Berlin Time

“Not backwards,” Valiko said on the phone. “Whatever she tells you, never turn the hands backwards. You stop the pendulum, you wait an hour, you start it again.”

“A whole hour?”

“It’s an old clock. It only knows one direction.”

The clock hangs in Eter’s kitchen above the table, in a walnut case with a little glass door. It has been on Berlin time for six years, ever since her daughter Nana moved there. Georgia stopped moving its clocks long ago. Germany still does it every spring and every autumn, and on Saturday night Berlin was getting an hour back. So Eter’s kitchen had to give one up.

“Gia did it last year,” Eter said, opening the glass door for me. “Since then it strikes thirteen at midnight. Only at midnight. I’ve got used to it.”

I put one finger on the brass disc of the pendulum, and it stopped. The kitchen went very quiet. You never notice a clock until it stops. It’s the same with fridges, and, I am told, with husbands.

Eter put a cup of tea in front of me. “An hour,” she said. “Sit.”

So I sat. She told me about Nana’s flat, which has a balcony nobody is allowed to put anything on. About the German neighbour who leaves notes on the stairs, in capitals. About the grandson, who now calls her “Oma” on the phone and then, when he remembers, “bebia”. I held the tea in both hands, the way you are supposed to hold tea. I did not drink it.

“You haven’t moved,” Eter said, after a while.

“Should I?”

“People move. They look at their phones. They scratch.”

So I scratched my ear. She watched me do it with the face she keeps for Gia’s parking.

“Revaz wound it every Sunday for forty years,” she said, looking up at the stopped hands. “Revaz is gone six years now, and the clock is still going. So far the clock is winning.”

“It’s not going tonight.”

“Tonight it’s resting. It’s earned it.”

When the hour was up, I gave the pendulum a small push. Tick. Then tock, as if it had only been thinking about something.

“You didn’t look at anything,” Eter said. “How do you know it’s been an hour?”

“It has,” I said, and she let it go. In our building it is rude to ask how somebody knows something. It usually turns out to be Gia.

“So now it’s wrong in Berlin as well?”

“Until three in the morning. Then it’s right there and wrong here, like always.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s how I like it.”

At the door she made me promise to come back in spring and do it the other way.

“Forwards is easy,” I said. “You just lose an hour.”

“Easy for you. At my age you count them.”

On the way out she poured my tea, full and cold, into the geranium on the windowsill. That geranium has had every cup she has ever made me, and it is the healthiest plant in Sololaki.