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 have 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.