ­ crossed the bor­ der for good. It ­ stayed with us, one of the rare fam­ ily ob­ jects that bore wit­ ness to our aban­ doned and later con­ fis­ cated house. It ­ seemed as if the most im­ por­ tant mes­ sages from the ­ family’s life by the lake were con­ veyed to us ­ through the life of our ­ wound-up clock. In­ side the clock, dur­ ing one of the rare mo­ ments when it was­ opened, my ­ father found a yel­ lowed slip of paper ­ folded and re­ folded sev­ eral times. Now what in the world could this be? My ­ father was quite ex­ cited as he care­ fully un­ folded it, care­ fully, lest the paper dis­ in­ te­ grate 76 and the mes­ sage dis­ ap­ pear. My ­ father eas­ ily rec­ og­ nized the ar­ chaic Ar­ a­ bic ­ script. In a mo­ ment he had con­ firmed that on the paper, now fully ­ spread out, was writ­ ten a per­ pet­ ual cal­ en­ dar. The di­ rec­ tions, writ­ ten by some un­ known an­ ces­ tor, were cal­ cu­ lated by East­ ern ­ rather than West­ ern time. There were also sev­ eral ac­ counts about the or­ i­ gin of the clock and its pre­ vi­ ous own­ ers. After he had fully ex­ am­ ined its con­ tents, my ­ father care­ fully ­ folded up the note and re­ turned it to its for­ mer place, be­ cause it too could be con­ sid­ ered an in­ te­ gral part of the ­ clock’s mech­ a­ nism. It con­ trib­ uted to the pre­ cise tell­ ing of time. And so the clock re­ mained a faith­ ful guar­ dian of the time sto­ len from us on the other side of the bor­ der, taken away ir­ rev­ o­ cably. Our lives, many near their end, were the great­ est ev­ i­ dence of this. The clock was also a faith­ ful guar­ dian of our fam­ ily his­ tory. Some­ times this old clock, with its sim­ ple mech­ a­ nism, ap­ peared to us a skele­ ton of time, and often, with its slow pulse at every beat, it was a ­ source of fear, a curve of un­ ex­ pected fate. Not only did it faith­ fully meas­ ure time dur­ ing those years of dif­ fi­ cult exile, it also ­ calmed us to face our fu­ ture, it sof­ tened the ­ strikes of time, it was on our side. In time the big fam­ ily clock re­ ceived its ­ worthy place in ­ Father’s li­ brary, just below the holy books . . . The large fam­ ily clock sit­ ting among ­ Father’s books ­ seemed to give a ­ rhythm to the ­ many-faceted quiet that was dis­ rupted by the con­ stant...