The Clockwork Prize

The sign over the door said HALMOS FERENC, ÓRÁS, in gold letters that had once been very grand and were now mostly brown, and underneath, smaller, in three languages, Clocks · Watches · Automata · Repairs. The window was full of clocks. Tall ones and squat ones, clocks shaped like temples and clocks shaped like ships, a clock in a glass bell with a little silver bird on top, and every one of them said a slightly different time, as if they were arguing about it.

Mara stood on the pavement of Király utca with a cardboard suitcase in one hand and a letter in the other, and looked at the sign for a long time.

Behind Mara, Budapest roared. That was the only word for it. Trams clanged down the middle of the street, yellow ones, pulled by horses with their heads down, and an electric one that hissed and sparked from the wire overhead and made Mara jump. Carts went past loaded with timber, and barrels, and once a whole cartload of plaster angels, their white wings sticking up over the sides, on their way somewhere to be glued onto something. Everywhere there were flags. Red, white and green, hanging from every window and balcony, strung across the street on ropes, flapping from the tops of the gas lamps. On the wall opposite, a huge printed poster showed a woman in armour with a sword and a shield, standing on a map, with the numbers 896–1896 in gold over her head, and underneath, in letters a foot high: EZREDÉVES KIÁLLÍTÁS. The Millennium Exhibition. A thousand years.

Everyone in the country knew about it. Even in the little town where Mara had grown up, three days away by train, they had talked about nothing else all winter. The great exhibition in the City Park, with its palaces and its pavilions and its castle. The new underground railway, the first on the whole continent, they said, running under the grandest street in the city. The King coming to open it all. Electric light. Moving pictures. Machines that could do anything.

And now Mara was here. In the middle of it. With a suitcase, and a letter, and a sign that needed regilding.

Mara pushed open the door.

A bell rang somewhere overhead, a small cheerful brass bell, and then, as if that had been a signal, every clock in the shop began to strike. Not quite together. The tall clock by the door went first, with a deep slow bong, and then the ship-clock went ting ting ting very fast as if trying to catch up, and the temple-clock played a little tune, and the silver bird in the glass bell opened its beak and sang, a real song, trilling and warbling, and turned its head from side to side, and flapped its tiny silver wings.

Mara stood in the doorway with her mouth open.

"Shut the door," said a voice. "You're letting the dust in."

It came from the back of the shop, behind a long counter scattered with watch-parts and tweezers and little glass dishes. A girl was sitting there on a high stool, with a drawing board propped on the counter in front of her and a pencil behind her ear and another in her hand. She was perhaps nineteen, with dark hair pinned up badly and ink on her chin, and she was looking at Mara over the top of the drawing board with the expression of someone who has been interrupted in the middle of something important.

Mara shut the door. The bird stopped singing. One by one, the clocks finished striking.

"Well?" said the girl.

"I'm looking for Master Halmos," said Mara. "Halmos Ferenc. I have a letter." Mara held it up. "From the schoolmaster in my town. He wrote to say I was coming. To be an apprentice."

The girl looked at the letter. Then at the suitcase. Then, for rather a long time, at Mara.

"Did he," she said. "He didn't tell me." She put down her pencil. "Of course he didn't. He never tells me anything." She turned on her stool and shouted, very loudly, towards a curtain at the back of the shop: "Apa! There's an apprentice here!"

Nothing happened.

"He's deaf when he's working," said the girl. "Or he pretends to be." She climbed down off the stool, wiped her hands on her skirt, which did not help the ink, and came round the end of the counter. Up close she was not much taller than Mara. "I'm Klára. His daughter. I do the drawings." She did not offer to shake hands. "What can you do?"

"I see patterns," said Mara. "How a thing works. If I look at it long enough, I can see how all the parts go together. Even if I've never seen one before." Mara hesitated. "The schoolmaster said it was the only thing I was ever good at."

"That's not a skill," said Klára. "That's a boast."

But she looked at Mara for a moment, and then went to the window, and took down the glass bell with the silver bird inside, and set it on the counter. "How does that work, then?"

Mara looked at it for a long time. At the bird, and its little perch, and the base of the bell, which was made of dark polished wood, with a tiny keyhole in the side. Mara thought about the song: how it had gone up and down, and trilled, and how the bird's beak had opened and shut in time.

"There's a bellows in the base," Mara said slowly. "Little ones. And a pipe with a piston in it, that goes up and down to change the note. And a drum with pins on it, like a music box, that tells the piston where to go. And the same drum moves the beak, and the head, with wires up through the perch." Mara looked up. "Is that right?"

Klára looked at Mara with a quite different expression.

"Nearly," she said. "There are two drums." She put the bird back.

The curtain at the back of the shop swept aside.

A man came through it: tall, stooped, white-haired, with a jeweller's glass screwed into one eye and a pair of tiny pliers in one hand, and a waistcoat covered in brass filings. He had a long, kind, tired face, and a moustache that had once been very magnificent and had been allowed to grow wild, and when he took the glass out of his eye and looked at Mara, his eyes were very bright and very blue.

"Klára," he said, "why is there a child in my shop?"

"It's your apprentice, Apa. The schoolmaster's letter. You read it at Christmas. You said yes."

"Did I?" Master Halmos looked at Mara, with great interest, as if Mara were a mechanism whose purpose he could not quite work out. "Well, if I said yes, then I said yes." He held out his hand. It was a big hand, scarred with old burns and cuts, the hand of a man who had worked metal all his life. And as Mara took it, Mara felt it. A tremor, very faint. As if, somewhere deep inside the hand, a small wheel was turning that should not have been.

Master Halmos let go quickly, and put his hand in his waistcoat pocket.

"Welcome to the workshop of Halmos Ferenc," he said. "Clockmaker to three archdukes, two bishops and a very difficult Turkish ambassador. Inventor of the singing bird, the walking lion and the mechanical chess-playing hussar that was sadly lost in a fire in Vienna in eighteen seventy-three. And builder, God and the bank willing, of the most remarkable machine this city has ever seen." He smiled, a sudden, brilliant, boyish smile that took twenty years off his face. "Would you like to meet it?"