They were printed in a foreign language. The paper seemed delicate and old. I lifted each sheet with my two hands and placed it on the lid of the open box. Then, at the bottom of the box, I saw it. A picture of my father’s face on a pink card. He was much younger than I had ever seen him, with no broken nose, no wrinkles or white hair. Still I had no doubt that it was him—I recognized the eyes. His lips seemed to be about to smile, but his eyes stared out at me with an acute and questioning intensity.
At the bottom of his picture, below his chin, almost covering his tie, was a stamp. I was too young to know much history, but I recognized the man on the stamp. I had no doubt he represented evil, and the sight of my father’s face above it made no sense. I tried to find more clues.
I could see that it was some form of identification. I looked for my father’s name, but it was not there. Instead, the card seemed to belong to someone called Jan Šebesta. It was dated October 1943 and was valid until October 1946. On the reverse, the bearer’s date of birth was recorded as March 11, 1921. I knew my father’s birthday was February 9, 1921.
The identity card I found as a girl in Caracas
I do not remember much else from that moment other than being terrified. I had to find my mother. My father was not called Hans. He was lying about his name and about his date of birth. The evidence was undeniable, printed on an official looking document. I ran down the long checkered granite terrace, past the sofas and armchairs and the enormous bronze and limestone sculptures. I flew through the white hallway, thinking then that the eyes of the Botero portrait of my father watched me as I ran.
I prayed I would not see my father before I found my mother. I could hear music in my parents’ bedroom. My mother was sitting on the daybed in their room, holding the libretto from a cassette box and mouthing the words to a loud Rigoletto. I threw myself at her. I sobbed and shook. I remember that she held me and then carried me to the stereo to lower the volume. Her hair brushed my cheek as she asked if I had hurt myself again, playing with the dogs.
“No. No. Mami, no. He is not who he says he is. It is not him.”
“Who?”
“Papi,” I said. “He is pretending, I have proof. He is not Hans, his real name is Jan, Mami. He wasn’t born on February ninth, he is lying. He is an impostor.”
I don’t remember anything else from that day.
The identity card, with the stamp of Hitler and its photograph of my father, jolted me to a sharp and unexpected focus. It brought to the fore every other tiny fissure in my understanding, all the minuscule silences and unanswered questions that had been invisible before. It was then that I first sensed that hidden beneath my father’s strength and triumphs were shadows cast by nameless horrors so terrible they had to remain unuttered.
The averted eyes, the pauses a second too long, the eschewing of reminiscence had until then passed mostly unnoticed. Finding that photograph in the box was the pivot. It marked the exact moment when the unfilled spaces, the cracks in the narrative, emerged.
And slowly, very, very slowly, I realized that in those gaps, buried and interwoven within the silences and minute instances of discomposure, lay the real story.
The next time I looked, the box had been moved from the library. I never discovered where it was kept. Much later, my mother told me that she never, in her many years of living with my father, saw that box. Decades would pass before I found it again.
4.
There were hints before. Peppered across my memories were moments that jarred, instances of disquiet. The cracks had been there all along. I remember when I was about seven, after a nightmare, going down the corridor to find refuge in my parents’ bed. It was something I rarely did, not because I did not have nightmares, but because my father slept naked and seemed irritated to have to put pajamas on under his dressing gown when I showed up. So I remember quite distinctly the few times when I did sneak in.
That night, after some comforting, I dozed off wedged between him and my mother. I woke to hear my father screaming, desperate, in a language that I did not understand. My mother reached out to him over me and hugged us both. She stroked his arm, his white hair, and murmured: “Handa, it’s okay, you are home in Caracas. You are here with us. It’s a nightmare.”
My father sat up nervous and sweaty and left the room, almost at a run. He had seemed in so much pain. My mother whispered, “Don’t worry, little mouse. He too has nightmares.”
“What about?” I asked.
“He had a hard time during the war in Europe. But that was a long time ago.” And then she left to go after him.
I curled up on my father’s side of the bed, put my head on my hands, and stared at the velvet fabric that covered the walls. I recall thinking at the time that if he was having nightmares, whatever was causing them could not have taken place so long ago. And why did my mother have to remind him that he was in Caracas? Where else could he be?
My eyes rested on the picture in the faded leather frame that sat alone on my father’s mirrored bedside table. The picture was dark and faded; it was hard to tell exactly what was there. It was the only picture of them in a house filled with photographs: my father’s parents seated at a table, not really looking at the camera or at each other. The table was covered with a white cloth, and on it was a newspaper, some glasses, and a bottle of wine. My grandmother was looking down at something in her hands, almost smiling at it. Perhaps she was knitting. My grandfather was also looking down, a cigarette held in between the long fingers of his right hand. On his left, he was holding something that looked like a pencil. I remember thinking that despite my grandmother’s expression, they both looked sad. Sad and old. Distant from each other and from the photographer. In the graying picture, they seemed far removed from my life too, certainly from our life that was filled with sunlight and bright colors. I remember that night I felt scared. Scared by them, scared by what I did not know about them, and scared for my father.
The only photograph of my grandparents kept in our home in Caracas
5.
When I was a child, my father seemed ancient and inaccessible. He was busy, always in meetings, unfailingly doing something important. I was desperate to be close to him, to find ways of connecting. We solved word and logic puzzles together. He talked to me about politics and the social inequalities of the society we lived in. He enjoyed debate and intellectual discussion. I remember when I was nine, he had been watching the BBC dramatization of I, Claudius. Keen to discuss it with him, I read the first in the series of Robert Graves’s books, which I found on a shelf in our library. It was, I can now see, an unusual choice for a young girl who liked Enid Blyton. I felt so proud as my father tugged at one of my plaits and looked down approvingly when I told him I had finished the book. I recall the moment he announced to my mother at dinner that night that I was clearly very clever and that I had just been discussing I, Claudius with him. I am not sure that I made head or tail of the book and can certainly not recall any part of the story now, but I had read it furiously from cover to cover. I just remember the joy of having impressed him.
My father and me in his study, c. 1978
When I had first told him I was setting up the spy club, he was enthralled. He suggested I prepare a diagram of how we would divide responsibilities. He particularly liked it when I said that we would give everyone a voice but have a structure that would assure clear leadership in case of an impasse. I had heard him discuss the management structure of one of his companies when we had been spying. I repeated what I had heard to give the impression that I had a precocious aptitude for business and management.