Fyodor Dostoevsky — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

Ivan Matveyevich had noticed the ticking three days before he permitted himself to notice it, which is to say that he had heard it perfectly well on the first evening, standing among the shelves of the municipal archive with a lamp guttering in his hand and the smell of old glue and mouse-droppings in his nostrils, and had told himself at once, firmly, the way a man tells himself a thing he does not believe: it is nothing, it is the pipes, it is the wind under the eaves, it is my own pulse magnified by the silence and by nerves that have not been right, if the truth be told, since the business with the pension records and the business with Agrafena Petrovna and the business, above all, of his own dwindling and unpardonable solitude—for he was forty-one years old and had never once, not once in all his cataloguing of other men's marriages and deaths, arranged the smallest particle of a life for himself.

And yet the ticking persisted, and grew, if anything, more distinct, until on the third night he traced it—his hands, he would swear afterward, quite steady, though in fact they were not steady at all, they trembled with the particular fine tremor of a man performing courage he does not feel—to a locked cabinet in the furthest, dampest corner of the third gallery, a cabinet marked in faded ink NEPRIKOSNOVENNO, not to be touched, and inside it, wrapped in a moth-eaten woolen cloth as though someone had long ago prepared it for burial and then thought better of the whole business, a clockwork mechanism of considerable age and unmistakable, offensive strangeness: for its hands, when he held the lamp close and bent his aching back to look, were moving—yes, moving, distinctly, audibly—backwards.

"It is nothing," he said aloud, to the empty gallery, in the voice of a man reassuring a child, or a corpse. "A defect. A reversed escapement. Nothing more."

But even as he said it he understood, with the cold clarity that visits a man precisely at the moment he most wishes to be stupid, that the numerals on its face did not correspond to any hour of any day he had ever lived, and that beneath the mechanism, pinned with a rusted tack, there lay a slip of paper in a hand not his own and yet, God help him, disturbingly like his own, on which was written a date not yet arrived.

It was at this juncture—naturally, inevitably, as flies arrive at spilled sugar—that Grushnitsky appeared.

He was a young man of perhaps twenty-six, with the quick eyes and the quicker smile of one who has made a study, a positive science, of other people's weaknesses, and he had installed himself in the archive these past two months ostensibly to catalogue the parish registers for the district office, though Ivan Matveyevich had long suspected, without troubling to prove it, that he spent the greater part of his salaried hours copying names and dates and small intimate biographical details into a leather notebook for purposes entirely his own.

"You've found the old clock, then," Grushnitsky said, leaning in the doorway with that particular indolence which in such men passes for charm. "I wondered when you would. Marvelous thing, isn't it? They say it was built to mark the hour of a debt owed—not paid, mind you, owed—and that it will go on ticking backwards until the debt is called in. A superstition, of course." He smiled. "Though I confess I've found a use for the principle. You know I've been building a—how shall I put it to a man of your generation—a profile, an accounting of a person, for the matrimonial engines they have now, the algorithms, the little questionnaires that promise to weigh a soul and match it to its opposite number. I've used your archive rather liberally for material, Ivan Matveyevich. Forgive me. Old letters make such convincing sentiment, properly translated into the modern idiom."

"You have used—" Ivan Matveyevich began, and could not finish; his voice, which he had meant to be stern, arrived instead thin and cracked, like a badly wound spring.

"Only the dead ones," Grushnitsky said gently, as though this were a kindness. "The dead don't object to being loved by proxy."

There was a silence in the gallery, and in that silence the clockwork, unregarded, went on turning its hands the wrong way, patiently, without haste, as though it alone among all of them possessed the leisure to wait for whatever was owed to come finally, and inexorably, due.

It was into that same silence that he moved. Ivan Matveyevich did not remember stepping toward him; he remembered only that he was already close, close enough to smell the tobacco and the cheap cologne with which Grushnitsky, in his youthful vanity, tried to disguise the smell of the archive's damp that clung to everyone alike, and that his own hand had closed—when had it closed?—upon the young man's sleeve.

"Show me," he said. "The notebook. Show it to me."

"Ivan Matveyevich—"

"Show it to me, I say!" And his voice cracked upward on the last word in a manner he despised, a manner belonging to hysterical women and to clerks passed over for promotion, and he heard himself despising it even as he could not stop it, even as the crack widened and let through something worse, something that had been years accumulating behind his ribs like dust behind a locked cabinet: "You will show me what you have made of us. Of the dead, you say—only the dead—but who told you where the line runs? Who appointed you to draw it?"

Grushnitsky, to his credit or his shame—Ivan Matveyevich could no longer tell which, and perhaps there was no longer any difference between the two—produced the leather notebook without further protest, and even, it seemed, with a kind of relief, as a boy will confess to a broken window the moment the master's eye falls upon him, glad at last to be done with the lying.

And there, on the pages, in a hand grown fluent through long practice, was the material of the dead: fragments of love-letters forty years buried, phrases lifted whole from women who had gone into the earth still hoping for an answer that had never come, small tender idiocies of the heart translated now into the brisk idiom of the matrimonial engines—enjoys long walks, values honesty above all, seeks a partner for life's quiet moments—each lie a small mercy, each mercy a small theft.

And then, near the last page, a name that was not dead at all.

His own.

"I thought," Grushnitsky said, very low, not smiling now, "that a man so devoted to other people's marriages and other people's deaths might wish, at least once, to see his own particulars set down as though they mattered. I meant no harm by it. I meant—forgive me—I meant it almost as a kindness."

Ivan Matveyevich read what had been written of him—forty-one, methodical, tender beneath a dry exterior, a keeper of records who has never learned to keep anything for himself—and felt the floor of the gallery tilt very slightly beneath his feet, the way a floor tilts for a man who has drunk more than he intended, though he had drunk nothing at all; and behind him, in its cabinet, unregarded, patient, the clockwork went on ticking backwards, and he understood all at once, with the coldness that comes not as revelation but as confirmation of something long suspected and long refused, that the date pinned beneath the mechanism was not some far and abstract reckoning.

It was tomorrow.

"It is nothing," he said again, but the words arrived this time without conviction even to his own ear, thin as the paper in his hand, and he set the notebook down upon the shelf among the parish registers with exaggerated, trembling care, as a man sets down a thing he is afraid he will otherwise throw. "A coincidence. A—a common name. There are surely other Ivan Matveyeviches in this district."

"Surely," said Grushnitsky, gently, and did not believe it, and did not pretend to.

Neither of them moved to close the cabinet. The lamp guttered lower. Somewhere above them a pipe knocked twice against the wall and was still, and the ticking, backwards, patient, unhurried, went on marking whatever hour it was moving toward—or had already, long ago, moved past—and Ivan Matveyevich stood among the shelves of other men's marriages and other men's deaths, forty-one years old, catalogued now himself, at last, into someone's accounting, and found that he could not decide, standing there with his hands still trembling in that fine, humiliating tremor, whether what he felt at being finally set down, finally counted, finally loved by proxy and by theft and by a rogue's indifferent pen, was horror.

Or something far worse, and far more difficult to confess: a kind of gratitude.

He did not say which. He said nothing further at all. He only reached out, at last, and drew the cloth back over the mechanism, as one draws a sheet over a face, and left the cabinet, this time, unlocked.