“What?”
I repeated the story my grandfather had told me once, of a day in September when the sun had started to slant and the foreman had called them in from the vineyard where he and Anna were harvesting grapes. One by one the pickers came to the ends of their rows and returned to the truck, pitched their grapes in gently, and stood waiting for the daily liter of wine that came with their pay. They talked tiredly to each other, compared rows picked, sore shoulders, suntans. Suddenly, Anna looked at Armand in dismay. “My watch,” she exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?”
“My watch. My watch is gone. The watch my father gave me.” The watch had been a graduation gift from Josef to Anna on the day she graduated from gymnasium. (He hadn’t come to the ceremony, and she believed he had forgotten all about her; it turned out he had been held up helping someone in need. He told her that the watch should remind her that she was always on his mind, but that she in turn should remember others who were less fortunate than she.)
The pickers stood there silently. This wasn’t a time to be losing things. “Where did you lose it?” one of them asked.
What a stupid question, Armand thought. If she knew, it wouldn’t be lost.
Anna didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t know, I had it on this morning. I had it on at the break, too, because I looked at it when it was time to go back.”
Another picker said, “Good luck finding it. How much ground did you cover today?”
Anna shook her head. A tear escaped from the corner of her eye. Another tear escaped. She kept shaking her head. Another. She bit her lip. They kept coming, tears and tears blurring the endless identical rows of vines. She couldn’t stop. Armand had hardly ever seen her cry.
“I’ll find it.” He touched her arm. “You’ll see.” He set off along one of the rows, looking down at the pale earth, the dust and rocks and the gray trunks of the vines. He stopped. He pressed his hands to his temples. He pictured the rows they’d walked slowly all day, his entire body tense with the effort of visualizing their path. He had to find it. He began to move, his eyes narrowed, fixed on the ground at the gnarled feet of the grapevines. The cicadas’ creaky roaring seemed to shut him into his looking. At first he chose his rows randomly, then with more and more purpose. Within a few minutes, he saw the watch glinting on the ground. He stooped to pick it up and felt a lightness wash over him, a sense of freedom like the first time he had seen the sea. He was so happy. He stood, squared his shoulders, and walked back to Anna, who was still standing, small and bleak-faced, by the truck. “Here.” He extended it shyly. “I found it.” Anna reached her hand forward, and he took her left wrist and fixed the watch back onto it.
In my imagination, Anna would have stepped forward, and they would have embraced, she with her head buried in his shoulder, their feet planted on the ground, with the smell of the dry wind about them and the comfort of arms clasped, long familiarity, blind love. But I didn’t say that part to my grandmother.
As I talked, I waited for Grandma to jump in and correct me, or at least to cut me off and change the subject. But she said nothing.
I waited. The car was silent, so silent that for a moment I wondered if she had stopped listening and fallen asleep.
“He told you that?” she asked finally.
“Yes, he did.”
I took my eyes off the road and stole a glance at her. Sure enough, I saw the sad, surprised expression that settled over her face whenever we spoke about my grandfather. “I can’t remember that at all.”
“Really?”
“Not at all, no.”
Silence filled the car again. My mind raced, thinking of what and how I could ask about their separation after crossing the Swiss border, their subsequent marriage.
“It’s a romantic story,” I ventured. “It seems surprising when you know what happened later—”
Now Grandma did cut me off. “Romantic?”
“Sure—you lose your watch, you’re brokenhearted, he finds it for you against all odds. By sheer force of will. Out of love for you.”
“Ach … no …” She trailed off and sighed. “He never really loved me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know that saying.”
“The saying?”
“The opposite of love is not hate—”
“Oh, right.” It was my turn to interrupt. I finished the sentence for her. “The opposite of love is indifference.” Grandma liked that one. She said it to me often.
“Right. Exactly.” Grandma went on. “The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.”
“So? What does that mean?”
“So, I’m indifferent. Once I loved him, now not.” She held up her hands, weighing the two ends of the story in her palms; they balanced out. “But he hates me. He hates me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was true, of course, and it had done a great deal to ruin my family’s mental health, but it still seemed too awful and mean to acknowledge it baldly.
But Grandma wasn’t waiting for me to say anything. “It’s logic, simple logic. You can only conclude he never loved me.”
“No, Grandma!” I exclaimed. “That’s a fallacy. If the opposite of A is B, that doesn’t say anything about C.”
“You sound like your mother teaching one of her classes. Talk sense.”
“I mean, logically, you can’t conclude he didn’t love you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if we take what you said about the opposite of love, then if he hates you, the only thing you can actually conclude by logic is that he doesn’t feel the opposite of love for you. I mean, I’m not exactly sure if this fits into a logical formula—”
“So?” Grandma cut me off.
“Look, I’m saying the fact that he hates you now doesn’t mean he never loved you. It means that he never felt the opposite of love for you. Maybe it means he never actually stopped loving you.”
“You think so?”
“I do.” I’d said it to comfort her, but as I reasoned it out, I realized it must be true.
“Hmph,” was Grandma’s dubious response. She turned away from me to look out the window at the mountains. Then she turned back. “Well, it’s good you’re there to take care of him. Don’t talk to me. I’m going to sleep.”