He could not remember when it was he had first looked at it as a thing apart, having properties of its own. Once, as a child in the gymnasium, a classmate had grabbed it as they were running in a game and had held him by it. He felt the pressure of the golden links on the back of his neck. The boy pulled steadily on the medallion and he lurched forward clumsily. Then the boy, grasping the chain in his fists, drew him toward him, hand over hand, as one might draw a rope up a well. When he could feel the other’s face, abrasive against his own, the boy released him suddenly and backed away, pointing at the spinning medallion unsnarling on his chest.
The figures on the medallion were as familiar to him as the features on his face, but for this reason he had been strangely unconscious of them, accepting them through long accommodation, nothing else. One night, shortly after the scene in the gymnasium, he took the medallion from beneath his pajama shirt, and holding it underneath the lamp by his bed, studied it. His finger traced the medallion’s outline, a shield large as a man’s hand. It was made of a thick, crusted gold, almost the color of leather, and its surface bristled with figures in sharp relief. At one edge an animal — perhaps a lion — reared, its body rampant, its front legs pawing the air fiercely, its head angry and turned strangely on its body in vicious confrontation. At the medallion’s center a knight sat stiffly, canted crazily on a horse’s back, and reached a mailed fist toward the thick-feathered legs of an eagle just above his head. The eagle’s head, in profile, hung at a queer angle from the long, naked neck, distended in fright. Its wings seemed to beat the heavy air in a clumsy desperation. Its eye, almost human, and in proportion larger than anything else on the shield, seemed, unlike the dangerously clawed, enraged lion, or the thick-walled mail of the stiff, awkward knight, vulnerable, open to unendurable pain and fright. Its talons clutched a crown shape which somehow in its anguish the eagle appeared to have forgotten it held, as though it protected itself from its attackers absent-mindedly, still clutching some irrelevant baggage. The figures emerged from a field of gradually diminishing darkness, the background, a deep gold the color of old brass, finally exploding in a sunburst of yellow in the eagle’s golden eye.
He had replaced it carefully inside his pajamas and from that time thought of it no longer as a part of his own body but rather as something merged with it, yet isolate: not part of him, but his, like a glass eye or an ivory limb.
He decided to ask his father about it. He and Khardov lived together at the back of Khardov’s shop. He had been a craftsman in precious metals, but the wars and revolutions had ruined his trade and now he repaired watches. In the dark back room where Khardov ate his lunch, even there not out of earshot of the noisy watches, the old man chewed on the raw, doughy bread and spoke to him.
“Time,” he said hoarsely. “Time, time, time,” he said, shrugging, jerking his thumb in the direction of the watches.
The boy looked uneasily at the dark curtain that separated their apartment from the shop.
“Listen to them chattering.” He drew the back of his hand across his cheek where a piece of moist bread had stuck to it. “Even the wars, even the wars, once leisurely and provisional with the news of battle a hard ride three days off, the capital always the last place to fall. Even the wars,” he said, his voice trailing off. He looked at the boy. “Where are your sieges today?” he asked him. “Where are your pitched tents, your massive bivouacs like queer cities of the poor outside the walls? The terrible armies and the gentle, gentle soldiers? Who storms a summer palace now? Isn’t that right, sir? Doesn’t that strike you as right?”
The boy nodded, confused.
“It is to be understood then, sir, that the new national product is the pocket watch. A cheap, sturdy symbol of the times, isn’t that right? And a practical symbol, too. More than the old icons, or the glazed four-color pictures of the dead presidents from the papers.” As Khardov spoke he held in his lap a carved, heavy casket in which were still the last precious shavings from the great times. He had pushed back the lid which slid on smooth wooden rails and let one hand loll idly in the dark box, as a man in a boat trails his hand in cool water. The boy could not see it but he knew that in Khardov’s fingers were the shapeless golden chips, the fragments of platinum and chunks of splintered silver, like the pebbled residuum of some lavish flood.
Khardov had almost finished eating and the boy still had not asked him about the medallion. “Khardov,” he said — he had been told to call him Khardov, not Father—“Khardov, why do I have this?” He pointed to his shirt under which the flat, cool part of the medallion lay against his chest.
He thought for a moment that Khardov might not understand him. He could have been pointing at his heart.
“You have it because it is yours, sir,” Khardov said softly.
This had been (though he could not understand now how naïve he had been; there should have been dozens of times when the subject of the medallion would have come up) the first time he could remember speaking to Khardov about it. Strangely, he had experienced a deep satisfaction in Khardov’s answer. It seemed an absolute confirmation of his own discovery the night before when he had taken the medallion, like the heart from his chest, to examine it beneath the lamp.
Until then, like all children, he’d had no real sense of his own being. His self he had simply accepted with the other natural facts of the world, something which had always existed. But his father’s answer, that he had the medallion because it was his, provided him with an insight into his own uniqueness. It was as if the center of the universe had suddenly and inexplicably shifted. No longer a part of it, he sensed irreconcilable differences between himself and it, but like a castaway who suddenly finds himself on an island to which he is bound only by the physics of geography, he felt an amused tolerance of customs and conditions arrived at through no consultation with himself, and for which he could never be made to answer. Relieved somehow of burdens he had been made to feel only when they had been lifted from him, he experienced a heady freedom. Of course. It was his. He was himself.
One afternoon, not long after his interview with Khardov, he returned from his classes to find a package on his bed. Inside were the richest, finest clothes he had ever seen. There were trousers of so deep a blue that they appeared black. Along the seams stitches were so closely set against each other that they seemed a single fat, stranded thread. “Tailors have gone blind making these,” Khardov boasted to him. There were jackets with wool so thick he could not bunch it in his fist, and high black stockings with silk so sheer that his legs looked gray in them. The heavy shoes he found beneath the bed were of a rich, pungent leather, the color of horses’ saddles on state occasions. He did not wonder where the clothes had come from, or even if they were for him. He put them on quickly and went to stand before the shard of mirror in the kitchen. By standing back far enough he could see, except for his face, his whole reflection. Pleased, he thought of the medallion settled comfortably, with himself inside the heavy clothes.