The Watchmaker
by Mike Rogers
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Everybody thought Ikey, the watchmaker, was a man of secrets. He wasn’t, not really, but what he did was complicated. In order to explain any of it, he had to explain all of it, and nobody could be bothered to listen that long. Anyone inclined to listen thought he wanted to keep it secret, but he didn’t.
Of course, he didn’t really make watches, he mended them. He could have made them, if he’d wanted to, and maybe he had wanted to, when he was young and being taught how to do it. But he learnt very early that only the rich could afford to have watches made for them. It wasn’t just the materials, it was the time it took. And if you weren’t going to do it properly, then there wasn’t much point in it. That was why Ikey contented himself with patching up the rubbish that was brought to him. There was enough of it for him to earn a modest living.
It was still an intellectual challenge, working out exactly which of the little wheels had failed, and how you could replace it or get around it; and sometimes there was the pleasure in finding a really beautiful piece, an heirloom passed down from a time of prosperity. The case might have been damaged from some harsh treatment that its original owner hadn’t survived, or simply tarnished, so that people who looked only at the outside remained unaware of the treasure within.
That was when Ikey found himself faced with a moral challenge rather than a practical or intellectual one, and it was an occasion he might, indeed, have chosen to keep a secret. If he had told anyone how valuable Great-Uncle Abraham’s disregarded timepiece really was, which had lain ignored and neglected at the back of a drawer for twenty or thirty years — maybe even half a century — they would most likely have run away with it and sold it.
But they would probably have sold it to a swindling dealer and not even got one-hundredth of its real value... if value was the same thing as price. And Ikey was never sure the two concepts were the same, certainly not if you looked inside the case and understood and admired the workmanship. And to admire it properly, you had to understand it, not just see the name and look it up online.
Ikey brought such timepieces back to life and did his best to make sure that the owners took pride in them; not so much that they flaunted them or boasted about them, which would attract attention and get them stolen, or bring round one of those vultures with “Horologist” printed on their cheap business card and a fake address and a fake phone number.
Ikey wanted the owners to have the same pride that one had in a good marriage or a piece of good cooking, the sort of pride that makes you stand up straight in the street and not look away from your own face in the mirror when you see it first thing in the morning. He didn’t want a beautiful piece of watchmaking to become an asset on a balance sheet or just another item in a rich person’s collection.
Sometimes, though, if he knew the family needed money, he would sell it through his connections to pay for operations or for a stay in a care home that would come to an end before the cash from the sale ran out. When a watch ticked, it was alive. Human beings give one another blood when they need it. No reason a watch couldn’t help keep a human heart ticking over.
His work took up almost all his waking hours. If he’d ever thought of paying himself hourly, he’d have gone on strike. But it was also his pleasure, his little way of setting the world right, leaving things better than he’d found them. And, because his work was small-scale and painstaking, all he needed most of the time was a clear surface and a strong light.
Ikey sat in the same room as his wife, Minna, now that she didn’t go out to work any more. They chatted while she read, sometimes magazines, sometimes real books, occasionally newspapers. Their two children had long since moved to the other side of the country, the sunnier side, and had their own families, their own worlds.
Ikey and Minna were happy. They’d done their duty by life, and they weren’t a burden on anybody. They felt they were entitled to shut their eyes and ears to what was going on in the world around them if it disturbed them. Radio? Television? Better to find out from the neighbours, only that wasn’t as easy now as it had been. Well-made watches wear quite slowly. People wear out a lot faster.
Sometimes it seems a very short distance from being middle-aged to being old to not being at all. And the new neighbours, though they were friendly enough, didn’t have the same traditions, came from different places, spoke different languages... It was clear, too, that many of them had come to escape suffering and danger and, now being free of it, might not want to talk of it.
Ikey and Minna had been lucky. But then so had their parents, because the generation or two above them had been wise. They’d seen what might come. They’d put an ocean between themselves and that unpleasant but pervasive prejudice, which became with frightening rapidity a removal of all legal rights.
Legal rights included, it turned out, the right to life. And that removal was enforced by rigid procedures, which were almost impossible to resist or evade, because everyone was used to conforming to the securely ordered structures of the state. In the past, those structures had protected all the state’s citizens and made life seem safe and calm.
Even with the repurposing of those mechanisms, the illusory sense of order persisted so firmly that the industrial processes of expropriation, transportation, extermination, cremation and obliteration could be carried out without intruding unduly on the daily existence of the rest of the population.
Ikey and Minna knew all about those things. They had seen photo albums filled with relatives that they knew they would never see alive, the pictures sometimes marked with dates and place names, some German, most Slavic, even Baltic. It wasn’t what was said, it was what was left unsaid.
Now that their own lives were calmly and slowly approaching a natural end, at the moment without illness or any especial pain, surely it was understandable that they would not wish to go looking for worry and disquiet by poking their noses into current affairs.
* * *
Ikey was resting his eyes from a particularly close piece of work by glancing across at what his wife was reading when he was struck by a large photograph that took up almost a whole page.
“Hey, Minna,” he said, “surely you haven’t taken to looking at pin-ups of Hell’s Angels in your old age? Do I have to turn round three times and say, ‘I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee’?”
“The first time you begin that ‘turning round’ nonsense, I’ll kick your fat butt for you! This isn’t a Hell’s Angel or someone in a heavy metal band, though I’d say he looks like one, a secretary of state for something or other.”
Ikey reached over, and she handed him the magazine, so he could look properly for himself. He didn’t believe for a second that she was lying, but maybe, he thought, there’s something else that she hasn’t noticed yet.
He began to study the picture with his jeweller’s eye glass in and did see something. It was not immediately obvious, which disturbed him in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Probably because he couldn’t quite explain what it actually was, it made him feel uncomfortable, because it looked like a tattooed set of Hebrew characters, only they were twisted in some kind of unsettling way. In one way, he didn’t want to know what they said but, in another way, he felt obligated to find out.
He wondered, too, why the guy had had it done, what he’d been told it was for, how it fitted with all the other aggressive, supremacist stuff he’d had absorbed into his skin to prove how deep it was inside him and also how much he wanted to show it off. Maybe it was some kind of joke or revenge by a Jewish tattooist... All speculation. What he needed was knowledge, and he knew where he could get it.
He took one of the little square slips of paper, the size of a pocket watch, that he used to put tiny components on when he was working, or to note down the details of the repair he was doing: date received, owner’s name and address, time spent and so on, which he could slip into the little chamois pouch in which he kept the timepiece until he could return it, repaired.
On the paper, Ikey sketched what it was he had seen, slowly and carefully, checking the tiny details through his eyeglass as he went. Then he folded it carefully, and put it into his left-hand waistcoat pocket, and patted it, for safety, or for luck.
“Why d’you think he had that stuff done to himself?” he asked his wife, as he reached out to hand her magazine back.
“Maybe he likes pain,” she said. “Some guys do.” And she gave him that look with big, falsely innocent eyes, meant to suggest ironically that if Ikey was one of those guys, she could oblige him with a good kicking and scratching where it really hurt.
“Nope,” said Ikey, “I reckon he looks more like a guy that prefers to inflict pain, not have it done to him.”
“Then maybe,” said Minna, turning over the page, so she didn’t have to look any more at a picture she found distasteful, “he just felt like having it done, and so he did it and didn’t think any more about the consequences.”
“Yeah,” said Ikey, “I reckon you’ve hit it there, Minna, my love; emotional conviction is the name of the game in politics nowadays. If ya feel it’s right, then it is right.”
“Especially if it’s wrong,” said Minna, flicking through to the end of the magazine and putting it down. Then she got up to go and make them their goodnight drinks.
But she never reached the kitchen, because there was an anxious rapping at the front door, and some calling in Spanish that was trying both to sound urgent, and also to be quiet enough not to carry all the way down the stairwell.
It was their neighbours, the young Mexican couple, Manuel and Carmen, and two really young children in nightclothes, holding soft toys and looking really big-eyed and scared.
“My cousins left their children with us while they went out to the suburbs to see about a place to rent, and now ICE is coming round, checking papers. We’re alright, but the children aren’t. Could you hide them for us?” asked the man, not wasting any time, having confidence that the people he was talking to would understand the situation.
He was not disappointed.
“Thank you so much for taking in our grandchildren when they arrived while we were out,” said Minna, loudly enough to carry four flights down. “Come in, dears, in the back bedroom, as usual. Grandpa Ikey will show you where to go, if you’ve forgotten.”
And he did, because he was there, backing up his wife, playing with the kids, imitating the funny faces on their soft toys so well that they even started laughing with him.
No sooner were they in the beds that were always kept optimistically made up, than he was back at the front door of the apartment, where Minna was wordlessly hugging Carmen. Ikey moved past them with a hammer and a couple of tacks in his mouth. He noisily affixed a piece of writing-filled parchment to the lintel.
“Hey, Ikey, shouldn’t that be in some kind of kosher scroll case?” said his wife.
“If it’s in a scroll case, they’ll ignore it, because they won’t know what it is. This way, they can see it’s writing, even if they can’t read it, and they’ll have to ask us what it says, and then we can tell ’em.
“Besides, scroll cases cost an arm and a leg, and my friend the scribe, Soyfer the sofer, did it for me for a shot of rye,” explained Ikey, while he managed to miss his thumb and hit the second tack at his third attempt.
“What is it?” asked Manuel, turning his head at various angles, in his efforts to make sense of the unfamiliar characters.
“It’s a mezuzah,” said Ikey, “and if it can stop Lilith — who was Adam’s first wife, only he done her wrong — from killing young babies, then, hell, it ought to keep ICE operatives out of our apartment.”
“You don’t believe that stuff, do you?” asked Manuel, cautiously, wondering what kind of urban fundamentalism he might have got himself into.
“Of course not!” said Ikey. “But that don’t mean it doesn’t work. Our kids survived, didn’t they, Minna?”
And Minna, moved despite herself to laughter by her incorrigible husband, slapped at his upraised arms in mock outrage, while even Carmen found she was laughing despite her tears.
“Hey, Manuel,” said Ikey, “you’d better go see Hilda on the first floor and tell her to get her kitty back in. She lets down the fire escape, so he can go for a prowl. It responds to human weight, you know, but it’s usually kept up to deter burglars... and, er... other intruders, if you get what I mean.”
Manuel put his arm round Carmen, and they went back downstairs. At the same time, Minna and Ikey turned off the lights, so nobody could watch them watching, and went over to their own balcony, as they called it, to observe the progress of events.
“There they are,” said Minna, “all in white, only they don’t got no pointy heads, like last time they came hunting for people they thought weren’t human.”
“Last time,” said Ikey, “was on the far side of the water, and they had black uniforms with shiny silver buttons and a double ‘SS’ like a lightning flash on the lapels.”
They watched in silence, as the white-clad figures circled in frustration that they couldn’t pull down the fire escape and climb up to break into apartments through their back windows.
“I read about ’em,” said Minna, “but I never believed it.”
“They got masks,” said Ikey.
“Of course they do,” said Minna. “Would you want people to know that’s what you do for a living?”
They pulled the drapes, put out the lights in the rest of the apartment, had their goodnight drinks and went to bed. They heard lots of heavy footsteps on the stairs and landing, with a long pause outside their own door. But nobody rapped on it or tried to break it down, so pretty soon they both slipped into what passes for sleep among people of a certain age.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
