The Weight

My father was a bitter man.

He was convinced the world was desperate to deceive and deprive him of all he was owed. Every neighbor with a nicer house or more expensive car was laughing at him. Every day spent at work was one stolen from his life. Every meal my mother made for him was just ash in his mouth. I remember once he likened his dinner to soil and accused her of trying to bury him in an early grave.

She took the comment in silence.

She did however speak up when he mentioned that he should have a younger wife, a prettier one. I had never heard my mother yell like that before that day, and I haven’t heard her yell like that since. We left that very night, our belongings packed into a few bags, and went to live with my aunt. Too young to understand, I asked if my father would be coming with us. She told me,

“Let him wallow in his own poison alone. I will do so no more.”

My father would demand to see me, the courts ensuring he could, but my mother would not speak to him nor look him in the eye. He was dead to her, and she flourished from it.

On the days I spent with him, (with my mother gone) his rantings would be turned towards me. He drove me once through a neighborhood filled with expensive homes and told me, “We should be living in such a place as this, son, we should be princes in palaces!”

Innocent at the time, I asked him why we did not live in such houses, why we lived in our little home, no better than a mouse’s nest in comparison to such mansions. Seeing them made me feel like a stain upon an otherwise spotless linen. My father told me as we left the neighborhood that my grandfather was a wealthy man, but a greedy one. He had more gold than he could ever know what to do with, but refused to share a single gram of it with his only son. He spoke of my grandfather with such disdain I could only imagine what a horribly greedy man he could be to refuse his child the same wealth he enjoyed. In my early years I had begun to picture him like the dragons in my storybooks, sitting atop a pile of gold coins. In my father’s narrative, he was the avaricial king withholding the wealth of the land.

I cannot deny I began to share my father’s covetous nature. I felt the same jealousy as he, seeing others with that which I could never have. But remembering my mother, I never let it poison me and the way in which I saw the world. I made peace with it where my father would remain ever restless.

I first met my grandfather a few years later.

My mother had taken me to see him. Having expected him to live in a towering mansion with golden halls, I was more than surprised when she took me to a cramped and decaying apartment building deep within the city. At the door I was not met by a greedy king or a dragon, but with a withered old man leaning on his cane standing hardly taller than my little mother. She greeted him with a warm hug and a kiss on his cheek. Craning his neck down, he regarded me with watery eyes through the lens of his glasses and placed a bony hand on my shoulder. He remarked how big I had gotten (revealing that he had seen me once before when I was an infant). His thick accent made it hard for me to understand him, but my mother understood him fine. He brought us in for coffee, giving me some candies as the two talked over pouring milk and spooning lumps of sugar. She appeared to be on much better terms with my grandfather than my father was. He seemed to be a kind old man, I couldn’t understand my father’s hatred towards him. Surely this feeble old man with paper skin and watery eyes in his little apartment wasn’t the same man my father spoke of.

The next time I saw my father I asked him if I had two grandfathers. I told him of the one I visited, mentioning that it couldn’t be the same one that he described. To my surprise, my father confirmed them to be one in the same. He had grown up in that “shithole flat” all his youth, but he knew his father had gold, he had seen it as a boy. His father had kept it hidden, refused to share it, refused to even acknowledge its existence.

A few years later when my grandfather passed, my father did not hesitate to clean out his apartment. He took me with him to help, and he tore through every drawer and box and cabinet searching for hidden gold. Come afternoon, he sent me down the street to get lunch. When I had returned, I found my father sitting in my grandfather’s cramped bedroom upon the floor, the floor trim of the closet torn out. He held a wooden box in his hands.

When I asked him what he had found, he looked up at me with haunted eyes. I asked to look in the box and my father stormed at me, demanding I leave the room, saying never to ask him again what was within the box. I sat out at my grandfather’s table where he and my mother had shared coffee years before and cried, unsure of what I had done to deserve such a reaction.

My father emerged from the room some hours later with a cardboard box. It was growing dark outside by this point. He set it gingerly on the table and knelt before me, holding my shoulders. His eyes held ghosts within as they held my gaze. For the first time since I could remember my father spoke softly and apologized to me. I could tell he had found what he was looking for, but I did not understand why he seemed so miserable. I thought he would be full of joy. He did not speak as he collected me up and left the apartment, locking the door behind him. He took me back to my aunt’s house and left me with my mother. For the first time since she left him, the two spoke. I watched from the window on the second floor as they stood just outside the doorway. I could not hear them nor make out what they said. After he left I asked my mother what they spoke of, but she wouldn’t say. I could not help but wonder what had been inside that box. I began to think it was empty. I wondered, but I never asked.

In the years after this my father no longer spoke of all the things he deserved in life. He was a much more quiet and solemn man. When he died it fell to me (just as it had fallen to him with his own father) to clean out his home and pack his things into boxes. A man’s life to be reduced to whatever fit in cardboard casings.

It was at the back of his own closet that I found the box from my grandfather’s apartment. At first I thought nothing of it, thinking it to be storage, but upon looking inside I saw the wooden box my father had held with such haunted eyes. I had long believed it to be empty and had grown somewhat thankful of it. My father no longer seethed hateful bile out of every word he spoke. Perhaps it is cruel of me to say, but it made him tolerable. Perhaps even a better man. A better father for sure.

The box wasn’t empty.

When I lifted it to peer inside, wanting to look upon the emptiness that had changed my father so, I found the box to carry an incredible weight. A gentle shake produced the sound of jangling metal. I opened the box and laid eyes upon the long awaited mystery.

It was full of rings. Gold rings. I poured some out into my hand and looked at the pile of bright bands gleaming back at me.

Just the amount in my hand was easily worth twenty-thousand dollars.

I poured the rings back in and looked through the other contents that lay beneath the wooden box. With it my father had packed away a red ledger and a little black book.

As I opened the red ledger I realized why these rings haunted my father so.

The ledger was full of names, full of dates.

Sofia/Otto Braun, 26/28. 8/4/42. 8/10/42.

Josef Lowen. 54. 8/4/42. 8/10/42.

Charlotte Friedman. 8/4/42. ---

These rings belonged to those in the red ledger.

Pages upon pages of names and dates.

When I could read no more I turned to the little black book. To my relief it held no names but that of my grandfather’s. It was his journal. It was here I learned how he came into possession of the rings.

His brother had been a soldier in the camps, aiding the death and suffering. When the camp was liberated, his brother fled home with the rings, hoping to be a rich man, but never selling off the gold. Fearing repercussions from his actions in the war he took his own life.

When my grandfather inherited his brother’s things, he had found the box. Fearing association with his brother, he took it and fled to the States. He could hardly look upon the box for the horror he felt thinking of each life every ring represented. He could not sell the rings away, nor could he bring himself to dispose of them.

To atone for his brother’s sins he would return them.

Over the years however, he lost hope. Each name he had managed to track down led him only to names written in stone, the lives long gone. On the verge of accepting his failure, he found the daughter of a couple that had died in the camps.

Her name was Rose.

He returned the rings to her and begged forgiveness on his brother’s behalf (and for his own, for never stepping forth as it happened). Rose took the rings and asked that he continue to return them. To search out the survivors and their descendants. The rings were such little things but they meant the world to those they had been taken from. Rose had long lost her mother and father, but now, however small, a part of them had been returned to her. My grandfather promised to continue his search.

Throughout his life he returned twenty-two rings.

Only twenty-two.

So many had no one to return them to.

In his final entry he addressed my father and explained himself, hoping that he would continue the search for him.

My father had not.

He had hidden the box away in fear and shame.

I was tempted to do the same, but I knew I could not. I would find a way. I had to. For Rose, for all of them.

The box was heavy in my hands, but I would do all I could to lighten it.