...of dead clocks

Theodor's room was the only warm room in the house. Since Frau Bernheim had started economising, the porter was only allowed to turn on the heat when the temperature outside was down to 5 Centigrade. A savage chill clung to the furniture, the rugs and the windows in all the rooms. They resembled the cold, clear, tidy and eerily clean rooms in the windows of furniture shops. Everything was pristine and unused. The polish gleamed like new. The carpets seemed never to have picked up any dust. Several of them had been taken up Frau Bernheim and stood in the corners of the rooms. They rested there, weighty and confident, as though they expected to be collected by someone. In the places where they had been, the flooring was linoleum, soft and smooth and brick-red - like india-rubber underfoot. Of the many clocks that Herr Felix Bernheim had had put into his redecorated house - when he was alive there had been one in every room, because of his weakness for them, and his knowledge that time was precious - only the one on the mantel in the dining room was still kept going. Frau Bernheim feared that the delicate mechanisms would run down with constant use. She left he dead clocks in their places, one in every room. From their meaningless white and silver faces, and the hands showing the same frozen hour for years, there radiated an eerie silence that stalked the frosty emptiness of the rooms.

[Right & Left, Roth, J.]