The Clock Repairer – Part 1: Stopped at Nine

"It stopped at nine," said Margo.

"In the morning or the evening?" asked Pieter.

"Does it matter?"

"Always." He turned the clock gently in his hands, an ornate brass piece from the eighteenth century, and listened to it as if it might speak.

The workshop was a narrow room on a canal in Bruges, hung with a hundred clocks all ticking at slightly different speeds. Light came in green off the water. The air smelled of oil and old wood. Pieter, thirty-eight, wore magnifying lenses pushed up on his forehead and had a gentle, unhurried voice. Margo, thirty-four, a curator from Brussels with a deadline and a very damaged exhibit, stood there in her good coat feeling suddenly less urgent.

"Three weeks," said Pieter, at last. "Perhaps four."

"The exhibition opens in three."

"Then three. But you must come each week. A clock like this needs company."

So she came. Each Thursday she took the train from Brussels and sat at the end of his bench with a coffee, watching him lay out the tiny gears on a velvet cloth. He explained each wheel and spring, and the hundred small ways a clock can fail. She told him about the museum, the politics, the long evenings alone in cold galleries.

On the third Thursday the clock began to tick. Pieter set it on the bench between them. The little sound filled the room.

"It's alive," Margo whispered.

"It was only waiting." He looked at her, his lenses pushed up, his eyes dark and kind. "May I say something that is not about clocks?"

"Please."

"I do not want you to take it away."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Striking the Hour.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Striking the Hour.