Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

find the love she needed. He had put it into his head to make their rings himself.
Marriage seemed to him both sacred and mundane, unadorned, simple, and precious.
Only two quite ordinary gold bands hammered wide to please her slender, tapered fingers, and
bare of any adornments or precious stones, would describe his vision of their union. To soften
these austere wedding bands he wanted to make a second ring for her that would carry a
single, beautiful, softly shimmering pearl to reflect the woman that he hoped she would grow
into—if he loved her well.
Henri suggested casting the rings, but this idea, in which he would model the rings in
wax, appeared entirely too professional, fast, and easy. He would be deprived of the pleasure
of beating the malleable gold to conform to his vision. He labored for several days with the task
of slowly rolling, annealing, bending, and soldering two thick gold rods into the desired shapes.
And as with the necklace, careful planishing with a polished hammer gave them the sparkle
and life he envisioned.
Content, he looked at his work.
The design of the pearl ring proved more difficult. Because of its vulnerability, the pearl
had to be protected as much as possible by the ring’s construction. Even then, Konrad
realized, Alexandra would be able to wear the ring only on special occasions. A precious piece
indeed.
At first he tried to hide the pearl inside a cage of baroque forms: the pearl the secret
symbol of their relationship. But his love for simplicity made him discard all those trial sketches.
Finally he thought of a hammered gold bowl that would mirror the backside of the pearl.
He would mount it in the mirror’s focus. Smiling he remembered his physics teacher in Berlin
who had demanded that his students memorize the various optical images of spherical mirrors.
In the end he added a thin flat ring around the edge of the bowl that surrounded pearl and
mirror like a halo.
Henri took him to a dealer of precious stones. The beauty of dark opals, a large
diamond with a soft, milky suspension, the likes of which he would never see again, and the
profusion of pearls in all shades from a mysterious black to pinks, proved a great temptation to
abandon his idea and start anew. Confused, he procrastinated for an hour during which they
drank one cup of Turkish coffee after another.
Eventually, his heart beating double from excitement and the coffee, Konrad bought a
large, mysterious, black pearl.
Following Henri’s suggestion Konrad fastened the pearl in the middle of the bowl on a
short stem made from gold tubing. Henri, who had never heard of optical physics, was much
impressed by the visual effect of the hammered mirror. A fairly large ring, it was equally
beautiful from close up and from far away, exactly what Konrad had hoped for.
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