Old Fei's Watch

Old Fei set up his three-foot watch-repair bench in the narrow lane behind Zhenhua Market and sat there for thirty years. On the bench lay a magnifier, tweezers, an oil pot, and a row of little glass bottles, each steeped with gears of every size, like so many jars of fish eyes. The lane never saw the sun, but his desk lamp burned from morning to night, lighting one small clear world. He was missing the tip of his left ring finger, taken by a spring in his youth; ever since, he looked at people and at watches with three parts more care.

Granny Ma sold soy milk at the lane's mouth, every day for thirty years. In winter her soy milk steamed white, and Old Fei's repair lamp shone white too; the one warm, the other cold, between them they wrung a little life out of the narrow lane. She liked to tell folks that Old Fei's eyes were venom: the moment a watch landed in his hand, he knew who had worn it, on which wrist, whether the owner was quick or slow of temper, and he could guess within an inch what the owner had been doing the instant the watch stopped, reading it from the scratches on the dial. A doubter once brought a watch that had lain dead half a year; Fei flipped the case open, glanced once, and said, "This was your wife's, worn on the right wrist — you two had words before she passed." The man went white to the lips: his wife had indeed died the previous autumn, after a quarrel, and the watch had stopped that very night.

In time the whole lane came to trust Old Fei. Some said he read fate through the watches; he shook his head. "I'm no fortune-teller. A watch is a dead thing — worn long enough it takes on the Temper of a living hand. It doesn't lie. The one wearing it does." Now and then a young fellow would bring a brand-new, gleaming watch and beg him to "read my luck"; Fei wouldn't even lift his eyelids, just waved a hand. "A new watch has seen nothing. It shows no one. Take it back."

Old Fei kept three rules. He would not mend a watch of unclear origin. He would not mend one whose owner would not tell the truth. And he would not mend his own. The first two were plain enough; the third puzzled everyone. On his right wrist he wore, year in and year out, a Shanghai-brand mechanical watch, filmed with a thick coat of dust, its hands long since frozen. He never wiped it, and never let another hand touch it. When someone asked why he didn't fix his own, long stopped as it was, he only smiled. "The time hasn't come."

A few days after that winter's solstice, a north wind poured down the lane and set his lamp flickering. A stranger came, a man in his early forties in a tailored suit, carrying a brocade box. He gave his name as Old Qian and said his mother had lately passed, leaving behind a gold lady's watch; he hoped Fei could fix it so that it might tick once more on the eve of her seventh-night rites. "She was clutching it when she went," Qian said. "She told me my father brought it back from Shanghai the year she married in." His ten fingers were scrubbed clean, yet across the heel of the hand lay a thin callus — the kind earned only by hefting steelyards and hauling gunny sacks in younger, harder years. Granny Ma would say such a callus never lied: Qian was a man who had crawled up out of a bitter life, made his money, and now wanted to look the part.

Fei took the watch. Gold case, small face, a leather strap replaced later — worn bright on the right, near-new on the left. He unscrewed the back. Inside, a line of tiny engraving: "To Yun, 1969." Yun was a woman's name, but Qian's family name was Qian; his father was Qian Fulai, his mother a Sun by birth — not a Yun among them, high or low.

Fei set the watch down. "What was your mother's name?"

"Sun, of the Qian household."

"And this Yun engraved inside — that was her childhood name?"

Qian hesitated. "…Yes. A pet name."

Fei said nothing. He nudged the hairspring with his tweezers, then set them down. He pointed to a diagonal scratch on the dial. "This mark sits at the three o'clock edge — made by a right-wrist wearer, knocking the crystal as she raised her hand to look. Your mother was left-handed. I've seen her — last year she brought me a little alarm clock from the bottom of her enamel mug to fix. Watch or clock, she wore everything on her left."

Qian's face went slack, as if a hidden cord had been cut. He was silent a long while before he said, low, "It isn't my mother's. It was my… my first wife. She took the name Yun. She's been gone seven years."

It turned out Qian's first marriage had been to a woman from the textile mill, eight good years together. Yun had saved three years of work points and asked someone to bring the watch back from Shanghai; Qian, delighted, had engraved the case himself. Later he made money in business, decided she no longer matched him, divorced her, and married the woman he has now. Yun made no scene; she took the watch off and gave it back, and the next year fell ill and died on a rainy night. Qian had never opened that box again.

"My mother's seventh night," Qian said, "I wanted to wear it. As a way of… of making amends."

Fei studied him. Suit immaculate, hair combed without a stray hair, yet around the right ring finger a pale band of skin — the ghost of a wedding ring worn long and then removed. From those earlier days on, he had worn no ring, and never dared bring this watch into the light for anyone to see.

"You've told the truth," Fei said. "I can mend it. But first you should know the hour it stopped — eleven forty-seven at night. If you want it to go on, let it go on from that hour. Don't wind it back to now. The hours a man owes are counted from the night he owed them."

Qian nodded; the tears came first, and he did not wipe them.

He had a habit, mending a watch, of talking to it. "Take your time," he would murmur. "What's the rush? The days are long." Others laughed; he paid no mind. A man who spends his life among gears and hairsprings wears his heart thin. This time he switched on the lamp, unscrewed the back, freed the hairspring, replaced the mainspring, and touched a drop of oil. As the gold case closed again, he set the hands to eleven forty-seven, wound it, and the watch began to tick — a sound as light as someone sighing in the next room.

Qian took it, closed it in his palm, and left.

The lane fell quiet again. Fei bent his head and went back to wiping his glass bottles. The Shanghai watch on his right wrist still stood still, filmed with dust, its hands fixed at some dusk in 1987. His master had pressed it into his hand on his deathbed: "A watchmaker's hands must not stop — but don't you mend this one. Keep it, and remember how I went." Fei had kept that charge more than thirty years and never once laid a tool to it.

Late, when Granny Ma had packed her soy-milk stall and passed the bench, she found Fei still sitting, the lamp pulling his shadow long across the lane. "Old Fei," she said, "when are you going to fix your own?"

Fei lifted his wrist and smiled. "It isn't broken. I just won't let it run."