At that point Herman would always start tugging at his hair. (Once he pulled mine too, when I was about seventeen, but he was so sorry afterwards that he took me into town and treated me to as many books as I wanted.)
Uncle Herman didn’t like obscurity. He had worked all his life towards the clarification of things that were uncommonly vague and in the wake of that pursuit he regarded every form of art, even one as trivial as mine, as an ideal way of gaining insight. That insight wasn’t supposed to boil down to the fact that things were obscure.
But they are. Between ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘They lived happily ever after …’ the fairy tale unfolds, and even though it may seem that the reader, or listener, is transported by the events between the first sentence and the last, it is these two sentences alone that do the trick. ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘They lived happily ever after’ reflect the way in which we see the world: as an event with an obscure beginning and, for the time being, an obscure end. Between them is our story, and our limitation, and although every fairy tale tries to weave together various events in order to reach that magical moment when all will be revealed, we are always aware that what we have read, or seen, is that which was already visible or readable, the representation of something obscure.
I felt the weight of the manuscript on my lap. Uncle Herman’s story, the story of the entire family, the history of departure.
There’s a group portrait in my mind. Left, Uncle Herman: his white hair standing out on all sides, his eyes coal-black, glittering like mica. Herman is eighty-five years old. He’s naked, white as freshly cooked spaghetti, pubic hair glistening. (A detail I can’t seem to forget.) Then Emmanuel Hollander, my father: a cross between Walter Matthau and Billy Wilder. He’s wearing a straw Bing Crosby hat, a pair of trousers that are slightly too short, so you can see his white sports socks, and below that, ridiculous gym shoes. He hasn’t got his shirt tucked in. Manny, as he likes to be called, is seventy-one. A pencil-stub glimmers behind his right ear. It’s easy to spot, because there’s no hair poking out from under his hat. Manny was the only man in our family who went bald instead of grey. Next to him stands Uncle Chaim, our great-great-grand-uncle, although that title isn’t entirely accurate. He was born in 1603 and died of woe in 1648. Chaim has something in his hand, the right hand, but it’s hard to tell what. A small man dressed in a peculiar collection of clothes: battered boots, a pair of trousers badly in need of mending, a coat like an old dog. Magnus, Chaim’s nephew, is standing beside him. Straight-limbed, lean and alert, about twenty-five years old. He has a wooden chest strapped to his back. In that chest are his clockmaker’s tools and a small pendulum clock. Then there’s me, Nathan Hollander, who everyone, except Uncle Herman, calls N. Once I was a little boy with bristly black hair, all knees and elbows, small for my age, skinny, as only little boys can be. Here, in this portrait, I’m a sinewy man. Six feet tall. Sharp features, deep-set eyes, a face that, as time went by, grew weathered and creased. The long limbs, head bent slightly forward, always someone to lean towards and listen to. The hair, bristly and grey, an unruly tussock of rimed grass. Next to me, far right, Zeno. He’s Magnus’s age here: as old as he was the last time I spoke to him. His hair has the soft coppery sheen that I remember like nothing else in this life. The eyes, I can see them as if he were sitting here opposite me: large brown eyes with moss-green flecks that, when they catch the sunlight, shimmer like water plants beneath the surface of a murky pond. His skin has the soft gleam of wax, his lips are slightly tensed.
My group portrait.
I call it ‘Travellers’. Because that was what we were. Each and every one of us. We came from the East, we travelled to the West. Uncle Chaim and his nephew Magnus, my most distant forefathers, lived in the region that now forms the border between Poland and Lithuania. There, in the dense primeval forest, where the bison still roamed and wolves and bears waylaid those who travelled from one village to the next, they made clocks. Whenever my grandfather, my Uncle Herman, or Emmanuel, my father, wished to explain or justify our presence in this place or that, they would say: ‘Clockmakers, every one of us. Travellers. Came from the East, on our way to the West.’ As if to say that the East was a sort of mythical birthplace, the womb of our … line, and the West, our Occident, the destiny towards which we, sometimes willingly, sometimes reluctantly, were headed. Travellers. Uncle Chaim journeyed through the kingdom of the night, from then to now, and later, in the company of his nephew. Magnus left the East, roamed for twenty-one years all over Europe, in search of Holland. Uncle Herman led us, my father and my mother and my sisters and I, out of the old Europe, into the New World, and never stopped travelling. Manny brought us from the east coast of America to the west, from the edge of history to its heart. I myself never had a home and Zeno, my young brother, removed himself from the face of the earth.
They’re all dead. And all of them, I have known and loved. Uncle Chaim and his hazy nephew Magnus, too, even though, by the time I was born, they had been history for nearly three centuries. They’re the only ones who are still with me.
I used to be awakened by voices in the night, cries that were so clear and sounded so close that they echoed in my head long after I had sat up in bed. ‘Nathan!’ My name, clear as day. ‘NATHAN!’ But no matter how often I was jolted awake, looked around, turned on the light, or didn’t, I never saw a thing. For a long time I thought it was God calling to me across the black waters of darkness and sleep. I’m the sort of person who bears such possibilities in mind.
It wasn’t until I was about ten years old that I discovered why I was hearing those nocturnal cries. We were living in the camp on the Hill, in New Mexico. In our cramped wooden house, I shared a room with Zeno, who had just turned one.
I was awakened by a creaking sound. When I looked up I saw an old man sitting at the foot of my bed. There was a full moon and its bluish light bounced off the hard desert ground, through the curtainless windows, into my room. One side of the old man’s body was sharply defined and I could see that he was wearing a shabby black suit. His back was slightly bent. Something glistened in his eye, a small, gleaming tube that was aimed at his lap.
‘Bah,’ he said. A shard of moonlight shot across his stubbled jaw as he turned his head to me. He grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows. The tube fell out of his eye, he caught it without looking. ‘Too dark. Can’t see your hand before your eyes. Nice clock you’ve got there.’ He shifted his gaze to my night table. I looked sideways, at the green fluorescent arms of Mickey Mouse.
I didn’t have to ask who he was. He didn’t have to tell me. Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim, no doubt about it.
‘How are you, my boy?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Magnus here yet?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘Young people …’ He winked. Because he smiled at the same time, his face turned into a bluish white wad of paper, a ball of creases and shadows.
There was a shuffling noise in the receding darkness and out of the wall came the ghost of a wanderer. He emerged from what seemed, for a moment, to be a forest path, and all at once he was standing in the middle of the room.
‘Speak of the devil …’ Uncle Chaim said.
Magnus looked around and scratched his head.
Uncle Chaim pursed his lips, shook his head, and gave me a meaningful glance. ‘Young people,’ he said again.
‘I’m young, too, you know,’ I said.
He stared at me, and then smiled. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are the eldest.’ He turned to Magnus and raised his head. ‘Have the two of you already met?’
Magnus, who was busy winding up the propeller of the biplane hanging under the lamp from a piece of fishline, jumped. ‘Nathan, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Magnus Levi,’ he said, ‘Currently going by the name of Hollander.’
Uncle Chaim chuckled.
I was now sitting straight