Karel Čapek — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

Dust. A drawer half-open. Ticking, faint, wrong.

Mr. Karas stood in the third gallery of the municipal archive with a folder under his arm and no particular reason to be there. He liked the third gallery. Nobody came. The light fell sideways through one high window onto shelves of bundled paper, tied with the same grey string for eighty years, and he walked among them the way other men walked the embankment on a Sunday — hands behind his back, eyes on nothing, entirely at peace.

He heard the clock before he saw it.

It sat wedged between two crates marked for pulping — POPULATION REGISTER, DECEASED, TO BE DESTROYED — an ordinary brass movement, no case, the gears bare and slightly green. He crouched. He listened. The second hand was moving. Backward.

Tick — and the hand fell back one notch. Tick — another notch back. He watched it for what he later reckoned must have been eleven minutes, crouched on the cold floor, the folder slipping from under his arm, saying nothing, because there was nothing sensible to say to a clock walking the wrong way through time in a room nobody visited.

"Herr Karas! There you are."

Brandejs came down the gallery the way he came everywhere, as if the building owed him rent. Coat open, hat pushed back, a leather folder of his own under his arm, thicker than Karas's, full of things that mattered to somebody.

"Look at this," said Karas.

Brandejs looked. "A clock."

"It's going backward."

"Needs a spring." Brandejs was already past it, already at the crates. "These the marriage registers? The old ones, the bureau records, before the war?"

"Some of them."

"Good. Excellent. I need forty years of them, minimum. Karas, sit down, I'll explain, you'll like it or you won't, it doesn't matter, I need the boxes either way."

He did not sit down. Karas remained crouched by the clock, which ticked its small denials at the floor.

"I am building," Brandejs said, and here his voice took on the particular smoothness of a man who has said the sentence before and enjoyed it each time, "a bureau. Not like the old one. Better. You feed it a man, a woman, their habits, their heights, their debts, their mothers, the hour they wake, the songs they hum without noticing, and it gives you back the one match out of forty thousand who will not leave. No guessing. No priest, no aunt, no dance at the fire station. A profile — height, income, temperament, forty other measures — matched against forty thousand other profiles, and the machine does in one second what your grandmother did badly in sixty years of gossip. I need old matches to teach it. Successful ones. Failed ones. Doesn't matter which — I need the record of what people did before they knew a machine was watching, and this — " he tapped the crate marked for destruction — "this is exactly that, going for pulp, Wednesday, unless somebody signs for it today."

"Ticking backward," Karas said again, to himself.

"Sign here."

"I'm not authorized to release population records."

"You're authorized to release paper going to the mill. That's all this is, on the form. Paper going to the mill." Brandejs was already writing. "I'll take the clock too, no charge to you, call it a curiosity, my office could use one."

Karas signed. It seemed, at the time, the smallest possible act — a signature, a favor, the disposal of paper nobody wanted and a clock that told no useful time. Brandejs had the crate on a trolley within the hour, and the clock in his coat pocket, still ticking its quiet retreat, one second undone for every second earned outside in the ordinary street.

Karas walked home along the embankment, hands behind his back, and found that his fingers, of their own accord, kept closing on air where the folder should have been, though he was carrying nothing now, nothing at all. The lamps along the river came on one by one, ordinary lamps, going the right way, and he stood a while watching them, feeling in his chest a small mechanical grief for which he had, that evening, no name and no wish to find one. He did not think, then, that he would hear anything further of the matter; and for three weeks he did not.

He was summoned at last, not by Brandejs but by a clerk of Brandejs's, a young man with a soft collar who used the telephone the way priests once used Latin — as proof of something rather than a means of saying it.

"Herr Brandejs asks whether you would come and see the Bureau. He says you signed for it. He says you might as well see what you signed for."

The Bureau occupied four rooms on the second floor of a building that had been, within living memory, a corset works. Karas noted the irony and kept it to himself. There were desks, girls at the desks, cabinets of index cards running the length of one wall, and against the far window, on a shelf of its own, the clock — cased now, glassed, gilt hands added for dignity — ticking, as far as Karas could tell from the doorway, forward like any other clock in the republic.

"You fixed it," he said.

"I had it fixed." Brandejs did not look up from the card he was reading. "Cost more than the clock is worth. Turns out it wanted a screw, that's all it ever wanted, one screw, eleven years pulling the wrong way over a fifty-heller screw. There's a lesson in that, Karas, though I haven't worked out what it is yet."

"The marriage registers."

"In there." Brandejs waved at the cabinets. "Forty thousand cards. Every one of your old couples, height, trade, age at marriage, number of children, whether it lasted, whether one of them ran, whether one of them drank, whether one of them, God rest her, went into the river by the mill — all of it in there, reduced, categorized, cross-indexed, feeding the machine its opinions on love. You should be proud. You're practically a founder."

"I signed a form for paper going to the mill."

"And here we are, not at the mill." Brandejs smiled, not unkindly — he was never unkind, that was the discouraging thing about him — and held out a card. "Look. Go on."

It was a woman's card, printed in the new type the Bureau used, height and weight and temperament reduced to numbers in little boxes, and at the bottom, in the space marked OUTCOME, a single word: DECEASED.

"She drowned in 1911," Brandejs said. "Her husband remarried within the year. We have him too — happier, this time, the machine would say, if the machine said anything, which it doesn't, it only matches. I don't ask the cards how they feel about being read this way. Neither should you."

Karas set the card down as though it were warm.

"You wanted to show me the clock," he said.

"I wanted you to see it working. It bothered me, a little, that it bothered you." Brandejs said this lightly, the way he said everything, but for a moment — briefly, and only once — something in his face resembled apology, and then the moment closed over like water. "It's a good clock now. Keeps the Bureau's time. The girls set their lunch by it."

Karas walked to the shelf and stood before the case a while. The hands went round in the ordinary direction, patient, unremarkable, telling nobody's secret. He found he missed, in a small and foolish way, its wrongness — the eleven minutes on the cold floor when a piece of brass had seemed, for no reason he could defend to anyone, to be trying to give something back.

"The registers will go for pulp eventually anyway," Brandejs said, behind him, gentler now, a man closing a ledger for the night. "Everything does, in the end. I've only borrowed them a little longer than the mill would have."

"Yes," Karas said.

He did not ask what became of the card marked DECEASED, whether it went into some drawer of the machine's failures or whether, matched and cross-indexed, it simply waited there among the forty thousand others for the day a young man's habits and a young woman's height might, by the arithmetic of the Bureau, be pronounced a fit.

He walked home by the embankment, as he always did, and the lamps came on in their patient forward order, and his hand, from long habit now, still closed now and then on the air beside him where a folder was not. The river went by the way rivers go, one direction only, unhelpfully wise about it, and Karas stood on the stone a while in the last of the light, feeling in some resigned and wordless region of himself that a small mechanism somewhere had at last, after its own fashion, been made to agree with time — and that this, though it looked like a mercy, was very probably a further and more ordinary kind of loss.