The Things We Cherished Read Online Free PDF Page B

anniversary clock, as the peddler called it, was a torsion model, intricately made and designed to run for more than a year before needing to be wound. Johann could not believe he’d actually been able to make it work.
    He covered the clock with a small blanket and set out walking from the barn. The journey into town was not insignificant and any other day he might have taken the wagon, but he did not want to risk jostling the clock, trying to hold it steady as he drove. Anyway, it was a fine morning in the no-man’s-land between winterand spring, with the still-damp earth giving off a sweet smell and a gentle breeze clearing the fog.
    As he ascended the hill, his eyes traveled across the rolling green earth, broken only by a stone monastery perched high in the distance. Then he looked back at the fields that fanned out below. The small but fertile plot of land, a few hectares in the lush valley nourished by the nearby river Main, had been owned by his family for generations. It would soon be time to till the soil. He would plant despite the fact that they would not be here for the harvest, hoping the promise of a late-summer bounty would raise the sale price of the land.
    He shifted the clock to his other arm and looked down, concentrating on his footsteps and taking care not to stumble as the path that dropped into the forest narrowed and grew uneven. Sunlight crept through the pines, drying the needles on the ground to a brittle carpet that crackled beneath his feet.
    His thoughts returned to Rebecca. The pregnancy had not come easily. Each month since their wedding there had been a hushed expectation, hope followed by disappointment. There were conversations, held only late at night in low voices though they lived alone, for who really spoke of such things at all, much less in the light of day? Whispers about what might be wrong, certain foods a woman might eat or salves she could apply that were rumored to help. But after the first year they had stopped hoping and accepted without recrimination that if God had not seen fit to bless them with a child, then the love they had for each other would be enough.
    Then one morning when he least expected it, Rebecca rushed into the barn as he milked the cows and wordlessly took his hand and pressed it to her midsection, smiling broadly. He thought that his heart would burst. They had about five months, Rebecca said, and so he redoubled his efforts on the clock. He wanted them togo before it became too difficult or unsafe for her to travel, so their child could be born in America, in the comfort and safety his precious wife deserved.
    The decision to leave had not been a simple one. It was more than just the farm: Johann generally felt as though he belonged here, considered himself first and foremost German—felt that way, at least, until the outside world reminded him otherwise every so often. The latest incident had come last winter, word of a Jewish merchant in a village to the east murdered by neighbors he had lived among all of his life who were convinced he was hoarding wheat in order to drive up prices. The man was shot, his house burned with his family still inside.
    Things were worse in the countries around them. He’d seen it in the eyes of the poor haunted immigrants from the Pale who passed through town on their way to the cities looking for work, heard the whispered stories of pogroms that had decimated their lives in an instant. The violence wasn’t just limited to the east—in Paris, a Jewish military officer was hung not a decade earlier, despite evidence of his innocence. And as much as Johann hated to admit it, Bavaria, stubbornly provincial and still steeped in its Catholic traditions decades after unification, was fertile ground for Jew hating. No, something told him that the time to get out was now. His son (he did not know why he always pictured the child as a boy) would not be raised with the shadow that caused Johann to wake with every scratch in the