I remember my disappointment when people said I looked like him. I desperately wanted to be petite with a turned-up nose, to be delicately exquisite, like my mother. I did not want the pallor, the under-eye circles, and the round, enormous green eyes.
It was clear that there were things that my father could not talk about. This was evident from the nightmares, the reticence. These boundaries made him even less accessible. His Spanish was thickly accented. Whenever he addressed his brother, Lotar, his first wife, Míla, or my half brother Miguel, who was twenty-three years my senior, my father would inevitably speak in effortless Czech. Languages came easily to me and I wanted to learn it. I coveted both the challenge and the bond it might forge between us. “No, no. It would be a waste of time. Czech is a useless language,” he said the only time I asked, in a tone so firm and hostile that it was obvious that I should not ask again.
Yet there were moments when, speaking Spanish, he was endearing and vulnerable. He repeatedly used the wrong word. Sometimes he would say a phrase that would make sense but sound odd. I remember him apologizing once when he had a cold: “My nose is jogging,” he said, his expression stern as he produced his handkerchief.
My father in 1993, with his portrait by Colombian artist Fernando Botero
6.
The last time I saw my father, then very frail and infirm, he had a runny nose. “It’s that jogging nose of yours again,” I mumbled through tears, his and mine. I had locked my green eyes on his, and with the hand he could still use, he squeezed mine because he could not speak clearly. Despite everything, we both laughed. I was living in London and was five months pregnant with my first child. I had answered a late-night call from his doctor in Caracas saying that I must come at once. My husband and I boarded a plane that same day.
In 1996, Corimon, the international conglomerate that had grown from my father and his brother’s paint factory, Montana, almost completely disintegrated. My father had retired from the business five years earlier but had kept all his shares as a vote of confidence in the management. After the collapse, caused by economic headwinds and strategic errors, only a shell was left, which had been taken over by banks. My father had worked for four decades to build an empire that encompassed many industries across the Americas. He felt immensely proud of the publicly traded company and personally responsible to its hundreds of employees and shareholders. The distress at watching his life’s work disappear was enormous but it had not stopped him. His spirit remained undaunted though the blow on his body was severe; the stress probably brought on his first massive stroke a few months after the debacle. My father had then defied all odds by living for a further five years. Although wheelchair-bound, he stayed active enough to continue to work, write, marry for a third time, divorce again, and establish a new daily newspaper in opposition to the Chavez regime. Regardless of the initial dire prognosis and for the years that followed, every morning at six forty-five my father ground through vocal exercises, swam laps aided with a float, and then traipsed up and down the checkered corridor with a walking frame three times a day.
In 2001, my father suffered a series of further strokes that weakened him and paralyzed his legs completely. Despite the setback, after we arrived in Caracas following the late-night summons, he rallied once more. We spent a week together in June that year at Perros Furibundos mostly chatting about politics and technology. We watched spy films as well as Cabaret on DVDs. I remember his nurse, a stern and spindly woman, poking her head through the door, bewildered as the three of us sang along to “Willkommen.” It was not until my husband and I were back in London a few months later, on the morning of Sunday, September 9, three weeks before I was due to give birth to my first child, that I received another call. Through the crackly static I heard the voice of Alba, my father’s trusted assistant of over twenty years.
“He had more strokes last night. We brought him to the hospital, he is alive, but there is nothing to be done. The doctor wants to speak to you.”
I remember being struck by the doctor’s firm and unfussy tone. As next of kin, I had to decide when to disconnect the machines. He explained that the strokes had been so damaging that the doctors were keeping my father’s heart beating artificially. The scans showed there was no brain stem function left. Total brain death, he called it. He used the medical terminology, unvarnished and brutal, that flows easily from those for whom the cessation of life is commonplace. The doctor knew I could not travel. He explained that he wanted me to take some time to think and let him know when I had reached my decision. Aware that I was absorbing few of his words, I agreed to call him back.
I dialed my mother in New York, who had remained close to my father even though they had divorced decades before. She reminded me that my father had never wanted to be dependent on machines. Losing the use of his arm and legs six years before had been arduous enough. Yet, with his capacity to think intact, he had battled on. If he could not use his brain, he would not want to go on. I had just needed to hear my mother say it. I made the call to the doctor in Caracas. “It might not be immediate,” he warned. “His instinct throughout has been to survive.”
Half an hour later came a sobbing phone call from Alba to say that he was gone.
My father was cremated on September 11, 2001. As I watched the tragedy of the attacks unfold, I grieved more privately too. I could not attend my father’s funeral. My pregnancy meant that I had to wait until my son was born before flying. It was some months later that I traveled to our house in Caracas.
We held a memorial service late one January morning under the shade of the ceiba tree. My husband addressed the gathered group and read Dylan Thomas’s famous poem that ends with the stanza:
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
That afternoon, when friends, family, and colleagues had left, I walked into my father’s study. Everything looked immaculate, exactly as it had months before. My father’s computer was on his desk, and to its left, still on its stand, was his pipe.
The last moments I had spent with him in this room were on the day I had flown back to London. He had been in a wheelchair, smoking that pipe, held with his only mobile hand; a glass of Coca-Cola and ice with a blue and pink paper straw before him on the desk. His desk had been covered in books, papers, and letters, and every drawer had been bursting with files. My father had compulsively collected things. He was a collector of watches and clocks, books, medieval objects, paintings, sculptures. He cataloged everything. Every single thing he had ever bought was listed in files by category, with the pertinent receipts and history arranged chronologically. Every paper that anyone had sent him, every note or memo, personal or professional, no matter how trivial, was filed either under the person’s name or by subject, within a range of dates. There were entire rooms in his office dedicated to his files. A long wall in his study was also packed with filing cupboards. I expected to spend days going through all his papers, sorting out what to keep and what to throw away.
Now, in the silence of this study, I pulled open the top drawer of his desk to start the task of sorting his papers. There was nothing in it. I opened drawer after drawer in the room only to find them entirely empty. I walked to the terrace to ask Alba where she had placed his files and I found her talking to Eric, our sage family lawyer.
“Your father made me throw them all away after you visited in June,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “He asked me to clear everything but a few of the files. He didn’t want you to be overwhelmed with his things.”
As we entered the study, she pointed to a cupboard in the corner behind his leather chair. It housed the only drawer in the room that was still full. On the top lay a yellowing folder holding every note that I had ever written to him. It contained an embarrassingly bad poem I had composed for him as a teenager that began with I hav
e your eyes. There were various notes and cards, most of them from my years at boarding school. Beneath this was another thick folder with dozens of letters and notes from my mother. Everything she had ever written to him, during their romance, their marriage, and even after their divorce, was there. He had asked that all other personal files and romantic notes be shredded, Alba explained. She then hugged me and she left me to look through the papers.
There would have been many folders filled with notes and letters, as my father had through the years been involved with many women. He knew that I would be the one to sort through his papers once he was gone. Erasing entire aspects of his past made his departure more real, but I was grateful for this gesture of kindness.
Underneath the pale yellow file of love letters, my father had left the box with his identity card from the war. It was the same box that I had found as a child detective, with that photograph of my father as a young man with intense and hopeful eyes and that enigmatic name, Jan Šebesta.
Only this time, the box was crammed with papers.
CHAPTER 1 Boxes
On the middle shelf of the vitrine that held my father’s collection, nestled between the intricate pocket watch embellished with chiming golden angels and a red enamel, gilt, and diamond fob watch in the shape of a beetle, sat a very simple round smooth gold piece that always struck me as dull. It did not do anything. It played no music. It sounded no alarms. It lacked complications to intrigue or delight. It was not beautiful, delicate, or ornate. It simply told the time.
I asked my father why he liked it. He replied that it was accurate, and he mentioned his own father. “Was it my grandfather’s?” I must have asked. “No,” he replied, “I bought it because it reminded me of a watch he owned.”
Now I own the watch from my father’s vitrine. It was manufactured in England in the eighteenth century by John Arnold. Apparently, in the world of watch collectors, Arnold and the Swiss manufacturer Abraham Breguet are generally considered the inventors of the modern mechanical watch. One of Arnold’s skills was manufacturing watches so precise that they could even be used for navigation. He was the first to design a watch that was both accurate and practical. This type of watch is called a chronometer; its main purpose is to be exact in the keeping of time. In Switzerland, the country with the most watchmakers in the world, there are very stringent rules as to what type of watch may be called a chronometer. Chronometers must be independently certified as such. To my untrained eye, this pocket watch still seems rather plain, with its flat white face and generic Roman numerals. And yet it is a very collectible piece because, above all, it keeps time accurately.
The connection with my grandfather had intrigued me. As a child, I never felt that I had any grandparents on my father’s side. Questions on the topic were answered curtly, without apparent emotion, met with only the most basic of details and in a tone that made it clear that this was not a subject for exploration. Perhaps talking about them to me would have made their absence more real. It was easier for everyone if they faded into the background, unmentioned and barely visible in a haze of grays, like the only photograph of them in our family home. Against a background of silence, that washed-out black-and-white image by my father’s bedside was all I had of the two of them.
My mother did not seem to know much about my grandparents either. As a teenager, even as I explored limits and tested rules with stereotypical determination, I knew that to raise the subject of my father’s past was to stray beyond what was allowed. We could freely discuss politics, religion, sex, drugs, or my parents’ marriage, any topic except that. I was never told this, but somehow I knew. It was the one taboo. At the height of my angsty rebellion, I flaunted a punk hairdo and would storm off from the dinner table, but asking about my father’s own childhood or his parents was something that I never dared to do. As I became an adult, I learned to calibrate questions with care. Despite the unspoken prohibition, whenever an opportunity arose, I tried to sneak in a furtive question. I was grateful for whatever tidbit my father was willing to share. It was clear that speaking about my grandparents was painful for him. He seemed unable even to talk about Czechoslovakia. He never volunteered any details about this period of his life. Later, after he became very ill, he let slip a little more. I allowed him to set the pace, and I learned to desist when the narrative faltered. For a long time, all I knew of my grandparents was that they were Czech, that they never made it to Venezuela, and that my grandfather had owned a dull gold watch.
Much later, during my research into my father’s family, I encountered a strong and wise woman whose parents had escaped the Holocaust and prospered in the UK. I asked her what she knew about the family they had left behind. “Very little,” she replied. I asked her why she had not researched it. She answered simply, “Because my parents never gave me permission. Your father did.” I had not thought of it like that until that moment, but I realized that she was right. My father had left me the box. Traumatized people often construct defense mechanisms strong enough to deter those closest to them. When an area is deemed out of bounds for so many years by an authority figure, the need for permission to enter persists even after they are gone.
Feeling that my father had given his consent made all the difference. When he intentionally left me the papers from the war years, he surrendered evidence of his other life. Even more important, he gave me his implicit blessing to explore his past and find out who his, and my, family were. Often, I have felt that it was more than just permission. At times it seemed almost an exhortation.
I opened the box my father had left in his vacant study, the one with the identity card I had glimpsed as a child, and realized that I must solve the mystery of what had happened if I was ever going to be able to understand him. My inquiries led me to other boxes, from different sources, inevitably holding clues but which also prompted more questions. My father left the world of which he seldom spoke as a riddle for me to unlock, the answer perhaps being the key to his complex and hermetic personality. The boxes held a jigsaw puzzle for me to reconstruct, with pieces just large enough to allow a sense of the theme. But there were also missing parts, fragments that I had to find to complete the picture.
As soon as I saw his papers in the box, it was clear that this was his way of showing me who he had been. It was his means of illuminating himself and also of remaining with me, of surviving as he had always done. He left it as a puzzle because he could not tell the story in its completeness. The truth of his past, for him, was a horror that could be glimpsed only through the cracks between his fingers.
I have now spent years researching my father’s life before he arrived in Venezuela. When I started inquiring, locating people, and attempting to assemble a family tree, another box that my uncle Lotar’s second wife, Věra, had kept untouched in Switzerland emerged. Věra was moving to a smaller, more manageable place and had rediscovered this box as she packed. Věra and Lotar’s youngest daughter, my cousin Madla, who is a painter and lives in London, shared this box of relics with me.
This second box also contained documents from the war. A handful were faded or torn, some were wrinkled, their edges softened, but most were intact, crisply preserved as if time had not passed. The box held Lotar’s papers and permits. There was also an identification document in a different name. And then there was a trove of letters from the 1930s and early ’40s sent by my grandparents to family in the U.S. and to their sons. There were dozens. Most of the ones to Lotar and my father were written from Terezín, also known as Theresienstadt, which I knew to be a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The letters were all handwritten, every inch of the paper covered in tiny characters. The words seemed uncensored, and my grandparents’ state of mind was further signaled by the care or the speed with which they wrote. Despite my lack of Czech, I recognized some names. Many others presented a challenge. Eventually, I sought help, and it took a Czech Holocaust expert almost a year of patient deciphering to unlock the correspondence. It took me several more ye
ars to be able to read more than a few lines without finding myself almost stupefied by a sadness that would render me incapable of absorbing any detail whatsoever. Initially, the letters, and what I assumed would be the desolation and hopelessness described within them, terrified me. I wanted to understand my father, unlock the mystery, but the idea of journeying through the letters was daunting. I was raising my young children at the time and dared not read the letters for fear of the darkness that would confront me. I had just embarked on the most optimistic adventure of my life, building my own family. I had to be forward-thinking, positive, and strong. The letters gave real voices to the people who, until then, had remained silent and stilled in gray photographs. Their words summoned my lost grandparents and people who had endured injustice and misery. I just could not face them and then turn easily back to a cheerful narration of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
But I remained intrigued as the years passed. Little by little, generally for just a few minutes at a time, I chipped away at the pages and pages of text that the translator had sent me by email. My children grew, and as they did, I became more comfortable allowing myself to feel and show them a wider range of emotions. As they became more independent, I no longer felt the need to shield them or myself from life’s darker moments. I felt the letters embodied this darkness. I allowed myself to read a few pages here and there. Each time I spent a little longer with them, especially as I realized that when you looked carefully, interspersed amid the horror were wisps of beauty and love. Their darkness was laced with vivid glimmers of light. It was this realization that first rendered me capable of tackling the correspondence at all.
When Time Stopped Page 3