The Things We Cherished

  “But Dolgenos handles white-collar crime. She won’t—”

  “And I want her well prepared,” Charlotte persisted. “Not just zooming in at the eleventh hour. She needs to meet my client first.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. “Fine.”

  Charlotte bit her lip uncertainly. She had asked for the moon, not expecting him to call her bluff and actually agree to her terms. Her thoughts turned to her caseload back at the office. “I can give you a week,” she said. In reality, she could get more. She hadn’t taken a vacation in almost two years, a fact that was a source of ribbing around the office. Despite their workload, her boss would give her the time willingly and her colleagues could cover anything that came up. But she needed to preserve an emergency escape, a way out in case working with Brian proved to be too much. And a week was all, maybe more than, he deserved.

  He exhaled, the relief visible on his face. “Great.” He waved the waitress over, signaling for the check. “Meet me at Newark Airport tomorrow night. The flight leaves at eight-fifteen.”

  She brushed aside her annoyance at his presumption that she would say yes, the fact that undoubtedly he had already booked the tickets. “Where are we going?” she asked as he handed a platinum credit card to the waitress without looking at the check.

  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.

  Two

  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.

  Then one morning when he least expected it, Rebecca rushed into the barn as he milked the cows and wordlessly took his hand and pressed it to her midsection, smiling broadly. He thought that his heart would burst. They had about five months, Rebecca said, and so he redoubled his efforts on the clock. He wanted them to go before it became too difficult or unsafe for her to travel, so their child could be born in America, in the comfort and safety his precious wife deserved.

  The decision to leave had not been a simple one. It was more than just the farm: Johann generally felt as though he belonged here, considered himself first and foremost German—felt that way, at least, until the outside world reminded him otherwise every so often. The latest incident had come last winter, word of a Jewish merchant in a village to the east murdered by neighbors he had lived among all of his life who were convinced he was hoarding wheat in order to drive up prices. The man was shot, his house burned with his family still inside.

  Things were worse in the countries around them. He’d seen it in the eyes of the poor haunted immigrants from the Pale who passed through town on their way to the cities looking for work, heard the whispered stories of pogroms that had decimated their lives in an instant. The violence wasn’t just limited to the east—in Paris, a Jewish military officer was hung not a decade earlier, despite evidence of his innocence. And as much as Johann hated to admit it, Bavaria, stubbornly provincial and still steeped in its Catholic traditions decades after unification, was fertile ground for Jew hating. No, something told him that the time to get out was now. His son (he did not know why he always pictured the child as a boy) would not be raised with the shadow that caused Johann to wake with every scratch in the night, reaching for the knife that he hid under the mattress. And in America, Rebecca would be safe.

  So he had planned their route—a train to one of the North Sea ports, then a ship to America. Going by wagon to the coast would have been cheaper, but Rebecca’s belly was growing every day. Time was of the essence.

  He had of course told Rebecca immediately of his plan. She was bright and strong-willed and would not have permitted him to do otherwise, even if he had been that sort of husband. He had discussed it only in the most hypothetical of terms, not wanting to get her hopes up in case something went wrong. He had worried that she would object to leaving her parents before their only grandchild was born. But she simply smiled. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” she said, quoting the Book of Ruth, eyes shining as she reaffirmed the promise she made on their wedding day to cast her lot in with his. She cleverly pointed out that they should sail to Baltimore, where the entry requirements were reputed to be less stringent than the busier New York port. She had a cousin there who might be willing to help. They agreed to tell no one of their plan, knowing that her parents would be enraged, and that their need to depart would signal desperation to sell and bring a lower price for the land.

  He reached the end of the forest about twenty minutes later, and the t
hinning trees gave way to a wide, rising plateau. In the distance to the south, Johann glimpsed the alpine peaks, snowcapped and breathtaking, ringed by a wreath of clouds. Though he had seen the view his whole life, it still filled him with awe. He had never been as far as the mountains, of course. He’d had romantic notions of taking Rebecca there for a weekend after their wedding, but there had always been fields to be planted, clocks to be made. Now he felt a sense of tugging sadness that he would never go. He would travel many times farther, but in the opposite direction, and the mountains would always remain just out of reach in his mind.

  A few minutes later the land dropped off again, sloping gently downward. Below sat a sea of clustered red rooftops, a lone gray steeple rising from their midst. A wide plume of smoke, yet to be blown away by the fresh spring winds, seemed to hover over the town like a flock of birds.

  Johann navigated the descent carefully, relaxing slightly as the road grew broader, turning from dirt to cobblestone. He crossed the wooden bridge over the small stream by the mill that signaled the edge of the town. Then he paused, studying the two- and three-story buildings that lined the street, their whitewashed fronts stained with the winter coal dust. He shook his head. It was considered a sign of prestige to live in the wood-latticed houses, but the idea of having neighbors so close on all sides made it hard for him to breathe.

  The town had done better than its tiny size might have predicted, the beneficiary of geography that made it the last outpost after leaving Munich before heading over the border for points south in Austria. It was a place visited out of necessity rather than choice, frequented by merchants making their way to and from Vienna, wealthy holiday-goers pressing onward to hike and breathe the restorative alpine air. This weekday morning, the streets were crowded with wagons and men on foot, loading supplies.