Grandfather's Watch

“How much do you want for this?”

“Excuse me?”

Marcus looks at me, holding my grandfather’s pocket watch.

“This watch; how much do you want for it? Can I buy it off of you?”

I understand what he’s saying but the words don’t make sense in my head.

“Are you seriously asking me this right now?”

Considering the question for a moment, he wonders whether he has done something wrong, determines that he hasn’t, and continues. “Well, you know, it doesn’t work and you sort of just have it lying around in this box.”

He means the wooden box with the golden fish emblem on the lid, the one that I sometimes think was originally envisioned as a fish tackle box.

What Marcus is asking me reminds me that everything has a price. He knows about this watch. He knows it was delivered to my family by the Soviet infantryman who found my grandfather lying next to it, the victim of a sniper who picked him out at the front of his unit, moving through the rubble of some German city during the final Soviet push towards Berlin.

Or so the story goes, because, really, no one will ever know the truth behind the object, what it has seen or experienced, where it has been, who has possessed it. This was the same watch my grandfather got as a gift from my grandmother before the war, the one he always carried in his vest pocket, as was the style at the time. They say he had an obsession with checking time, that he was always punctual. Sometimes people thought him rude, the way he could inadvertently pull out his watch and check the time in the middle of a conversation.

“Sergei, what are you doing here? Checking your time while I am speaking to you?”

“I am sorry Yuri, it is just a habit. I always have to know how long it is before the next thing is to happen.”

“What happens next?”

“I finish speaking with you, we finish our vodka, and I go home to see my wife.”

That’s the type of conversation I imagine him having. His real name wasn’t even Sergei, although I can bet he probably had a friend named Yuri. Those are actually pretty good odds.

When the war started, he took this watch with him to the front, one of the only things he packed before he got onto the train with other men from his town, the wives and children of these men waving them off from the platform. They were allowed only small sacks, incidentals that would serve more as keepsakes to remind them of home rather than anything of use. The claim was that the army would clothe you, so there was no need to bring any sorts of things like gloves or scarves or socks. But my grandfather wasn’t stupid, and he brought all those things with him as well. There aren’t any statistics about how many of the Soviet soldiers actually died because the State didn’t equip them properly. Died because of the cold or because there weren’t enough guns or ammunition to go around.

I see him now with that watch, checking it right before the train pulls out of the station, checking to see if it was leaving on-time, according to schedule, or whether it was conforming to the Communist motto of “better late than never, and likely very late.”
 
I see him during the war, touching the watch in his breast pocket just before diving out from behind a corner or a tree, shooting indiscriminately into the darkness, the steam billowing out from the ground as if it were alive. It heaves in anger as the troops cross it, the frost snapping with every step.

I’m guessing that, sometimes, he would pull that watch out of his pocket and place it down next to him, open with its face reflecting back the nearby fire, a tiny pinpoint of light obstructing the Roman numerals along its inside edge. Off to the side, on the rare occasion he was able to step away from the other troops, he would put his hands towards the fire, trying to warm up, and just stare at the watch, think about what was happening back at home at that exact moment. The watch would sit there for as long as he wanted it to, looking back at him, contemplating its owner, thinking about the man who treated it as part of his own family because it was the only thing he had linking him back to them.

These objects, they absorb their owners, the people who touch them and treasure them. That watch felt his breathing as it lay in his pocket, it felt his warmth from behind the fabric of his clothes. And every time he held it, smiled at it in reminiscence, it grabbed a little piece of his memory and the feelings tied up with that memory, and pulled it into its coils.

This watch that Marcus is holding, the one that’s scratched, with the cracked glass, the one that doesn’t and hasn’t told time in over six decades, it was the last thing that knew my grandfather. And now he wants to buy it off me.

I stare at the watch and don’t say anything.

“I thought I could get it fixed.” He puts it up to the light and turns it over so that I can see the cement scrapes on the golden back, claw marks through softly etched paisley flourishes. “It’s cool looking. So old.”
I walk over to him, pull the watch out of his hand and slip it back into the box, closing the lid.

“Yes, very old,” I agree.

His hand stays suspended comically for a moment, still holding the thing that is no longer there. And then he makes a motion with it, throwing his fingers open, as if to indicate “poof, it’s gone.”

He smiles. “Want to go grab a drink?"