The watch that cannot calculate

The watch arrived in a box too large for it, on my twelfth birthday, from my mother, who has still not explained where she found it. A Poljot chronograph on a black leather strap: steel case, black dial, two small white subdials, and a ring of numbers crowded around the edge like a timetable for somewhere I was not going. I wound it once, said thank you in the voice children use for tools, and put it back in the box. It stayed there through most of my adolescence. Twelve is a bad age to be handed an instrument.

What I did not know then is that the ring does not turn. It is a slide rule, fixed to the bezel, and it cannot be used to calculate anything: an instrument performing the idea of an instrument. The dial says 23 RUBIS, which is not a boast but a headcount, the twenty-three jewels of the movement underneath. That movement is a Swiss chronograph the First Moscow Watch Factory bought as tooling after Valjoux stopped building it, then rebuilt to its own taste, more jewels and a quicker balance. The last of them were assembled in 2011. My mother handed me one in the same year the line went quiet, which neither of us knew and neither of us could have done anything with.

Now I wear it daily. That was not a decision I remember making. It gains. It wants winding every morning, and the scale still advertises arithmetic it has no intention of performing. Poljot means flight, the kind of joke a factory makes without smiling. Today is the twelfth of April and the radio has been saying so since breakfast. I wound it at the desk and set it by nothing in particular.