Photo by Anahit Hayrapetyan
Perpetuum mobile-an imaginary machine that works without loss of energetic resources.
Its existence contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics. By the Law of Energy Conservation, all the attempts of making an eternal engine are condemned to failure.
I was turning the pedals, but my bicycle was not moving. I was moving faster and faster, with as much power as I had in my feet. I was sweating and my feet were getting tired, but my bicycle was not moving. The front wheel was not moving. As fast as I was turning the pedals, the light bulb on the ceiling was turning red.
My father, who was a successful inventor, found a fat book from my mother’s library about eternal engines and read all day. He was thinking about making such an engine that would produce energy and work forever. My mother, who was a teacher of physics, was snickering and nodding her head and explaining to my father that it was just a theory and that the eternal engine’s existence was impossible for one simple reason, loss of energy. My father argued with my mother.
“It is possible,” he said. He pointed to the example of the clock in Prague’s square that works from time immemorial and without anyone’s interference, even without winding, and until today it displays the correct time. No one so far has found the clock’s eternal engine’s secret. He said that on top of the clock’s huge number board are big windows, the size of the door on our house. Each hour two of those windows open and twelve apostles come out, look at the square, and return inside. Then an ominous skeleton comes out and rings a bell in its hand, the rooster crows, and the windows close. My grandfather was in Prague. My father believed his account. Prague’s clock was what gave my father hope that an eternal engine was possible. It was raining in Prague, and people were holding black umbrellas. Behind the windows of gloomy buildings, people’s silhouettes were not moving. I was riding on Prague’s tiled streets on my bike. People for a moment were looking out from under their umbrellas and wondering, seeing me getting wet from a light rain shower since I had no umbrella or hat. Finally, I made it to the square.
My father called. On the square of Prague, I was standing under the tower of the clock and looking at how amazing it was. The skeleton came out and started to ring the bell. Then the room was buried in darkness.
“Poor thing,” my mother said. “Lost in sweat.”
“It is enough,” said my mother, sitting in candlelight.
I realize now that they never let me stop at anything. They woke me up; my mother in the morning, my teachers at lunch time, my father in the evening. They woke me while I was in a dream. While I was dreaming, alarm clocks woke me, phones, door bells, school bells, car horns, my father’s voice, which was demanding that I ride my bike.
I continued turning the bicycle’s pedals. My mother was continuing her laundry, washing clothes in a tub. My father continued making his schema for the eternal engine. My sister was lying on a sofa upside down, so the blood went right to her brain, and was reading. My mother took a break every so often and, wiping the sweat from her brow, sighed.
My father caught her gasping for air and said that it is worthless to try to catch the bus with a bike. She never even caught it once. My mother was quiet and continued her laundry.
One evening my bike’s chain fell off; the house was buried in darkness. After a couple days, my father put the chain back on; the ceiling light turned red and started spreading light. I noticed that my father’s eyes were wet: Prague’s rain was running from his eyes.
“Where did your mother leave you?” my father cried with a quiet voice. “Where did she go? Mmmm? Where?”
Then my father connected my bike to the engine that he made and the engine to the washing machine. I was moving my bike’s pedals, the washing machine was working, and when I remembered that my mother was not there anymore, I moved the pedals even faster. I was gasping for air, breathless, but my determination never left me.
One day I had a dream. My mother was in Prague. She got on a tram, and I tried to catch her with my bike. I turned and turned the pedals to catch the tram; the tram’s bell rang. I awoke from the dream in our room and understood that the tram was not real: I had a dream in my dream. When I woke up in the morning, the tiredness of my legs was still there. After forty days, my mother was gone. My grandfather appeared and said that my father was going to have a new wife. My father understood that my mother was not coming back.
That evening I found a back wheel for my bike. As soon as my father fell asleep, I took the bike out of the house. My sister sat backwards on the bike, her back toward me, facing the way that was getting longer as our house got further and further away. Finally, I challenged the stability of my bike and moved it from its place. The house was left in darkness, and my father was asleep. My sister had a money box with her modest savings. She felt sorry, but she didn’t let me break the damn thing.
We needed to rent a house. So I took a job at the train station, unloading trains.
Our doorbell rang. It was my grandfather. For the first time I saw him with a tie, and I thought it was Czech. He came inside. He looked at our gloomy walls in our rented house. I thought he honestly felt sorry, but my sister thought that he was faking the sadness. He told us that my father’s wife had a child. Then he added that my father made an engine for the crib, so he doesn’t have to rock the crib and he would be able to read. He didn’t take the eternal engine out of his mind. He may never do it.
My grandfather wrote down our phone number, folded the paper, placed it in his pocket, and disappeared. One day the phone rang. I picked it up; it was not him. My grandfather never called us. It was my father’s wife. She was agitated and asked us to go their house. My sister cried.
She didn’t see our father for six years. When the door opened, a big, tall woman stood right in front of us. My father would have been as tall as her waist, but maybe in my memories my father was small.
The lady cried and I noticed next to her a poor boy who saw me for the first time. He was looking at me and studying me like he was noticing my father’s features repeating on my face.
“Do you know that your father has not said a word to me so far?” said my father’s wife.
“He wouldn’t talk to us either,” I replied.
It was impossible to catch my father.
“Where is he?” I asked my father’s wife.
“Your father?” she asked.
“Yes,” my sister replied.
“He took a rope and went to the cemetery to hang himself.”
My father’s child hugged his mother.
“Why?” asked my sister.
My father’s wife shrugged her shoulders. With her guilty look, she relied on my help because she knew that my sister didn’t know how to forgive.
“Did something similar happen before?” I asked my father’s wife.
“No!” she replied. “But your father is like a two-year-old child when he gets upset. One time he was upset before we went to sleep; and when I looked for him in the morning, I found him scrunched up in a crib.
It was after midnight. We were on the way to the cemetery, looking for my father. The cemetery was not far from our house.
“I know where our father went,” said my sister.
We went by my mother’s cemetery. All four of us were quiet.
“He wouldn’t do it,” said my father’s wife. “I know him well by now. He wouldn’t do it. When he needs to get his tooth pulled, he ties his tooth with a string and the other side of the string on the door knob and asks me to pull the door. He asks me, he doesn’t have the courage.”
“People commit suicide only once,” my sister replied testily.
“There is not even a normal tree to tie a rope,” said my father’s wife. “From what is he going to hang himself?”
We approached my mother’s grave, but my father was not there. I looked at my mother’s portrait. She didn’t know. My father didn’t visit her. My father’s wife sat by my mother’s grave and cried for her fortune. She complained about my father. She apologized to my mother for slapping my father. I didn’t know if she knew that my mother was a forgiving person, or if she was assuming that dead people are forgivers.
She apologized that we weren’t living with them. My sister cried, too. The little six-year-old boy’s eyes were filled with tears. He hadn’t seen my mother. It was odd that I never knew him; I thought that he was my real brother and my mother hid his existence, and that my father’s wife had nothing to do with his existence.
From their cries, I understood that they were trying to stay a while. I left there and went alone to look for my father in a big cemetery.
I went so deep, and I was afraid to look at the gravestones in case I’d see my father’s picture on one of them. I don’t know how far I went when I noticed a shadow that was not mine. I turned around, scared. It was the little one who followed me. For the first time, when it was just two of us in that gloomy cemetery, I noticed that he looked like my father. He was carefully looking around at the tombstones. Maybe he was trying to understand why they have people’s pictures printed on the stones. Who were they? After that, I was afraid that he might not like strangers.
For a moment, I thought I lost him. Then I noticed that he was bent over an open sewer pipe and was looking at the reflection of his silhouette on the water. I held his hand and continued looking for my father. My father was nowhere. We climbed to the highest point of cemetery.
We looked down the hill and saw our house buried in the darkness. There was a deaf silence in the cemetery. The tombstones were quiet. We turned around. I was trying to remember what kinds of things my father had told me. I was unable to hear his voice in my memory.
We checked all over at the cemetery. For a moment I thought my father was very short, only as tall as my waist, as tall as the tombstones, and he was hiding behind the tombstones, passing from one to the next. We passed the same sewer pipes again. My brother held his head down and looked at the water and started wondering. Maybe he thought the reflection of his silhouette was left in the underground sewer pipes. Then we turned around to my mother’s cemetery. Behind the cigarette smoke, the darkness was hiding someone. It was not my father’s wife; it was my sister. It was the first time I saw her smoking.
We went back home. My father’s wife tried to pull the door, but it didn’t want to open. She pulled harder. The door opened. From inside we heard some vague noise. Tied to the inside part of the door knob was a rope. I was scared. I went in carefully. My father’s wife turned the lights on behind me. My sister and my father’s wife screamed as they walked in behind me. My father tied one side of the rope to the door knob and the other side to a chair leg.
When she opened the door, she pulled the chair on which my father was standing with the rope around his neck. Who knows how long he was waiting for someone to open the door? The body was swinging. The pendulum on the clock was moving forward and back. The cuckoo came out randomly from its nest and four times artificially called “Ku-ku.”
Ku-ku.
Ku-ku.
Ku-ku.
Ku-ku.
Until now, I can’t get rid of the feeling of the moment when I saw my six-year-old brother’s hair turning gray.
During my father’s funeral, my grandfather told me a secret, that the reason of my father’s death was him. He was guilty of making the door open outward.
When my father’s casket was lowered by ropes into the ground, my sister turned around and slapped my father’s wife.
The casket made a solemn thud inside the hole. My father’s wife gathered her things in suitcases and left. I looked at my father’s wife dragging her suitcases and at my brother walking next to her. Who was that strange lady? How did she find my brother? How did she find us? And why was she taking my brother? My sister and I returned home.
Before we went to sleep, I hung on the wall a photo of my father in which he appeared to be thinking. I destroyed the clock’s engine, so the cuckoo bird didn’t come out, so we couldn’t hear its call. The bird stopped coming out, but it was still calling from inside the clock.
That first night I dreamed that my bike was in my room; it was shining. I touched the handle bars and turned the wheels by hand. Then suddenly I noticed that my father was hanging from the ceiling. He was pale. I sat on the bike and started to turn the pedals. The color on my father’s face was coming back. I started to turn the pedals a little faster. I thought my father grinned. I turned the pedals even faster. I recognized his smile and gave more power to the pedals.
He blinked his eyes. I turned the pedals as fast I was able. He winked. Then the little clever part of my mind snickered. I was turning the pedals with as much power as I had. I was sweated, I was panting, but I was turning the pedals with more and more power. My father was not realizing that he should let the rope go. My legs were getting tired and my power was abandoning me slowly…
Translated by Dr. Lusine Mueller
Edited by Dr. Alfred Mueller
