The sun had just gone down when I stepped into a workshop at a palace. A water clock in the shape of an elephant stood to one side, taller than a man. Small figures sat on top of it, and at the appointed hour, I was told, one of them moves and strikes a bell. In a small pool at the center of the workshop a boat floated, and on it sat four musicians made of bronze. Water trickled somewhere. An old man was peering inside the arm of one of the musicians, moving a small peg to another hole.
When he took his hand away, the musicians on the boat began to move. They made as if to beat a drum and play a pipe. With no one touching them at all. But the tune was not the one from a moment before.
"The tune has changed," I said.
"Change where the peg sits and the tune changes." He answered with satisfaction. "Each of these pegs is an instruction. Depending on which hole it goes into, the figure moves differently. I am writing down for the figure beforehand what to do and how to do it. Then the figure moves as I have written, even when I am not beside it. Move the pegs and it plays another piece." He pointed to the elephant clock. "That one counts the hours by the force of rising water, and strikes its own bell at each appointed time. Without a man keeping watch."
"They seem alive," I said.
"That is exactly what visitors say." He laughed. "They stand there open-mouthed. They think it is alive. Some are frightened by it. A made thing moving like a man. ...Honestly, I enjoy their astonishment. As though I had shaped life myself."
I watched the bronze musician quietly. Fingers moving with great delicacy, and not one breath drawn. The chest did not rise and fall. "If you pulled out all of these pegs," I asked, "what becomes of this musician?"
His hand stopped.
"...It stops," he said. "Until they go back in, it is a lump of bronze."
"And it cannot start itself again?"
"It cannot." He drew his hand slowly off the figure. The pleasure went out of his face, and something deeper rose in its place. "I always thought I was imitating life, and just now I understand. It is only imitation. This musician does what I have written for it. What I have not written, it can never do. It cannot be astonished, cannot love, cannot decide on its own to stop. It moves, and it is not alive."
Out on the pool the musician repeated the same tune, note for note. Without a hair's error. Without a hair of heart.
"Then why do you keep making them?" I asked. "Knowing they are not alive."
He was quiet a long while. "...I have always wondered that myself," he said at last. "Knowing it is a vain thing, I have spent my life trying to make a figure closer to being alive. One more thread of breath, one more piece of heart. Reaching my hand out, knowing I cannot touch it. As if something inside me already knows the very thing I cannot make, and misses it."
"Movement I can give," he said quietly. "More exactly than a man's. But life — however finely I set the pegs, I cannot give a single grain of it. The gap between movement and life is an invisible river my craft can never cross." He looked up at the elephant clock. As though at something higher than it. "It is a strange thing. I am a maker. And the more I make, the clearer it becomes what I cannot make. And the thing I cannot make is the thing I keep missing. Knowing my hand will not reach it."
I stayed with that a long time. It was exactly what I had wanted to hear from this man — no, it was also my own heart, which I had carried all my life without a name for it. Made of clay, and missing what is not clay. Having an end, and missing what has no end. Beyond the river he said he could not cross, it seemed to me, must stand the one who first cut that river. And this old man's longing, and mine, may both be an answer to one voice calling us from across it. I only bowed my head where he had bowed his. Two thirsty men, waiting for the same rain.
As I left the workshop, the elephant clock reached its appointed hour and rang its own bell. A clear and exact sound. The old man raised his head at it for a moment, then bent again over the inside of the bronze musician's arm. The back of a man who spent his life imitating life, and bows lower before the thing he cannot imitate. The water ran without stopping, counting out the next hour.
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