Chapter1
FRANZ
Despite the fact that Franz was not a small man, the grey coat he wore looked somewhat large on him. It was by no means a shabby coat, of good cut and material, fitting his slender figure perfectly, yet hinting at times long gone by, when he had been its master, younger, stronger and taller. Now, since the coat covered him almost entirely, one had the choice of either looking at his head, or else at the bottoms of his sharply creased, black pants, spilling onto well-worn, dark patent leather shoes , which conveyed the sense of having accompanied Franz, alongside the coat, for many years. His skull, topped with thin, yet full, silver hair, was shaped like that of a bird of prey, his nose sharp and beak-like. Gently smiling blue eyes lit up his face, which was pale due to the unevenly spread layer of 50+ Sunscreen, he applied each morning for protection against all those harmful rays listed on the bottle.
Franz had much to fear. He was 95 years old, in perfect shape and, while people would tell him so constantly, this only added to his secret apprehension that, no matter how good you look and feel at this age, time was running out. He could hardly think of anything else these days, although he tried to live his life as if this were not the case.
Franz loved the city he lived in. He was not a rich man but well off enough to afford a good lifestyle. His comfortable apartment, situated in a fashionable part of town, was surrounded by small shops, decent restaurants, and several coffee-shops, one of which he visited like clockwork every morning, to indulge in one of his simple pleasures, a fresh Espresso, or two.
He had many friends and acquaintances, with whom he met for dinners and leisurely luncheons. He went to the opera regularly. On weekends he took his well-cared-for town car out of the underground garage and drove to his house in the country, where he would rest, in order to be ready for another week full of wonderful things to do.
To keep busy, Franz spent his time writing book reviews, essays and the occasional witty speech, which he delivered with great charm, whenever he was invited to attend special events honoring his lifetime of academic and literary accomplishments. Plus, in response to a number of requests made by several of his closest friends over the years, he had finally begun working on his memoirs. This was not an easy task and, until now, he had always managed to avoid it. But, feeling obliged to honor his promise, which he had regretted the moment he made it, there was no escape.
At first, Franz considered writing about everything: his youth inEurope, his narrow escape from the horrors of the Nazi regime, his brilliant rise through the ranks of American Academia, his wife Amelia, who had died several years earlier, their children, their children’s children and all the rest of it. What a splendid book this could be, filled with adventures, successes, setbacks followed by triumphs, both intellectual and physical as well, because here he still was, in command of all his faculties, at an age most people dreamed of ever reaching. At the same time, though, he felt overwhelmed by having to revisit so many memories. He tried sorting through them, getting them lined up correctly in his mind and found that he could not do it. The more he tried to place them along the time-line of his life, amounting to almost a century, the more confused Franz became. Being of a tidy Germanic nature and, thus, unable to accept a flawed account of what had happened, and when, he drove himself into a state of utter hysterics, while trying to remember things in the order they had occurred. He soon reached a point where he could no longer be sure whether certain events had really happened at all. For the first time in his life he experienced a profound sense of self-doubt and the misery that is its companion.
Alas, those were not the only reasons he eventually decided on writing his memoirs as a set of vignettes. He also realized that he probably did not have enough time left for a substantial book and he did not want to leave an unfinished work behind. That would be unacceptable for a man like him, who had always finished what he started, and proudly so. Hence, having already wrestled with this dilemma for too many weeks, Franz settled on writing a collection of short narratives, depicting only the highlights of his life he felt were worth mentioning.
Having arrived at this practical solution, for a predicament which he felt he should not have had to deal with in the first place, he started writing. At this point it should be mentioned that Franz did not believe for one instant that his obvious and imminent death was deserved or even fair and this drove him quite mad. He hated dealing with the past instead of planning for the future. In his mind, plenty of other brand new projects were being developed constantly. As far as he was concerned, he could have filled another lifetime with contributions of equal value those he had produced until now. The awareness of this fact frustrated him deeply. Therefore, his memoir’s progress was slow and often very unsatisfying. Some days, he would cynically try to reduce a story he was writing to its absolute bare bones because he thought, since he could drop dead at any moment, it was best not to waste any time. At other times, he stayed up till the early morning hours, desperately typing even the tiniest details in long, winding sentences because he was afraid to leave something out that would later reveal itself as a significant aspect, without which the whole story would lose its significance.
Forever having to balance between these two extremes now seemed to rule Franz’s life. He never knew ahead of time what sort of a day he was embarking upon, when he swung his ancient legs energetically over the edge of his narrow Spartan bed. Later, on his way back from that much needed Espresso, walking along the pavement purposefully like a grey heron that had seen movement along the water’s edge promising a possible catch, he would arrive at the spot where the decision was inevitably made for him.
Since he was used to walking uphill on one side of the street to the coffee shop and then coming downhill on the other, in order to avoid the sun in his face, he would pass an old watchmaker’s shop. It had a smallish window with shelves full of clocks, all displaying the exact same time. Franz could not help but stop to look at them every day. And, for some strange reason, he always hoped to find one clock amongst the whole array that would be even just one minute off. But, so far, that had never happened.
Over the years, as Franz got older and became increasingly conscious of the impact of time and his own hopeless quest not to run out of it before he was done, the watch-shop had turned into a symbol of the elusive stuff. There, in the window, time was being counted painstakingly by all these different time-pieces, ticking away. It turned into an obsession for him, to see his own life reflected in the rapid forward movement of countless spindly second hands racing across those clock faces.
Franz thought that he appeared to have lived just like that, in circles, always punctual, never late, with every minute final it its passing. Even worse, each time he came upon the window, he was driven by an icy fear that the clocks would not be in motion any more. All of them stopped, for lack of winding. Forgotten by the watchmaker who, truth be told, looked like he could drop dead at any moment too. Who would wind them once the old man was gone?
Franz suffered from a nightmare about this scenario. In the dream, he walked up to the window, found not a single clock ticking and, when he looked closer to search for his reflection in the glass, he saw nothing. Absolutely nothing! At this point, he would wake up sweating and breathing hard, casting a terrified glance at his digital glow- in- the- dark alarm clock. He would have to wait until the soothing red digits changed onward, before he could close his eyes again. On days following the nightmare, he would walk up to the watch-shop with more apprehension than on days when he had managed to sleep dreamlessly, and his decision on how to write the next pages of his memoirs was based on what he felt, after watching time pass on those clocks for a while. Not that there were many good feelings to be extricated from staring at the window. It either depressed him to the point where he would, after returning to his apartment, sit down at the computer and get his writing done as quickly as he could, fearfully sensitive to every little ache, pain and discomfort. Or else, he would stay up far too late, lost in the melancholic recall of youthful memories. In either case, the creation of his memoirs had turned out to be a Greek drama of the worst kind and, on this particular day, as he walked towards the fateful little shop, he wished suddenly that, for once, time could be on his side.
© Corinne Wesley
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