The forest 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 left and right on the ice as if reconsidering the journey.

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 clearing halfway up the hill, I wanted only to stretch out on the grass and close my eyes for ten minutes.

The rustling beside me wouldn’t let me.

I turned, and an autumn leaf settled gently onto the grass.

There was nothing remarkable about an autumn leaf.

What was remarkable was that no tree stood above me—only blue sky.

Perhaps the wind had carried it from the forest. Exhaustion has a way of making ordinary things mysterious.

Then I heard it again-Ffffft.

Another leaf came down. Then another, and I looked up.

Hundreds of leaves trembled against the clear blue sky, floating like small living things, turning lazily in the light, as though somewhere beyond the blue another forest were shedding its autumn upon ours.

Eventually, I closed my eyes. Perhaps I slept.

The steep path beneath my feet seemed to become gentler, bordered by tall grasses bending in the wind. Crickets sang nearby. Mist rose from the warm earth. Then came footsteps. A man appeared through the haze.

He was neither very young nor old. Perhaps thirty. Tall and slender, with light-brown hair falling carelessly across his forehead. His eyes looked darker beneath unusually long lashes.

Beautiful eyes, I suppose, but that wasn’t what I noticed first. I noticed the sadness in them. He wore an open-necked shirt and street shoes entirely unsuitable for a forest path, just like mine. A large watch with a broad brown leather strap sat on his wrist.

He stopped when he saw me. For one strange moment neither of us spoke. Then he raised a hand towards an imaginary hat and inclined his head. The gesture was absurdly old-fashioned.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

He smiled.

“Not yet.”

Something cold travelled across my shoulders.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

He studied me more carefully, and his smile vanished.

“Although…”

“What?”

“I think I remember you.”

“You either remember someone or you don’t.”

“You’d think so.”

He looked at his watch.

“Some days this thing loses its mind. Other days I think it’s me.”

“What does it do?”

“Sometimes it loses ten minutes. After I had it repaired, it started gaining time. A few minutes at first. Lately, sometimes an hour. It stops and starts. Occasionally the second hand runs backwards.”

“Have you had it repaired?”

“Twice.”

“And?”

“The watchmaker says there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Convenient.”

“For the watchmaker, certainly.”

I laughed. He did too, and for a moment the sadness disappeared from his face.

Then he said, “Sometimes I lose pieces of things.”

“What things?”

“Reality, I suppose.”

He wasn’t joking.

“I’ll be walking somewhere and suddenly I’m farther along the road, but I don’t remember getting there. Sometimes an afternoon disappears. Other times five minutes seem to last for hours.”

He pushed his hair from his forehead.

“Once I stood outside a railway station watching rain fall. People were moving so slowly I could almost see individual drops hanging between them.”

“You probably fell asleep on the station bench.”

“Probably.”

He shrugged.

“But then I missed a train that hadn’t arrived yet.”

That silenced me.

“And sometimes,” he added, “I remember things that haven’t happened.”

Above us, another leaf whispered through the empty sky.

“Like me?”

“Maybe.”

He closed his eyes.

“There’s a courtyard.”

Something shifted inside me.

“What kind?”

“An old house. A green wooden porch. The paint is peeling near the bottom. There are vines above a cement path, growing over a wooden frame. Sunlight comes through the leaves in little patches.”

He frowned.

“And blue flowers.”

“Morning glory?”

His eyes opened.

“Yes.”

And suddenly I was fourteen again.

My grandfather sat beneath the vine-covered veranda, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, his thick eyebrows making him look angry when he wasn’t. The courtyard smelled of warm dust, grapes and barrels cooling in the cellar.

Back then, you didn’t need marketing to sell wine.

You only needed somebody to say, “Nea Dragomir has good wine. And it’s cheap.”

That was enough. The city had been expanding, swallowing fields and orchards and creeping closer to the village every year. Strangers appeared at our gate carrying bottles, demijohns, sometimes whatever container they could find.

Grandfather sold them wine, but nobody bought wine and left. That would have been almost impolite.

First came a glass. Then perhaps another half-glass. The weather had to be predicted, neighbours discussed, politics complained about, and at least one good story exchanged.

And if your story made Grandfather laugh, somehow you always went home with a little more wine than you had paid for.

I was fourteen when the young man came to the gate. Tall and slender, with light-brown hair. He wasn’t there for wine. He looked lost.

“Nea Dragomir,” he called, “could you tell me the road towards the city?”

Grandfather looked him up and down.

“A man who doesn’t know where he’s going shouldn’t be sent anywhere before he’s had a glass of wine.”

The stranger laughed, and Grandfather poured him a glass.

I had been running across the courtyard when I stopped. I remembered my dress now: white, covered in enormous yellow sunflowers, and I remembered the stranger looking at me with those ridiculous long lashes.

At fourteen, a man in his twenties belonged to another species entirely—somewhere between adults and the mysterious creatures inhabiting novels and films.

I hadn’t fallen in love with him. At least I didn’t remember, but I remembered his eyes. Before leaving, the stranger raised his glass towards me.

“Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“Why would we?” I’d asked.

He considered the question seriously.

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll give me directions next time.”

Now I stared at the man standing before me in the forest.

“No,” I whispered.

“What?”

“My grandfather’s vineyard.”

His face went blank.

“What vineyard?”

“You came there. You asked Grandfather for directions. He gave you wine.”

“I’ve never been to your grandfather’s vineyard.”

“But you described it.”

“I told you. I remember things. Or dream them. Or lose them. I don’t know anymore.”

He closed his eyes again.

“There’s a girl.”

I said nothing.

“She’s running across the courtyard. She’s wearing a dress with sunflowers.”

My heart beat faster.

“What is she doing?”

“Singing.”

“What song?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled.

“She has a terrible voice.”

“Excuse me?”

His eyes opened, and he laughed.

“Perhaps not terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“Enthusiastic.”

“That’s considerably worse.”

For one moment we were simply two strangers teasing each other on a forest path. Then I remembered that one of us was remembering an event that hadn’t happened to him yet.

“You remember me at fourteen.”

“I remember something.”

“But I’ve already lived it.”

“Apparently.”

“While you haven’t.”

“No.”

I tried to understand.

Perhaps my memory was behind me, and his was ahead of him.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Lately, quite a lot of you.”

“Me?”

“Fragments. You beside a river, laughing. You standing at a railway station in a red coat.”

“I don’t own a red coat.”

“Maybe you will.”

“What else?”

He hesitated.

“Your hand in mine.”

Silence.

“My hand?”

“I think so.”

“And when exactly does that happen?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then at least we’re equally useless.”

A leaf drifted down between us from the perfect blue sky. He caught it, and something changed.

Not around us, but between us. The air seemed denser, as though the small distance separating his body from mine had contracted without either of us moving. His watch began ticking:tick-tick-tick.

The hands were racing forward.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has it done that before?”

“Never this fast.”

He stepped backwards, and the watch slowed.

He looked at me and cautiously stepped closer.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.This time was faster.

“Again,” I said.

I moved away.

The ticking slowed almost to a stop.

We moved towards each other, and watch hands raced.

“That’s impossible.”

“Thank you. I was worried it might be normal.”

I should have been frightened, but instead, curiosity won.

The engineer hidden somewhere inside me had apparently decided that if the universe intended to malfunction, the least it could do was provide repeatable results.

“One more time.”

He laughed.

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I’m testing a hypothesis.”

“Which is?”

“You and the watch.”

“That’s slightly alarming for both of us.”

He stepped closer.

The watch raced.

“Perhaps it isn’t measuring time,” I whispered.

“What else would a watch measure?”

“Distance. Energy. Possibilities. I don’t know.”

I remembered things I had once read, and only half understood: that at the smallest scales nature behaved in ways ordinary intuition disliked; that time and space were not quite the rigid stage upon which we imagined ourselves walking; that energy was bound somehow to the evolution of physical states.

Perhaps the universe was perfectly sensible, and we were asking it the wrong questions; or perhaps I was exhausted on a forest path flirting with a lunatic whose watch needed servicing.

Both possibilities remained open.

“What happens if I touch you?” I asked.

His eyebrows lifted.

“For scientific purposes?”

“Entirely.”

“That’s disappointing.”

I held out my hand. He took it. The watch stopped-not slowed: just stopped.

So did everything else.

The wind vanished. The grasses froze. Leaves hung motionless above us. In the distance, a bird remained suspended against the blue sky, its wings open.

I couldn’t hear my breathing, but I could feel his hand: warm and real.

His thumb moved slightly against my fingers. So time hadn’t stopped completely, or perhaps we were no longer entirely inside it.

“Well,” he said.

“What?”

“I think it likes you.”

I laughed. He looked at me with that strange half-smile.

“I think it has been trying to find you.”

Behind him, the forest began to fade, and for a few seconds, two worlds occupied the same place: trees, but also an old house.

Grass beneath our feet, but farther away an unpaved road.

My apartment block flickered behind a vineyard that had vanished half a century earlier …and there was the green porch.

Morning glory climbed one of its posts.

Grandfather sat beneath the vines with his hat beside him, while a fourteen-year-old girl in a sunflower dress ran across the courtyard.

She was singing badly.

I almost laughed, then the gate opened. The young man beside me walked through it. Except he was still holding my hand. Two versions of him existed at once.

“No,” he whispered.

The girl stopped singing.

“Nea Dragomir,” the other man called, “could you tell me the road towards the city?”

Beside me, his fingers tightened around mine.

“I remember this.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

Grandfather stood.

“A man who doesn’t know where he’s going shouldn’t be sent anywhere before he’s had a glass of wine.”

The man beside me began to laugh, not because it was funny, but because he remembered Grandfather saying it at precisely the same moment that he heard it for the first time.

The two moments had become one. Then fourteen-year-old me looked towards the gate.

For one impossible instant, I thought she looked beyond the young man standing there, looking straight at me and smiling.

The watch gave one violent tick. The courtyard vanished. The forest returned. Noise crashed back into the world—birds, wind, cars somewhere below.

“Entschuldigung!”

A group of German hikers appeared around the bend. One nearly walked into us, apologised and hurried after the others.

We were still holding hands. I looked down.

“Perhaps the experiment is finished.”

“Do you want it to be?”

That was an annoyingly good question. I withdrew my hand. The watch began ticking again, slowly and normally.

He looked at it. Then at me.

“Where do you think I go from here?”

I remembered the young man standing at Grandfather’s gate decades earlier.

“Maybe you’ll give me directions next time.

I smiled.

“I think that’s why you’re here.”

“To ask you for directions?”

“Apparently.”

“Directions to where?”

I looked towards the path. I didn’t know whether I was sending him into my past, his future, or somewhere that belonged to both of us. For once, it didn’t seem terribly important.

“There’s a vineyard,” I said.

“Is the wine good?”

“Very.”

“Expensive?”

“Cheap.”

“Excellent.”

“But you’ll have to listen to my grandfather’s stories.”

“I’ve survived worse.”

“And there’s a girl.”

“The terrible singer?”

“The enthusiastic singer.”

“Of course.”

He smiled.

“What should I say to her?”

I thought about it.

“Tell her you’ll meet again.”

“Will we?”

I looked at his watch.

“Apparently we already have.”

He began walking.

After several steps, he turned.

“One more question.”

“What?”

“The woman at the railway station.”

“What about her?”

“Buy the red coat.”

Before I could answer, the rustling began again. Leaves poured from the empty blue sky. For a few seconds I could see him between them, then I couldn’t.

I ran to the first bend, but the path was empty. I waited, but nothing.

Eventually, I walked home. For weeks afterwards, I looked for a red coat without admitting to myself why. I found one in a shop window just before Christmas. I bought it-of course I did.

Sometimes, when memory takes me back to Grandfather’s vineyard, I wonder which version of that afternoon I remember.

The one I lived when I was fourteen?

The one I watched from the forest decades later?

Or some third version that hasn’t happened yet?

I remember Grandfather pouring the wine, the morning glory and a tall young stranger with sad eyes raising his glass towards me, but now I remember something else.

When he set the glass down, his Pobeda began to tick very fast. He looked at it. Then, just for a moment, he looked beyond fourteen-year-old me towards something I couldn’t see and smiled.

Perhaps time doesn’t always flow like a river.

Perhaps sometimes it gathers in quiet places—a vineyard, a railway platform, a forest path.

Perhaps it waits until two lives come close enough and then folds a little, just enough to let one touch the other.

I don’t know. What I know is that some evenings, when I walk through the forest, I hear a strange sound behind me.

Tick-I stop.

Tick. I turn, and most of the time, no one is there.

Tick.

But lately, the ticks have been getting closer.