Four digits in the entryway

Last Sunday at the barakholka, two rows over from where the robot came from, a wall clock lay face up on a folded blanket. Its cord was coiled on the glass like a garden hose put away by somebody tidy. Four digits behind a dark pane in a wooden frame, ЭЛЕКТРОНИКА 7 lettered small in the corner. It was built to sit above a door, not on the ground. I recognised it before I read it. There was one in my classroom at school, above the board, and I loved it the way you are allowed to love an object at nine, without needing a reason. The room was not orderly. Forty of us, a teacher who had given up on the back rows, a timetable nobody believed in. The clock did not care. It cut the morning into pieces I could hold: second lesson, eighteen minutes of it left. It was the only thing in the building nobody argued with.

Elektronika was never a factory: it was the name the Soviet electronics ministry put on almost anything with a circuit inside, calculators, tape decks, pocket games, clocks. The 7 is the clock line. Seven-segment displays, four digits or eleven, the long ones counting out the date as well. Some glowed by vacuum fluorescence and some by diodes. Mine is the diode kind, each stroke assembled out of small round lamps. It began as a kit from the Reflektor plant in Saratov.

Mine hangs in the entryway now, above the coat hooks, where it lights the wall green a second or two before I find the switch. These clocks were built for corridors and dispatch offices, and a great many still hang in exactly those places, which is the part I keep returning to. It has made the flat countable in a way I did not ask for, which is the same service it did in that classroom. I do not look at it for the time. I look at it and know how much of the day is gone, and the day holds still for a second while I do.