The Clockwork Bird

1The clockwork bird had sat on the shelf in Grandpa’s workshop for as long as Mira could remember: a small brass nightingale on a silver branch, its feathers engraved so finely they seemed to ruffle. Grandpa said his own grandfather had made it, in a town in Hungary that no longer had the same name. When it was wound, it was supposed to sing.

2It had not sung for forty years.

3“Something inside is broken,” Grandpa said, whenever Mira asked. “Very small. Very old. Nobody makes the parts any more.” Then he would turn back to the clocks on his bench, the ones customers brought in, and the subject was closed.

4After Grandpa’s stroke, the workshop went quiet. His right hand would not do what he told it, and the tiny screwdrivers lay untouched in their leather roll. He sat by the window most afternoons, watching the street. Mira, who was fifteen, came every day after school. Sometimes they talked. More often they did not.

5One afternoon, without quite knowing why, she took the bird down from the shelf and set it on the bench in front of him.

6“Show me,” she said.

7He looked at her for a long time. Then he pointed with his left hand at the smallest screwdriver.

8It took them five weeks. Grandpa could not hold the tools, but he could see, and he could explain. Mira’s hands became his. She learned to lift the brass casing without scratching it, to lay out each part on a white cloth in the order it came out, to breathe slowly when her fingers wanted to shake. Under his directions, she found the problem: a spring no thicker than a hair, snapped clean through.

9There was no replacement. So, with Grandpa leaning so close that she could hear him breathing, she shaped a new one from a strand of piano wire, bending it with pliers a fraction of a millimetre at a time. It took her four attempts.

10On the evening she finished, Mira wound the key and set the bird on the bench between them.

11For a moment, nothing. Then the brass head turned. The tiny beak opened. And a thin, sweet, slightly wavering song filled the workshop, rising and falling like something remembered from very far away.

12Mira looked at Grandpa. His eyes were wet. He reached out with his good hand and covered hers, and they sat there, the two of them, until the song wound down and the bird was still again.

13“Now,” he said quietly, “you know how.”