Teju Cole

Watch

Time Keeper

My father used to travel frequently on business. His travels took him to places like Brazil, South Korea, Denmark, and the UK. On these trips, which sometimes lasted weeks, he returned with small presents for me and my siblings, presents we looked forward to as avidly as we looked forward to having him back home. On one trip, he bought us, collectively, a beautiful hardbound edition of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which for months afterwards was the most precious book in the house. But the present I remember most from those years, when I was between the ages of eight and twelve, was actually something else, a present that I never received, a present that perhaps never existed. Once, before going on what was going to be a particularly long trip—lasting two months, as I recall—my father asked each of us if we had any special requests. Who knows how our desires are formed? I had a specific item in mind, and to this day I am not sure where I even got the idea. What I wanted was a watch, but not just any watch. I wanted a watch with a white dial and a white leather strap. My father promised to do his best. And so, from the time he left, I began to dream about wearing this future watch. Disappointment was inevitable. He had looked everywhere, and couldn’t find the item I had described, he said. The failed mission seemed to pain him even more than it pained me. I imagined him running from airport to airport, from store to store, hoping to fulfill this fairy tale quest.

Illustrator Elisa Talentino

When I grow up, I told myself, I’ll buy a watch with a white dial and a white leather strap. And so it was that, in my late teens, some years after I had left Nigeria and moved to the United States, I did buy myself such a watch. My thirst was briefly slaked, but the experience was trivial, forgettable, as tends to happen when we are too literal about childhood dreams. Afterwards, watches came and went in my life, and there were long periods in which I didn’t wear a watch at all. Occasionally, I’d be tempted by an expensive watch, and I even indulged the temptation a couple of times. But this wasn’t really me. The watch I bought about eight years ago wasn’t cheap: it was inexpensive. I make this distinction because the word “cheap” suggests shoddiness and disposability. This watch of mine—let us call it the Second Watch, because it became the most significant after the one I conjured in childhood—this Second Watch was actually solidly built, beautifully designed, manufactured by a small Belgian maker. It didn’t cost much, a price in the hundreds of dollars, and would have cost even less had I not bought it in Oslo, where there’s always a premium for the pleasure of shopping in Norwegian krone. Its crystal gently rose above the bevel, its dial was black, its hands slim and white, and there were enchanting, understated sub-dial details in orange and forest green. The strap was the only disappointing note: plain black leather with a plasticky-looking finish and an absence of visible stitching. Shortly after, at a watch shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found a better strap, in hunter green.

Two years later, I was in Toulouse, and perhaps it was the grandeur of Saint-Sernin, one of the world’s most beautiful basilicas, or perhaps it was the attention to detail of its Romanesque sculptures, that persuaded me that afternoon to replace the hunter green strap on the Second Watch with a calf-leather navy blue strap, a blue so deep it was nearly black. Now, with this change, the watch had come alive. I was conscious of it on my wrist, and I was aware for the first time of how it was accreting stories: Antwerp, Oslo, Cambridge, Toulouse: like a coin passed from hand to hand. During the worldwide pandemic, a package arrived. The package was unexpected, from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had made a comment in passing once to my friend David, admiring his watch. It didn’t cost a lot, he had said. It was beautiful and it was made by a very popular watchmaking company, not Citizen, not Seiko, but you’re barking up the right tree. And now David had bought me the watch and mailed it to me. I was moved. It had an off-white dial and a styling that recalled the classic chronographs: stainless steel case and bezel, three sub-dials, a prominent crown, a gleaming pair of pushers. Was the mass-market maker hoping we’d think of Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona? Possibly so, but in a gesture of humility, or plausible deniability, the watch had been given a tan leather strap. This is how the Third Watch arrived: an unsought benediction, an act of grace. It could not have cost even a hundred dollars.

I am now in the phase of life in which I do not leave the house without putting on a wristwatch. I feel naked without one. I am certainly not going to sit in a classroom or meeting and check the time on my phone. It would feel gauche to me. The Second Watch is the one I have worn almost daily, invested in its debonair sobriety, in the steady but stylish affect of its black dial and navy blue strap. The Third Watch has been for occasions that call for lightness, a watch made to pair with a white linen shirt or the breezier occasions of summer. Desires: I check myself for the old desire to own a Glashütte. It’s not gone, but it’s also not strong. I have no wish to argue against expensive watches for they, too, are a form of storytelling. But two summers ago I was in Vaugirard, the 15th arrondissement, where one feels the untouristed life of the city, though the Eiffel Tower can be glimpsed from every other street. The Second Watch needed its battery changed. I stopped at the tiny white-fronted horologerie-bijouterie and asked the woman there, in my poor French, if it would be possible. She was skeptical, not of the work but of me. Come back in an hour, she said. When I came back, she was not there, but the technician had returned from his break and was seated behind a low table. He welcomed me warmly, as though he'd been expecting me. I told him what I needed, showed him the watch, and he smiled and nodded. He said it would take about five minutes. Should I step out and come back? Non, non, asseyez-vous, s’il vous plaît. So I sat opposite him and watched him work, feeling the privilege of the invitation. Time was, appropriately, suspended in that shop. Was it really only five minutes? All talking ceased. We had fallen into a dream. It might have been ten minutes, or a year. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

His face was serene, but his hands were intense, not as a taut bow is intense, but as a dancer is: a paradox of relaxation and alertness. The left hand was in a white cotton glove. Clipping a red-rimmed loupe to his glasses (which gave him a cyclopic aspect), he placed the watch on its front on a piece of baize and examined the back. It was notched in six places around the perimeter. After careful measurement, he slotted a precision wrench into the notches and guided the back cover open. A patient etherized upon a table. He removed the anti-magnetic disc, placing it to one side, and with a pin, pushed the old battery out. Using a pair of fine brass tweezers, which looked like the forelegs of a delicate insect, he placed the new battery into the sensitive mechanism.

He was Cambodian. I now saw him in unquiet times, young. He was in the fields, fighting a war he didn’t want to be fighting. There was a village on fire. His eyes were hard, his brow furrowed, his soul close to being shattered, so many people had died, and more were dying every day. But he had the gift of concentration, this man, and a feeling for bringing order to chaos. He became a bomb disposal expert. The causes had become confused: nothing was worth this much suffering. And yet, better to defuse bombs than to build them. Thus did he hold his life in his hands every day. His heart rate slowed, he got used to being the eye of silence in the storm, to being the one who could be calm when no one else was. Every day he thought: one wrong move, and time stops forever. So he avoided the wrong move. The years flowed past like water through a weir, and as the years flowed, the war ended, as they all eventually must. The young man became old. Peace settled more deeply into him, he was radiant with it.

C’est fini, he said, startling me. He pushed the crown down and the second hand began to sweep. He gave the watch back to me, with both hands, as though it were an offering, this man who was entirely without affectation. I don’t remember how much the replacement cost. It was nothing. I wanted to lavish this master with gifts. And yet I was called on, sooner than I expected, to offer something of my own. As I walked out of that reverie, as I walked down rue de la Convention, and was passing by the bus stop a block down from the horologerie-bijouterie, with time ticking anew on my left wrist, an old woman waved me down. Did I know when the 62 bus towards Porte de France would come? I told her I had no idea. Well, she said, read the posted schedule. My French is poor, I said. I’m nearly blind, she said, vous devez essayer. So I read the schedule, and it wasn’t difficult at all. The bus would be arriving in about seven minutes, I told her. She thanked me, but I know she was really saying: you always have to try.

These “time pieces” (as we so innocently call them) collect stories, in their own right and as notaries of our experiences, of our sorrows and elations; and thus “time keepers.” Three weeks ago, after a house move, I walked out in my new neighborhood. It seemed time to replace the battery on the Second Watch again. I left the watch with the Armenian man at the local watch shop, and when I came back the next day, he shook his head sadly and said it wasn’t a battery issue but a mechanical one. The part could be replaced. For how much? A lot, more than half as much as the watch had cost me in Oslo eight years ago. I thought about it for a moment. Then I remembered that the free loop on the tan leather strap of the Third Watch was also damaged and due for repair. I made a quick decision: would it be possible to swap out the navy blue strap of the Second Watch and affix it to the Third Watch? The Armenian examined both, unsure if the pins in the lugs were compatible. Then he said they were, and told me to come back the following day. Why it should have taken so long, I don’t know; nor was it clear why it should have cost as much as he demanded (far more than the Cambodian). But where artisans are involved, I don’t complain.

What I now had on my wrist was the Ship of Theseus: everything was changed except the essence: a battery, a watch, a strap, a half dozen cities. The off-white dial of David’s gift, with the dark leather of the “new” strap, which was supple with use: the effect of the combination was quietly stupendous. One is moved by the simplest realities. But what was this now, this amalgam: had I arrived at the Fourth Watch? No, I decided. This was my desire, the First Watch, assembled with patience, precise but unplanned, not as I’d first thought it, translated after four decades into a tangible thing.