The Weight of a Wristwatch My Brother Never Took Off

The second drawer down

My brother Sipho wore that watch to church, to funerals, and to the beach at Amanzimtoti where he swore the salt air did it no harm. When he died, it came to me in a small brown envelope with my name written on the front in his slanted, hurried hand, the same hand that had marked exam papers for thirty years before he retired. I put the envelope in the second drawer down in my bedroom, under a folded pillowcase I never used, and for the better part of six years I let it stay there.

I am a retired primary-school teacher. I taught Grade 3 in Durban for most of my working life, in a classroom that smelled of wax crayons and wet raincoats through the whole rainy season. I know how to be patient with things that are not ready. So I told myself the watch was not ready, and neither was I. Every so often I would open that drawer to fetch a safety pin or a spare button, and there it would be, the shape of it under the pillowcase, and I would close the drawer again a little too quickly.

Durban has a way of holding onto heat, and grief is not so different. It settles into the low places and it waits for you. I would be fine for weeks, sorting my recipe cards or watering the ferns on the veranda, and then I would hear a certain song on Lotus FM, the kind Sipho used to hum badly while he shaved, and the whole thing would come back up warm and thick.

What Sipho was like

People think of a Rolex and they picture a rich man. My brother was not rich. He was a teacher, like me, and he bought that watch second-hand from a colleague in 1988 when he got his first permanent post, and he paid it off over many months from a salary that was never generous. He used to say a man should own one good thing and look after it properly. That was his whole philosophy, really, applied to shoes, to his old Cortina, to the watch, and I think to people too.

He was the sort of brother who remembered your birthday but forgot his own. When our mother was dying in Cato Manor, it was Sipho who slept in the chair beside her bed for eleven nights, and he wore that watch the whole time, and I remember the little gold second hand going round and round in the lamplight while we waited for something none of us wanted to name. So the watch is not a luxury object to me. It is eleven nights in a chair. It is a man who kept his promises.

The phone call from Pietermaritzburg

The reason I finally opened the drawer for good was my granddaughter, Nandi. She got into her degree at the university in Pietermaritzburg, physiotherapy, which she has wanted since she was small enough to bandage the dog with toilet paper. Her mother, my daughter, works hard, but the fees and the residence and the books together were a mountain none of us could see over. We sat at my kitchen table with a calculator and a lot of tea, and the numbers simply would not soften no matter how we pushed them.

I did not say anything about the watch that night. But I lay awake with the ceiling fan ticking, and I thought about Sipho, and I thought about what he would want a good thing to be used for. And I understood, the way you understand something you have known all along, that a watch in a drawer helps no one, and a granddaughter with a degree would have made my brother stand up taller than any object on his wrist ever could.

Learning what I actually had

The next morning I took the envelope out properly for the first time in years. The watch was heavier than I remembered, cold at first and then warming against my palm. The face had a small honest scratch near the number four, from a day at the beach I could not place. I did not even know what it was worth. I am a woman who taught eight-year-olds their times tables. I did not grow up knowing the difference between one model and another.

So I did what my generation does now, which is to sit with a cup of rooibos and read carefully. I looked at how you are meant to go about it, which experienced Rolex Watch Buyers actually look for, what the little numbers between the lugs mean, why the original box and papers matter even for a watch this old. I felt a bit like I was back at teachers' college, taking notes in a margin, underlining the parts I did not understand so I could ask about them later.

It surprised me how much I did not want to be foolish about it. Not for the money exactly, but because it was Sipho's, and doing the thing carefully felt like a way of respecting him. I made a list of questions in my Grade 3 handwriting, the letters still round and clear out of long habit.

The morning I nearly changed my mind

There was a morning, near the end, when I very nearly put the whole thing back in the drawer and told Nandi we would find the money some other way. I had the watch on the kitchen table beside my toast, and the winter sun was coming in low over the neighbour's mango tree, and it caught the gold and threw a small warm coin of light onto the wall. I sat and watched that coin of light and I cried, quite plainly, the way you can only cry when you are alone in a house you have lived in for forty years.

Then I did something I had not done since he passed. I put the watch on my own wrist. It was far too big for me, my brother had strong hands, and it slid around loose like a bangle. And somehow that was what settled it. The watch did not belong on me. It had belonged to him, and now it needed to belong to its next chapter, to a young woman learning to mend other people's bodies. I had been guarding an object as if guarding it could bring him back, and it could not, and I was tired of the weight of that particular kind of hope.

Deciding, out loud

When you have made up your mind after a long time of not being able to, there is a strange lightness to it. I said it to my daughter first, on the phone, plainly. I told her I had decided to Sell My Rolex and put every cent of it toward Nandi's first year. She went quiet, and then she said, Ma, are you sure, and I said I had never been more sure of anything Sipho would have approved of.

I will not pretend the practical side did not worry me. I am a careful woman and I have read the newspaper stories. I wanted to understand the difference between a fair offer and a poor one, and how a person actually turns a watch into money for school fees without being taken advantage of. When I read about how to Sell Rolex for Cash in a way that made sense to an ordinary Durban pensioner, I felt the last of my nervousness loosen. Not because anyone made me grand promises, but because it was explained like a fair and human transaction, which is all I ever wanted it to be.

What I kept

I did keep the envelope with my name in his handwriting. I did keep the memory of the scratch near the number four, and the eleven nights, and the coin of light on the kitchen wall. Those things were never for sale, and no one asked me to part with them.

Nandi started her first block of lectures in February. She sends me photographs of her textbooks and her new friends, and last week she sent one of herself in a white coat, learning to take a pulse. She holds two fingers to the inside of a wrist, feeling for the small steady ticking underneath, and when I saw that picture I had to sit down for a moment.

Because that is exactly what my brother's watch did, all those years. It kept time quietly, faithfully, on the inside of a wrist, and now my granddaughter has learned to do the very same thing with her own two hands. I did not lose Sipho by letting the watch go. I let him carry on, into a young woman's careful fingers, into a life that is only beginning. The drawer is empty now, and for the first time in six years, when I open it, I am not afraid of what I will feel. I feel him there, and I feel proud, and I close it gently, the way you close a door on a sleeping child.