Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (30 page)

He moved Calia’s dishes to the sink and sat back down
at the table. “Yesterday I went through such files as I have from that trip I
made to central Europe after the war. I was looking for so many people that
nothing stands out very clearly in my mind. Lotty had given me her
grandparents’ address on the Renngasse—that was where she lived before the
Anschluss—a very tony address which had been taken over in ’38 by people who
wouldn’t talk to me. I concentrated most of my energy in Vienna on my own
family, and then I wanted to get to Budapest to look for Teresz’s people. We
weren’t married then, of course, we were still very young.”

His voice faded into memory. After a minute he shook
his head with a sad little smile and continued. “Anyway, the notes I have about
the Radbukas—well, let me get them.”

While he went up to his study I helped myself to fruit
and rolls from his refrigerator. He came back in a couple of minutes with a
thick binder. He thumbed through it, opening it to a sheet of cheap grey paper
encased in plastic. Even though the ink was fading to brown, Lotty’s
distinctive script—spiky and bold—was unmistakable.

Dear Max,

I admire your courage in taking this trip. Vienna for
me represents a world I can’t bear to return to, even if the Royal Free would
grant me a leave of absence. So thank you for going, since I am as desperate
for a conclusive answer as everyone else. I told you about my grandparents. If
by a miracle they have survived and have been able to return to their home, it
is Renngasse 7, third-floor front.

I want to ask you also to look for any record of
another family from Vienna, named Radbuka. This is for someone at the Royal
Free who sadly cannot recollect many details. For instance, the man’s first
name was Shlomo but the person doesn’t know his wife’s name, or even if they
would have been registered with some kind of Germanized names. They had a son
called Moishe, born around 1900, one daughter named Rachel, two other daughters
whose names the person isn’t sure of—one might be Eva—and a number of
grandchildren of our generation. Also, the address isn’t certain: it was on the
Leopoldsgasse, near the Untere Augarten Strasse end: you turn right from U.A.
onto L-gasse, then it’s the second turning on your right, into the interior
courtyard, and on the third floor at the back. I realize that’s a hopeless way
to describe what may now be a pile of rubble, but it’s the best I can do. But
please, I ask you to treat it as seriously as your search for our own families,
please make every effort to see what trace you can find of them.

I am on duty tonight and tomorrow night both, so I
won’t be able to see you in person before you leave.

The remainder of the letter gave the names of some of
Lotty’s aunts and uncles and concluded with,
I’m enclosing a gold prewar
five-Krone piece to help pay for your journey.

I blinked: gold coins sound romantic, exotic, and
wealthy. “I thought Lotty was a poor student, barely able to make her tuition
and rooming payments.”

“She was. She had a handful of gold coins that her
grandfather had helped her smuggle out of Vienna: giving one of them to me
meant wearing her coat and socks to bed in lieu of heat that winter. Maybe that
contributed to her getting so sick the next year.”

Abashed, I returned to the main question. “So you
don’t have any idea who in London asked Lotty for help?”

He shook his head. “It could have been anyone. Or it
could have been Lotty herself, searching for relatives. I wondered if it might
be one of her cousins’ names: she and Hugo were sent to England; the Herschels
had been quite well off before the Anschluss. They still had some resources,
but Lotty once or twice mentioned very poor cousins who stayed behind. But I
also thought it might be someone who was in England illegally, someone Lotty
felt honor-bound to protect. I didn’t have anything to go on, mind you. But one
imagines something and that was the picture I painted to myself . . . or maybe
it was Teresz’s idea. I can’t remember now. Of course Radbuka might have been a
patient or colleague from the Royal Free for whom Lotty felt similarly
protective.”

“I suppose I could get in touch with the Royal Free,
see if they have lists that date back to ’47,” I said doubtfully. “What did you
find in Vienna? Did you go to—to—” I looked at Lotty’s note and stumbled
through the pronunciation of the German street names.

Max flipped through the binder to the back, where he
pulled a cheap notebook from its own plastic cover. “I looked at my notes, but
they don’t tell me much. Bauernmarkt, where my own family lived, had been badly
hit in the bombing. I know I did walk all through that area, through what they
used to call the Matzoinsel, where the eastern European Jews gathered when they
immigrated during the early years of the century. I’m sure I tried to find the
place on the Leopoldsgasse. But the site of so much desolation was too
depressing. My notes I kept for news from the different agencies I visited.”

He opened the notebook carefully, so as not to tear
the fragile paper. “Shlomo and Judit Radbuka: deported to Lodz 23 February 1941
with Edith—I think that’s the name Lotty thought might be Eva—Rachel, Julie,
and Mara. And a list of seven children, two to ten years old. Then I had a job
tracking down what happened in the Lodz ghetto. Poland was a very difficult
country then—it wasn’t yet under communist control, but while some people were
quite helpful, there were also ferocious pogroms against the remnants of the
Jewish community. It was the same story of desolation and deprivation that
existed all over Europe: Poland lost a fifth of its population to the war. I
nearly turned tail a half dozen times, but finally I did get hold of some of
the records of the ghetto authority. The Radbukas all were deported to a death
camp in June of 1943. None of them survived.

“Of my own family, well, I found a cousin in one of
the DP camps. I tried to persuade him to come to England with me, but he was
determined to return to Vienna. Where he did live out the rest of his life. At
the time no one knew what would happen with the Russians and Austria, but in
the end it worked out fine for my cousin. But he was always very reclusive
after the war. I had looked up to him so as a child; he was eight years older
than me, it was hard to see him so fearful, so withdrawn.”

I stood silent, sickened by the images he was
conjuring, before bursting out, “Then why did Lotty use the name Sofie Radbuka?
I—that episode—the picture of Carl going to the country, looking for her
cottage, Lotty staying behind the doors and using the name of a dead
person—it’s very unnerving. And it doesn’t sound like Lotty.”

Max rubbed his eyes. “Everyone has unaccountable
moments in their lives. It may be that Lotty thought she was responsible for
the loss or death of this Sofie Radbuka, whether it was a cousin or a patient.
When Lotty thought she might be dying herself—well, we were all living
difficult lives then, working hard, coping with the loss of our families. The
deprivation in England after the war was still acute, too—we had our own bomb
sites to clean up. There were coal shortages, bitter weather, no one had any
money, food and clothes were still rationed. Lotty might have snapped under the
strain, overidentified with this Radbuka woman.

“I do remember when Lotty came back from that illness.
It was in winter, maybe February. She had lost a lot of weight. But she brought
a dozen eggs and a half pound of butter back from the country with her and
invited Teresz and me and the rest of our lot over for tea. She scrambled all
the eggs up with the butter and we had a wonderful feast, and at one point she
announced she would never again let her life be held hostage. She was so fierce
we all rather backed away. Carl refused to come, of course; it was years before
he would speak to her again.”

I told him about the bulletin board I’d found with
Questing Scorpio’s entry. “So there definitely was someone in England by that
name in the forties, but my feeling is that Paul Radbuka’s response was so
intense that Scorpio didn’t write back. I posted a message saying Scorpio could
get in touch with Freeman Carter if there was something confidential to
discuss.”

Max shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know
what any of it means. I just wish Lotty would either tell me what she’s
tormenting herself with—or stop carrying on in such a dramatic fashion.”

“Have you spoken to her since Sunday night? I tried
talking to her last night, but she bit my head off.”

Max grunted. “This is one of those weeks where I
wonder what keeps our friendship together. She’s an important surgeon; she’s
sorry she was momentarily under the weather at my delightful party, but she’s
fine now, thanks very much, and she needs to make rounds.”

The doorbell rang. Tim Streeter had arrived. He was a
tall, rangy guy with a handlebar moustache and an engaging smile. Max called to
Agnes, who quickly relaxed under Tim’s calm air of confidence, while Calia,
after a momentary suspicion, promptly announced he was a “lawrus” because of his
giant moustache and offered to throw him dead fish. Tim made her squeal with
laughter by blowing spluttery air through his moustache points. Max, much
relieved, took off for the hospital.

Tim toured the premises, looking for vulnerable spots,
then crossed the street to the park with Calia so she could play with the dogs.
Calia brought Ninshubur with her, proudly showing Mitch and Peppy that her dog
had tags just like theirs. “Ninshubur is Mitch’s mummy,” she announced.

After seeing the skillful way Tim kept between Calia
and any passersby, seeming to make it part of a game instead of alarming the
child, Agnes returned to the house to set up her paints. When the dogs had run
the edge off their energy, I told Tim I needed to move on.

“There’s not an imminent threat, as I understand it,”
he drawled.

“A hyper-emotional guy flailing around—not threatening
directly, but making everyone uncomfortable,” I agreed.

“Then I think I can do it on my own. I’ll set up a
camp bed in that sunroom: it’s the one place with vulnerable windows. You’ve
got the photos of the stalker, right?”

In the confusion of getting Morrell to O’Hare, I’d
left my briefcase at his place. I had a set of photos in it, which I said I’d
drop off in an hour or two on my way into the city. Calia pouted when I called
the dogs to me, but Tim blew through his moustache and gave a walruslike bark.
She turned her back on us and demanded that he bark again if he wanted another
fish.

Quarantine

I reached the cottage on a day so hot that not even
the bees could bear it. A man who’d ridden the bus with me from Seaton Junction
carried my suitcase up the road for me. When he finally left me, after asking
for the eighth or ninth time if I was sure I could manage, I sat exhausted on
the door-stone, letting the sun burn through my jumper. I’d darned it so many
times that it was more mending thread than cotton at this point.

It had been hot in London, too, but a horrible city
heat, where the yellow skies pushed down on you so hard your head began to buzz
as if it were filled with cotton wool. At night I sweated so much that sheet
and nightgown both were wet when I got up in the morning. I knew I needed to
eat, but between the heat and the lethargy my physical condition induced it was
hard to force food down.

When Claire examined me, she told me brusquely that I
was starving myself to death. “Any infection on the wards could kill you in a
week, the condition you’re in right now. You need to eat. You need to rest.”

Eat and rest. When I lay in bed at night, feverish
nightmares consumed me. I kept seeing my mother, too weak from hunger and
pregnancy to walk down the stairs with us when Hugo and I left Vienna. The baby
died of malnutrition at two months. Nadia, they’d called her, meaning hope.
They would not be hopeless. I knew the baby died because my father wrote to
tell me. A Red Cross letter, with the prescribed twenty-five words, that
reached me in March, 1940. The last letter from him.

I had hated the baby when my mother was pregnant
because it took her from me: no more games, no more songs, only her eyes
getting bigger in her head. Now this poor little sister whom I’d never seen
haunted me, reproaching me for my nine-year-old jealousy. In the night as I
sweated in the thick London air, I could hear her feeble cries growing faint
with malnutrition.

Or I’d see my Oma, her thick silvery-blond hair, about
which she was so vain that she refused to bob it. In her apartment on the
Renngasse I would sit with her at night while the maid brushed it, the ends so
long my grandmother could sit on them. But now, in my misery, I would see her,
shaved as my father’s mother had always been under her wig. Which image
tormented me more? My Oma, shaved and helpless, or my father’s mother, my Bobe,
whom I refused to kiss good-bye? As I grew thinner and weaker in the London
heat, that last morning in Vienna grew so loud in my head that I could hardly
hear the world around me.

The cousins with whom I shared a bed, not coming to
England, staying in bed, refusing to get up to walk to the station with us. Oma
and Opa would pay for Lingerl’s children, but not the daughters of my father’s
sisters, those dark girls with nut-shaped faces whom I so closely resembled.
Oh, the money, Opa had no money anymore, except that little hoard of coins. The
coins that bought me my medical training could have bought my cousins’ lives.
My Bobe stretching her arms out to me, her beloved Martin’s daughter, and I
with my Oma’s jealous eyes on me giving her only a formal curtsy in farewell. I
lay in bed weeping, begging my granny to forgive me.