“I own three watches. One is an expensive gift, and I don’t like traveling with it. The second is a cheap Swatch. The third is the watch set to Berlin time.“

– Bonaparte, once, to Leopold

Once upon a time, he was a child, listening in the car to a cassette – once upon a time, people listened to cassettes – of Les Misérables.

No one called it Les Mis. Notat that time, not yet. He had not grown up or sad at the time either, not yet. He listened to the tape so often and long it went hoarse in parts; the best, the ones he paused and replayed. No matter; he knew them by heart.

Castles on clouds and revolutionary barricades. The roofs of Paris, its sewers. Places as magical, as real to him as Berlin and New York … Do you hear the people sing? He did, like the boy in the story “who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.” 

He sang until, when Les Misérables came to town, his parents took him to see the show.

A birthday present. An enormous, nearly unthinkable expense. So enormous his brother and sister would be sent to his grandparents’. He, his mother, and father would go, orchestra level, dead center. He knew every note of the score, every word in the libretto. 

They gave him the tickets on his birthday, a month before the show. That was the real present: that month, wondrous, of expectation. He found a watch that no longer worked and set it to eight p.m., the time the show would start, in a month. And for a month, he savoured.

The reader is expecting, perhaps, a sad twist at this point; a flat tire on the way, the flu the day before the performance…

“… but that’s not what happened. The show was the most spectacular, moving event I’d ever witnessed. I kept wearing the watch after that, set to that date and time, so I could look at it and remember.”

There are practical difficulties to wearing a watch set to the wrong time; that breathless second before the curtain rose one night at eight p.m. Examples include catching trains and scheduling appointments. Practical difficulties to growing up without growing cynical.

To not forgetting the words to certain songs, how birthdays and Christmases felt. To seeing the world, whatever the cost, orchestra level, dead center. To living constantly, breathlessly riveted, on a castle on a cloud, in love, in the midst of hate and crowds of rushing commuters.

Fortunately, he did not become a practical man. The watch helped. Years later, once upon a time, it was finally time. He went.

To New York, to Paris, to Berlin. As magical, as real as he had spent years dreaming, savouring, believing they could be. Mad Hatters and Mona Lisas. Rooftops, stars, sewers. Döner kebabs at two a.m. and dodging S-Bahn ticket inspectors.

It was the most spectacular, moving show anyone had ever witnessed. When he returned home, he left the watch on Berlin Time and put it in a drawer.