The King of the Two Sicilies (1970)

Andrzej Kusniewicz's novel, published in Polish in 1970 as Krol obojga Sycylii (Polish Wikipedia) and in Celina Wieniewska's English translation in 1980, follows Emil R., a young Viennese officer of the Imperial Sicilian Lancers, through the summer of 1914 and his entanglement with his elder sister Elizabeth, while a gypsy prostitute is found strangled in a Hungarian garrison town. Emil's diary calls his sister L. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): In a diary entry from the coast near Trieste, Emil records how L. stepped off the boat onto the quay and told him to throw his watch into the sea, since she was doing the same with hers: she unpinned her gold Omega from the belt of her skirt and threw it, with its chain and a cluster of charms, far out into the waves between the rocks, then her handbag, then his wallet. Climbing the empty island, she tells him that without watches time has ceased to exist. The watch is a lady's Omega worn on a chain at the belt; no model is named.

Source text: She began to unpin her gold Omega watch from the belt of her skirt and, together with its chain and a cluster of charms, threw it far away into the waves between the rocks. (Andrzej Kusniewicz, The King of the Two Sicilies, scan cataloged as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 66, OCR line-break hyphens closed up; the copyright page records the Polish title, the translator is credited at the front, and Empress Elizabeth is called L.'s namesake on the same page; Internet Archive scan OCR)