Chapter 1

============================================================

The shop smelled like oil and old wood, and Maryam loved it the way some people love the smell of rain.

Her father said this was normal. "A shop of clocks," he had told her once, in his careful English with the edges of Damascus still in it, "is a shop of arguments. Each clock has its own opinion about what moment we are in."

Maryam was ten years old, and she thought this was one of the best things anyone had ever said about anything.

She was sitting on the high wooden stool behind the counter, a magnifying loupe pressed to her eye. In front of her, on a square of dark green felt, lay the insides of a pocket watch. It was not a valuable watch. Her father had said she could practice on it. She had taken it apart that morning, and now she was trying to put it back together.

"The pallet fork first," her father said. He was bent over his own workbench, across the room, a tiny screwdriver in his hand. "Then the escape wheel. Remember?"

"I remember."

She did remember. She remembered almost everything he told her. She was a girl who remembered.

Her fingers were small, which her father said was an advantage. His own hands were large and steady, but they had been working for forty-one years, and he sometimes said they were starting to argue with him, like the clocks.

Outside, a car went by. A door slammed somewhere on the block. Upstairs, above the shop, their apartment was quiet. Maryam's mother was at the hospital; she worked as a nurse on Saturdays. Her little brother Adam, who was five, was at their neighbor Mrs. Choi's house, probably watching cartoons and eating too many crackers.

Maryam liked Saturdays. Saturdays were her day in the shop. Her day of oil and wood and the patient voice of her father saying, *Slower. That is it. Good.*

She set the pallet fork. The tweezers shook a little. She held her breath.

"Breathe," her father said, without looking up.

She breathed.

The pallet fork clicked into place. She felt the tiny, satisfied snap of it through the tweezers, and she smiled.

"Baba," she said. "I did it."

He looked up. He was a tall man, but thin, and his hair had gone gray at the temples before it should have. He wore glasses on a cord around his neck, and a gray apron, and under the apron a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When he smiled, his whole face changed. It went from serious-clock-man to something much younger, something that belonged to a boy who had once played soccer in an alley in Damascus.

"*Mashallah*," he said. "Good. Now the escape wheel."

She reached for the escape wheel.

That was when it happened.

She heard him make a sound. Not a word. A sound. Like *huh*, or maybe *oh*. She looked up, the tweezers still in her hand.

Her father had put his hand on his chest. His face was the wrong color. It was the color of the gray felt on his workbench.

"Baba?"

He tried to stand. The stool went over backward with a crash. Then he went down.

She would remember, for the rest of her life, the sound his knee made when it hit the floor.

She dropped the tweezers. She ran around the counter. She knelt next to him. He was on his side, breathing in short, ugly breaths, and his hand was still clutched against his chest.

"Baba," she said. "Baba, Baba."

"Phone," he said.

The phone was on the counter. She grabbed it. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped it once, and then she picked it up and she dialed 911. She had never dialed 911 before in her life. She had practiced it, at school, in second grade, but she had never done it.

The woman on the other end had a calm voice. Maryam loved that woman instantly, for her voice. She would love her forever.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"My father," Maryam said. Her own voice sounded strange to her. Thin and far away. "My father. He's — on the floor. In our shop. On Maple Street. He can't breathe right. He's — his chest —"

"Okay, honey. I need you to stay on the line. What's the address?"

"Forty-one Maple Street. Ambrose Clocks and Watches."

"Ambrose?"

"That's — that's what the shop is called. He bought it from a man named Ambrose. My father's name is Yusuf. Yusuf Haddad."

"Okay, Maryam — is that your name, honey?"

"How did you know my name?"

"I didn't, sweetheart. I just guessed. Maryam, an ambulance is on its way. Now I need you to do some things for me, okay?"

She did them. She turned her father onto his back. She loosened his collar. She put her hand on his forehead and his forehead was cold and damp and she almost threw up, but she didn't, because the woman was telling her what to do and her father was breathing, he was breathing, he was breathing.

She counted the breaths. That was something to do. One. Two. Three.

The clocks on the wall kept ticking. She thought, in a part of her mind that wasn't really thinking, that they sounded very loud now. Like a small army marching toward something.

The ambulance came in four minutes and eleven seconds. She knew this, afterward, because she had counted the ticks of the big mantel clock, the one with the brass pendulum, the whole time.

When the paramedics lifted her father onto the stretcher, one of them — a woman with a red braid — looked at Maryam and said, "You did good, sweetie. You did real good."

Maryam nodded. She couldn't speak.

"Is someone with you?"

"My mother. My mother is at the hospital."

"Which one?"

"Saint Anne's."

"That's where we're taking him. You want to come in the ambulance?"

"Yes."

"Put your shoes on, honey."

Maryam looked down. She was in her socks. She had not even noticed.

She ran and got her shoes.

Before she climbed into the ambulance, she looked back at the shop. The door was open. The bell above it had stopped swinging. The pocket watch was still on the felt on the counter. The pallet fork, which she had just set, was still in place.

All the clocks were ticking.

She turned off the light. She locked the door behind her.

Then she climbed into the back of the ambulance and held her father's hand the whole way to the hospital.

----

In the emergency room, her mother was waiting. She was still in her blue nurse's scrubs. Her hair, which she usually wore pulled back, had come loose on one side. When she saw Maryam, she made a sound Maryam had never heard her make, and she gathered Maryam into her arms and they stood there for a long time, not saying anything.

"*Albi*," her mother said at last. "*Albi*. My heart. You called them. You saved him."

"I don't know if I saved him."

"You called them. You did the right thing."

"Is he going to be okay?"

Her mother looked at her.

"I don't know yet," she said.

Maryam thought her mother was the bravest person in the world for saying *I don't know* instead of *yes*. It was a kind of bravery she had not, until that moment, understood existed.

She sat down in a plastic chair, and her mother sat next to her, and they waited.

It was a strange thing to think, in an emergency room, while her father was dying or not dying on the other side of a set of double doors. But she thought it. She held onto it. It felt like a small, solid thing, a thing she could hold in her small hands. A clock she could fix.

She held it.

She waited.

The clock on the wall ticked, and ticked, and ticked.

Her father did not die.

Maryam liked that picture. A scaffolding. She knew about scaffolding. She had seen scaffolding on the outside of a church on Fourth Street, when they were fixing the steeple.

Her father stayed in the hospital for six days. Then he came home.

"Home" was the apartment above the shop. Three small rooms and a kitchen. A narrow staircase that smelled, faintly, of the shop below. Her father was carried up those stairs, the first day, because the doctors did not want him climbing. He sat in his chair by the window, and he looked out at Maple Street, and he was quiet.

Her father had never been a loud man. But there was a new quiet in him now. A quiet like a clock that has been wound too tight and is afraid to tick.

Her mother, Aida, took two days off from her nursing job. Then she had to go back. There were bills, she said. There had been bills before the heart attack, and now there were more bills. Hospital bills. Medicine bills. The stent itself had cost — her mother would not say how much, but Maryam had heard her on the phone, in the kitchen, at night, and she had heard her cry, which was a thing her mother almost never did.

On the third day her father was home, Maryam went down to the shop by herself.

She had the key. Her father had given it to her the summer before, when she turned nine, as a kind of ceremony. "You are old enough now," he had said, "to be a person with a key."

She unlocked the door. The bell rang overhead. The smell came out to meet her — oil and wood — and for a moment she thought she might cry, because it was the smell of her father, and her father was upstairs in a chair, not here.

She did not cry. She took a breath. She turned on the light.

Then she looked at the clocks.

There were twenty-three of them.

Twenty-three clocks waiting to be fixed. Some were on the shelves at the back. Some were in the big safe-like cabinet her father kept locked. Some were in their own boxes, labeled in her father's handwriting, with the owners' names and the dates they had been brought in. She went along the shelves and she read the labels.

MR. FINLEY — GRANDFATHER CLOCK (STRIKE BROKEN)

JANE DELANEY — MANTEL (NEEDS CLEANING, OVERHAUL)

THE POST OFFICE — WALL CLOCK (MINUTE HAND LOOSE)

MRS. BELLAMY — SWISS BRACKET CLOCK, 1892, GRANDFATHER'S (OVERHAUL, REPLACE MAINSPRING)

Maryam stopped at that one. Mrs. Bellamy's clock. She remembered Mrs. Bellamy, a tall old woman with very white hair, who had come into the shop in April with a clock wrapped in a green velvet cloth, and who had said to her father, *You must understand, this is not just a clock.*

Her father had said, *No clock is just a clock.*

Mrs. Bellamy had smiled, and she had given him the clock, and she had said, *I need it back by August. August the twelfth. It is for an anniversary.*

*It will be ready,* her father had said.

It was now the tenth of June. August twelfth was eight weeks away. And her father was sitting upstairs in a chair, and he was looking out the window, and he was not going to fix any clocks for a long time.

Maryam went and sat on the high stool behind the counter.

She looked at the twenty-three clocks.

She thought about her mother on the phone at night, crying.

She thought about the hospital bill.

She thought about Mrs. Bellamy.

Then she got down from the stool, and she went to the shelf, and she picked up the wooden box with MRS. BELLAMY written on it. She carried it carefully over to the workbench — not her father's workbench, but the smaller one by the window, the one her father had said she could use when she was practicing.

She set the box on the bench.

She put her hand on top of the lid.

"I am going to fix you," she said, to the clock in the box. She said it out loud. She felt a little silly saying it. "I am ten years old. But I am going to try."

Nothing answered. Clocks, when they are in pieces in boxes, do not answer.

But she felt, sitting there at the workbench, that something had shifted in her. That a part of her had clicked into place, like the pallet fork in the practice watch, the one she had set the morning her father fell.

She left the box where it was. She would not open it yet. She was not ready to open it yet.

She locked up the shop. She went upstairs.

Her father was still in the chair by the window. He had a book on his lap. It was a book about Damascus, a book with photographs, and he had not turned a page in an hour.

"Baba," she said.

"*Habibti*."

"Can you teach me?"

"Teach you what?"

"To fix them," she said. "The clocks. All of them. I want to fix them. I don't want the shop to close."

"Come here."

She came.

He took her hand. His hand was thinner than it had been. She had not expected that. How fast a hand could get thinner.

"*Habibti*," he said. "Clockmaking is not a summer's work. It is the work of a life."

"I know," she said. "But I can start this summer. Can't I start this summer?"

He held her hand.

"Yes," he said, finally. "You can start this summer."

"Starting when?"

"Tomorrow."

She smiled. She felt something crack open in her chest, something that had been very tight for three days.

"What do I bring?" she said.

"A notebook," he said. "And patience. Patience is the only real tool."

"I have patience."

She squeezed his hand.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow," said her father.

Tomorrow came, and on tomorrow, Mrs. Bellamy came too.

It was ten in the morning. Maryam was at the workbench by the window, a notebook open beside her. Her father had not come downstairs — it was too soon for stairs — but he had sent her down with a list. The list was in his careful handwriting, which tilted a little to the right, like a row of small trees leaning in a wind.

#1. Check each clock. Write down what it needs.

#2. Do not take anything apart yet.

#3. You are learning. You are not yet doing.

#4. I will be patient.

She was on her third clock (Mr. Finley's grandfather clock, a tall mahogany cabinet with a broken strike, which meant it ran but did not chime) when the bell above the door rang.

Mrs. Bellamy came in.

She was a tall woman, even for a woman, and she was seventy-eight years old, and she walked with a silver-topped cane that Maryam had always admired. Her hair was the color of clean snow. She wore a pale green blouse and a long gray skirt and a string of very small pearls, and she stopped in the doorway when she saw that it was not Maryam's father behind the counter.

"Oh," she said.

"Good morning, Mrs. Bellamy."

"Where is Mr. Haddad?"

Maryam came around the counter. She had been dreading this, but now that it was happening, she found that she was not, exactly, afraid. She was something else. She was *ready*, the way she had been ready on the floor of the shop with the phone in her hand.

"My father is not well," she said. "He — he had a heart attack. On Saturday. He is home. He is not going to be able to work for a while."

Mrs. Bellamy's face did the thing faces do when they receive bad news and are trying to be polite about it. A small, controlled folding.

"Oh, my dear child. I am very sorry. Is he — is he going to recover?"

"The doctors say yes. It will be slow."

"I see." Mrs. Bellamy leaned a little on her cane. "I see. Well. I — I am glad he is alive. I am *very* glad. Please tell your mother I am thinking of you all."

"Thank you."

There was a silence.

"My dear," said Mrs. Bellamy, "I came about my clock."

"I know."

"My grandfather's clock. From Switzerland. Your father was going to — "

"I know, Mrs. Bellamy."

Mrs. Bellamy's mouth worked. She looked, for a moment, much older than her cane. "I am sorry. It is the wrong time. I should not be here about a clock. I will come back."

"No," Maryam said. "Please. Don't go. Please sit down. Please."

There was a small wooden chair by the door, for customers. Mrs. Bellamy looked at it, and looked at Maryam, and sat down slowly, holding the cane between her knees.

"Your clock," said Maryam. "I know about your clock. I know you need it by August the twelfth. I know it is for an anniversary."

"Yes."

"My father wrote all this down. I have read all his notes."

Mrs. Bellamy tipped her head. "You have read your father's notes?"

"Yes. He writes in English and Arabic. I read both."

"I see," said Mrs. Bellamy, and there was a flicker of something on her face — surprise, maybe. Respect. Maryam could not tell.

"Mrs. Bellamy," Maryam said, and now her heart was going very fast, but she kept her voice steady. "I know I am only ten. But I have been helping my father for two years. And he is going to teach me, from his chair. And there is a man — Mr. Halpern — who my father thinks will help too. And I am going to fix the clocks. All of them. Including yours."

Mrs. Bellamy was very still.

"My grandfather's clock," she said, "is from 1892."

"I know."

"It has a — a mechanism I have been told is very particular. A Swiss escapement. Your father said he would have to open it very carefully. He said it had not been overhauled in forty years."

"I know."

"Child," said Mrs. Bellamy. "I am not — I do not wish to be unkind. But this is a clock that is very precious to me. It is the clock my grandfather wound every Sunday in Lucerne. My mother carried it across the Atlantic when she came to America in 1938. She carried it in her arms on the boat. It is — it is our clock."

"I know."

"And you are ten."

"Yes."

Mrs. Bellamy looked down at her hands. They were folded on the top of her cane. They were very thin hands, with a single gold ring on the left one, and the ring had a small diamond in it that had once probably been brighter.

"My dear," she said, finally. "Let me think. Let me come back in a few days. I do not want to — to decide like this, in the shop, without thought."

"All right," said Maryam.

"Will you tell your father I asked after him?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Bellamy began to stand. She was slow about it, the way tall thin old people are slow. Maryam wanted to help her but knew, from a lifetime of watching her own grandmother in Damascus, that you did not help unless you were asked.

Mrs. Bellamy stood.

At the door, she paused. She looked back at Maryam, who was still standing by the counter, in her father's too-big apron, with a pencil behind her ear.

"Child," said Mrs. Bellamy.

"Yes?"

"What is your name? I realize I have never asked."

"Maryam."

"Maryam." Mrs. Bellamy said it carefully, as if she were testing the weight of the word. "That is a good name. A very old name."

"My father says it is one of the oldest."

"It is." Mrs. Bellamy smiled, faintly. "In Greek it would be Maria. In Latin, Mariamne. In Aramaic — which is what she herself would have spoken — it was very like what you say now."

Maryam stared. She had never met a person who knew the Aramaic version of her name before. She had only known one person who knew the Arabic version and the English version, and that was her father.

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"I was a professor," said Mrs. Bellamy. "For forty-one years. I taught Greek and Latin and some Aramaic, a very little, at a college in Philadelphia. I am now retired, and I fill my days with my garden and my clocks."

"Oh."

"Good day, Maryam."

"Good day, Mrs. Bellamy."

The bell rang, and Mrs. Bellamy was gone.

Maryam stood in the middle of the shop for a long minute. She looked at the MRS. BELLAMY box on the bench.

She picked up her pencil.

She went back to writing.

Her father began her education on the sixth day after his heart attack.

He sat in his chair by the window. She sat on a wooden kitchen stool she had dragged in from the other room. Between them, on the small table, she laid out her tools.

"Today," her father said, "we begin at the beginning."

"What is the beginning?"

"The beginning is *why*. Not *how*. *Why*."

"Why a clock works?"

"Why a clock exists. Why anyone ever built one."

He was thinner, yes. But his voice was still his voice. And when he talked about clocks, something came into his eyes that Maryam had missed, terribly, for six days.

“Parent-Child Relationships and Responsibilities 39 – 81 III.” her father said, "there were sundials. Long before. Five thousand years. The Egyptians and the Babylonians. They watched the shadow of a stick on the ground. This was their clock."

“That is to say, an edifice or temple is to be built in order that humanity might find a place of meeting, and this is to be conducive to unity and fellowship among them.”

“Look ye not upon the seed, look ye upon the tree, and its blossoms, and its leaves and its fruits.”

"What did they do at night?"

"They used water. Clepsydra, the Greeks called it. A water clock. Water drips from one bowl into another, at a steady rate, and you measure time by the water. But water freezes. Water leaks. It was still not a good enough clock."

"When did the good clocks come?"

"In Europe, in the thirteenth century, more or less. In the towers of cathedrals. Monks needed to know when to pray. Do you know what was the hardest problem?"

"The spring?"

He smiled. He actually smiled. "Good. Yes. How to make something *tick*. How to make something move, but *slowly*, and *evenly*, so that one movement was always the same length as the next. That is the secret. A clock is not a machine that measures time. A clock is a machine that makes time *regular*."

"The heart of any mechanical clock," her father said, "is the escapement. *El hurub*, we say in Arabic. The escape."

"Escape from what?"

"The escape of energy. The spring — or the weight, in a weight-driven clock — wants to release all its energy at once. Like a child running downhill. The escapement says, *No, no. A little at a time. One step. One tick. Another step. Another tick.*"

He drew in the air with a finger. His finger was not as steady as it had been, Maryam noticed, but it was almost.

"The escapement has two parts," he said. "The escape wheel, and the pallet fork. The escape wheel wants to turn. The pallet fork rocks back and forth and lets it turn, one tooth at a time. That rocking — that is the *tick*, *tock*. The pallet fork is the soul of the clock."

"The soul?"

"I am an old man. I am allowed to be romantic."

"You are not an old man."

"I am today. Tomorrow I will be younger. But today, an old man."

"Now," he said. "The mainspring. This is the heart. In a pocket watch, a coiled piece of steel, wound tight. It holds all the energy. It pushes the gears. A broken mainspring is very bad. It must be replaced, not repaired. Never try to repair a mainspring. They fly apart. They cut."

"Yes, Baba."

"The gear train is what multiplies the turning. A slow turning at the mainspring, a fast turning at the balance wheel. The balance wheel is what the pallet fork talks to. The balance wheel rocks. It is the pendulum of a pocket watch. In a clock, we may have a real pendulum, hanging down."

"Mrs. Bellamy's clock has a pendulum?"

"A small one. It is a bracket clock. The pendulum is short, and beats fast."

"Beats?"

"One tick per swing. A pendulum-beat. Some pendulums beat once a second. A long one. Some, like Mrs. Bellamy's, beat three or four times a second. It is — like a heart."

He said the word *heart*, and Maryam looked at his chest, and he laughed, softly.

"Yes," he said. "Like that. Mine has been rewound."

"Baba."

"I am joking, *habibti*. I am making a small joke about myself."

"It is not funny."

"No," he said. "It is not funny. I am sorry."

He put his hand on hers.

"I am going to be here," he said. "I am going to be here a long time. Long enough to teach you everything I know. This I promise."

She wanted to cry. She did not. She had decided, on the stool behind the counter the day before, that she was not going to cry in front of her father unless it was a very good reason. A heart attack was a good reason for some people to cry, probably. But he had lived, and he had promised, and she had work to do.

"Tell me," she said, "about the escape wheel."

On Saturday, Maryam went to see Mr. Halpern.

Mr. Halpern lived on the other side of town, in a small yellow house with green shutters and a garden. The garden had tomatoes in it, and rows of some herb Maryam did not recognize, and one peach tree that was too small yet to give fruit. Maryam's mother drove her there in the morning. It was the first day her mother had taken off since going back to work, and she was quiet in the car, which was how she was when she was tired.

"He is very old," Maryam's mother said, at the corner before the yellow house.

"I know."

"Eighty-six, I think. Maybe eighty-seven. Your father has known him a long time. He came with a broken watch the first year we were here. They became friends. Over clocks."

"Baba says he is patient."

"Baba says he is the most patient man he has ever met. And Baba is the second most patient man I have ever met. So you will be in the company of patience today."

"Who is the most?"

"Hmm?"

"Who is the most patient man Baba has ever met?"

"Mr. Halpern."

"No — I mean, who is the most patient man you have ever met?"

Her mother glanced at her, and smiled a tired smile.

"My father," she said. "Your *jiddo*. Who is in Damascus, and whom I have not seen in eight years. He is more patient than anyone. He was born patient."

"Do you think I will meet him again?"

"I hope so," said her mother. "I hope so, *habibti*."

The car stopped. Maryam got out. Her mother said she would come back in three hours, and Maryam waved, and the car drove away.

Mr. Halpern opened his door before she rang the bell. He had seen her through the window. He was a small man with a round face and a white beard that was trimmed very neatly, and he wore a dark blue cardigan over a blue shirt, and a small round cap on the back of his head, which Maryam knew was called a kippah.

"Maryam Haddad," he said, with a small bow. "Welcome to my workshop."

"Thank you, Mr. Halpern."

"Your father has spoken of you for years. Now at last I meet the famous apprentice."

"I'm not an apprentice."

"Aren't you?" He smiled. His eyes were very small and very blue and the skin around them had a map of creases. "Well. Come in. Come in. The workshop is in the back. We will have tea first. I always have tea first. Tea before work. This is my rule."

The kitchen was small and clean, and a kettle was already boiling. Mr. Halpern made tea in glasses, with a lot of sugar, which was how Maryam's grandmother used to make it in Damascus. He put a small plate of cookies between them. He sat down across from her.

It was a question she had not expected. She had expected him to say, *Now, then. Let us see what you know.* She had been ready for that. She had her notebook. She had a pencil. She had her father's diagram.

But instead he was asking her *why*.

She took a sip of the tea. It was very hot. It was so sweet her tongue almost curled.

"Because my father is sick," she said.

"Yes."

"And because he cannot work, and someone has to."

"Yes."

"And because we have no money."

"Yes."

Mr. Halpern waited.

"And because — "

She stopped.

"And because?"

"And because I love it," she said. She said it quietly. She had not known this, exactly, until she said it. "I love the clocks. I love the sound of them. I love that each one is different. I love that my father made a life out of them. I don't — I don't want to lose it. The whole thing. I don't want to lose the shop."

Mr. Halpern nodded. He did not smile. But his eyes were softer than before.

"Good," he said. "Good. Those are the right reasons. You may now become my student."

"Your student?"

"Every Saturday. For the summer. Here, in this workshop. Your father has taught me things over the years, and now he has asked me to teach something to you, and this I am pleased to do. I am an amateur. I am not a master like your father. I have made watches for sixty years, but only as a hobby. I am a retired accountant. I was not clever enough to be a clockmaker."

"My father says you are very good."

"Your father is kind. Too kind, sometimes." Mr. Halpern picked up his tea. "Come. Finish your tea. The workshop is waiting."

The workshop was in a small back room that had once, Mr. Halpern said, been a sunroom. Now it had long benches along three walls, and cabinets of tiny drawers, each drawer labeled in a beautiful copperplate handwriting — PIVOTS, RUBY JEWELS, CROWN WHEELS, HAIRSPRINGS — and a tall, standing lamp with a magnifying lens on the end of a swinging arm. There were clocks everywhere. On the walls, on the shelves, on the benches. All of them were ticking, and they were ticking in a thousand slightly different rhythms, and the room sounded like a forest of mice.

"Do you like it?" Mr. Halpern said.

"Yes."

"Good. First, a lesson. Not about clocks. About patience."

"Okay."

"The secret of patience," said Mr. Halpern, "is not what most people think. Most people think patience is waiting. It is not. Patience is *looking*. Looking at one thing, and one thing only, and not looking away until you understand it. A clockmaker who loses patience is a clockmaker who begins to look at the next thing before he is done with this thing. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"We are going to practice looking. That is all we will do today."

"Just looking?"

"Just looking."

He took a small watch from a drawer. He laid it on the bench. He angled the lamp. He gestured to her to pull up a stool.

"Look at this," he said. "Look at it for ten minutes. Do not touch it. Just look. Then tell me everything you see."

Maryam thought this would be boring.

It was not boring.

For ten minutes, she looked at the tiny insides of a pocket watch. She looked at the wheels, the tiny teeth of the wheels, the way the teeth were not quite square but slightly curved, the little jewels that the pivots sat in, the spring coiled like a small, sleeping snake. She saw things she had never seen before. She saw a hairline crack on one of the pivot plates. She saw that one jewel was clearer than the others. She saw a fleck of dust, no bigger than a grain of salt, that had gotten caught in a gear tooth.

"Time," said Mr. Halpern.

"Oh."

"Tell me."

"You saw the crack. Did you see that the crack has been there a long time? That it has been polished over by the oil?"

"No."

"The next thing we practice is *how old*. How old a mistake is. You can see it, sometimes. Oil carries history."

"Oh."

"But that is a lesson for another day."

She smiled. She couldn't help it.

"Mr. Halpern," she said, "did you really make watches for sixty years?"

"I did."

"That is a long time."

"Yes. It is almost my whole life. It is how I stayed sane."

He seemed to see the question anyway. He looked at her over his glasses.

"One day," he said, "I will tell you my story. But not today. Today we look. Today we learn to look."

"Yes, Mr. Halpern."

"Now. Look at this one."

He took out another watch.

She looked.

"Maryam. I have been thinking. I have decided."

"Yes?"

"You may work on my clock."

Maryam's heart did a small sprint, which it often did now, since her father's heart attack, because she had discovered that hearts do a lot of sprinting when you are ten and in charge of things.

"Thank you, Mrs. Bellamy."

"On two conditions."

"Yes?"

"The first is that your father supervises every step. Every step, Maryam."

"He will. He said he will."

"The second is that you come and see me. Once a week. To report on progress. I do not want to be surprised in August."

"Yes, Mrs. Bellamy."

"And I will pay the same fee I agreed with your father. Cash, at the end. I assume this is still acceptable."

"It is more than acceptable. Thank you."

"Good." Mrs. Bellamy tapped her cane once on the floor, the way some people strike a gavel. "When shall I come? For the first visit?"

"Why don't — would you like me to come to you? I can bring — I can bring the casework. We have not touched the movement yet. We are still reading the books. I can show you where we are."

Mrs. Bellamy considered this. She looked at the shop, at the dim shelves, at the clocks. "Yes," she said. "Yes, come to me. I live at 112 Elm Street. It is the blue house with the white fence. There is an iron gate that sticks. Shake it twice. Come tomorrow at three."

"Yes, Mrs. Bellamy."

"Good day, Maryam."

And Mrs. Bellamy went.

Maryam ran upstairs. She took the stairs two at a time, which she was not supposed to do but could not help. She burst into the apartment shouting "Baba, Baba, she said yes, Mrs. Bellamy said yes!" and her father laughed, which was a thing he had not done in eleven days, and it was the best sound Maryam had heard all summer.

----

The next day, at three exactly, Maryam rang the bell of the blue house with the white fence on Elm Street. She had the casework of the clock in a cardboard box, wrapped in a piece of old flannel. She was carrying it with both hands.

Mrs. Bellamy opened the door. She was not using her cane inside her own house, which was a thing Maryam noticed. She stood up straight.

"Come in, child."

The house smelled like tea and old paper. There were books on every wall. There were more books than Maryam had ever seen in a house — more than in her own school library, she thought. The books had titles in languages she could not read — Greek letters, Latin words. There were framed photographs too, of people in black and white, standing in snow, standing in sun, standing on a boat once, and once a photograph of a small girl with dark curls holding a bicycle.

"Is that you?" Maryam asked.

"It is. Age six. Nineteen fifty-two. Locarno."

"Where is Locarno?"

"Switzerland. On a lake. It was my grandmother's town. My mother took me there every summer, before she died."

"Oh."

"The clock in your box," said Mrs. Bellamy, "came from not far from there. A little village called Meiringen. My grandfather was a schoolmaster. He bought the clock for his wife when they married. That was eighteen ninety-two."

"Do you have a picture of him?"

"I do."

She led Maryam to a wall in the dining room. There were many small framed photographs, hung close together in a patient arrangement. She pointed to one. It was a photograph of a man with a mustache, standing beside a woman in a lace collar. They were very young. In the background was a wall, and on the wall was a clock — the clock. Maryam's clock. Mrs. Bellamy's clock.

"Oh," said Maryam, very softly.

"Yes."

"It was there from the beginning."

"It was there from the beginning. It wound their first week of married life. It wound the years they raised my mother. It wound my mother's childhood, every minute of it. It came with us to America in nineteen thirty-eight."

"Why did you come?"

Mrs. Bellamy looked at her, with a small quiet expression.

"My mother's family," she said, "was half Jewish. In nineteen thirty-eight, it was — it was no longer safe for people like us in parts of Europe, even in Switzerland for some, and my grandfather was worried about my mother. So they sent her to America to live with an aunt. She carried the clock. She was sixteen. She never saw her parents again."

Maryam did not know what to say.

"You came from war too," Mrs. Bellamy said, gently.

"Yes."

"When?"

"Four years ago. I was six."

"Where is your family from?"

"Damascus."

"Damascus," Mrs. Bellamy said, as if she were tasting the word. "The oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Do you know that?"

"My father says that."

"It is true. In Latin it is *Damascus*. In the Bible, it is *Dammesek*."

"It is where I was born."

"Yes."

There was a silence. Then Mrs. Bellamy did something surprising. She pulled out a chair at the dining room table and gestured at it.

"Sit, child. Let me bring tea. You have brought me the case of my grandfather's clock and we are going to drink tea and you are going to tell me how it is going, and after that, if you wish, I will show you a photograph of my grandfather winding this clock every Sunday for fourteen years. I was a child. I remember."

Maryam sat.

And she was glad. She was, she discovered, very glad indeed.

On the third visit to Mrs. Bellamy's, Maryam brought a picture of her own.

She had found it in her father's old brown envelope, the one he kept in the drawer of the desk. It was a picture of the shop in Damascus. His shop, before. His shop that was not there anymore, because in 2014 a shell had come through the roof and turned the upper floor to rubble, and the clocks had all been destroyed, and her father had sat on the broken stones and wept for a whole afternoon, and then he had stood up and said to her mother, *We are leaving. We must leave.*

She brought the picture to Mrs. Bellamy.

Mrs. Bellamy looked at it for a long time.

"This is your father's shop?"

"Yes. The old one."

"He is standing in the doorway."

"Yes. He was twenty-eight in that picture."

"He looks very young."

"He was."

"And this — this is you?"

"Yes."

"You are holding something."

"A clock. It was a clock I used to carry around when I was two. Like a doll."

Mrs. Bellamy smiled. Her eyes were a little wet.

"You are a clockmaker's daughter by birth."

"Yes."

"And the shop — what happened to the shop?"

Maryam opened her mouth and closed it. It was hard, sometimes, to say. She had not said it, in words, to anyone in Bellwood. She had said it to her father and mother, who already knew, and she had said it once to a kind counselor at school, in the third grade, who had asked gentle questions and then had had to excuse herself. She had not said it to anyone else.

But Mrs. Bellamy had asked. And Mrs. Bellamy had told her about the clock from Meiringen.

"In twenty-fourteen a shell came through the roof. A mortar shell. My father was out at the time. My mother and I were at my aunt's house. No one died. But the building was ruined. All the clocks. All of them."

Mrs. Bellamy put a hand to her mouth.

"Maryam," she said.

"And the street where we lived — the street had a mosque, and a school, and a bakery, and a man who sold oranges. In my memory. I was six."

"Yes."

"The bakery had flatbread that came out of the oven in the morning and my father would buy one for me, hot. Very hot. I had to juggle it from hand to hand."

"Yes."

"And the mosque had a — a little blue dome. Not a big one. Just a little blue dome on the corner. And at certain hours the call to prayer would come from it, a man's voice, singing, and I thought, when I was little, that the voice was the voice of the dome. I thought the dome was singing."

Mrs. Bellamy was crying now. She was crying the way people cry who have not cried in a long time, quietly, without moving. Her hand was still over her mouth. A tear went down the side of her face and stopped at her chin.

"Mrs. Bellamy — I'm sorry. I didn't mean — "

"No, child. No. It is — I am grateful. I am grateful to you. I am grateful. You must keep telling me."

"I don't know what else to say."

"Whatever you remember. You have not lost any of it, you know. You think you have. You have not."

"Are you sure?"

"I am seventy-eight years old. I know how memory works. It is stubborn. It keeps things."

"I don't even know if I remember the real Damascus. I was six."

"You remember the Damascus you knew. That is the real one for you."

"Everyone on the news," Maryam said, and now her own voice had gone a little thick, "everyone just says the war. Nobody says — nobody says it was a place where you could buy oranges from a man on a corner. Nobody says there was a bakery. Nobody says anyone lived there. They just say the war."

"I know, child. I know."

Maryam swallowed.

"My father," she said, "says that is the worst part. When people forget that there was a place. When they only remember that there was a war."

"Yes," said Mrs. Bellamy. "I understand this. I have a — a similar memory. Not mine, my mother's. A country she loved, that later she could not bear to speak of. Because everyone spoke of it only as the country that had done the thing it did. Not the country of her father's orchard, or the road she used to ride her bicycle on. I grew up with her silence."

"I don't want my silence."

"Good," said Mrs. Bellamy. "Do not have your silence. Tell everyone about the oranges."

"I will."

"You have told me. You have begun already."

"Mrs. Bellamy," Maryam said.

"Yes?"

"Why is the clock so important to you?"

Mrs. Bellamy looked up.

"Because," she said, slowly, "my grandmother wound it every Sunday morning after my grandfather died. For seven years. It was the first thing she did on a Sunday. And when my grandmother died, my mother did the same. Every Sunday morning. For thirty years. And when my mother died, I did the same. Every Sunday morning. For forty-one years. Until the mainspring broke, this March, on a Sunday, in my hands."

"Oh."

"It has been silent since then. Silence is not a thing I can live with, Maryam. Not in that particular clock."

"You will not have to. I will fix it. I will fix it, and I will bring it back, and you can wind it again."

"Yes."

"Mrs. Bellamy?"

"Yes, child?"

"I think we — I think we are friends now."

Mrs. Bellamy laughed. It was a small laugh, and it was real.

"Yes, Maryam. I think we are."

The bad day came near the end of June.

Maryam had been working steadily for two weeks. She had cleaned the case of Mrs. Bellamy's clock, inside and out, with a soft toothbrush and a solution her father had prescribed. She had polished the brass hands. She had learned, from books her father lent her, the names of all the parts of a Swiss bracket clock of the late nineteenth century. She had begun, with her father's permission, to work on a second clock — a smaller one, belonging to Mr. Finley — which had a broken strike. The strike was a hammer that hit a bell. The bell was fine. It was the hammer's linkage that had worn out.

It was on the smaller clock that she made the mistake.

She was tightening a screw.

It was a tiny screw, no larger than the head of a pin. It held the hammer-linkage in place. She had been told, by her father, to tighten it only a quarter-turn.

She was tired. She had been at the bench for four hours. She had had lunch — a cheese sandwich — but she had forgotten to drink water, which was another of her father's rules. She was tired, and she was distracted, because her mother had fought on the phone with someone about insurance that morning, and she had been thinking about it. She had not been *looking*.

She tightened the screw a full turn.

There was a small, clear, sad sound. A *click* that was too sharp, not the satisfying click of a thing settling, but the sharp cold click of a thing breaking.

The screw had sheared. The head of the screw had snapped off. The body of the screw was stuck in the hole, and she could not remove it, because she could not grip what was not there.

Maryam sat very still. Then she put her head down on the bench and began to cry.

She cried not like she had cried in years. She cried like a small child. She cried into the felt. She cried with great ugly hiccups. She cried because the screw was broken, yes, but she also cried because the shop was closed upstairs and her father was in a chair and her mother was on the phone crying at night and there was a clock from 1892 in a box and a woman named Mrs. Bellamy was waiting and there was a man in Germany in 1941 who had been hidden in — what had Mr. Halpern almost said last Saturday? — somewhere, to save him from being killed. She cried because Adam, her little brother, had asked her that morning when Baba would be better, and she had said *soon*, and she did not know what soon meant, and she did not know, and she did not know, and she did not know anything.

After a time, she stopped. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her shirt. She did not go upstairs.

She sat at the bench. She looked at the sheared-off screw.

She took a small magnet. She tried to lift the broken piece of screw out of the hole. It would not come.

She took her smallest tweezers. She tried to grip it. There was nothing to grip.

She took a needle and she tried to pry from the side. The needle bent.

She sat.

Finally, because she could not stand it anymore, she went upstairs.

Her father was awake. He was reading. The book was a copy of the *Hidden Words* of Bahá'u'lláh, in Arabic, which was a book they had at their family altar at Naw-Rúz and which he kept now beside his chair. He looked up when she came in.

"*Habibti*. What is wrong?"

She told him. She told him with the last of her tears in her voice, but she told him honestly, and she did not leave out the part about being tired and not drinking water and being distracted by the insurance fight.

"Bring it up. Bring up the whole linkage."

"Yes, Baba."

She brought it up. She brought her tools up too. She set them on the small table. He took the linkage in his hands, which were steadier than they had been three weeks before, but still slower than they used to be.

"You see here," he said, "where the screw has sheared. The steel has failed. The steel was old and the threads were a little off. You used too much force, yes, but the screw would have failed some time soon regardless. Do you understand?"

"A little."

"What I am telling you is this. This failure was partly your mistake, and partly the clock's age. But it does not matter exactly how much was which. It can be fixed. Watch."

He took a tiny drill. It was smaller than a grain of rice. He fitted it into a small hand-vice. He showed her how to grip the base firmly, so that the drill went straight down, into the center of the broken screw body, and not into the side.

"The trick," he said, "is to drill out the body of the screw, a thread-width smaller than the outside of the thread. You then use a tap — this tool here — to re-thread what is left, if the hole is salvageable. If not, we drill oversize, install a small bushing, and re-thread. Either way, the hole lives."

"I didn't kill the hole."

"You did not kill the hole. *Habibti*, listen to me. A clockmaker's hands will break things. This is a fact. The question is not whether we break, but what we do after."

"What do we do after?"

"We repair. We learn. We write in our notebook what happened. We do not tighten when we are tired. We do not work when we have not drunk water." He smiled. "You are not your mistake, *habibti*. You are what you do after."

She sat with that for a long time. She repeated it in her head.

*You are not your mistake. You are what you do after.*

She underlined the last part, twice.

It was on the first Saturday of July that Mr. Halpern told Maryam his story.

They had been working on a small Swiss watch — not her father's clock, but a watch of Mr. Halpern's, a very old one that he had inherited. It had needed a new balance staff, and Mr. Halpern had fitted the new staff with Maryam watching, and she had learned about staking tools and pivot holes and the strange delicate art of tapping a tiny steel pin into place.

It was hot outside. The fan on the workbench hummed. The cookies were gingersnaps this Saturday. Maryam had eaten four.

"Maryam," said Mr. Halpern.

"Yes?"

"I said I would tell you my story one day."

"Yes."

"Today, I think, is the day. If you would like."

"I would like."

He leaned back. He took his glasses off. He cleaned them on the bottom of his cardigan. He put them back on.

"I was born in nineteen forty-one," he said. "In a city called Hamburg. In Germany. Do you know about Germany in nineteen forty-one?"

"A little. From school. The war."

"Yes. The war. And the other thing."

"The — "

"The Shoah. The Holocaust. Yes."

"Yes."

"My family was Jewish. My father was a watchmaker. My mother was a schoolteacher. I had — I had an older brother, Aron. He was eight when I was born. I do not remember him. I was too small."

Maryam held very still.

"In nineteen forty-two," said Mr. Halpern, "my parents made a plan. They knew what was coming. My father's brother had already been taken. My mother had cousins who had disappeared. They could not leave Germany by then. There was nowhere left to go that would take them.

Maryam did not breathe.

"My parents agreed. This was a very hard thing to agree to. I am told my mother cried for three days. Frau Winkler took me when I was thirteen months old. She put me in her back bedroom. She told her neighbors I was her sister's orphaned son, from Dresden. She called me Thomas. For three years I was Thomas Winkler.

"My parents and my brother were taken, in the autumn of nineteen forty-two, to a camp in the east. Theresienstadt, first. Then Auschwitz. They did not come back.

Mr. Halpern stopped.

Maryam was crying. She had not meant to cry. She had been doing so well at not crying lately.

"I am sorry," she said.

"Do not be sorry."

"I am very — I am very sorry for your family."

"Thank you, Maryam."

"Your — your brother — "

"I never knew him. Only in pictures. Frau Winkler had hidden some. His name was Aron. He liked drawing. He drew horses."

"How did you — how did you get to America?"

"In nineteen forty-seven. A cousin of my mother's, who lived in Pittsburgh, found me. Frau Winkler released me with great sadness. I was six. I came on a boat. I learned English. I went to school. I became an accountant. I married. My wife, Hannah, she died four years ago. We had two children. Now they have children. I have four grandchildren. I have been in this country for seventy-nine years."

"You became a watchmaker too. Like your father."

"I did. Yes. Though only as a hobby. I did not have the training. But — but I have the love. I wanted my father's work in my hands. Even if I never knew him, I wanted to do what he did. It was a way — " He paused. "It was a way of meeting him. My hands doing what his hands did. I would sit at my bench and think, *Are you here, Papa? Do you see?*"

"Do you think he was?"

"I think he is. Still."

Maryam wiped her face.

"Mr. Halpern, I'm really glad Frau Winkler saved you."

"So am I, Maryam Haddad. So am I. Every day."

A clock ticked somewhere. Then another. The fan hummed.

"The clock my father brought from Damascus," Maryam said, "it ticked through the day the shell came. It was in our apartment, not the shop. It ticked through the whole thing."

"Yes," said Mr. Halpern. "Yes."

"It is upstairs in our apartment now. My father winds it still. Every Friday."

"Good."

"Mrs. Bellamy's clock ticked through when her mother came on the boat, in nineteen thirty-eight. Her mother carried it in her arms."

"Yes."

"All of these clocks."

"All of them."

They sat. The watch they had been working on was half reassembled. Mr. Halpern looked at it. He looked at her.

"Maryam Haddad," he said. "Come. Let us finish this watch. Let us do what we are here to do."

"Yes, Mr. Halpern."

And she placed the balance wheel into its little home, and she watched it begin, slowly, to beat.

Mrs. Bellamy's clock had one hundred and thirty-eight parts.

Maryam knew this because she wrote each one down. She had been working up to the day when her father would say it was time to open the movement. He had said it at last, on the second Monday of July. She had nearly finished cleaning the smaller clocks in the backlog. Mr. Finley's grandfather clock was fixed and delivered. The post office wall clock was fixed and delivered. Jane Delaney's mantel clock was running again, cleaner and brighter than it had been in twenty years. Small checks had started to come in. Maryam's mother had cried again, but this time with relief, and she had made *muhammara* for dinner, which was Maryam's favorite, and they had sat at the table and Adam had told a joke and Baba had laughed, carefully, holding his chest, and the apartment had felt like itself again for the first time in weeks.

It was Tuesday. It was time for the Swiss clock.

Her father came down, for the first time, to the shop. He did it slowly, step by step. Her mother walked behind him. He did not take the old wooden stool — it was too tall for him now — so Maryam had dragged in the kitchen stool, and she had moved her own work to the small bench by the window, which was now piled with diagrams and photocopied pages from three different clock-repair books that Mr. Halpern had loaned her.

Her father sat on the kitchen stool by her small bench. He looked around the shop. He looked for a long time. He did not cry, but she saw his eyes shine.

"*Habibti*," he said.

"Yes, Baba?"

"You have kept it."

"I have kept it."

"Now. Let us open it."

The movement of Mrs. Bellamy's clock was a brass chassis about the size of a small book. Two brass plates, back and front, held between them the gears, the escapement, the pallet fork, the small pendulum attachment, the mainspring barrel, the strike train. Her father had already, the week before, removed the mainspring with a special tool called a mainspring winder, because this was dangerous and should not be done by a person his daughter's size. The spring was now safely caged. It was a relief not to have it inside.

Maryam had her notebook open. She had a pencil, a pen, and a set of labels she had made at home, each with a small number on it.

"Screw number one," her father said.

She removed it. She placed it on a square of felt, labeled 1.

"Screw two. This one comes out last, under tension."

"Under tension?"

"Yes. There is a small spring behind the ratchet wheel. When you remove this screw, the spring will push. Be ready. Do not drop it."

She was ready. She did not drop it. She placed it on 2.

She worked for three hours. Her father watched. He coached. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but he was not asleep — she would say a word, and he would say the next word. *Now the cock. Now the bridge. Now the escape wheel. Do not touch the pivot. Never touch the pivot with your fingers. The oil from your skin will eat it.*

When she was done, the one hundred and thirty-eight parts of Mrs. Bellamy's grandfather's clock from Meiringen were laid out on her bench on six squares of felt. They were each labeled. They were each in position in what her father called the exploded diagram — the way an engineer would draw a thing mid-burst, every part visible, none of it moving.

Maryam stood back. She looked at the explosion of brass on the felt.

"Baba."

"Yes?"

"Is this supposed to be terrifying?"

Her father laughed. He laughed a real laugh, and he pressed his hand against his chest to steady himself, but it was laughter.

"Yes," he said. "The first time. Always."

"I feel like I will never get it back together."

"You will. I will help you."

"There are one hundred and thirty-eight parts, Baba."

"There are one hundred and thirty-eight parts. And one is missing."

"Missing?"

"The mainspring is spent. You will install a new one. Mr. Halpern has ordered it. It is coming next week."

"So one hundred and thirty-eight minus one, plus one new."

"Correct. Now, the worn pivot on the fourth wheel."

"What about it?"

"Look."

He took her loupe. He held it up. He pointed. She brought the fourth wheel under the lamp. She looked.

One of the pivots — the pivots were the tiny axles on which each gear turned — was not quite smooth anymore. There was a little groove in it, a shallow groove, where forty years of friction had carved its mark.

"Is that bad?"

"It will not run right, long-term. It is at the edge. It might go another ten years. It might go two. For a clock with this much history, we do not want *might*. We want *will*."

"Can we replace the pivot?"

"We can turn a new one."

"Do you — "

"I cannot turn one. Not yet. My hands do not agree to do such fine work, not yet. But Mr. Halpern has a small lathe. Small enough, precise enough. I will speak to him."

"You will come with me?"

Her father looked at her.

"*Habibti*, I — " He paused. "Yes. I will come. Saturday. I will come with you to Mr. Halpern's."

He had not left the apartment, except to go to doctor's appointments, in over a month.

Maryam bent down and kissed his hand.

"Baba."

"*Ya Rabbi*," he said, softly. "*Albi*. All right. Saturday."

"Saturday."

They sat at the bench. Outside, on Maple Street, a little summer rain had begun to fall. It made a small sound on the window. All the clocks in the shop kept ticking, out of rhythm with each other, as they always had. Maryam looked at the explosion of brass, one hundred and thirty-eight small bright pieces of Mrs. Bellamy's grandfather.

"Baba," she said.

"Yes?"

"In Switzerland, one hundred and thirty-two years ago, a man married a woman in a place called Meiringen. And he bought her this clock. And every Sunday for his life he wound it. And then his wife wound it. And then their daughter. And then Mrs. Bellamy."

"Yes."

"And now it is on my bench."

"Yes."

"I — I hope I don't break it, Baba."

"You will not break it. We will not break it. We are not alone, *habibti*. Mr. Halpern is with us. Mrs. Bellamy is with us. I am here. *Allah* is with us. The clock is with itself. It knows what it wants to be. We only help it be."

She nodded.

She picked up her pen.

*July 14. Mrs. Bellamy's clock is in 138 pieces on my bench. The fourth wheel pivot is worn. We will turn a new one at Mr. Halpern's workshop. Baba is coming on Saturday. He has not left the apartment in over a month. The clock is with itself.*

Outside, the rain thickened. The clocks ticked. Her father fell asleep on the kitchen stool. She covered him with a thin blanket from upstairs, and she kept working until it was too dark to see, and then she came and sat beside him and watched him breathe until it was time for dinner.

The crisis came on a Saturday in late July.

Her father had made it to Mr. Halpern's workshop. He had been slow, and he had been tired, and he had sat in a chair with a cup of tea for most of the visit, but he had been there. Mr. Halpern and Mr. Halpern had stood near each other for the first time in two months, and when they embraced Maryam thought they might both cry.

They did not. They drank tea. Then they went to the workshop. Mr. Halpern turned a new pivot for the fourth wheel of Mrs. Bellamy's clock, and Maryam watched the little lathe sing, and her father sat near her and pointed out what to watch for. The new pivot came out, at last, polished and clean and the exact right diameter, and Maryam carried it home in a small box of felt.

That had been the good Saturday.

The crisis came the Saturday after.

Maryam had begun reassembly. She had put the new mainspring in, with her father's careful supervision, in a special barrel, after many hours of preparation. She had placed wheels. She had placed pivots. She had oiled bearings, drop by drop, with the tiniest oiler in the shop. She had begun to feel, for the first time, that this clock might, actually, in time, become a clock again.

Then she came to the escape wheel.

The escape wheel was a tiny gear with fifteen delicate teeth. In the Swiss escapement of the clock, each tooth mattered — each was shaped exactly so, to interact with the pallet fork in exactly the right way. Maryam had cleaned the escape wheel and she had been about to install it when her father, looking at it under the lamp, paused.

"Bring it closer."

She brought it closer.

He looked for a long time. He said a word in Arabic she had not heard him say before. It was a word, she gathered, that you were not supposed to say in front of your ten-year-old.

"Baba?"

"One tooth is cracked."

"Cracked?"

"A hairline. Look. Here."

He handed her the loupe. She looked. And there it was. A line that she had not seen. A line that was not supposed to be there. A hairline crack through the base of one of the fifteen teeth.

"Will it break?"

"In time, yes. Soon."

"Can we fix it?"

"No. Not this one. You cannot repair a cracked tooth on an escape wheel. You must replace the wheel."

"Can we buy one?"

"For a Swiss clock from eighteen ninety-two? I do not think so, *habibti*. Not easily. Not in time. A clockmaker with a lathe fine enough to make one — "

"Mr. Halpern?"

Her father was quiet.

"Mr. Halpern's lathe is fine," he said, slowly. "But an escape wheel is not a pivot. It must be cut from stock, the teeth each one perfect, then heat-treated so they do not wear. It is master's work. It is — I do not know if Avraham can do it."

"We can ask him."

"We can ask him. Yes."

"Today."

"Today, yes."

----

They went to Mr. Halpern's together. Maryam carried the escape wheel in a small silk pouch. Mr. Halpern examined it under his lamp. He was silent for a full minute. Then he sat back.

"I have never cut an escape wheel," he said.

"No," said Maryam's father.

"I have the lathe. I have the steel. I have, perhaps, the eye. I do not have the experience."

"No."

"It would take me — " Mr. Halpern thought. "It would take me a week. Or two. And I might fail. Do you understand? There is every chance I cut three wheels and none of them run true."

"I understand."

"And you need this by August twelfth."

"August twelfth."

Mr. Halpern was quiet. He picked up the escape wheel. He looked at it as if it had given him a personal insult.

"Avraham," said Maryam's father.

"Yusuf."

"You do not have to."

"I know I do not have to. Do not insult me. I am deciding."

Maryam held her breath.

"I will do it," said Mr. Halpern. "I will do my best. I cannot promise success. I can promise effort."

"Thank you," said Maryam's father. "*Barak Allah fik.*"

"I will need the wheel as a template. And I will need Maryam to come every day this week, and help me. I am not going to do this alone."

"Me?" said Maryam.

"You. You have good eyes. You have patience. We will do it together."

"Yes, Mr. Halpern."

"Every morning. Nine o'clock. Your mother will drive you. I will speak to her."

"Yes."

"And if I fail," said Mr. Halpern, "we will figure out the next thing. There is always a next thing."

"Yes."

"We will tell Mrs. Bellamy the truth," said Maryam. "If we fail. We will tell her. She will understand."

"She will understand," agreed Mr. Halpern.

"She is my friend," Maryam said.

Mr. Halpern smiled at her, over his glasses.

"She is lucky to be your friend," he said.

They did not fail. But the week was very hard.

Mr. Halpern cut three wheels. The first was off by a tenth of a millimeter, and the teeth did not engage right. The second had a hairline like the original — he had not heat-treated it long enough. The third he almost gave up on, because he was so tired, but Maryam sat with him, and she watched, and she handed him tools, and she brought him water, and once she brought him a honey cookie she had baked with her mother the night before.

On Friday evening at seven p.m., the third escape wheel passed every test. It turned freely. Its teeth were even. It was hardened without being brittle. Mr. Halpern set it down on the bench and put his face in his hands and said a word in Hebrew that Maryam did not understand.

"What does it mean?"

"It means, *Blessed be the One who has brought us to this day.*"

"Oh."

"We say it on good occasions. On the first strawberries of the season. On seeing a friend after a long absence. On finishing something you did not know you could finish."

Maryam said it in her head. She said it in English, then in her head she said it in Arabic, because she had a feeling it worked in every language.

"Mr. Halpern."

"Yes, Maryam."

"Thank you."

"Thank your father. Thank your grandfather. Thank my father. I am only the hands."

----

On Saturday, something else happened.

While they were there, there was a knock at the door.

The apartment could not hold them all. They spilled into the stairwell. The Nazhat children played with Adam on the landing. Mrs. Rahmoun, who spoke Arabic and a little Hebrew, sat with Mrs. Weintraub and they talked, somehow, in two and a half languages. Maryam's father sat in his chair and received everyone, and he was tired, but he was smiling, the real old smile, the alley-soccer smile, and Maryam's mother ran back and forth with tea glasses in her hands.

At one point, Mrs. Weintraub came over to Maryam. She was small and curved like a comma, and she took Maryam's hand in both of hers.

"I hear," she said, "you are a clockmaker."

"I am trying to be."

"Avraham says you are more than trying."

"He is kind."

"He is honest. He does not flatter. If he says you are good, you are good. Child, I was your age once — long ago, in Kraków — and nobody expected me to be very much of anything. You listen to your teacher. You keep going. Yes?"

"Yes, Mrs. Weintraub."

"Good girl. Good girl. Eat your *maqluba*. Eat. You are thin."

She ate her *maqluba*.

*O Thou kind Lord! Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock. Thou hast decreed that all shall belong to the same household. In Thy Holy Presence they are all Thy servants, and all mankind are sheltered beneath Thy Tabernacle.*

She said it in English, because she wanted Mrs. Weintraub and Mr. Halpern to understand, and because this was what she had been thinking all evening, in the smell of *maqluba* and challah and *baklava*.

When she finished, the room was quiet for a moment. Then Mrs. Weintraub nodded. "Yes," she said. "Yes. That one. That is the one."

And everyone ate dessert.

There were nine days until August twelfth.

Maryam worked on Mrs. Bellamy's clock every single day.

The escape wheel went in. It turned. The pallet fork was reset. It rocked. The balance of the clock was not a free balance — it was a pendulum, a short one, with a brass rating nut at the bottom. Maryam's father taught her how to set the beat. *Listen,* he said. *The tick and the tock. They should be equal. If the tick is louder than the tock, or earlier, the beat is off. You move the pallet fork a fraction. You listen again.*

She listened. At first she could not hear. Then she could.

She listened for two whole evenings. The tick and the tock, equalizing. The tick and the tock, evening out. Until at last they were a perfect pair of small wooden footsteps going down a wooden hall.

The hands went on. She set them to twelve.

She wound the clock.

It ticked.

For three seconds.

Then it stopped.

She almost cried.

"Friction somewhere," said her father, from his chair. "A pivot that is catching. Let us look."

They looked for an hour. They found it. A tiny fleck of something — impossible to see without the loupe — had gotten onto the third wheel pivot. She cleaned it. They reassembled.

It ticked.

For three minutes.

Then it stopped.

"Friction," said her father.

"Baba. How many times."

"As many times as it takes. This is the work, *habibti*. This is the work."

It ticked for nine minutes. It ticked for forty minutes. It ticked for two hours, and stopped. It ticked for seven hours, and stopped. Each time, Maryam and her father found the problem. Each time, they fixed it.

On the evening of August eighth, the clock ticked for twenty-four hours without stopping.

Maryam, who had been sleeping in the shop on a folded blanket because she did not want to leave it, woke up on the floor at five in the morning. She sat up. She listened. The tick was there. She got up. She looked at the pendulum, which was swinging, swinging, swinging.

She ran upstairs.

She burst into her parents' bedroom. Her mother sat up. "*Ya Allah*, Maryam, what is — "

"Baba. It is still going. It has been going twenty-four hours."

Her father, still in bed, opened his eyes. He smiled. He closed them again.

"Bring me a coffee," he said. "I want to watch it go another twenty-four."

She brought him a coffee. She sat on the floor by his bed. He drank his coffee. And she told him, for the fourth time that week, everything about the clock, even though he knew it all, because telling him felt like the best thing in the world.

August twelfth was a Tuesday.

It was, or would have been, Mrs. Bellamy's fiftieth wedding anniversary.

So it was not a wedding anniversary dinner. It was an *in memoriam* dinner. It was held in Mrs. Bellamy's dining room. There were twelve people.

Maryam. Her father. Her mother. Adam. Mr. Halpern. His daughter Ruth and son-in-law David, visiting from Philadelphia. Mrs. Weintraub. Mrs. Bellamy herself, and three other women — old friends, a former colleague from the classics department, and a neighbor — who had known Mr. Bellamy.

The table had a white cloth. There were candles. There were flowers from Mrs. Bellamy's garden. On the sideboard at the head of the table, in the place of honor, was the clock.

It had been polished. Maryam had polished it herself, for two hours, with a soft cloth and a paste her father had taught her to mix. The brass shone. The wood shone. The dial, an old white enamel dial with Roman numerals, gleamed. The hands, newly blued, were sharp and clean.

The clock was ticking.

Maryam had wound it that morning. It would tick for eight days without being wound again.

At eight o'clock precisely, while the twelve of them were eating — there was roast chicken, and couscous, and a salad from the garden, and Maryam's mother had made *fattoush* which Mrs. Bellamy had eaten twice — the clock chimed.

It chimed a small, clear, silver chime. Eight perfectly even notes. The room went quiet. All twelve people looked up.

Mrs. Bellamy had her hand over her mouth. She was crying. She was crying and laughing at the same time.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Henry. Oh, my dear."

Maryam reached across the table. She took her father's hand.

Her father squeezed it.

After the chime, the clock went back to its tick. Soft, patient. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Under the conversation, which had started again. Under the clink of silverware. Under the laughter — because after a moment there was laughter again. Because that is what happens at dinners. The conversation starts again. The forks start again.

Mrs. Bellamy stood up. She was old, and her knees hurt her, but she stood up. She raised her glass.

"I want to make a toast," she said.

Everyone raised their glasses. Even Adam, who had juice.

"To my Henry," said Mrs. Bellamy. "To my grandfather Friedrich, who is somewhere I trust, watching. To my grandmother Elsa. To my mother, Ida, who carried this clock across the Atlantic in her arms when she was sixteen. To all the hands that wound it. To all the Sundays."

She paused. She lifted her glass higher.

"And to the hands," she said, "that put it back together after it broke. To Avraham Halpern, who cut its new heart. To Yusuf Haddad, whose knowledge we have leaned on. And to Maryam Haddad, the clockmaker's daughter, who at the age of ten took on a project that would have daunted a master, and did not falter. To you, my dear. To you."

Everyone said *to you*. Maryam's ears were very hot. She drank her juice. She was afraid she was going to cry. She did not cry. She had been a person who did not cry very much this summer, and she was not going to start now.

Mr. Halpern stood up. He also raised his glass.

"With permission," he said, "I would like to say a small thing. In my tradition we say, on good occasions, a blessing. *Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v'kiyemanu, v'higiyanu la-z'man ha-zeh.* Blessed are you, Lord our God, who has kept us alive, has sustained us, and has brought us to this time."

Maryam's father stood up. He also raised his glass. His glass was water — he was not, now, drinking wine. His hand trembled a little, but not much.

The glasses were raised. They were all raised.

Maryam did not cry. She was the only one. Every adult at that table was crying a little, even Mr. Halpern, even her mother. Mrs. Bellamy was frankly weeping. Adam did not cry either, because he was five and did not understand, but he lifted his glass and he said "cheers," and everyone laughed, and the clock ticked in the corner, and the candles made small triangles of light on the white cloth.

Maryam would remember this dinner for the rest of her life.

Summer ended.

School began. Maryam went into the fifth grade.

Her father began going down to the shop for a few hours each afternoon. He did not work full days yet — his cardiologist had said not until Thanksgiving, and her mother had been firm — but he was there. Customers came. He took in clocks. He sent Maryam home to do her homework, which she was behind on, because the clock had taken all of August.

One Saturday morning in late September, Maryam opened the shop by herself.

Her father was upstairs, having a slow morning. Her mother was at the hospital. Adam was at Mrs. Choi's.

Maryam turned on the light. She put on her apron. She took the keys out of the small drawer where her father kept them.

The shop was not empty, now. There were only four clocks on the repair shelves. The waiting list, her father had said, was down to reasonable. Some of the customers had gone elsewhere. Most had waited. A few new customers had come — word, it turned out, had gotten around town about the girl who had fixed the Bellamy clock, and there was a small steady trickle of people curious to meet her.

Mrs. Bellamy herself had come by twice to check on the clock. It was, she reported, ticking perfectly. She had wound it every Sunday. On the sixtieth day, she had wound it at the exact same second as the week before. She said this made her feel less afraid.

Mr. Halpern came by every week. Not as a mentor, now. As a friend. He brought small cakes that Mrs. Weintraub had baked. He sat on the wooden chair by the door and he and Maryam's father talked about watches, and about politics, and about their grandchildren (Mr. Halpern had four; Maryam's father had two, in Germany, whom he was hoping to visit in the spring). They talked in a mix of English and broken German and broken Arabic and signs, and they laughed a great deal.

Mr. Halpern had suggested, in October, that they start a small monthly gathering. *We will invite your Syrian community,* he had said to Maryam's father, *and my Jewish community, and anyone else who will come. We will eat food. We will talk. We will remember that we are neighbors.* It had started in November. The first gathering had been at the Nazhats' house. Twenty-one people came. The second had been at the Halperns'. Twenty-eight came. The third would be at Mrs. Bellamy's. She had insisted. *The dining room holds thirty,* she had said, *if the children are willing to sit at the small table.*

All of this Maryam was thinking about, as she stood in the shop on the Saturday morning with her apron on and the keys in her hand.

She turned to the back wall. On the back wall, among the thirty-seven clocks her father had brought over the years, was a small, tired, beautiful clock. It was an Ottoman-Arabic clock, brass-cased, with tiny inlaid stars. It was her father's clock. The one he had owned in Damascus. The one that had been in their apartment on the morning of the shell. The one he had wrapped in his coat and carried to Jordan, and then to Germany, and then to America.

He wound it every Friday.

But this Saturday, for the first time, Maryam went to the wall. She reached up. She took the key. She wound it herself.

It was stiff. She had to work a little. But it gave, a click at a time, and the spring tightened, and she heard the small *hnnn* that meant the mainspring had caught. She let the key go. She stepped back.

The clock ticked.

It had always ticked. Her father had never let it stop. But she had never been the one to wind it before.

She stood there for a moment in the morning light in the shop, in her father's apron, with her small hands cold and smelling of brass. She looked at the thirty-seven clocks on the wall. All of them were ticking. All of them were disagreeing, in their small, passionate ways, about exactly what moment it was.

It was her first morning, really. Her first morning as a clockmaker's daughter who was becoming a clockmaker. She did not know yet if she would do this forever. She did not know if she would go to college and be a classics professor like Mrs. Bellamy, or a doctor like Mrs. Rahmoun, or a watchmaker and an accountant like Mr. Halpern, or a nurse like her mother, or a clockmaker like her father. She was ten.

But she knew that this work would always be in her hands. That there was a small room in her life into which she would always be able to walk. That there was a smell — oil and wood — that would always mean *shelter* to her. That her father had taught her. That Mrs. Bellamy had befriended her. That Mr. Halpern had saved her — because he had, in that week of three escape wheels, saved the whole summer for her, and maybe saved the shop.

She stood in the shop.

The clocks ticked.

Outside, on Maple Street, it was autumn, and the leaves were beginning to turn.

She was the clockmaker's daughter.

And she had a shop to run, that morning, for a little while, until her father was ready to come down.

*Time didn't end. It just changed languages.*

She underlined it.

Then she closed the notebook, and she set it on the counter, and she got to work.

THE END

============================================================

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is about time, and about the people who keep it.

Every mechanical clock in the world is a small argument with forgetting. Someone built it; someone wound it; someone, one day, will be the last person alive who remembers the hand that first wound it. Clocks outlive us, as Mr. Halpern says in this story. They tick through our losses and our homecomings and the quiet summer afternoons we did not know, at the time, we would want to keep.

I wrote this story to honor immigrant craftspeople — clockmakers, tailors, bakers, cobblers, watchmakers — who carry their trades across borders and who, in their patient workshops, keep alive skills and memories that travel with them from the places they had to leave. The Syrian clockmaker in this book is one of tens of thousands of such people in America, and in Germany, and in Canada, and elsewhere. Their shops are small maps of elsewhere.

If you have family who came from somewhere else, ask them about their trades. Ask them what their grandparents kept on the wall. Ask about the oranges.

Thank you for reading.

— Crimson Ark Publishing