Prologue
1.
There is a question mark, almost lost in a sea of names on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague. Visitors hush children as they pass through each chamber of the Pinkas memorial. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the dizzying display of black and red letters. They memorialize 77,297 individuals. Each was a resident of the Czech districts of Bohemia and Moravia during the war. All were victims of the Nazis.
Next to every name is stenciled the date of birth, and next to each date of birth neatly sits the date of death.
One entry bears the name of my father, Hanus Stanislav Neumann, born on February 9, 1921. It is different. Unlike the others on that wall, it has no date of death.
Instead, carefully calligraphed, there is an incongruous and bold black question mark.
I visited the memorial in 1997 as a tourist, unaware of any link with the synagogue. Scanning across the top wall to my right as I descended the steps into the first chamber, I was astounded to see my father’s name. He was then very much alive, settled and working in Caracas. And yet the bold question mark was there, both jarring and oddly apposite.
This was the first time I had seen the query inked on the wall, but questions about my father had emerged long before. My quest for answers started when I was just a little girl, living across an ocean and a sea in a very different world.
My father’s name with the question mark, tenth line from the top, in the Pinkas Synagogue, Prague
The questions began with a photograph. They started with a picture that was kept hidden but was then found. A memento left behind by accident or on purpose, perhaps subconsciously, that engendered doubt. An image that was out of sorts with reality, as I saw it, forcing the present into an unfamiliar focus. It prompted questions. It demanded answers of the past.
My childhood memories hum with the songs of troupials, crickets, and frogs. My recollections are cradled by tranquil breezes; they sway to the rhythm of tall palm trees and are lit by the reds and oranges of bird-of-paradise. Yet in all their warmth, color, and chaos, they are punctuated by the crisp metal rotors, wheels, pivots, and mainsprings of mechanical watches, of beautifully intricate movements with complications. Among enormous sculptures, my mother recites verses from Rubén Darío and Andrés Eloy Blanco, and my father dances as he sings “Yellow Submarine.” In most of my early memories, there are people moving around the open rooms, terraces, and gardens—politicians, diplomats, industrialists, writers, filmmakers, ballet dancers—gesticulating, chatting, laughing, sitting, or standing, invariably surrounding my parents. There is the noise of success, the prattle of happiness, but in some of the memories, the hubbub fades and there is just enough silence to hear the watches tick, click, whir, and chime.
Embedded in my memory is the image of a particular watch. It is a round silver pocket watch, perfectly polished, lying facedown, with its cover off and the gold insides visible.
It is an odd piece—different from the others in my father’s collection. The watch has four cases. It is rendered in an easily tarnished silver. Most of the others are gold and ornately decorated with precious stones. It is large and heavy, and the first case is indelicate, with a braided burgundy cord attaching a key. It has a thick relief motif that would perhaps be more familiar if it were carved in wood.
Press a button on the side, and the first case pops open to reveal a much finer silver face, surrounded by tortoiseshell and silver screws. You can then see the dial, the curved gold hands, and the face of light and darkened silver ringed with symbols for numbers; the letters in the center spell the maker’s name.
Inside this second cover is an aged piece of paper trimmed to fit roundly inside the back of the case. In beautiful black script, it reads: Thomas Stivers, London, England. Made in 1732 at the Old Watch Street Shop for Export Trade India.
Inside this is a smaller plain polished silver case.
Within this third unremarkable metal shell sits another polished silver case that houses the device itself. Eyes are drawn to the beauty of the hands and face, and without the outer cases, the watch now seems rather small and delicate, fragile, even. As you lift the glass and inspect the piece closely, additional hinges are revealed within, and if you examine the face, at the six o’clock mark there is a tiny, almost invisible lever. If you move the lever lightly—being careful not to damage the enamel—toward the center, the back of this case clicks open, disclosing a magnificent movement with ornate wheels of interwoven filigree that resemble flowers and feathers of silver and gold.
Most people never look at the movement. They rarely open the mechanism to understand what is behind the meticulous timekeeping. For the majority, observing the dial and knowing that the watch functions within a beautiful case is marvel enough. Yet when you examine this beguiling mechanism, you find it is not functioning—the thin silver thread that forms the spring is torn, and the watch cannot keep time.
When my memories pan back from the watch, my father is hunched over, his back cocooned by a white chair. He is wearing a black plastic visor with two rectangular magnifying lenses in front of his eyes. His thick white hair is tousled around the adjustable band. He is unaware of the world outside, oblivious to me, as I tilt my head through the crack of the door and stare at him. He sits at a purpose-built wooden table, his slim fingers grasping pointed tweezers. He is trying to tease out a thin silver thread from a part of the watch that looks to me like a spool made of gold. He is moving very gently, with absolute precision and fathomless patience. If his fingers were not playing over the watch, just a millimeter here and there, his stillness would suggest that time had stopped.
He is trying to repair the mechanism. He needs his watches to be accurate to the second. It seems a necessity rather than a want. He keeps most of them in his bedroom: some on stands in a Louis XV vitrine, some carefully laid in the drawers of a nineteenth-century tulipwood chest that have been specially lined with thick burgundy velvet. He opens and checks a few at least once a week, the winding mechanisms, the springs, the levers, the chimes. If they need to be regulated, he will take them to his workshop, the long windowless room in my memory, the one off a long corridor by the kitchen. The room that is narrow and resembles the carriage of a train. The room that unfailingly remains locked, its key kept in my father’s pocket, attached to a gold chain clipped to a belt loop in his trousers. There, he will sit at the table upon which his minuscule tools are arrayed. He will don one of the black magnifying visors that hang on hooks aligned on the wall. Depending on the watch, he will push the lever or pry the case open and examine the movement. The first thing he will do is ascertain that the escapement and the train are functioning. The train should be in constant motion; that is crucial to provide energy for the mechanism to run for many hours. Usually, trains are made up of four wheels, one each for hours, minutes, and seconds, and a fourth connected to the escapement. The latter consists of tiny pallets, a lever, and two further wheels, one for escape and another for balance. It allows just the right amount of power from the train to escape at precise intervals, sufficient to allow the correct movement of the hands. It makes the ticking sound and ensures exactness. Both train and escapement are critical components. They must work together faultlessly, or time will not be kept.
The workshop drawers are filled with lights, magnifying glasses, and tools. He owns 297 pocket watches. Sometimes, if he spots me nearby, he calls me to his side and winds the one I love. Not the one he tries to fix but the one with complications, the one that works perfectly, which plays a song in chimes and has two cherubs with moving arms knocking little golden hammers against a bell.