The Things We Cherished Read Online Free PDF Page A

though pushing the long hand with great effort.
    It would be sold to Augustus Hoffel, the richest man in town, to sit on the mantelpiece of the elegant
Gasthaus
he ran. Or so Johann hoped. He had shown Herr Hoffel the photograph nearly a year ago and the man had seemed enthusiastic about the prospect of the clock, offered to buy it then and there. Of course he hadn’t paid a deposit, nor given Johann the money he needed for the fine metal and other parts, and Johann had not dared to ask. Herr Hoffel was known as a man of repute, doing business on credit with merchants as far away as Regensburg. Who was Johann, a humble farmer, to ask for a down payment up front? So Johann had to wait two months to barter and scrape together the materials he needed before beginning. But the clock was finer than anything he had ever made or even seen, and he felt certain that Herr Hoffel would buy it on sight, giving him without negotiation his full price, the sum he needed to buy passage to America for himself and Rebecca.
    Rebecca. He stroked her raven hair, splayed across the pillow,smiling to himself as he always did when thinking of his wife, even when she was lying just inches away. Rebecca was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and when they met, she had the eye of the rabbi’s son. Were it not for Johann, she would be living in a grand house with running water, a toilet inside. But against all odds and her parents’ virulent protestations, she had chosen him, the farmer who turned up each week at the kindergarten where she worked because she loved the children and not because she needed to, with his jokes and stories and whatever simple gift he could scrape together for a few pennies. He could not believe it when she accepted the proposal he had hardly dared to make. Rebecca’s parents, who had stopped somewhere just short of disowning her, reluctantly agreed to host the marriage ceremony in their home, but had been too embarrassed to invite their friends.
    He reached down, touching her hand, feeling the calluses that had not been there when they met. Rebecca had proven to be stronger than her sheltered upbringing might have suggested. She had taken gamely to his simple life, moving into the cottage with the crude planked floors left to him by his deceased parents. Under her care, the two-room shelter became homier than it had ever been; flowered curtains now adorned the windows, and handmade pillows softened the wooden chairs. She took on without complaint, too, the tasks that filled the day of a farmer’s wife, learning to spin wool and clean and mend clothes until they were more thread than fabric, to churn butter and make meals with whatever was available, canning and storing what she could for the long winter months. She even worked beside him in the field, laughing and singing, until he insisted she stop out of fear for her condition.
    Two years had passed since they stood beneath the canopy. Two years later and Johann still could not believe his good fortunethat Rebecca had chosen him as her own. As he watched her sit before the cracked mirror each evening, combing her dark tresses in preparation for bed, he sometimes wondered if it was a dream, whether if he blinked he might wake up to find it all gone.
    The minutes seemed to stretch endlessly as he lay awake. Finally, he dozed off. He slept fitfully, dreaming that he went to retrieve the clock the next morning and it had disappeared, the space beneath the floorboards empty. The vision faded, replaced by another, equally disturbing, of the clock falling from his hands and shattering into a thousand pieces on the ground.
    He awakened, restless and drained, to the sound of the roosters crowing to a yet-unseen dawn. After washing at the basin with greater care than he otherwise would, he put on the clean brown work shirt and trousers that Rebecca had laid out. “I’m going,
Liebchen
,” he whispered to Rebecca, breathing in the powdery scent where her neck met her