Chapter 48: Flea Market
The plasterer had vanished.
One day, he was giving a detailed, spit-flecked monologue about the superior porosity of lime-based renders, waving his calloused hands over Kira’s blueprints.The next, his phone went straight to a generic mailbox message. Matthias, looking more grizzled bear than architect, muttered darkly about the “cursed eastern wall” and the flighty nature of artisans. The second quote, from Felix’s dachshund-owning contact, arrived on a piece of torn notebook paper, the numbers circled twice in anxious red pen.It was forty percent higher.
“It’s the arched niches,” Yvonne sighed, pressing her glasses to the bridge of her nose. She stood in the café’s back room, sunlight highlighting the dust motes dancing over the disaster of her planning table. Sample tiles, fabric swatches, and three separate, conflicting structural reports formed a topographical map of her anxiety. “He says they’re a ‘bespoke shape.’ ‘Bespoke’ just means ‘expensive’ in contractor.”
Joost leaned against the doorframe, tablet in hand. “I could tell him we’ll pay him in exposure. The influencers Vita knows will definitely tag him.”
“He’d probably throw a trowel at you,” Yvonne said, but a faint smile touched her lips.
Vita bustled past with a tray of freshly washed milk jugs, her cheeks pink from the steam. “My uncle in Riga, he is plasterer!Very good!But also… now he is in jail. For… disagreement about a car.” She shrugged, as if this were a minor vocational hiccup.“A shame. He had gentle touch.”
The door to the café floor swung open, and Victoria entered, shedding the crisp Berlin morning like a second skin. She wore dark jeans and a simple black sweater, her work bag slung over one shoulder. She took in the scene: Yvonne’s slumped shoulders, the chaotic table, Joost’s dramatic posture of despair.
“Impromptu crisis summit?” Victoria asked, setting her bag down.“The plasterer ghosted us.The new quote is terrifying. Vita’s uncle is incarcerated.” Yvonne summarized, waving a hand over the table.
“Ah.” Victoria moved to the small sink, filled a glass of water, and drank it slowly. She placed the glass down with a quiet click.“Right.We’re going out.”
Yvonne blinked. “Out where?I have to—”
“You have to not look at this for three hours. Or you’ll start believing in Matthias’s curse.” Victoria’s tone brooked no argument. “Joost, Vita—can you hold the fort? There’s a lull until the lunch rush.”
Joost straightened, puffing out his chest.“The Klee is in capable hands. The espresso machine and I have an understanding.”
“It’s a machine, you noodle,” Yvonne said fondly.
“A sensitive soul!” he called after them as Victoria gently steered Yvonne by the shoulders towards the door.
“Where are we going?” Yvonne asked, grabbing her patchwork jacket from the hook.“You need something broken that you can fix. Or something old you can polish. We’re going to find it.”
Twenty minutes on the U-Bahn, packed with weekend shoppers and tourists, deposited them into a different kind of Berlin pulse. Mauerpark on a Sunday wasn’t a location; it was an organism. The noise hit first—a glorious, sprawling cacophony of beats from competing buskers, the shrieks of children chasing soap bubbles, the polyglot hum of thousands of people bargaining, laughing, shouting. The air was a layered symphony of scents: sizzling currywurst, sweet churros dusted in sugar, the damp-earth smell of crushed grass, and beneath it all, the subtle, dusty perfume of forgotten things.
The flea market sprawled like a vibrant, chaotic marketplace from a dream. Endless rows of trestle tables and blankets on the ground buried under the physical sediment of lives.Cracked porcelain dolls shared space with tangled heaps of brass doorknobs. There were towers of vinyl records, racks of fur coats smelling of mothballs, glass cases displaying Soviet-era pins and medals. A man played a saw with a violin bow, its eerie, wavering note cutting through the din.Yvonne inhaled deeply, the tension in her shoulders beginning to unknot. “Okay,” she said, almost to herself.“This is good.”
Victoria watched her, fascinated. Yvonne’s eyes, usually so focused on the immediate tasks of the café, had gone wide and soft, scanning the disorder with a curator’s practiced gaze. She wasn’t looking at the mess; she was looking through it, searching for the singular, salvageable note in the noise.
“What’s the strategy?” Victoria asked, tucking her hands into her pockets.This was Yvonne’s domain.
“No strategy,” Yvonne said, already moving towards a stall overflowing with kitchenware.“You just walk until something calls to you. It’s not about what you need. It’s about what fits.” She picked up a glass juicer, its ribs cloudy with age, turned it over, set it down.They drifted through the aisles. Yvonne’s fingers grazed surfaces, feeling textures—the smooth cold of marble, the rough warp of water-damaged wood, the satisfying heft of a cast-iron pan. She bartered effortlessly in rapid-fire German with a woman over a box of mismatched spoons, emerging with six for a few euros.
“For the sugar bowls,” she explained to Victoria, slipping them into her tote bag. “When they go missing.”
Victoria, whose world was built on precise acquisition—research, compare, procure—found the process beautifully alien. She saw a art deco lamp, its base tarnished but elegant. “That could be stunning restored,” she pointed out.Yvonne glanced at it.“Yes. But it’s too… proud.It would glare at the other furniture. It wouldn’t be happy.” She said it with such absolute conviction that Victoria couldn’t doubt her.
They turned a corner, and the character of the stalls shifted.Here, it was less curated junk, more true debris. A mountain of old doors leaned against a fence. Boxes of rusted hinges, nails loose by the pound, orphaned tiles.Yvonne stopped.
On a frayed blanket, next to a heap of bicycle chains, sat a clock.Or rather, the remains of one. It was large, designed to hang on a wall, its case made of solid, dark oak, carved with simple, sunburst patterns around the edges.The glass was gone. The face, yellowed with age and stained by water, was cracked diagonally.The numbers were bold, black Art Nouveau-style numerals. The hands were missing.It was a corpse of time.Yvonne knelt.
The stall owner, an old man with a face like a weathered walnut, watched from a stool, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.He said nothing.Yvonne picked the clock up. It was heavier than it looked.She turned it over.The back panel was missing, revealing a cavern of dusty, intricate mechanics. A few gears were visible, frozen with rust.The pendulum hook was empty. She brought it close to her face, her glasses slipping down her nose.
“It’s Swiss,” she murmured, more to the clock than to anyone.“The movement… see the stamp?It’s solid. Just seized.”
Victoria knelt beside her. “Can it be fixed?”
“Anything can be fixed,” Yvonne said, her voice distant, absorbed.Her thumb rubbed a smudge of dirt from the oak. “It’s a matter of whether it’s worth the work. Whether it wants to be fixed.” She looked up, her eyes finding the old man. “Wie viel?”
A grunt.A figure.It was negligible.
Victoria reached for her wallet, but Yvonne stopped her with a touch.“No. This one’s mine.” She paid with coins from her pocket, the transaction silent and swift.
As they walked away, the clock cradled carefully in Yvonne’s arms, Victoria asked, “Why that? It’s just a broken clock.”
“It’s not just anything,” Yvonne corrected gently. “Look at the carving.Someone took real time with this.Not for show. For the pleasure of the line.It was loved.Then it was forgotten. It ended up on a blanket next to bike chains.” She adjusted her grip.“It deserves a second chance.To be clean. To be quiet. To maybe even tell time again, in its own way.”
Victoria felt a lump form in her throat.The analogy was so clear, so unspoken. The fear of becoming forgotten, of being left beside the irrelevant debris of a faster world. The desperate, quiet hope for a second chance, for hands capable of gentle restoration.
“Besides,” Yvonne said, her tone lightening, “the café needs a clock.The one above the counter ticks too loudly.It sounds impatient. This one,” she looked down at the broken face, “when it works, it will have a kinder sound.”
They wandered further, the clock a new anchor. Yvonne found a box of vintage postcards—Berlin scenes from the 60s—and bought them for the wall behind the register. Victoria, emboldened, haggled fiercely and successfully for a bizarre, ugly little painting of a melancholy cat in a spacesuit, simply because it made Yvonne laugh until she snorted.
The afternoon sun warmed their backs. They ate greasy fries from a paper cone, sprinkled with curry gewürz, and watched a crowd gather for the weekly bear pit karaoke. The raw, unselfconscious joy of it was contagious.
Standing there, licking salt from her fingers, Yvonne looked at the crowd, then at the heavy, broken clock in her arms, then at Victoria—who was smiling at a man butchering a David Bowie song with glorious, tearful conviction.
“You know,” Yvonne said, her voice almost lost in the music, “the plasterer.He didn’t believe in the project.He saw a list of tasks and a price tag. He didn’t see the sunburst arch, or the way the light is supposed to hit the tiles at four PM.” She shifted the clock. “We need to find someone who sees the clock, not the rust.”
Victoria nodded, wiping a smudge of ketchup from the corner of Yvonne’s mouth with her thumb.“Then we keep looking. We don’t hire the first person who shows up.We wait for the one who gets it.” She paused. “The café can survive a few more weeks of exposed brick. It has personality.”
Yvonne leaned into her, the solidity of Victoria a counterweight to the fragile, hopeful burden in her arms. The contractor problem hadn’t been solved.The quote was still exorbitant. But the panic had been sanded down, replaced by a gritty, determined patience. She had, literally, found a new piece of the future to rebuild.
As they walked back towards the U-Bahn, the sounds of the flea market fading behind them, Yvonne said, “I know a retired watchmaker. In Wedding.He’s irascible.And brilliant. He might know a plasterer.”
It wasn’t a solution.It was a thread. And for now, holding the beautiful, broken clock and Victoria’s steadying hand, the thread was enough.
And for now, holding the beautiful, broken clock and Victoria’s steadying hand, the thread was enough.
They were navigating a narrower lane, where the stalls gave way to individuals selling things from the backs of vans and the trunks of dented cars, when a sharp, distressed yip cut through the hum.It was a sound of pure frustration. Then another, higher, more plaintive.Yvonne’s head snapped towards the source.
A man in a stained anorak stood beside an old Volvo estate, its tailgate open. Two dogs were tethered to the tow hitch by mismatched leashes. One, a skinny greyhound mix, shivered silently, pressed against the bumper.The other was the source of the noise. It was a wiry tangle of black and tan fur, standing with stiff, defiant posture, barking at a pigeon on a nearby awning. It wasn’t large, but it was dense, a bundle of rough-hewn energy.The man gave its leash a curt tug. “Ruhe jetzt!”
The dog ignored him, issuing one final, thwarted ‘arrf’ at the bird before turning in a tight, agitated circle and sitting abruptly, as if the decision were its own.
Yvonne stopped walking.Her gaze fixed on the dog.It had a beard, she realized. A scruff of darker fur around its muzzle gave it a look of perpetual, grumpy assessment. Its ears were folded forward, tips flopping, and its legs were indeed comically short for its sturdy torso.“He’s like a barrel on stilts,” Victoria observed quietly.
“Not stilts,” Yvonne murmured, already drifting closer. “Little table legs.”
The man saw her interest and plastered on a weary, salesmen’s smile.“Guter Hund. Sehr loyal.”
“What is he?” Yvonne asked, kneeling a few feet away, placing the clock carefully on the ground. The dog swiveled its head, regarding her with bright, liquid-brown eyes.It did not wag its tail.
“Airedale, fast,” the man said, crouching to scratch behind the dog’s ear. The dog tolerated it for a second before shaking its head free.“But the legs, you see?Papers got lost in a move. The breeder, he wouldn’t take him back.Not to standard.Temperament is… lively. Needs a firm hand.”
The dog sniffed the air towards Yvonne, took two hesitant steps until its leash went taut. It stared at the cracked face of the clock beside her, then back up at her face, tilting its head.
“He’s judging my life choices,” Yvonne whispered to Victoria.
“He’s not wrong,” Victoria whispered back, but she was watching Yvonne’s face, seeing the same focused softness that had settled there with the clock.
Yvonne held out her closed fist. The dog deigned to sniff it, a quick, dismissive puff of air. Then it licked her knuckles once, a dry, rough swipe, before sitting back down, as if completing an inspection protocol.
“How much?” The question left Yvonne’s lips before she seemed to consciously form it.The man named a figure. It was, as he’d said, good.Shockingly good. It was the price of a mediocre espresso machine, or three of Matthias’s bespoke niches.A stillness settled over their little triangle. The greyhound shivered.The lively dog scratched its neck with a vigorous back leg, the sound overly loud.
Victoria crouched next to Yvonne, her voice low and practical. “You’re about to start a renovation.There will be dust, strangers, noise.You have a café to run downstairs. I’m… functionally bisected between here and London for the foreseeable future.” She listed each point like a checkbox. “Logistically, it’s a terrible idea.”
Yvonne nodded, still looking at the dog. It had found a small scrap of tape on the pavement and was now chewing it with intense, focused concern. “I know.”
“He’s not a clock, Liebling. You can’t put him on a shelf when he’s broken.”
“I know that, too.”
They watched the dog. It abandoned the tape, sighed deeply, and laid its head on its paws, its eyebrows twitching.
“He’s a mess,” Victoria said, her voice softening.“So’s the clock.So’s my renovation schedule. So’s… us, in some ways.” Yvonne finally looked at Victoria. “But we’re trying to build something solid.Something that lasts.”
Victoria absorbed this. Her gaze travelled from Yvonne’s earnest face to the dog’s resigned one. “A living thing,” she said, the words testing a new weight. “It’s a bigger commitment than a lease agreement.”
“It is.”
“It would be our dog,” Victoria stated, clarifying. “Not your dog I visit.Not my dog you watch. A shared, ridiculous, non-standard dog.”
A slow smile spread across Yvonne’s face, tentative and hopeful. “Yours, mine, and Café Klee’s.He could be the official floor inspector. A temperamental, leg-deficient quality control manager.”
The dog farted, a surprisingly poignant sound in the tense silence. It looked vaguely embarrassed.Victoria choked on a laugh.“See?He’s opinionated. He has feedback.”
Yvonne reached out, this time to gently touch the wiry fur on the dog’s head.It didn’t pull away. It simply closed its eyes, accepting the contact as its due.“Something alive,” Yvonne murmured, her voice thick. “Something we have to care for together. Not a project, but a… a heartbeat in the middle of it all.”
Victoria watched Yvonne’s strong, capable hand resting on the animal’s scruff.She thought of her London flat, silent and sterile. She thought of Yvonne’s apartment, cluttered and breathing. She imagined the click of claws on the floorboards above the café, a presence waiting for her return.A reason to hurry back.
It was the most illogical, perfect next step.
“We’d need a vet,” Victoria said, shifting into planning mode, a familiar comfort in the unknown.“A name.A bed.Food. We’re agreeing to fifteen years of vet bills and chewed shoes over a single glance.”
Yvonne’s eyes glistened behind her red frames. “Is that a yes?”
Victoria took a deep breath, smelling dog, dust, currywurst, and the impossible future. “It’s a ‘let’s take him for a walk and see if he tries to drag us into the Spree.’ Then we’ll discuss.”
Yvonne stood, brushing grit from her knees, and looked at the man.“Can we walk him? Just around the block.”
The man shrugged, handing over the leash.“Fünf Minuten. He pulls.”
The moment the leash changed hands, the dog stood, shook itself from nose to tail, and looked up at Yvonne with a sudden, alarming sense of purpose. It was no longer a forlorn creature on a blanket; it was a creature with a direction.
They set off, the dog trotting ahead with decisive, short-legged purpose, the broken clock tucked under Victoria’s arm.It didn’t pull. It led. It moved like a small, furry engine, navigating the crowd with a confident weave, pausing only once to inspect a discarded pretzel before deciding against it.
“He’s practical,” Yvonne observed, the leash already feeling natural in her grip.
“He’s got terrible legs and no papers,” Victoria said, watching the dog’s determined progress. “He’s a mutt with an identity crisis.”
“Aren’t we all?” Yvonne said softly.
They walked in silence for a block, the rhythm of the dog’s pace setting a new tempo for the day.The plasterer was forgotten.The daunting quote was a distant cloud. There was only this: the pull of a leash, the weight of a clock, the woman beside her, and the terrifying, thrilling prospect of a shared heartbeat.
“We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” Victoria asked, her voice full of wonder.
Yvonne glanced at her, then down at the dog, then back at the path ahead. “I think,” she said, “he’s already decided for us.”
He had. The transaction, once they returned to the man and the Volvo, was shockingly brisk. Crumpled euros changed hands. The dog’s meager belongings—a chewed tennis ball, a thin blanket that smelled of engine oil—were passed over in a plastic bag. The man untied the lead from the hitch, handed the looped end to Victoria, and simply drove away. The greyhound was gone, a blank space where it had shivered. Their dog stood between them on the pavement, the leash now slack, and stared at the departing car’s exhaust with an air of profound, bureaucratic disappointment.
“Well,” Victoria said, the word hanging in the sudden void of responsibility. The dog turned its bearded face up to hers and blinked.
Yvonne shifted the broken clock in her arms. “We should… walk. See if he follows.”
He did. He fell into step beside Yvonne, his slightly shorter legs working double-time to match her stride as they moved away from the market’s fringe. He didn’t look back. After two blocks, his posture changed, the tension in his shoulders easing. He began to sniff the base of a lime tree with investigative zeal, one hind foot poised in the air.
“So,” Victoria began, watching him. “A name.”
“It has to be sturdy. Unpretentious.”
“Otto?”
“Too imperial. He’s not an emperor. He’s a… foreman.”
“Gustav?”
“Too soft. He’s not a Gustav.” Yvonne considered the dog, who was now scraping at the tree root with a focused scrabble of claws. “He’s practical. Grumpy. Competent.”
“He looks like a middle manager in a regional bank,” Victoria offered. “The kind who knows where the spare key to the stationary cupboard is.”
A smile touched Yvonne’s lips. “Hans.”
The dog paused his digging, as if hearing the syllables. He glanced over his shoulder at them.
“Hans?” Victoria tested it. It was solid, ubiquitous, faintly outdated. It held no poetry, only function. It was the name of a thousand bus drivers and bakers. “Hans.”
The dog gave a short, low wuff, not a bark, more an acknowledgment. He resumed his excavation.
“Hans it is,” Yvonne said, with finality. It fit the way his rough coat fit him—not elegant, but correct.
The journey home was a slow procession of new routines. Hans insisted on inspecting every third lamp post. He balked momentarily at the top of the U-Bahn stairs, his body becoming a dense, immovable weight, until Yvonne simply scooped him up, clock and all, and carried him down. He rested against her chest, still as a statute, his heart a rapid thrum against her ribs. On the train, he sat pressed against Victoria’s legs, a warm, living bulwark against the chill of the aluminum pole she held.
By the time they turned onto their street, the clock’s weight was a dull ache in Yvonne’s bicep, and Hans’s leash was looped securely in Victoria’s grip. The café’s warm light spilled onto the pavement. Vita was visible through the window, wiping a table, her movements a cheerful dance.
The bell above the door jangled their entrance. The rich, familiar scents of coffee and steamed milk wrapped around them, overlaying the new smells of dust and dog.
Joost looked up from the espresso machine’s portafilter. His eyes traveled from Yvonne’s face to the grimy clock in her arms, down to the wiry, bearded creature at Victoria’s side. His eyebrows climbed towards his messy hairline. “Let me guess,” he said, his voice flat with theatrical dismay. “The flea market had a two-for-one special on chaos.”
Hans’s nose twitched, sniffing the air thick with pastry and citrus cleaner.
Vita dropped her cloth. A sound escaped her, a high, wordless vowel of delight. She was around the counter in a heartbeat, kneeling without hesitation, her hands already outstretched. “Suns!” she cried, her Latvian accent curling the word. “Oh, you beautiful suns!” Hans took a cautious step forward, then allowed Vita’s practiced hands to cup his face. His tail, a stiff metronome, gave one experimental, then two confident thumps against the floor tiles.
“His name is Hans,” Victoria said, surrendering the leash as Vita took it.
“Hans,” Vita cooed, scratching the spot behind his ears. He leaned into it, his eyes closing halfway. “I had three dogs at home. Big ones. Farm dogs. You are a city dog, yes? You will learn.” She looked up, her face radiant. “He is perfect!”
Joost approached more slowly, circling the new arrival with an appraiser’s eye. “Right. So we’ve acquired a… supervisor. Does he have a résumé? References? What’s his position on the quarterly pastry waste?” He crouched, meeting Hans’s gaze. Hans opened his eyes and stared back, unblinking. “He’s judging our cost-per-unit. I can feel it.”
“He was a bargain,” Yvonne said, finally setting the clock down on a vacant table with a groan of relief.
“That’s what worries me,” Joost shot back, standing. “The clock, I get. Broken things are your specialty. But this?” He gestured to Hans, who was now sniffing Vita’s shoe with deep interest. “This is a living, breathing, probably hungry liability. This is the least practical thing you’ve ever brought back from a flea market, boss. And you once bought a taxidermied squirrel wearing a tiny felt hat.”
“The hat was handmade,” Yvonne defended, but she was watching Victoria.
Victoria stood just inside the doorway, her work bag still hanging from her shoulder. She was watching the scene: Vita’s joyful ministrations, Joost’s wary but fascinated orbit, Yvonne’s proud, tired smile as she rubbed her sore arm. The warm light glinted off the cracked face of the clock and the dog’s wet nose. A slow, deep smile spread across Victoria’s face, softening the sharp lines of her journey, the stress of the unseen plasterer, the shadow of London waiting in her inbox. It was a smile of pure, unmanaged whimsy.
They had all lacked those recently.
Hans, having completed his inspection of Vita, turned and trotted over to the table where the clock sat. He sniffed the carved oak sunburst, gave it a consolatory lick, then sat decisively beside it, facing the room. He placed one paw on Yvonne’s boot. His message was clear: the inspection was over. He was now part of the inventory.
Joost sighed, a long, exaggerated sound. “Fine. I’ll add a line item to the budget. ‘Canine Resources: Treats and Potential Property Damage.’” He looked at Victoria. “You’re complicit in this, you know.”
Victoria finally moved, dropping her bag behind the counter. “I am,” she said, her voice rich with amusement. “I believe I’m listed as a co-conspirator.” She walked over to Yvonne, her hand finding the small of her back, a point of contact as natural as breathing. She looked down at Hans, guardian of the broken clock. “Welcome to the project, Hans.”
Hans’s tail thumped twice more on the floor. It wasn’t enthusiasm. It was ratification.