In Babylon. Marcel Moring

a blackened mouth, he had tightened his belt, knotted his puttees, and left.

      The year was 1648.

      

      Magnus Levi, as he was still called at the time, reached, after more than twenty-one years of travelling, the easternmost part of the Lowlands. And there he stayed. Not because he was tired, which he was, or sick of travelling, which he also was, but because he arrived in a town on Market Day. He wandered among the stalls looking at blushing apples, pears as big as a man’s fist, cabbages like cannon balls and bulky rolls of worsted. He could smell contentment in the air and he felt something settling inside him, going slowly round and round, the way dogs do when they have found a place where they want to lie down. Magnus tried to resist this unfamiliar feeling, but it was strong, almost overwhelming. He jumped when a cloth merchant called out to him.

      ‘What’re you selling, friend?’

      He could vaguely make out what the man asked, because the dialect in which he spoke sounded much like the Plattdeutsch he had picked up along the way.

      ‘Uhren.’

      ‘Clocks?’

      Magnus nodded.

      The man beckoned him to come closer and then gestured to him that he wished to see what was in the wooden chest. Magnus placed the chest on the merchant’s stall and opened it. Hanging among his neatly arranged tools was the little pendulum clock he had made. The man pursed his lips and nodded admiringly.

      ‘Schön,’ he said. He looked back at Magnus, his head slightly tilted, and asked, ‘Deutsche?’

      ‘Deutsche?’ Magnus shook his head. ‘Weiter östlich. Polen.’

      ‘Pol …’

      Once again Magnus shook his head. ‘Da gewohnt. Nicht Polak.’

      The merchant shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the pendulum clock. ‘Wieviel?’

      Magnus named his price and the man on the other side of the stall began busily converting. Again he pursed his lips.

      Meanwhile a small group of curious onlookers had gathered around them. People asked the merchant where the traveller had come from and the merchant, who suddenly felt like a true cosmopolitan, told them the story. Just as Magnus was taking the pendulum clock out of the chest so that they could see it better, the cloud of spectators parted. A lady and her companion walked through the space they had made. Magnus, who hadn’t noticed a thing, was busy letting the clock chime. The melodious cooing of the rods and the first four lines of the song Friede always used to sing rose up in the clear spring air. He had worked for months to get the eleven copper rods just the right length that they would produce the proper tones, and before that he had slaved many, many months to build a mechanism that would allow the tiny hammers to hit the rods at just the right tempo, and in sequence. He stared dreamily at the little clock. He didn’t notice that anything had changed until he saw the merchant give a deep nod. At first he grinned, taking the nod as a sign of appreciation and admiration, but when it remained silent and everyone appeared to have shifted their gaze, he looked sideways. Standing next to him was a young woman in a dress of midnight-blue. A black crocheted shawl was draped across her shoulders. She was in the company of a servant girl in a white lace cap.

      ‘What song is that?’

      She had dark eyes, the colour of polished, gleaming walnut, and curly black hair, tied back in a ponytail.

      He stammered out something that even he didn’t understand.

      ‘Deutsche?’ she asked.

      The merchant explained to her where the clockmaker had come from and then Magnus told her that he had been on the road for twenty years now and had travelled through Poland and Bohemia and Moravia repairing clocks and in one big city had even built a timepiece for the mayor.

      When he had finished speaking, the young woman asked how much he wanted for the pendulum clock. Magnus looked at the timepiece. The sloping sides were like the curve of a woman’s hip, the wood was the colour of … He named a price that was barely half what he had named earlier.

      ‘What?’ cried the merchant. ‘You told me …’

      Magnus, who realized he had let himself get carried away and was about to be laughed at, picked up the pendulum clock and tucked it back into his wooden travelling case. He smiled unhappily, shrugged his shoulders, and said, in even clumsier German (if that were possible), something that was meant to explain his peculiar behaviour. The young woman leaned towards her maidservant and whispered something in her ear. Then she gave Magnus a nod and asked the merchant to measure off two yards of white linen.

      The group of onlookers dispersed and Magnus slung the chest onto his back. He walked between two stalls and made his way to the large church in the middle of the market square. There, in the shelter of the buttresses, where it stank of rotting vegetables and old fish, he had a serious word with himself. How could he have been so stupid? To let himself be carried away by a pair of beautiful eyes? Imagine selling Reisele for a price that wouldn’t even cover the cost of … You’re in a strange land, Magnus Levi. You’ve got to keep silent and listen, instead of bragging and swooning. When he had gone past the church the sun came out again, and in the clear spring light he walked out of the market square, into an alleyway between two large white houses with stained glass windows. Behind the glass he saw a row of plants in white and blue pots. They bore red flowers, as big as apples. He had seen many things on his journey to the West: he had been in prosperous regions, but nowhere had he seen such abundance as in this place, nowhere had it been as clean, nowhere did the brass door knobs gleam as brightly as they did here. Behind the white houses was a cobblestoned street lined with clipped trees and tidy flower beds. As he walked among those little trees he heard the click-clacking of a woman’s heels. When he looked around he saw a servant girl, who had gathered up her skirts and was running towards him.

      When she had caught up with him, she stood there for a while, panting. He waited for her to catch her breath, trying to look friendly. This wasn’t easy, because he was frightened. He had recognized her as the servant girl he had seen with the young woman who had been standing next to him at the market, and he was afraid she had come to tell him that he had behaved in an unseemly manner and that she would have him run out of town. That had happened to him before, somewhere in a Prussian village. He had never quite been able to discover what he had done wrong, but whatever it was, he had nearly been thrown in prison for doing it.

      ‘My mistress asks if you would be so kind as to repair the clocks in her father’s house,’ panted the girl.

      He looked at her without quite understanding what she meant. She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and she didn’t seem to find him at all threatening or strange. But that still didn’t set his mind at rest. ‘Ich geh weiter,’ he said. ‘Andere Stadt. Muβ gehen …’

      The servant girl sighed and shook her head. ‘They’ll pay you well,’ she said. ‘She wants you to come, sir. She’s seen your clock.’

      Pride is like the sun that peeks out from between two clouds. Magnus felt the agreeable warmth of recognition.

      ‘Die Dame ist nicht böse?’ he asked.

      The servant girl shook her head. ‘You may come this evening, seven o’clock,’ she said. She told him the address and made him repeat it three times. Anyone, she said, could show him the way. Her master’s house was known to all.

      For the rest of that day Magnus wandered about the town. He looked at shops, peered through the open doors of coffee houses, and stood for a long time gazing at mothers as they walked with their young children across a grassy field. Ducks waddled along the banks of a pond, deer stood poised on a hilltop, a jay skimmed carelessly over his head. Everything was small and clear and still. Magnus had arrived in a fairyland.

      That night, in the little town in the east, Magnus was to meet the woman of his life. Her name was Rebekka Gans and she was the daughter of a prosperous cattle dealer. The shy clockmaker had moved