A friend who was living in the city at the time had warned me that the swans devoured anything they came across, even the most rotten and foul-smelling stuff. In his view, the birds’ voraciousness contradicted the bucolic image the lake was intended to project. When I saw the swans anxiously courting me, never letting me out of their sight, I recalled his remark. Because of it I found them so unpleasant that I had to retreat to a path several dozen meters away that led to an avenue that encircled the lake. From that point on the path, one saw the surface of the water as a great metallic expanse. People who passed by this spot were either taking a short cut to a nearby railway station, which at that midday hour didn’t attract many passengers, or were headed downtown and would have to go around the station on their way. Having nothing better to do, I sat on a bench and gazed at the skyline beyond the lake. I held the book I’d brought along for the day, which, as usual, didn’t interest me, and which therefore I had no desire to open. I preferred to admire, as I said, the metallic expanse of the lake, despite its failure to glisten.

From that distance one could recognize the swans only by their sinuous necks, like ghostly shapes whose blurred silhouette concealed a secret or a promise to be revealed in the future, or in the present if the circumstances were different. All the time, though, my thoughts kept returning to an object I’d seen that morning in a shop near my friend’s home. While I awaited him for our early breakfast, as we had arranged, I walked along the avenue browsing in shop windows. A wristwatch in one of the windows instantly caught my eye. Its case was black and its face white, this in itself didn’t distinguish the watch from the rest; but what was unique was that it ran in reverse: the hands moved counterclockwise. This oddity, which I otherwise would have deemed irrelevant, since it turned the watch into a kind of toy or curiosity, became in this instance a coincidence charged with meaning. For various reasons, my visit to this German city confronted me with a particular point in time; it was a journey to the past, and in part, to a form of the past that indirectly belonged to me. On one hand, a good number of years had passed since I’d seen my friend, and being in his company now was causing me to relive, unexpectedly, and with who knew what outcome, several memories from an era we both had left well behind us; and on the other, ever since the train crossed the Belgian border, my apprehensions regarding this country, Germany, connected with the elimination of a good part of my family during the Holocaust, had been barely palpable, and still worse, were on the contrary being transmuted into a dulled sensation of guilt and frustration.

I’d heard so many stories about panic attacks, acute anguish, and nervous crises experienced by Jewish travelers upon arrival in Germany that it troubled my conscience not to feel what the post-Holocaust common sense now seemed to call for at the very least, that is, a kind of suppressed rage at all Germans, and every German, while at the same time at nobody in particular, at a community of people who’d supposedly settled into the most insulting indifference; and it frustrated me that the possibility of my experiencing a clear and direct emotion had been blocked — as was always the case, and still is, with me — an inhibition I’d believed would be overcome at a juncture so intimately fraught as my being in Germany. So the discovery of the watch stood out as a sign, or indeed, was a certain kind of symptom that had now materialized: I had found an object I related to the obstacles of my situation. In part my own, personal past, and in part that of my family, that unique zone where history was linked to a zone of my own identity, came together here. In the face of this, the reverse watch thus combined the ambiguity and the indifference with which reality speaks as it advances in its unbridled race toward the future. The watch epitomized the contradictory voice of objects, often more conspicuous and allusive than the human voice; it moved forward, like all instruments that measure time, and yet simultaneously said the opposite since it appeared to move backwards.

I imagined the watch on my wrist and thought of how long it would take to get used to reading the time that way, the questions I’d be asked, and so on. I especially imagined how others would react, that they’d regard the watch as yet another unequivocal sign of my tendency toward moderate extravagance, or, I should say, a mediocre extravagance, so timid as to hardly be verifiable. I also imagined my relatives after this trip to Germany, a sort of advance guard anxious for commentaries and impressions, for stories of panic attacks and scenes of ethnic or cultural shock; and I particularly imagined my nephew and niece, fascinated by the watch and eager to possess it, one of the few anachronistic talismans offered by the modern world, I thought. And lastly I imagined a certain moment in old age, a transcendent scene, the night of the legacy: I would give the reverse watch to my nephew or my niece, a sort of secret handshake marking my abstruse passage through the world, and he or she would keep it as a proof and a symbol, the side of me that would remain with them; the half-distant, fairly alien uncle who had once drawn near, almost at the end, believing it was forever, with that sentimental gesture and that odd device.

I have two prized objects to hand down: my grandfather’s cigarette lighter, and my father’s ivory binoculars. Besides these, nothing I own ever belonged to anyone else. I haven’t thought yet about whether I’ll give both objects to one of them or one to my nephew and the other to my niece. I’d have a problem if there were three of them: even if I tried, the share could never be equal. If I had bought that German watch — I doubt it would have been Chinese back then — I’d have something for a third. But at that moment, as I sat in the park beside the lake, I imagined myself having bought it, so that I had three gifts. The reverse watch pointed to the past, that would be the best legacy, a caveat that we should always look behind us so as to discover our own nature. And what’s the point of knowing our own nature, the nephew or niece might ask. To hide it, I’d reply; to subjugate it, which is impossible, and to hide it, so as to believe we’ve left it behind, etc. To delude ourselves, and move forward.

The watch, I mean, represented a course of action. I recall how its high price impressed me that morning, and I was unsure whether it was due to the watch’s quality or its rarity. Of course, if such an object was to be distinctive, it had also to be a bit expensive, because if it were cheap that would declare its uselessness. I could say a great deal more about the cigarette lighter and the binoculars, in particular I could say that they, unlike the watch, are objects that offer no lessons, despite being excellent heirlooms. A family such as mine, which came out of that void an ocean away, knowing nothing of its history beyond a few decades back, will suddenly in the future have tangible proof of an almost deep past, in objects that will condense the history of individuals and bodies. It could be amazing. And I thought, all thanks to these three objects. In my younger days as a smoker I used to use my grandfather’s cigarette lighter. From time to time, I still use my father’s binoculars, but mostly I periodically open the leather case, which over time has become so thin it’s like dried-out paper about to crumble. I take out the binoculars, heft them and inspect them, peer through them, turn the central wheel to focus, and finally stow them away in their case. Curiously, over time this inspection has turned into a ritual that has nonetheless forgotten its referent; I mean, my memories of my father are by now largely distant; I don’t think of him when I take out the binoculars, except as an idea. Not as a living person, with a voice and a certain warmth but, rather, as a figure that person has occupied ever since he abandoned, as they say, this world.