The Place Where Time Floats

At first, it was only a rustle.

Brief, discreet, but strangely distinct.

I was exhausted. As usual, I had woken in the middle of the night, driven for nearly three hours, and then climbed, breathless, up the hill behind my apartment block.

Sometimes I wondered what had possessed me when I bought a flat in the last building before the forest. The final hundred metres were particularly hateful. In summer, your shirt stuck wetly to your back; in winter, the car barely made it up, sliding from one side of the road to the other on the ice.

But that morning I hadn't had the heart to stop. I didn't want to risk sunrise finding me down in the shadow of the valley. Now, in the little clearing halfway up the hill, all I wanted was to lie in the grass and close my eyes for ten minutes.

The rustling beside me wouldn't let me.

I turned.

An autumn leaf—because it was autumn—settled gently onto the grass.

I stared at it.

There was nothing unusual about an autumn leaf. What was unusual was that no tree stood above me.

Only blue sky.

I looked around, too tired at first to make much of it. Perhaps the wind had carried it from the forest. Perhaps exhaustion was making ordinary things mysterious.

I was about to close my eyes when I heard it again.

Ffffft.

Another leaf came down.

This one landed near my shoe.

Then another.

I raised my head.

Not one, not two, not ninety-nine, but hundreds of leaves were trembling against the clear blue sky.

They floated above me like small living things, turning slowly in the light, as though some invisible forest existed high above the real one. They came and came, whispering as they fell, and for several minutes I could do nothing but watch them drifting through that enormous blue ocean. Eventually, I closed my eyes.

Perhaps I slept. Perhaps I didn't.

I imagined a gentler path than the one waiting for me uphill, bordered by tall grasses bending in the wind. In the living silence I could hear crickets. Drops of light trembled between the blades of grass, and a thin mist rose from the warm earth.

Then footsteps came through it.

A man appeared on the path.

He wasn't exactly young, nor was he old. Perhaps thirty. Perhaps forty. There was something about his face that made age difficult to judge.

When our eyes met, an extraordinary sadness passed over it.

Not fear.

Recognition.

He stopped.

For a second neither of us spoke.

Then he tilted his head and lifted one hand towards an imaginary hat, an old-fashioned gesture so natural that I almost smiled.

His shirt was open at the neck. His street shoes had seen better days and were entirely unsuitable for a forest path.

Just like mine.

A large watch with a broad leather strap sat on his wrist.

Something about him hurt.

I didn't know why.

Then, suddenly, I thought of my father, long gone from this world.

The light was changing. I could feel the day slipping away from me, and I remembered that I still had the hill to climb.

I stood.

"Wait," I said.

The stranger looked at me.

For one strange second, his expression changed.

"You shouldn't be here yet," he said.

I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly.

"What?"

But somewhere far away, a bird screamed.

I turned instinctively towards the forest.

When I looked back, the path was empty.

I hurried to the first bend, from where I could see almost all the way to the top.

There was no one there.

Not a moving branch. Not a retreating figure.

Nothing.

Only the grass moving slowly in the evening wind.

I told myself I had fallen asleep.

That was the reasonable explanation.

The evening had begun washing trees, flowers, people, sorrows and astonishments in its soft light. A warm mist rose between the stones of the path.

I started back down, watching my feet. I had already ruined one pair of shoes walking through that forest and had no intention of sacrificing another.

That was why I saw the watch.

I almost stepped on it.

I stopped, moved back a pace, then sideways.

It was still there.

The stranger's watch.

Its glass caught the fading light and flashed once, almost like a tiny signal.

I picked it up. It was heavier than I expected.

I turned it over and held it close to my ear. Nothing.

I waited.

One second, then another.Still nothing.

I was about to shake it when: Tick.

I froze: Tick.

The forest changed, but there was no flash, no thunder, no great tearing open of the sky.

Something much worse happened because the sound of the road disappeared.

No engines. No distant doors slamming. No television drifting from an open apartment window.

I looked uphill.

The apartment blocks were gone.

Where they should have stood, there was only forest.

Young forest.

Thin trees moved in the wind where concrete buildings had been a moment earlier.

Somewhere below me, an engine coughed into life.

An old engine, then came voices.

I knew one of them, and I ran.

The path was no longer covered in gravel. My shoes sank into soft earth as I pushed through the trees, following the voice, and there he was.

The stranger.

Except now I knew him.

My father stood beside an old car at the edge of the road.

Not my father as I remembered him at the end of his life.

My father before me.

Young.

His hair still dark. His shoulders straight. His hat in one hand; I had seen that face in photographs.

He looked towards me. Not through me but at me.

His expression became the same one I had seen earlier on the path: surprise first, then that inexplicable sadness.

His eyes dropped to the watch in my hand, and for the first time, I understood.

His wrist was bare.

"Where did you get that?" he asked.

My throat tightened.

I wanted to say “you gave it to me forty years from now, or perhaps forty years ago.”

Instead, I heard myself ask the most foolish question possible.

"What year is it?"

He stared at me. Then the forest screamed, and the sound was so sharp that I clutched the watch in my fist and everything dissolved.

Trees, road, car, my father's face—all of it folded into darkness like mist swallowed by wind. Voices burst around me, splitting the silence into a thousand shards.

"Entschuldigung!"I jumped aside.

A group of German hikers had appeared on the path, laughing and talking as they passed. One of them nodded politely at me. Another was checking something on his phone.

Behind them, exactly where it belonged, stood my apartment block.

For several moments I couldn't move. Then I opened my hand.

The watch lay in my palm-a Pobeda.

An ordinary Soviet-era watch, neither particularly expensive nor particularly rare. The sort of watch thousands of men had once worn, and almost nobody would wear now.

And suddenly another memory struck me.

My father leaving for work early in the morning.

His briefcase waiting obediently beside the coat rack.

His hand reaching for his hat.

And there, beneath his shirt cuff—

A Pobeda.

The memory vanished before I could hold it.

The hikers disappeared around the bend. Their voices faded.

Silence returned.

I looked at the watch again.

The second hand was still.

I should have left it there.

For a moment, I even bent down to place it among the stones. Perhaps the stranger would return for it, so I'd better leave it there on the ground. Perhaps my father was just a faded memory, and I was too tired or perhaps some things belonged neither to the dead nor to the living. The path trees remained still like a bird that forgot how to tweet

Then I heard it: Tick.

I straightened: Tick.

This time the sound did not come from the watch in my hand.

It came from somewhere in the forest: Tick.

Farther away: Tick.

Closer, and then I slipped the Pobeda into my pocket and began walking home.

I will return to the silent forest, to the place where autumn leaves fall from an empty sky and disappear before they touch the earth.

The place where, for the length of a heartbeat, past and present forget which one came first.

The place where the soul can sometimes float between now and then, and somewhere among the trees, something is still ticking. The watch had stopped, but somewhere inside me the pendulum kept swinging.