“Blood kinship,” he said, “is not kinship yet. One must pass the exam to be a relative.”
“After all, for a boat that has lost its oars, there is only one path—downstream, from the past to the future, and that is all.”
“What I give them, the people, is a simple oar, a blade that blocks the race of seconds. That’s all. By using it—both you and everyone—you can row against the days, and ahead of them, and finally, across time.”
“On a single-track road, you cannot overtake without moving aside. The discovery of the cross-section of time allows me to lay a second track.”
“Life, like medicine, must be shaken: otherwise, it will not have the proper effect.”
Maxi’s favorite fairy tale at the age of four was the story of Tick and Tock. Straddling his father’s knee, palms pressed into the nap of the tobacco-scented jacket, the little boy commanded:
“Tell me about Tock.”
The knee swayed in time with the pendulum, ticking from the wall, and the father began:
“The story is told like this: once upon a time there was a clock (and a spring was in the clock), and the clock had two sons—Tick and Tock. To teach Tick and Tock to walk, the clock, though groaning, allowed itself to be wound. And the black hand—for a special fee—strolled with Tick-Tock around the clock face. But Tick and Tock grew up: nothing was right, everything was wrong for them. They left the numerals and the face—they won’t go back. And the clock searches with its hands, groans and calls: ‘Tick-Tock, Tock-Tick, Tock!’ Is that how the story is told, or not?”
And little Max, diving his head under the coat skirt, squinted through the broadcloth eyelids of the buttonhole and invariably replied:
“Not like that.”
The warm waistcoat of the father shook with laughter, rustling past his ears; through the slit of the buttonhole, a hand was visible, tapping out a pipe:
“Well, how is it then? I’m listening to you, Mr. Max Schterer.”
In the end, Max Schterer did answer: but only thirty years later.
The first attempt to step out of words into action dated back to Max’s sixth year of life.
The house where the Schterer family lived adjoined the mustard fields, which stretched in green squares toward a distant bend in the Volga. One day—it was a July evening—the boy did not appear for dinner. The servant walked around the house, shouting the truant’s name. Max’s place setting remained vacant throughout dinner. Evening turned into night. The father and the servant set out to search. The light burned in the house all night. The runaway was only found toward morning: at the river crossing, ten versts from home. He had the appearance of a seasoned traveler: a satchel on his back, a stick in his hand, a crust of bread and four kopecks in his pocket. To his father’s angry shouts, demanding a sincere confession, the fugitive calmly replied:
“It wasn’t me, but Tock and Tick who ran away. And I went to look for them.”
Scherer-father, having allowed both himself and his son to eat and sleep, decided to drastically change his educational methods. Calling little Max to him, he declared that fairy tales were folly and nonsense, that Tick and Tock were simply the clank of one metal strip against another, and that clanking could not run anywhere. Seeing the confusion in the boy’s wide-open blue eyes, he opened the glass door of the wall clock, removed the hands, then the clock face, and, running his finger along the toothed contours of the mechanism, explained: the weights, because they are heavy, pull the teeth, the teeth pull the cogs, and the cogs pull the pinions—and all this is for the purpose of measuring time.
The word “time” pleased Max. And when—two or three months later—he was put to the primer, t, i, m, e were the first signs from which he tried to construct, tracing his pen along the slanting lines, the word.
Having learned the way to the stirring wheels, the boy decided to repeat the experiment performed by his father. One day, waiting until no one was home, he placed a stool against the wall, climbed onto it, and opened the clock door. Right before his eyes, the yellow disc of the pendulum swung rhythmically; the chain, tautened by the weight, went up into the darkness and the rustle of the pinions. Then something strange began to happen to the clock: when they sat down for lunch, Schterer senior, glancing at the dial, saw: two minutes past two. “A bit late,” he grumbled and hastily picked up his spoon. At the next glance, in the interval between the first and second, the clock replied: two minutes past four. “What the Zum Teufel? [German for ‘To the Devil’—a corrupted Swiss dialect word] Have we been eating soup for two hours?” Schterer junior remained silent, not lifting his eyes; when they rose from the table, the hands had reached five minutes past seven, and by the time the servant managed to run for the watchmaker who lived nearby, the clock announced the proximity of midnight, although the sun was shining outside the window.
The master, answering the call, first removed the hands and, handing them to little Max, asked him to hold them. While he, exposing the mechanism, examined the screws and cogs together with the host, the mischievous boy had enough time to slip the tiny thread-attached prosthesis off the short clock hand. Having carefully inspected and verified everything, the master declared that the clock was in full working order and that there was no need to disturb him, a busy man, unnecessarily.
Schterer senior, infuriated, shouted that he trusted his own eyes more than strangers’ knowledge, and demanded that the maddened clock be fixed. The master, offended in turn, declared that if anyone was maddened, it was certainly not the clock, and that he had no intention of wasting time and taking money for fixing something that wasn’t broken. And, putting the hands back in place, he slammed first the clock door, then the house door. And the clock, as if finishing its mockery of its owner, suddenly changed its course dramatically and began to tick off the minutes with chronometric precision.
The rest of the day, father and son spent without exchanging a word. Occasionally, one or the other would look anxiously at the dial. Night was already blackening outside the window when Max, overcoming his embarrassment, approached his father and, touching his knee, said:
“Tell me about Tock.”
And the legend of Tick and Tock, which had been banished from the Schterer house, returned to its own place. Schterer junior, conducting his first experiment, had forced the clock hands to swap axes: the minute hand onto the hour hand’s axis—the hour hand onto the minute hand’s axis. And he was able to observe that even such a simple rearrangement disturbs the functioning of psychic mechanisms.
Stretching out his hand, the experimenter touched one of the hands—the shorter one. The other was guiding its long black point upward. It was necessary to examine it as well. Rising on his tiptoes, he reached up. Something crunched above his head, and in his fingers, the broken tip of the hand lay black. What to do? A black thread bristled from the seam of his jacket. A minute later, the broken tip was neatly tied to the nearest point. True, the short hand became long from this, and the long one short,—but what did it matter? At that moment, footsteps in the corridor. The boy slammed the clock doors shut, jumped down, and dragged the stool back into place.
The old, patient Zurich clock did not get angry at the curious boy who had damaged its black finger. Steadily pacing from corner to corner on its long leg inside its prison-tight glass cage, it condescendingly allowed a pair of child’s eyes to visit it in its solitude on the wall. Measuring out the seconds methodically, the mechanical teacher from Zurich, like most teachers, was tense, precise, and methodical. But genius does not need to be taught fantasy; suffering from its own excessiveness, it seeks only one thing from people—measure. Thus—teacher and student were quite suited to each other. Whenever the father would start his post-lunch snoring behind the wall, Schterer junior, moving the stool up to the problem of time, would begin his inquiries. He pulled the teacher by its weights, felt its round white face, and crept with inquisitive fingers into its hard and prickly brain. And one day it happened that the mechanical teacher—evidently puzzled by some difficult question—suddenly lowered its foot and stopped ticking out the lesson. Max, believing the clock was pondering its answer, waited patiently, standing on the stool. The silence lengthened. The hands froze on the white disc. From behind the pinions—neither sound nor resonance. The frightened child, jumping to the floor, rushed to his sleeping father; tugging at his dangling sleeve, he mumbled through his sobs:
“Papa, the clock is dead. But it’s not my fault.”
The father, shaking off his drowsiness, yawned and said:
“What nonsense. To die—that’s not so simple; calm down, boy: it’s broken. That’s all, and we will fix it. And only girls cry.”
Then the future master of durations, wiping his eyes with his fists, asked:
“And if time breaks—will we fix that too?”
The father, following the example of the old clock, had to fall silent. Straightening up, he looked with some anxiety at his offspring.
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