The Watchmaker
by Mike Rogers
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
It was Manuel who woke them; he arrived earlier than they’d have liked, but he was coming to take his cousin’s kids back to their parents in the suburbs, where they’d found somewhere to live. He was removing a worry, and that helped Ikey and Minna to get a couple more hours totally relaxed shut-eye.
Over breakfast, Ikey announced that he was going to see his friend Soyfer the sofer.
“Is that a ‘rye’ smile I see?” asked Minna, as she put down her coffee cup with a disapproving clatter.
“To make a friendship grow, you gotta water it, ya know?” said Ikey, in his best proverbial voice.
“Yeah, yeah, friends who drink together, think together. I heard it all before. But what ya don’t tell me is which is the more important activity.”
“Minna!” said Ikey, spreading his hands in injured innocence. “The reason I’m gonna see Soyfer today is not contained in a glass bottle. I’m sure you’re clever enough to work out what it might be.”
He’d had success with this approach before. He knew what a great imagination his wife had; it was just a matter of pointing it in the right direction. He gave her a bit of time, doing what he seldom did, clearing away his own breakfast plate, running it under the faucet, setting it ready for washing.
“I got it!” said Minna. “You’re gonna get him to write mezuzahs for Carmen and Manuel and their friends! That was what frightened ICE away last night, so we got some sleep. Sometimes, Ikey, you’re a genius. I’m so glad my father insisted I marry a man with craft.”
To give him his due, Ikey had considered the possibility of doing this but then reflected that having a whole apartment house of Jews with Hispanic surnames was going to focus ICE’s unwelcome and evidently supra-legal attention on everybody who lived there.
His reason for going to see Soyfer the sofer was different, though also intimately related to his friend’s professional skills, but he didn’t want to discuss it with his wife. Nor, again to give him his due, did he ever want to tell her an outright lie, a distinction of positively rabbinical subtlety. He was always one to correct misapprehensions, frequently at considerable length, and the present instance offered him an irresistible opportunity to do so while diverting his wife’s attention from any further enquiries into his motivation.
“Minna, Minna! I am not a man ‘with craft,’ I am a man with a craft, a particular skill, in a particular area of expertise. The man with a craft has all the right tools and uses them in the right way on the objects he’s dealing with, like me with watches or the pieces of metal I shape to fit in the watches.
“A man with craft, a crafty man, has tools, sure, but they’re not physical, tangible ones, and he uses them on people, on people’s hearts and people’s minds. He’s shaping them to suit his purpose, right enough, shaving bits off, sanding them down, patching a bit where he’s taken too much away.
“The ones who have a bit of craft but not enough skill, they use real tools: a knife at the throat, a gun in the back, a bullet in the head, really crude workmanship. It doesn’t deserve the name of craft; it’s best called violence pure and simple. Any fool can make a joint fit, if they don’t care about splitting the wood and want to drown it in glue to make it hold together, but time and heat and wear will take it apart soon enough, believe you me—”
“Hey! Ikey!” said Minna, reaching out and taking his hands, to calm him down. “I’ve never heard you so passionate. What’s got into you?”
“Last night, I guess,” said Ikey, sitting down, because he found himself trembling unexpectedly. “I mean, I do my job slowly and carefully, and worry before I do anything I can’t change afterwards. But these people... these people... I thought all that stuff was well in the past. Different country, different people, you know?”
He stood up, still holding his wife’s hands in his own. “I gotta go,” he said, squeezing them and letting them go. He could see the tears in his wife’s eyes.
“Bless you, Ikey, bless you!” she said. He hoped she’d still bless him, even when she found out, if she ever did, what he was actually going to do.
* * *
When Ikey arrived at Joe’s Bar, Soyfer the sofer was sitting on his own in front of a chessboard, where the pieces showed that a game was being played. There was no glass in front of him, but his left hand was hovering over the back row, moving between the queen’s bishop and the queen’s rook.
When Ikey saw Soyfer’s left hand swoop down like a hawk and move the knight, Ikey shut the door fully — which he knew would make a noise — and advanced towards his friend, only to be confronted by Soyfer’s back, as he’d got up and moved round the table, sat down again and was letting his right hand hover over the front row of pawns...
“Yura...” began Ikey, hesitantly.
“I see you,” said Soyfer, “I seen you when you come in, I see you now, because there’s a mirror over there, behind where I was sitting, I see you and I hear you, as the marriage-guidance counsellor recommends you should say to whichever unreasonable partner you’re trying to extricate yourself from or is trying to extricate themselves from you. But, in my case, it’s the plain truth and not some kind of performative utterance, so put your butt down over there, get Joe to bring bottle and glasses and take away this goddamn game, because whoever wins it, red or black, I’m still going to lose.”
He cleared his throat, but the action started so deep down that it sounded like a subway train going by or an elderly Yellow Cab trying to start up on a cold morning, turning over with a rattle and a clank, eventually catching and settling to a muttering, strangled roar that indicated an exhaust with more rust holes than a sieve.
“I worry about your constitution, Yura!”
“It’s in a better state than the national one at the moment, believe you me, Ikey! Conviction politics! What it means is that the politicians who don’t already have convictions yet deserve them, except they have ways to stop the Department of Justice from indicting them!”
“Why are you in such a bad mood, Yura?”
“Because there’s nothing I can do about anything, and I’d like to do something about everything. Playing chess sharpens my sense for possible moves to make, and playing against myself sharpens my awareness of my own impotence.”
“The big glasses, please, Joe!” said Ikey, and Soyfer laughed loud and long.
“You’re lucky, Ikey! You look at little things all day, and they seem big to you. And then, at the end of the day, you put those glasses down that you use for looking at things, and you can see how small and manageable they really are!”
“I have something for you,” said Ikey, producing the folded piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket.
Yura unfolded it slowly, flattened it on the table, looked at it through the spectacles he was wearing, pushed them up on to his forehead and looked at it again with his naked eyes, finally fishing out a folding pince-nez from his left waistcoat pocket, which he perched precariously on the thinnest part of his nose, just above the nostrils, to take a final view, after which he raised his head and breathed out in a silent whistle.
“Where’s it from?” he asked.
“The Illustrated Man,” said Ikey.
“And you don’t mean the book of Ray Bradbury stories, do you?” asked Yura.
Ikey shook his head. “Round the side,” he added, “down below all the other ones, you wouldn’t see it unless you were looking for it...”
“Except that you’re the Man with the Microscope, the man for whom the tiniest dust mote means a lost second every day, and those lost seconds add up, don’t they? And what they add up to is the mess we have in the world today; not just here, which is bad enough, but everywhere.”
“So what can we do, Yura?”
“We do what we can do, wherever we can do it. This guy” — and he tapped the piece of paper — “is somewhere to start.”
“How?”
“I’m gonna see Manny. He used to be a sofer like me, but they kicked him out of the guild.”
“What? They ‘de-quilled’ him, like they defrock priests?”
“Yeah, good phrase, that. I’ll try and remember it.”
“Mad Manny? Mad Manny who’s in Bellevue?”
“Not any more, but wherever they’ve moved the inmates to as part of the ongoing tendency to redevelop every major public building as a set of condos. I’ll find him. You see, this” — and he flapped the piece of paper again — “is what drove him mad.”
“I copied that out,” said Ikey. “Does that mean that I—”
“No. It’s a danger for a sofer, for a trained scribe, who understands what the letters mean when he writes them. And he writes them with true concentration, with kavanah, and without protecting himself by a mitzvot, though even they don’t always work... Now, this is a neat-sized piece of paper. You got any more?”
Well, of course he had! We know Ikey by now, the man with method, he had them in his other waistcoat pocket, and handed over a wedge.
“Three will be plenty,” said Yura, handing back the rest. “Manny’s the only person who can write this stuff.”
“Won’t it harm him some more?”
“Not really. He sees green scaly demons from time to time; well, most days, actually, sometimes five times a day, usually only three, coming to eat him.”
“Can’t they treat him for that?”
“Nope. They’re real. Even the Baal Shem Tov couldn’t do anything for him, if he were still around, that is. If you hold his hand without a glove or anything, you’ll see them, too. It’s OK, they disappear when you let go, which, of course, you do. So, up in Bellevue or wherever, they put him in a straitjacket in a padded cell and knock him out with drug of choice. As he’s totally unresponsive, the demons lose interest and go away. Not to say, of course, that madness isn’t contagious; witness the state of the nation. And the world.”
“And if Manny writes something... What effect will it have?”
“Who knows? But something’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”
After which, Yura devoted his attention to the contents of his glass, turning it, studying it, appreciating the meniscus and the surface tension, the refraction of objects by the glass itself and then by the liquid in it, finally sniffing, savouring and swallowing the contents and waiting for the effects on mouth, throat and, presumably, synapses, before he began the process again.
When the glass was finally empty, he put the pince-nez away, so he could scrunch up his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose.
“Ikey,” he said, “you have to consider the burden I bear, as a scribe who has to keep on writing out the whole history of the Jewish people in kitvey hakodesh, the holy script, with true commitment and concentration—”
“Kavanah,” said Ikey, to prove he’d been listening.
“And what I learn from it is how much of a mess the Jewish people made of governing themselves over the millennia when they were, as they see it, in charge of their very own homeland, which, as now, they had taken away from the people who were there when they arrived.
“In more modern times, they were scattered and persecuted minorities; then they were charming, mutually helpful, full of sympathy and wonderful stories. In the big wide world, they became famous lawyers, doctors, scientists, musicians, actors, writers, film directors and, though I’d rather not stress it too much, bankers... That was the smart move, that was the way to take over the world by intelligence and not violence...”
He stopped. He picked up the empty glass and looked at it. “D’you think I should switch to vodka?”
Ikey shrugged. Minna would smell the rye on his breath. But if he had anything more, he’d stagger, and that would be really bad.
“At least,” said Yura, “with the rye, I know it’s coloured, and I can make allowance for the fact. Vodka’s supposed to be completely clear. But the stuff that claims not to deceive you can be the most deceptive of all. I won’t call you; I’ll come round, because I should have something to hand over. And also to take back from you, the moment you’ve done what I want you to do.”
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
