In Babylon. Marcel Moring

shouted out the details of what had happened. Then he plugged up his ears with wax and climbed the tower. The smith went with him. But when they reached the top, the clock would not be silenced. The two men climbed back down again, went to the village elder, and told him what was wrong. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ the clockmaker said, ‘until the works have wound down.’ The village elder shook his head and said that wasn’t possible. Tomorrow was the annual fair and if the clock hadn’t stopped by then, the merchants would all go running. The village would lose such a large portion of their income that they wouldn’t be able to afford the sowing seed for the following year. The clockmaker looked at the smith, spread his arms, and climbed back up. There, between clock and clapper, he met his death.

      Uncle Chaim was a taciturn man. He sat in his little wooden house, repaired timepieces, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘History,’ he told the young Magnus, ‘is like a clock. You think it’s getting later, but the hands are always moving in the same circle. What’s on top today, is on the bottom tomorrow.’ Magnus, who often came to see him in the little house at the edge of the woods and helped him out, or leafed through the old books that lay under the bed, Magnus would think back on what had happened, when a band of Cossacks had struck off the head of Chaim’s wife because she happened to be standing outside the door with a basket of washing when the horsemen thundered past. And he also thought of the village on the other side of the forest that, one day, was no longer there – burned to the ground.

      Whenever Magnus was with his uncle, in the shaky wooden house, hidden among the trees at the edge of the forest, Chaim sat him down on the cracked bench beside the door and told him about the past, wading back and forth across the grey wooden floor, taking up clocks, picking up a screw here and there and putting it in one of the many drawers and boxes on the table under the window. Magnus sat down on the bench, which was so old it gleamed like dung, and listened. They drank tea out of glasses white with lime.

      The old man told him of the days when there weren’t any Cossacks and everything was green and fields of sunflowers bloomed just outside the village, green stalks as thick as your arm with heads as big as wheels and in those heads the black spiral that nearly sucked you in, right into the heart of the sun … Magnus listened and thought: It’s all nostalgia, regret for lost time.

      Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim’s favourite story took place in the days when he was just a boy and lived in a town in the North, on the river harbour. His parents owned a modest house on the quay. At the end of the cart track that ran along the house, where the deep furrows branched off to the right and disappeared in the first hesitant overgrowth of the great forest, stood a small wooden structure that looked like a cowshed and was inhabited by a woodsman and his three daughters. Chaim spent nearly all his days in the woods behind that odd-looking house, where he and the eldest of the three girls would think up long, perilous adventures.

      ‘It wasn’t a very big forest,’ he said. ‘Maybe two days around, but when you’re ten years old you can wander about a forest like that for a week and think you’re in another country. We usually pretended we had to make a dangerous journey, on horseback, straight through the Carpathians, through the forests of Lithuania. Early in the morning I would come for Freide and we’d go to the kitchen and fill a knapsack with provisions: some bread and cheese, a bottle of water. Then we’d mount our horses, the ones we didn’t have – we were just pretending – and ride out. First a long way over the firebreak, but soon we were among the trees, where it was dark and quiet. Usually we wouldn’t be home until suppertime, when it started getting dark. I can’t remember us talking much. We rode and rode, and were especially careful when our horses had to go downhill. Such fun we had. But the best part about the forest was clearing the land.

      ‘At the end of the summer,’ said Chaim, ‘we’d all go into the forest. The woodsman, Freide and her sisters and I would spend the whole day gathering brushwood. We sawed down sick trees, cut back gnarled branches, cleared the paths … In the afternoon we ate in the open field, right next to the lane, and in the evening, when we were done, we brought our brushwood there and made a big fire. You mustn’t forget, it was getting colder by then. Late September. During the day the sun still shone brightly, but the evenings were cool. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and the woodsman and I built a campfire. First a pile of dry leaves, covered with twigs, then a sort of wigwam made of branches, and on top of that heavy, gnarled boughs, as thick as an arm and often still green. After a while we had a big cone of wood. We left a small opening at the bottom where we could stick in a dry, burning branch. The campfire began to burn from inside out, from little to big, from dry to wet. It usually wasn’t long before we had a huge fire, and we roasted potatoes in the ashes. Above us, and in the forest, it had gone completely dark and we sat in that clearing, lit by the flames. Shadows danced among the trees. The sparks from the fire flew up to the treetops and burst into pieces. We would sometimes feel a little scared. As we pricked our potatoes on sticks and held them in the ashes, the woodsman told us ghost stories. I wish you could have seen it.’

      That’s what he always said, Uncle Chaim: ‘I wish you could have seen it.’

      Magnus saw other things. One day when he arrived at Uncle Chaim’s house he found a bare patch with smouldering stumps of charred wood where the house had been. The clockmaker was nowhere in sight. Magnus walked among the half-burnt pieces of wood, through the ankle-deep layer of damp ash, but found nothing to remind him of the little house. The bench was gone, the table, the shaky wooden bed with the old books … He picked up a stick and poked around in the blackened mess. Just as he was about to leave, he saw something lying in the scorched coppice, under an oak. It was Chaim’s instrument kit, the chest he used to carry on his back when he travelled about the country repairing clocks in remote villages and towns. It had been cast aside, landed in the bushes, and been forgotten. Magnus slung the chest onto his back and set out on his journey.

      ‘Cossacks,’ said Uncle Chaim, when I asked him once what had happened. ‘Beware of Cossacks, my boy.’

      ‘There are no more Cossacks,’ I said. ‘Not here.’

      ‘There are always Cossacks.’

      Here was America, where we were already living, the land where Uncle Chaim thought that people lit their lamps with a dollar bill and nobody ate potatoes.

      ‘Cossacks and potatoes,’ said Uncle Chaim. And he sang, to confirm his loathing for potatoes:

      Zuntik – bulbes,

      Montik – bulbes,

      Dinstik un mitvokh – bulbes,

      Donershtik un fraytik – bulbes,

      Shabes in a novene:

      – a bulbe-kugele!

      Zuntik – vayter bulbes.

      Sunday, potatoes. Monday, potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday, potatoes. Thursday and Friday, potatoes. But on Shabbat, a special treat: potato pudding! Sunday, more potatoes.

      ‘The food alone should have been reason enough for me to leave that country,’ Uncle Chaim once said. I had reminded him that this would have made him an eligible candidate for the Hollander Top Ten List of Terrible Reasons to Make Drastic Decisions.

      ‘Pah!’ he said. ‘Don’t compare me to your father, who left Europe because he didn’t want to wear a tie. Or Magnus, who left because he was looking for a wife without a moustache.’

      That was what Magnus had said, that all the women in their region had moustaches. ‘Moustaches and hairy legs.’ He had shivered at the thought. Uncle Chaim had looked at him sideways, his left eyebrow lowered. ‘Hairy legs? When did you see a leg?’ Magnus, inhabitant of the spiritual realm for nearly three centuries now, had blushed like a young girl. ‘Nu, Magnus, Nephew. Where in all those parts did you ever see a leg?’ Magnus had mumbled something about moustaches and that he had certainly seen them before and that you could only assume … His uncle’s eyebrow remained firmly lowered and it was a long time before he looked away. Finally he turned to me and shrugged.

      But neither hairy legs, nor upper lips, were the reason for Magnus’s departure. It was the last Cossack