When I was a kid, I had a grandfather. “Well what?” You ask me. Grandparents are everybody. The usual case.
It is so, not entirely. The children of my generation had little grandparents. My grandmothers were, yes. The military widows.

My grandmother was also a military widow. Where did Grandpa come from? Her grandfather was her second husband, her mother’s father. He was also a widow, his family (children and wife, pregnant with twins at the beginning of the war) died in the Minsk ghetto. He himself remained alive by chance – rushed to take his eldest daughter from the summer camp under the tombile. I could not go back to Minsk. not had time.

Then there were many such families - people, broken by the war and lost loved ones, came together and tried to rebuild some peaceful life, raise surviving children.

My grandfather was a clockmaker. A good watchmaker - other watchmakers respected him very much and admired his skill. “Well,” smiled the grandfather, “I was given ten years of teaching to such a master!”
The master became his second father. The disciple adored him, wrote letters to him and consulted him in difficult times - all his life, as long as the Master was alive.

The childhood memory. I am 5 years old. The evening. It is dark in the room. At one end of the long table burns a bright table lamp, and the grandfather, putting a lump in the eye, concentrated over the next clock. I know that it is impossible to distract or distract him, his work is small and diligent. I am just interested in watching him. But if suddenly a small piece falls on the floor, I immediately jump up and run for the magnet - "there are children's eyes... found? This is smart!”

Grandfather's watches were different - mostly handheld, of course, but also desktops and walls... We also had old German watches hanging at home, bought after the war at the bazar and hand-repaired by them. They beat every hour – a bim-bom! Every half hour a bomb!
(All my life afterwards I will be drawn to old watches, desks, floors and especially walls with battle - unfashionable and unnecessary in our time, they will remind me of my childhood and grandfather.)

One day, the client brought to repair the stalled clock and begged his grandfather to "do something". The clock was wrapped in a blanket like a child. Very old clock. In a terrible condition.

“No,” my grandfather shrugged his head, “I can’t fix such a mess. They have a place in the garbage. I have no such details.

But the client did not leave. He continued to call “the best master”. It was very important for him to make that clock go back. No, he didn’t need others. It is these. After long interrogations, he finally admitted that his reason was, of course, a fool... but daddy... the old daddy... “has gotten in his head”... when the clock stops, he will die. How do you like that? Have you ever heard something like this? And now he slept out of sorrow and says that his time has come...

Grandpa scratched his head and promised to try.

Oh, and he was tormented with those hours, oh, and wept! He consulted with other watchmakers, cleansed something carefully, tossed and wrapped, looked for some missing springs... One day we and he even went somewhere far away to the other end of the city, where in a small wooden booth a very ancient old man sat and digged in old mechanisms. Once he was even a better master than my grandfather, but now for the difficult work no longer took - the eyes are not the same, the hands are not the same... But no matter how there was, the right wheel he still found.

The grandmother cried, recalled the old Jewish word "ain-rE-de-nish" - "self-suspension", "self-deal", "imaginary disease", argued that a person can go through a war, lose loved ones, overcome unbearable pain, survive the most terrible times - and die from such nonsense...

After a long time, the clock was repaired. The client was out of joy.

Grandpa died three years later. The owner of the watch recovered and lived safely for several more years. The old clock survived them both. And they went for a long time, counting the time that passes... and goes... and is forgotten.

And only somewhere deep in the bottom of my memory is still warm an old saying in an already almost dead language: "An anredenish from Erger Fun a Krenk" - "Imaginary disease is worse than real."

Memory is such a thing... if it is allowed, it takes us back, back, to those times that have long passed and will never return - where everyone we loved is still alive.
But when I take the clock in my hands to turn the arrow again, I always hear my grandfather’s voice: “Never turn the clock back! It is very harmful! Just forward!”

Only forward.