Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Alexandra's Letters
1983
One morning Konrad’s old watch stopped. It seemed properly wound. How annoying, I
thought, now that Konrad’s and Alexandra’s life was finally beginning to unravel the watch that
had kept me company gave up.
I took it to a watchmaker. He looked at it. "It will need some cleaning, it looks as if it has
not been cleaned for a hundred years. Have you set it to run so slow?"
"Oh," I told him, "I don’t use it to count my hours, it runs at the pace of life in Eastern
Europe, and you will find other things strange with this watch—it runs backwards. Please don’t
change any of these oddities."
He shook his head and laughed.
He took out a few screws and found the spring was broken. That would be a major
repair. I signed my name authorizing the repair of the watch.
When I came home, I found Andrea in tears. What had happened?
She showed me a telegram. My father had died.
We flew to Germany the following day. Mother was relieved to see us. "You don’t
imagine how difficult the past year has been." She said. "After his stroke, he could no longer
speak. Later he recovered some of his speech: he was able to sing. But he was indescribably
despondent. When awake he sang Georgian nursery songs to himself and cried for his mother,
in Russian. When I could no longer handle him physically, I had him transferred to a resthome.
I found a nurse for him who spoke Russian. He insisted that the woman's name was Elisabeth.
"It was a dreadful time. I am so happy that you are here, and that he has been released
from his long, unhappy life."
She wiped tears from her eyes with her apron. "He died alone, fighting the restraints
they had put him into to keep him in bed. He again and again demanded to go to Tiflis to ask
his mother to forgive him his trespasses against her."
We buried him in the cemetery at G—, the town where my parents had lived since my
father’s retirement. Mother was looking forward to a new life, planning to visit us at
Christmastime.
Mother gave me Alexandra’s portrait and a thin packet of letters. My father’s treasure,
which he had saved from the Poles when we were deported from Silesia. I knew they existed,
but he had never shown them to me.
A few months later, before she could visit us, Mother died from a massive cerebral
aneurysm.
On our return flight to Los Angeles, gliding at thirty thousand feet above the ice-fields of
Greenland, I opened the package of letters. Those long flights strip time and space of meaning,
one departs at twelve noon and arrives at two in the afternoon, on the other side of the earth.
The sun has barely moved, meanwhile one has eaten three meals and lost twelve hours of
one’s life.
The package contained eight letters and the last postcard from Geneva, all in
Alexandra’s tiny hand. The entire correspondence of a mother to her abandoned son, seven
letters in twenty-five years!
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