The Gold
Watch

A gift to Mihály from his father

"I tell you, it was my only object of value, the only one worth mentioning—admittedly a bulky, commonplace thing, whose pretentious, petty-bourgeois quality stood for everything I disliked. But its loss, now that it appeared to me in its full symbolic significance, filled me with panic. It was the feeling that I was now irrevocably damned: that they had stolen the very possibility that I might one day sober up and get back to the bourgeois world."