Time's Mistress (5 page)

“We know,” the old woman said. “We stood in the rain watching you. Where is she?”

And there it was, the question I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to rob this lovely old couple of their happy memory, but I didn’t know how to deflect the question either, so I said, “She couldn’t make the trip.”

“Ah, that’s a shame.”

“This is going to sound strange, but would it be possible to keep this?” I asked, reluctant to let go of the photograph.

“Oh, of course, of course. We’ve got the negatives, we can easily make another copy. You should have it. It’s the start of your life, after all,” the old man said.

“Thank you so much.” I put the picture in my pocket.

A few minutes later the train rolled in and we said our goodbyes.

I can’t begin to explain how I felt. It was as though they’d given me a part of my life back that I’d lost forever. Now it wasn’t just my memory. I’ve always believed that the more people who remember something the more real it is. Now, with three of us to remember, that day in Hyde Park was real again.

Next stop, Prague, guided by
May
, a battered collection of poetry by Karel Hynek Mácha. The train was cramped and hot and sweaty, filled with backpackers. I’d booked a private compartment which I ended up sharing with half a dozen young students broken up for the summer and looking to get drunk and lucky in one of Europe’s party cities. The only other “grown-up” in our carriage was a businessman who didn’t like flying. I know that because he said it at least five times in three hours. He kept telling the kids how they were fifteen years too late and how Prague had been
the
city to visit after the Gentle Revolution. He leaned over toward me and said, “It’s the closest we’ll ever come to the spirit of the Sixties,” conspiratorially. “Free love, if you know what I mean? Especially as a Westerner. We were like gods back then.” I didn’t say much to them, just leaned against the side of the compartment with my head resting against the window reading through the pages of the poems. I made it to the line about the lover weeping, and took it as an order.

There were two places in Prague I wanted to visit, a restaurant we’d always talked about going to,
Svata Klara
, which wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was a treasure trove of history trapped in a seventeenth century wine cellar, and of course the Charles Bridge at midnight. I booked myself into the hotel, which had been an old Dominican monastery in a previous life, and then went out for a walk, wondering if I would somehow stumble upon Mácha’s so-called Alley of Sighs, the white chapel or the execution hill he wrote so hauntingly about. I knew the poem inside out now. Reading nothing but it for six hours will do that to a man.

The Old Town center of Prague is like another world—a place out of time. Of course there are all the touristy bits you’d expect, the over-priced coffees thanks to the invasion of Starbucks, and the locals have really embraced the ideals of capitalism to the point that what’s theirs is theirs, and what’s mine is theirs seems to be the maxim of the day. Some of it, like the Jewish cemetery built on top of a row of shops, made me smile at the quirkiness of it, right up until I saw just how many gravestones were crammed into that tiny space. I started to think about what it really meant. Then there were other parts where the wealth of the city is on display with the rows of shop windows filled with Hermes, Dolce, Versace, and Bulgari. When you thought about the beggars on their knees two streets away it was kind of sickening, really, but that was the modern world all over.

I walked around for a couple of hours. That was all it took for me to stumble on the underbelly to the city.

Walking down Karlova, this wonderful Brothers Grimm kind of street that leads toward the Charles Bridge, I was confronted by a naked woman doing her best to walk seductively down the middle of the cobbled path. She had that vaguely stoned look to her brown eyes. And yes, I was looking at them; it was the only place I felt safe to look. She seemed to be finding it increasingly difficult to walk—never mind seductively—in heels without breaking her neck.

A fat man with greased-back hair and a thick gold chain around his neck that made him look like something out of a Seventies Sexploitation movie was ten steps in front of her, walking backwards, and filming the looks of passersby for his website and encouraging her to bend and twist, dip a little thigh, flash a smile, be coy, and cover up, open up.

Somewhere in the distance a brass band struck up the opening chords of the Indiana Jones theme tune. It couldn’t have been more surreal, or more perfect.

It was nowhere near midnight and the bridge was on the other side of the tramlines, less than a minute’s walk. I could see the distinctive tower over the rooftops. I decided to check it out while the puppeteers and artists were plying their trade, so I waited for the old red tramcar to pass, and then joined the crowd moving toward the bridge.

With the sun going down, the tower’s arch had transformed into a gothic picture frame, and inside it I could see the silhouette of the black castle and skyline on the other side of the river. I had to squint to see any of it clearly. I couldn’t help but smile. A guy was on his knees acting out some sort of passion play with puppets of a cloven-hooved George W. and a wild-haired Saddam with a uni-brow fit to launch a thousand nightmarish ships. Who said political satire had to be cutting edge?

The first thing that caught my eye was the terrible restoration job. They’d obviously tried to purge two hundred years worth of soot from parts of the old bridge, and left some of the gold on the statues looking like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Tourists climbed up onto the wall to have their photographs taken with the various saints and patron saints that lined the bridge. I walked toward the middle and St. Christopher; after all, I was a traveler. I didn’t realize I had been clutching Isla’s medallion until I was standing on the wall, eye-to-eye with the statue. I hung her St. Christopher from the fingertips of the baby Jesus on the saint’s shoulder. I recited a couple of lines from Mácha as a sort of prayer, and clambered back down before anyone could complain about the crazy tourist hanging off their national treasure.

As I turned, I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was of a couple standing outside of a shop window, meeting for the first time. The hope in their eyes was agonizing. I know, because it was the hope in my eyes the painter had captured. I couldn’t see if the same look of love was in Isla’s eyes because her head was tilted just slightly away as she looked into the window. All I could think was “be brave” as I walked up to the artist. He sat beside his easel, eating a meat pie with his hands.

“This painting, how did you see this?” I asked, pointing an accusing finger at the shop on the Westgate Road.

He looked up at me like I was mad.

I was beginning to think I was.

“I mean, this picture, that very minute, that’s the most important minute of my life, what’s it doing in one of your paintings?”

He continued to look at me, and then a slow smile spread across his lips as he recognized me. “It’s you,” he said.

I nodded.

“Oh, my God, it’s you.” He jumped up, dropping his meat pie and grabbing my hand to pump it. “I’m so pleased to meet you! You have no idea!”

I really didn’t.

I felt like a character in some surreal black and white art house movie.

Once was coincidence, but twice, what was that? It certainly wasn’t coincidence.

“I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

“It’s a funny story,” he promised, but I doubted it. “I was away from home, living in this shitty bedsit, when my girlfriend phoned me to tell me she was pregnant … it was the happiest moment of my life,” he said, still grinning. I have to admit it, his grin was infectious. I wanted to share his happiness. “I just went to the window and took a photograph of the world outside. I wanted to remember that exact moment, all of it, exactly how it happened. I always wondered what was happening down there.”

“It was the happiest moment of my life, too,” I said, thinking about it all over again. Thinking about how it felt to swallow my fear and walk across the street and say:
hi, I’m Steve, I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with me.
“I was finally being brave. I saw this woman, and I just knew I had to walk over there and tell her she was going to be the love of my life.”

“That’s wonderful! What happened? Did she fall in love with you? Tell me she fell in love with you! That would be perfect; two happily ever afters entwined in a single painting. I could call it four hearts. That’s a great name for a painting. Four hearts.”

I nodded. “She did.” I didn’t realize I was crying until he asked me what was wrong. “This was supposed to be our honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I let him read between the lines.

There was a moment in which the silence between our heartbeats was deafening, and then the painter understood the implications of the word supposed, and said, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I … what happened? Can I ask?”

“She saved someone’s life,” I said, “but no one saved hers.”

I really was crying now, not just a single tear. The painter sat me down on the tarpaulin he’d laid out on the ground. I told him what I was doing, my pilgrimage, and about the old couple I’d met in Paris a few days ago. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off the paining. By the time I stopped looking at it, it was past midnight and the tourists had gone home.

“It seems to me this journey of yours is being steered, my friend. Call it fate, call it chance, you were meant to be here, tonight, because you needed to be here. I want you to have this,” he said, taking the painting off the easel.

“I can’t … let me give you something for it.”

He shook his head, “You already did, believe me. Just by being there you gave me part of your life and made it such an important part of mine. Let me give it back to you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

I held the painting like it was the most precious thing in the world as I walked back to my room in the old Dominican monastery, and hung it on the wall.

I lay in my bed looking up at the painting of when I meet Isla Durovich for the first time. Four hearts.

But there were only three of them now.

At three-fifteen the next morning my watch stopped and I couldn’t get it going again. It was only a small thing, but it felt like the greatest tragedy in the entire world. I cradled it in my hands like a dying child, willing it to tick. It didn’t.

I’d seen a place in the Jewish Quarter called Old Watches. It was a tiny antique place with a watchmaker who looked like a gnome with mad whiskers and madder eyes. I set out at first light. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it fixed. I couldn’t bring Isla back, but I could fix this. It’s funny how little things become obsessions. I didn’t care about my train to Vienna, I wasn’t leaving until my moon landing watch was keeping good time.

The morning air was brisk. There was rain in the air. Locals bustled toward the underground station, Staroměstská. It was too early for the shops; they were all boarded up or shuttered. It felt like I was seeing a secret part of the city, like watching a lover in bed, drowsy and not quite ready to face the world. I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen the watch shop, somewhere close to the old Jewish cemetery and the synagogues, so I just wandered around for a while drinking in the architecture of dreams and desires that had fired those imaginations oh so long ago, marveling at just how beautiful the buildings were and wondering—not for the first time—what future generations would think of the modern monstrosities we left as our legacy with the ugly but functional lines.

The shop was open.

There must have been ten thousand watches and parts of watches in the window, all of them at least fifty years old, most a lot older, all of the working parts ticking away to different rhythms. I opened the door. A little bell rang. There was no room inside—there was a one-foot square space in front of the watchmaker’s counter and the rest of the shop was taken up by mechanisms. He looked up from the timepiece he had been tinkering with and waggled his bushy eyebrows. There where tiny hairsprings and mainsprings and little coils scattered across the counter, some of them almost microscopic.

“What can I do for you, young man?” He asked, in perfect English. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been all primed for five minutes of miming to get my point across.

I took my watch off and put it on the counter between us.

“It stopped last night and I can’t get it going again.”

“Well, let’s have a look at it, shall we?” He studied it, reached into one of the drawers beneath the counter and brought out a little tool to screw the back off it. He put a jeweler’s monocle in his eye. Using a fine pin he teased the mechanism, tutting like a mechanic about to tell me he could fix my car, but it was going to cost a lot because the gear box was shot, the manifold was blown, the gaskets were knackered, and a whole bunch of other technical terms that made no sense whatsoever to me was wrong with it. “I see what the problem is,” he said. I was glad he could, because I couldn’t.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s broken.” He grinned at me. “But don’t worry, I can fix it. I assume you
want
me to fix it?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “How much will it cost?”

“For you? Nothing, Steve,” he said, taking the monocle out.

“You know my name? How?”

“I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.”

“Yeah, right, sure, but
how
do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to. We’re all cogs, my friend; we’re all gears in the guts of the world. We tick, we tock, our orbits occasionally draw us close to one and other, though more often than not they take us away.”

“Have we met before?”

He inclined his head. “Maybe. You have one of those faces. Now, let’s see about fixing this, shall we? Been losing a lot of time, has it? The spring’s loose. I should probably replace it, but I’m not sure you want me to do that.”