When Time Stopped

by Ariana Neumann

  He then described my father:

  A vigorous, well-built man of forty-three, Hans has close cropped gray hair, alert green eyes, a bent nose (it was broken in a youthful boxing match), and a mouth rather more sensitive and expressive than one might expect to accompany a broken nose and a decisive personality. He is a lover of art and has a splendid collection of modern paintings and sculpture. In addition, he is the president of the Museo de Bellas Artes, and has done much to foster the development of Art in this country…

  Hans Neumann and Maria Cristina Anzola in Caracas, c. 1980

  My father had filled every part of our house with art. Every wall in every room opened up his collection to visitors; even the large garden was dotted with sculptures. There were beautiful artworks by well-known European masters alongside some lesser-known young Latin American artists. Peppered among the gentler pieces was disturbing surrealist and expressionist art, pictures of fragmented bodies, deconstructed landscapes, and even one of warring body parts. There were sculptures, small and huge, of naked women. I remember the shocked silence of a particularly pious mother of a friend from my Catholic school who had come to my birthday party. She shielded her daughter’s eyes with a blue balloon as she led her toward the door, past an immense bronze of a nude woman with legs apart that leaned against a hammock in the entrance hall. I do not remember that girl ever coming to play at my house again.

  3.

  When I was very young, I wanted to be a detective or, even better, a spy. I often said I wanted to be a doctor, but I think I was just trying to sound clever, as the sight of blood has always made me feel faint. The reality is that I wanted to solve mysteries. To further this ambition, at age eight, I started a spy club with my maternal cousins and a few friends. We had read and been inspired by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. We were unfazed by the fact that we lived in the tropics and not in rainy England. We called it the Mysterious Boot Club. My friend Carolina and I had chosen the name carefully. Carolina, a year older than I, was one of the best students in her class at the British School. We had known each other and got along not because our families were friends but because she understood, like I did, the gravity of our investigative endeavors. We had initially thought of naming it the Mysterious Footprint, but that seemed too bookish and obvious for a club of young detectives. We did not want our enterprise to be dismissed as childish—we needed to be taken seriously by the other children and, more important, by the adults. Too many pages in books with mystery stories were filled with enigmatic footprints in the mud. So we decided to call it after the boot that had made the puzzling footprints—it seemed better somehow, less silly: both more cryptic and more worldly.

  Nestled along the garden’s northernmost wall, surrounded by trees cackling with parrots and the odd wild monkey or sloth, sat a large disused kennel: the official clubhouse of the Mysterious Boot Club. I had asked my father to give us a tin of white paint and some thick brushes so we could make it look the part. He had obliged and we duly decorated the kennel. Carolina had the best handwriting and she fastidiously inked the letters CBM (Club Bota Misteriosa) in bold black permanent marker on a part of the outside wall that was protected from the rain. Every Saturday before the meetings, we would crawl through the low doorway next to the letters. Equipped with a small broom and a box of tissues that we had borrowed from the supply cupboard, we swept the cement floor, cleared the cobwebs, and attempted to shoo away the caterpillars, ants, and bugs that had sought shelter in its tin walls. Wooden crates served as bookshelves, stools, and a table. The place was stuffed with mystery books and notepads half-filled with our attempts at finding enigmas to spice up our mundane and protected lives.

  In the absence of substantive mysteries with which to wrestle, I had occupied myself in composing bylaws that set out the hierarchy and objectives of the club. Given that role, I was unsurprisingly appointed president. The two most sensible and organized members of our group, Carolina and my cousin Rodrigo, were the vice presidents. We had decided that all prospective members should undertake IQ and physical agility tests. The intelligence test I had torn from a Reader’s Digest left lying around the kitchen, and the agility test consisted mostly of running ahead of the not very furious dogs with pockets full of kibble before climbing a tree. We had to bend the rules a little sometimes to ensure that anyone invited could belong. A disappointed aunt heard about our bylaws and coerced us into accepting my youngest cousin, Patricia, who tended to bite when angry and was too young to read, let alone pass, any written test. My parents were adamant that I behave in a kind and inclusive manner, so the entrance requirements were malleable and existed principally to give the members a certain aura of prestige.

  On those Saturday mornings, we would swap books and collect pocket money in a washed-out mayonnaise jar with a slit on the lid, for club supplies and to help an old people’s home down the road. We would all bring notebooks and spy on the people who lived, visited, or worked in my house. We would set one another tasks in half-hour slots and then gather at the clubhouse to drink mango or watermelon juice and read out our reports in serious tones.

  The bulletins were mostly tedious. We all, of course, pretended that they were riveting. Oftentimes, we had to spy while taking turns guarding the tiny biting cousin. Carolina observed that the gardener repeatedly picked up leaves from the same patch in the garden, over and over, week after week. It was clear to her, she solemnly reported, toying with a dark curl of her long hair, that he was simply killing time. My older cousin Eloy, who had big blue eyes and a musical voice, read in great detail his notes about a cleaner whom he had watched dusting and who had suspiciously moved books from one library shelf to another. He had also seen her as she switched around LPs in my father’s color-coded collection. Rock and roll (alphabetically arranged by band with red tape on the spine) had been exchanged with opera (alphabetically arranged by composer with yellow tape). Eloy could not detect whether this had been an act of playfulness, defiance, or absentmindedness. He said what we all knew: when my father spotted the displacement, he would be irate. My father’s constant desire for organization was mystifying and slightly unnerving to all the members of the Mysterious Boot Club.

  We would ask everyone who visited or worked in the house if they had seen anything out of the ordinary. Months would pass and our gatherings continued, in the main, identical. We diligently monitored the activity in the house and patiently recorded every mundane detail. We would encounter small puzzles, gather, and whisper excitedly only to realize with abject disappointment that, after a few queries, all was too easily explained.

  I remember once feeling exhilarated, during school holidays, when we found a red waxy rind in the rubbish after the worried cook had complained that an entire ball of Edam cheese was missing. We ineffectively dusted the rind for fingerprints and patrolled with an ink pad that I had borrowed from my father’s desk, demanding that everyone at the house cooperate and be fingerprinted. It turned out that Maria, the Galician lady who was missing two fingers and came to do the daily ironing, had skipped breakfast and lunch that day, was famished, and had a passion for the imported yellow cheese. She confessed wearily just as Carolina and I asked to press her remaining fingers against the ink pad. There always seemed to be a straightforward explanation for such puzzles. All of us children yearned desperately for a real conundrum against which to test our skills.

  Then one day my cousin, after what seemed like hundreds of unmemorable reports, the gentle and pragmatic Rodrigo, relayed that my father had moved a strange gray box from a locked drawer in the watch workshop to a cupboard in the library.

  Quite why that particular bulletin caught my attention, I cannot say. Perhaps it was because Rodrigo told us that my father had been acting awkwardly and seemed to move more slowly than he should, considering he was just carrying a cardboard box. He reported that it seemed to contain something heavy or precious. After my father left the library, Rodrigo had opened the cupboard but had not dared touch the box.


  I did not disclose the slightest interest in the incident to my fellow spies. I am not sure why. Perhaps it was because it involved my father.

  That afternoon, as soon as the spies left after their lunch and swim, I went to look for the box. I found it easily enough. It was dark gray and made of board and cloth. It sat below the shelf where the checkers board and the wooden chess set were kept. It was not concealed, it just lay there inside a cupboard in which it did not belong. I remember thinking at the time that it may be filled with broken watches. I moved it and, contrary to Rodrigo’s intelligence, was struck by how very light it was.

  I sat on the carpet in front of the bookcase and lifted the lid with the tips of trembling fingers. I sensed that this was the mystery we had been waiting for. The box contained only five or six papers and cards. On the top was a long-expired Venezuelan passport, much smaller than the ones I had seen. It was dated 1956 and bore a picture of my father as I knew him, smiling and already wrinkled, with glasses balanced on a boxer’s nose. Underneath the passport lay other documents, thin and fading.

  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.

  “Your father is so brilliant,” “A true Renaissance man,” “You are so lucky,” people would say without exception. I often wished he were a little less brilliant and spent a bit more time watching football matches on television like other fathers. When you are a child, you do not want to be different. You do not want to have a family who stands out or parents whom your friends talk about. I already had an impossibly beautiful mother, the kind of beautiful that people would stop in the street and stare at. People spoke about her beauty, and that was bad enough.

  Then there was my father.

  People consistently spoke about my father in hushed tones. Twenty years older than my mother, he was almost fifty when I was born and utterly unlike the fathers of my friends. He seemed so much busier, so much more complicated. As I grew older, I had to call his secretary to ask for a meeting if I wanted to have a proper chat during the week. He was so much more serious than my friends’ parents. So much more wrinkled, with that pale skin and those deep circles under his eyes. And then there was that day when he picked me up from school and all the other girls in my fourth-grade class sniggered when one announced, “Ariana—your grandfather is here.”