The Winding

My grandfather taught me that a mechanical watch must be wound every day, even when you aren't wearing it, and if you leave it alone long enough, it stops. For the first time in a decade, I wound his watch.

Click. Click. Click.

The hands began to move. A red star sat on the dial, the Yugoslav emblem, on the scratched glass, its army green strap faded from years of use. The crown turned easily beneath my fingers at first, then resisted as the mechanism tightened. The Florida sun reflected off the lens in a circle on the ceiling. I noted the scratches on the face and sides.

I often wondered where it had traveled on his wrist, what conversations he had while wearing it, and how many times he had looked down at it. The communist Yugoslav emblem sat right there on his wrist, but he yearned for somewhere else. He loved a country he had never been to, except for what he saw on television and heard on broadcasts from free Europe beyond Yugoslavia.

America.

When the American hockey team beat the Soviets at Lake Placid, he and my father celebrated while everyone else in the city couldn't be bothered. On his wrist was the Yugoslav wristwatch, ticking away.

When I was born, my father said he sent my photograph, a screaming baby girl wrapped in an American flag, to everyone who would look. Finally, an American in the family, he would say, but he couldn’t come to see me. Neither could my grandmother. Photographs and postcards were all my grandparents had of me, and later of my brother.

Years later, he told me how he and my grandmother survived three years of the siege of Sarajevo in the apartment where they had lived for thirty years. Then word came through the resistance; if they wanted out, now was the time.

They left the apartment they called home with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Somewhere between the mortars, snipers, and the UN, they made it through safely, though scarred for life.

The watch came with him on his wrist. He could have lost it, but he didn't.

At an age when most people begin thinking about retirement, my grandparents had to begin again. He already spoke English, one of several languages he knew, so when we met, we could speak to each other.

When he finally saw me, he couldn't believe how big I had gotten. I was sleeping when he came into the house. I didn’t meet him until the next morning. I was wary of him at first. Until then, my grandfather had mostly existed in black-and-white photographs. My father kept one on the mantel of him in his twenties, dark-haired and handsome enough to resemble an actor from Hollywood’s golden age. The man standing before me was older now, his face lined and his hair gray, his bright green eyes twinkling in the sunlight.

Dedo, as we called him, made me laugh. When he lived in a trailer in a retirement community in Florida, he’d remark on his neighbors passing with tennis balls fitted to their walkers.

“Look, Jeckie, they are barely valking. Dey look one hundred years old. One foot half in da grave and valking with dat.” I snickered though I knew I wasn't supposed to.

We people watched while playing rummy or poker, a cigarette always between his fingers, talking about anything and everything.

Dedo taught me chess, which appealed to my analytical mind. Losing irritated me because I always wanted to win, but he warned me that cheating is dishonest. He valued honesty, integrity, and bravery.

"Cheating is never worth it. If you lose, hold your chin high and play again until you vin. Learn from your mistakes and you will vin. My princess is smart enough to vin," he said.

He would ask me questions all the time about what I learned so far. Discuss the current news and my thoughts on the subject. He would comment here and there, but I would answer his questions at length. Then I would question him about every detail he knew. These were our conversations.

He picked me up from the school bus stop on his green bike.

“My beautiful little princess," Dedo would say in his native tongue, then switch to English in his thick Slavic accent. "How vas your day? No box match with anyone?” He smiled as I said I didn't do anything. He would then laugh, and then I would realize he was teasing me.

I would run to him from the bus and jump into his arms. By then, his five-o’clock shadow had already returned, scratching my cheek when I hugged him. He shaved every morning, and I remember watching him lather up with a brush the shaving cream and start shaving upward. Proper men, he believed, should be presentable, not look like “cavemen.” He wore Old Spice, its strong scent competing with the stench of cigarettes.

Our card games diverged into lessons about anything from politics to physics. He taught me how to learn and to love learning. He checked his watch frequently. If we were expected somewhere at two, that meant not one minute later than two.

“You must never be late. It’s rude.”

I wasn't.

“You’ll never get back yesterday, but today and tomorrow are yours to do vat you vant vith,” he said as he checked his watch and wound it.

One afternoon during my junior year of high school, he picked me up in his faded yellow beater, the metal pipe he kept for protection tucked beside the driver's seat. I slipped into the back and lay down. He stared at me in the rearview mirror.

“Are you ashamed?”

“No. I just have a headache.”

I lied.

As school consumed more of my life, I saw him less. Then came college, and visits became monthly, if I came home at all.

During my sophomore year of college, I was accepted to study at the University of Oxford. Before leaving, I visited my grandparents. My grandmother had begun showing signs of dementia. He was drinking and smoking more than usual.

We laughed together and played cards while watching a soccer match, our favorite pastime. He'd yell at the TV if the referee made a call against his team, cursing rather colorfully. Then I recorded him telling a joke about his neighbors being as old as Titanic survivors.

“Oh, you know, I vas swimming in da vater.”

Titanic was my favorite movie, and the joke made me belly laugh.

As he hugged me goodbye, he said, “I'm very proud of you, kid. Very proud. I vill see you in de summer then.”

I smiled at him. He gave me a half-smile.

Then I shut the door.

A few weeks later in England, my father called late one evening. He never called the house line.

“Jeckie, I have some news. Dedo, he died,” he said quietly.

Silence.

My vision narrowed. My chest tightened. I couldn't stop crying. My roommates held me. I went outside into the freezing rain and sleet, lit a cigarette, and looked at my watch.

It was nearly midnight.

Why would he do this?

For a while, I understood the desire to end it all, too.

I returned to the States still devastated; everyone else had already said goodbye while mine was only truly beginning.

I never attended his funeral. I never even saw his ashes.

I played the recording over and over on my flip phone, needing to hear his voice, needing to hear the two of us laughing at his Titanic joke. I wanted to laugh with him again.

I can still hear that joke.

I could not enter his apartment for years, and when I finally did, dust settled over his drawers. I took a deep breath and opened it.

Tools. Reading glasses. Stale cigarettes. Socks. Clothing. Old Spice. The watch.

In the still, dusty air, I lifted the frayed strap to my nose. Beneath the dust and age, I thought I could still smell his aftershave and sweat.

It did not tick. It lay still and silent in my palm. I took the watch home and put it away in a drawer.

Every time I see a yellow car, I think of him.

Why did you leave me, Dedo? Why didn't I notice the drinking, the smoking, the strain?

For years, the questions circled, and the watch sat in its drawer without answers.

Years later, I began to understand what I couldn't when the phone rang in England. His death wasn't evidence that he had loved me less. I think of him bent over the kitchen table, curtains drawn in the middle of the day, a man shrunk down to the size of his own pain.

Understanding did not give me back the visits I had missed or the afternoon I hid in the back of his yellow car, but eventually it made room for forgiveness.

I had spent years trying to forgive him before I realized, standing over that closed drawer with my hand resting on the cold wood, that I also needed to forgive myself. Once I did, yellow never bothered me again.

A decade after his death, I opened the drawer.

The watch.

Click. Click. Click.

I turned the crown, and then came the familiar resistance I knew as a child and the clicking gears sound. The second hand started moving, and I fastened the army green strap around my wrist. I could not get yesterday back, but today was still mine.