My Niece's Wedding


When my niece, Nivedita, was 14 years old (this is the elder sister of the other niece for whom I bought, a few days ago, some bits of girly stuff; see the post on April 7), she had asked me one night to tell her a bed-time story. Thinking that at 14 years she was too old for Enid Blyton and too young for Edith Wharton, I had tried to strike a balance, so to speak, and had made up the following story for her.

In the year 1824, Emperor Albert Frederick III of the Zozenhollern dynasty ascended to the throne of the Hessian Empire, and, being an amateur horologist, summoned to his royal court watch-makers from the distant ends of Europe. Some came from Lisbon, a few from Venice, many from Krakow, one from Zurich, and three even all the way from St. Petersburg, all of them overloaded with their contraptions. The Emperor examined all of them over a period of one week, and finally declared that the watch-maker from Zurich, Franz Ferdinand Bauer, would join his court.

Bauer spent a happy first six months inspecting the various clocks, time-pieces, and watches in the royal palace, polishing up their glass and silver, and making some additions of his own choice to them. The Emperor had asked him to give him a model for a new watch never produced or seen anywhere else in Europe at the end of six months, and Bauer fully satisfied His Highness with his design for a magnificent clock truly worthy of a royal being. In this manner, Bauer spent two years at the court, producing a new design every six months. In the third year, however, the Emperor declared that he wanted a new design every two months, and as the years went by he began to reduce the time-interval gradually. First, he wanted a novel design every month, then every two weeks, then every one week, until finally one year, he demanded that Bauer produce for him a new blueprint every morning.

Bauer strove wildly to meet the Emperor's demands for five years, producing a fresh model every morning. One day, however, he realised that he was on an impossible mission, for he was trying to beat time with time, and no matter how fast he would try he would never win this battle. As the days passed by, he began to feel more and more that he had annihilated time and that he was living in a timeless Now that was stretched out in both directions into the infinite past and into the infinite future. One evening, he collapsed in the court when he was showing the Emperor another design, and returned to his home-town of Zurich a week later, a broken man. Bauer was never able to look at a clock ever again in his life.

After a few years, however, he slowly recovered and began to train some young men of Zurich in the art of making watches, and it is these men who started the noble tradition of Swiss clock-making. It is said that in honour to Bauer no maker of the exquisite Swiss clocks ever wears a Swiss watch on his hand, nor keeps any Swiss clock at his bed-side.

Nivedita, at that time, did not quite like my story, and said to me, 'How typical of you to tell me such a weepy tale! Do you have to send me to sleep in tears?' Yesterday evening, however, I was reminded in a most pleasant manner how fuzzy the dividing line between 'fact' and 'fiction' is. I received an email from Nivedita : she has become engaged to a Swiss clock-maker in Lausanne who never wears any watches, nor uses a Swiss alarm-clock, and they will be getting married on June 5 in a Catholic Church in Zurich which is the only Church there to have no clocks. To which I instinctively said to myself, 'Phew! What a relief! What would have happened if I had instead told Nivedita a story about a stock-broker in the City who is likewise on Bauer's impossible mission and is similarly out to annihilate time?'