by Angels
Anna was a wilful child, spoiled by her parents. When she turned ten, her father, at her request, had a small room built for her use alone, in the basement of the house, which was full of a clutter that delighted the child. Stefan found there a faceted pink quartz bowl Anna used as a candle holder.
There were five idyllic years, during which Anna became a young woman. Stefan remained a privileged confidant. She admitted to him, the day she turned fifteen: “My parents are beginning to want to marry me off. But I don’t want an arranged marriage. I want to choose myself the man with whom I will live the rest of my days, but they won’t understand!”
“If you want to choose him yourself, Damoiselle,” said Stefan, his throat tight, “no one will be able to prevent you.”
During the next two years, Anna had to refuse, politely but without appeal, one good match after another, every three or four months. Her parents at first blamed themselves: they had been too hasty; was she still not a child? Many young women only found a husband when they were eighteen or nineteen.
But after her seventeenth birthday, they began to worry. They regretted never having bent her to their will before; she had never learned obedience.
And then, on a night at the beginning of autumn, they received the visit of a dynastic servant: the son of the Dynast, his Highness Radulf, had glimpsed young Anna during a stroll along the canals, and desired to meet her. Anna was directly informed of the visit and, horrified, went to confide in Stefan.
The man who had spent seventeen years living only for her felt the hand of Chronos close upon him. He asked “But isn’t this wonderful news?” in a tone meant to provoke Anna even further. She fled to her room.
The next day, Pieter Havel was beaten and thrown out of the Achinger house, on the Herbstestrass. He crawled painfully along the gutter in the middle of the alley that ran at the back of the houses, until he disturbed a wasps’ nest. He owed his life to the intervention of Anna, who opened the basement’s window for him. Stefan, who was watching from the attic window, saw him vanish inside the house.
He waited for Anna to come find him and tell him what had happened, and to swear him to silence. Then he went down to see Pieter. For a long while he watched the young man he had been seventeen years before, then he roused himself, undressed Pieter, and bandaged his wounds. When he was done, he covered the boy up as best he could, heaved a deep sigh, and blew out the candle stub.
With early morning he returned, bringing a tray of food, but Pieter still slept. Stefan left, and waited in his quarters for Anna to come to him. Morning was well advanced when she came, asking him to accompany her. They went down to the basement, and Stefan was barely in time to catch a collapsing Pieter in his arms. He took him back to the little room and put him back to bed.
Anna began to speak with Pieter. Stefan remembered this conversation and the burning wish he had had, to be left alone with a young woman with whom it seemed to him he had already fallen in love; so he left the room and shut the door.
He felt destiny’s grip squeezing him almost hard enough to crush him.
Night fell; in the parlour, Anna and her parents awaited the Dynast’s son. The clock struck eight. Finally, His Highness’s carriage stopped in front of the house on the Sommerstrass. Stefan steeled himself to patience. He had never known what time it was when he met with Radulf. He resolved to listen at the parlour’s door; he heard Radulf invite Anna to the ball, heard Anna decline and explain her refusal. Then he ran to the basement stairs, afraid he would be too late.
Pieter saw him and spent an eternal second beholding him in silence, before taking flight along the great hall. Stefan followed him and took up Radulf’s cloak as Pieter ran into the son of the Dynast. Stefan interposed himself between the two and unleashed a flood of apologies, giving Pieter enough time to flee.
Anna’s parents, horrified, had witnessed the scene from the rear of the hall. “Who was this young idiot?” asked Herr Holtz, in a voice that he wanted to shake with anger. Stefan, for an instant, thought to answer him with the exact truth; but he contained himself. “A young apprentice we had just hired on a trial basis, sir. There will be no need to dismiss him, I am sure we will never see him again.”
Three days later came the letter from the son of the Dynast, asking Anna Holtz’s hand in marriage. Stefan saw the young woman drowning in despair; he tried to console her somewhat, but he could not tell her the truth. After Radulf’s second visit, Anna came to him: “Do you know where Pieter Havel lives?”
“Yes, Damoiselle. At the house of the inventor Johann Havel, on the Ligeiastrass. I have the address.”
At teatime that afternoon, Anna paid no attention to what was being said. Her parents did not notice, too busy congratulating her on her imminent wedding.
Suddenly Anna spoke to her mother. “You always wanted what was best for me, didn’t you, Mama?”
“But of course.”
“And you, Papa, do you regret indulging my whims?”
Her father considered her a moment. “You know I don’t, Anna. We are happy for you because we want your happiness, as always.”
“Thank you,” she said, and wiped her eyes and abruptly left the table.
Stefan saw her for the last time as, disguised as a common woman, she descended the stairs that led to the service entrance. When the sky had darkened over the roofs of the high houses, he knew that Anna and Pieter had vanished in the flow of time.
GONE
Anna’s absence was discovered the next morning. The servants were questioned harshly. It was rapidly established that the young woman had fled the previous evening, but no one could ascertain her destination. Herr and Damme Holtz ordered one and all to keep absolute silence on the subject, while they set a search in motion.
Toward early afternoon, a man wearing a cape bordered in dynastic crimson came to ask some questions of Anna’s parents, who could not bring themselves to lie to him.
Radulf himself came in the evening. His gaze was that of a man who has just killed. “There is nowhere she can flee,” he said with desperate rage. “The city’s exits are sealed, and my men are patrolling the surrounding lands. I will find her.”
Stefan went to number thirty-seven of the Ligeiastrass the next day. He had left behind a letter of resignation. He bore at his side a purse containing all that was left of Anna’s treasure, along with his savings on seventeen years’ wages.
The door had been smashed in; inside was total chaos. Dozens of heterogeneous objects lay scattered across the floor. Horrified, Stefan called for Johann, who came out of his workshop, wiping his hands dry on a rag.
“Hello, Pieter,” he said in a faint voice. “As you can see, the Dynast’s men came to visit yesterday. They weren’t very happy when they failed to find Anna, but I believe I have convinced them she was nowhere about. No, I’m not hurt: they shook me about, but nothing else. Come.”
He led Stefan into his private workshop, where the time machine still stood proudly, minus its painting. “They tore off some of the ornaments and hit the gears with a hammer, so I had to spend the morning putting everything to rights. Fortunately, it’s a rather sturdy piece of work.” He went to a corner of the room and took up a roll of canvas. “Help me put the painting back in place, will you? That part, I figured I had best put away in safety.”
Stefan helped the inventor put the canvas back in place. “There we are; just like new,” said Johann Havel in a sarcastic tone. “Don’t you want to try it?”
Stefan looked him in the eye. He had understood at last, and the knowledge was bitter. “Do I even have a choice?”
“I don’t know. Believe me, I don’t know.”
“I just want to see her once again,” said Stefan. “Once more, that’s all. So I can remember how happy we were, she and I.”
“Then take your place. This machine was built for no one but you.”
Stefan sat down on the black leather seat
and spun the pedals. The mechanism creaked shrilly and began to move. The stars, suns, and comets tied to the periphery of the great horizontal gear passed in front of his eyes again and again, evoking the illusion that the clouds moved in the night sky.
A terrible vertigo seized him. He fell from the machine, to be caught by Johann. The whole room seemed to sway, its walls insubstantial.
“Go now,” said the inventor. “Go and regret nothing.”
Stefan clumsily opened the workshop’s door, went out of the house on the Ligeiastrass. His feet came down in the freshly fallen snow of a winter evening.
He began to walk toward the Fernestrass, where he had once lived with Anna. His vertigo had faded but was not yet gone. He began to shiver; the cold reached through his too-thin clothes.
In front of him, a young woman walked through the snow; she was wrapped up in a worn coat from beneath which her legs emerged, clad in extravagant silk stockings. Her feet were swallowed up by enormous men’s galoshes. As he passed her, Stefan saw she was at the term of her pregnancy. He hesitated and she, seeing that he watched her, gave him the smile of an inexperienced professional.
“Pardon, mein Herr,” she said in a voice she tried to make seductive. “Could you help me get to the Geburtshaus? I feel the baby coming fast. My man’s sick, he had to stay home.”
Stefan took her arm mutely, bearing up a good part of her weight. She began to walk faster. “Remind me, meine Damme,” he asked, “what day is this?”
“December fourteenth,” she said, and Stefan bit his lip till blood flowed.
When they came in, the nurse judged at a glance both the young woman’s state and her social standing. She asked Stefan in a sour tone: “Are you the father?”
“Me? No, certainly not,” said Stefan, and an instant later three men rushed in, carrying Anna Holtz in their arms. He saw Pieter Havel looking at him, without seeing what should have been obvious, so absorbed was he by Anna. Stefan watched her being carried away on a stretcher, her beautiful face twisted in pain, Pieter holding her hand.
He had had his wish. Now the time had come to accomplish the most painful part.
THE HAND OF CHRONOS
Number thirty-seven of the Ligeiastrass was vacant. On the morning of December fifteenth, Stefan went to see the owner and showed him a purse full of gold: all the money Anna Holtz had taken with her into the past. “I would buy the house from you. Is this enough?”
“Ah—but certainly, Herr . . . ?”
“Havel . . . Johann Havel.”
He moved in that evening. He had a plaque put on the door: “Johann Havel/Inventor.” It would not be a lie for very long.
He would have to learn the principles of gears and levers, the composition of ceramics and the secrets of metals. He knew it would take him nearly twenty years to rebuild the time machine according to his memories, and that meanwhile a thousand and one other things would get built. He did his apprenticeship building a small mechanical elephant, which walked swinging its trunk from side to side.
It took him three years to achieve it, and when at last he held the toy in his hands, he went to the Krug orphanage.
In the long low room where the youngest children played, he bent down to a small boy and smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Pieter.” The boy’s voice betrayed a small measure of fright, and Johann remembered how intimidated he had been by the old man.
“Would you like to come live with me, Pieter? I would be your Papa.”
The boy hesitated, then nodded, and Johann went to sign the official papers. “One question only, meine Damme. The child’s parents . . . ?”
“Our principle is not to reveal this information,” answered the governess. Seeing Johann’s supplicating expression, she relented: “Let us say that his mother’s profession did not allow her to take care of him.”
On the way, Johann first held the boy’s hand. When they had reached the bottom of the street, he squatted down and took a package out of his pocket. “Look what I have for you,” he said. He took the elephant from its nest of paper, turned the key in the mechanism, and set it down. On the sunlight-gilded flagstones, the little elephant walked forward, swinging its trunk. Pieter showed a radiant smile.
“What do you want to call him?” asked the inventor, because he remembered he had to ask the question now.
“Elfy,” said the little boy, without hesitation.
“Then take Elfy with you, and hold tight to him. I’ll carry you to my house.”
He put Pieter on his shoulders and walked up the streets that would lead him to the Ligeiastrass.
He would see Pieter grow up for twelve years, which would pass both too fast and too slowly. With the passage of time, he would build him a whole menagerie of toys, would invent for him a crowd of games. He could not doubt it, for he remembered it all.
In a room of the house on the Ligeiastrass, Johann set up his private workshop, where no one, not even Pieter, had the right to enter. There he began his long labour.
He tried at first to make the ornaments himself, but he failed and had to resort to articles imported from a great city without Neuerland. He ordered a trompe-l’œil canvas showing a cloudy night sky from an artist, but it was not the one he needed. He had to run through a dozen painters before he finally obtained the proper canvas. He had to make himself the moulds to cast his gears, to try hundreds of combinations of pulleys and chains, before reaching something satisfying. Through a thousand false leads and dead ends, he rebuilt the time machine. He did not invent it: he merely remembered it.
When Pieter reached the age of sixteen, he left school and looked for work. He finally found a post as a servant in the Achinger household, on the Herbstestrass. “It’s only for a while,” he said to Johann. “But I’ll save up some money, and it will give me good references.” He left the house in which he had spent nearly fifteen years, promising to come visit Johann every Sunday.
Time passed inexorably. In his house on the Ligeiastrass, the old inventor Johann Havel busied himself about his time machine.
One evening in late fall, almost six months after Pieter had found his job, Johann tied the last silk thread, tightened the last screw, and he knew that the machine was finished. He sat down on the black leather seat, spun the pedals a few times. Above his head, the great horizontal gear pivoted on its axis, mimicking the celestial sphere, and the stars, the comets and the moons of shining metal hung to the rim of the gear began to spin. Johann Havel let the movement of the cogs stop by itself, then climbed down from the seat. He felt in the grip of a slight vertigo, as if he had just come out of sleep or was falling into it. The walls of his house seemed to become insubstantial. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the cool glass of the window a moment, then he went to sit heavily in a faded velvet armchair. Morning sunlight surprised him; he had no awareness of having slept.
The last days seemed unbearably rapid. Pieter came back to his house, still shaken and bruised. It seemed to Johann Havel that it was only an instant later that Anna knocked at the door. He recited the words he had never forgotten. Once she had left, promising to return, Pieter asked: “You will let her leave . . . alone?”
“Perhaps,” said Johann Havel—and he hated himself in that instant, but he could not fight against his memories—“perhaps you should accompany her.”
“If she wants me along,” said Pieter sadly.
“Believe me, she will,” said Johann Havel.
Anna returned just before sunset. Pieter offered to accompany her, and the young woman did not refuse. She sat down next to him on the black leather seat, and Pieter spun the pedals.
“Nothing is happening,” said Anna. “Herr Havel! Your machine—”
“ . . . is working perfectly, Damoiselle. Your voyage has already started. Leave the house, and fear nothing. Farewell, Pieter, my son.”
Johann led them to the door. He followed them
with his gaze as they went down the Ligeiastrass, with uncertain steps, in the light from the setting sun. His eyes were blurry with tears and he did not see them reach the end of the street.
He went back in, sat down heavily. The hand of Chronos seemed to have loosened its grip, but he was a prisoner of it still.
The Dynast’s men came to see him the next day. They shook him roughly, shouted accusations and smashed objects chosen at random, but Johann did not lose his nerve. He pretended to be afraid and said again and again that Damoiselle Holtz had come to ask him if he could build her a large clockwork animal, nothing more, and that he had not seen her since. In the end, they believed him. When the servants of the Dynast had gone, he took up his tools and repaired the insignificant damage they had inflicted on the time machine, leaving everything else aside.
He waited for Stefan’s visit, and the next day watched him sit down on the black leather seat. “Go,” he said, “and regret nothing.” He buried his face in his hands so that he would not see him get out of the house, on his way to the past.
He felt as if a blade had been pulled out of his belly: a relief mixed with the fear of what would happen, now that the wound was exposed. And yet, he could feel it: the hand of Chronos had still not completely relinquished its grasp.
THE LAST VOYAGE
No one believed the Dynast’s son when he declared that he would die if he did not find Anna Holtz. Young men, even at thirty-two, are liable to childish pronouncements future circumstances will force them to recant.
But Anna was never found. In the end, her parents assumed that she lay somewhere at the bottom of one of the city’s canals, although they kept the secret hope she had managed to leave Wessendam and now lived, anonymous, somewhere in Neuerland. As for Johann Havel, he went a few times to visit the grave in the paupers’ cemetery where lay Anna Havel, dead in childbirth, accompanied into eternity by a child left forever nameless.
