A question whose answer I would have liked to hear myself, but not in front of this guy.
Lotty raised haughty eyebrows at him. “What I do is no conceivable business of yours. It was my understanding from the uproar you caused in the hall that you came to see whether either Mr. Loewenthal or Mr. Tisov were related to you. Now that you’ve caused a great disturbance, perhaps you would be good enough to give your address to Ms. Warshawski and leave us in peace.”
Radbuka’s lower lip stuck out, but before he could dig his heels in, Morrell intervened. “I’m going to take Radbuka up to Max’s study, as V I tried to do an hour ago. Max and Carl may join him there later, if they’re able.”
Don had been sitting quietly in the background, but he stood up now. “Right. Come on, big guy. Dr. Herschel needs to rest.”
Don put an arm around him. With Morrell at his other elbow, they moved the unhappy Radbuka to the door, his neck hunched into his oversize jacket, his face so expressive of bewildered misery that he looked like a circus clown.
When they’d gone, I turned to Lotty. “Who was Sofie Radbuka?”
She turned her frosty stare to me. “No one that I know of.”
“Then why did hearing her name make you faint?”
“It didn’t. My foot caught on the edge of a rug and-”
“Lotty, if you don’t want to tell me, keep it to yourself, but please don’t make up stupid lies to me.”
She bit her lip, turning her head away from me. “There’s been far too much emotion in this house today. First Max and Carl furious with me, and now the man himself shows up. I don’t need you angry with me as well.”
I sat on the wicker table in front of her settee. “I’m not angry. But I happened to be alone in the hall when this guy came to the door, and after ten minutes with him my head was spinning like a hula hoop. If you faint, or start to faint, then claim nothing was wrong, it makes me even dizzier. I’m not here to criticize, but you were so upset on Friday you got me seriously worried. And your agony seems to have started with this guy’s appearance at the Birnbaum conference.”
She looked back at me, her hauteur suddenly changed to consternation. “ Victoria, I’m sorry-I have been selfish, not thinking of the effect of my behavior on you. You do deserve some kind of explanation.”
She sat frowning to herself, as if trying to decide what kind of explanation I deserved. “I don’t know if I can make clear the relationships of that time in my life. How I came to be so close to Max, and even Carl.
“There was a group of nine of us refugee children who became good friends during the war. We met over music; a woman from Salzburg, a violist who was herself a refugee, came around London and gathered us up. She saw Carl’s gift, got him lessons, got him into a good music program. There were various others. Teresz, who eventually married Max. Me. My father had been a violin player. Café music, not the stuff of the soirées Frau Herbst organized, but skillful-at least, I think he was skillful, but how can I know, when I only heard him as a child? Anyway, even though I had no gift myself, I loved hearing the music at Frau Herbst’s.”
“Was Radbuka the name of one of that group? Why does Carl care so much? Is it someone he was in love with?”
She smiled painfully. “You would have to ask him that. Radbuka was the name of-someone else. Max-he had great organizational skills, even as a young man. When the war ended, he went around London to the different societies that helped people find out about their families. Then he-went back to central Europe, looking. That was in-I think it was in ’47, but after all this time I can’t be sure of the exact year. That was when the Radbuka name came up-it wasn’t anyone in the group’s actual surname, you see. But that is why we could ask Max to look. Because we were all so close, not like a family, like something else, perhaps a combat team who fought together for years.
“For almost all of us, Max’s reports came back with devastating completeness. No survivors. For the Herschels, the Tisovs, the Loewenthals-Max found his father and two cousins, and that was another terrible-” She cut herself off mid-sentence.
“I was starting my medical training. It consumed me to the exclusion of so much else. Carl always blamed me for-well, let’s just say, something unpleasant came up around the person from the Radbuka family. Carl always thought my absorption with medicine made me behave in a fashion which he regarded as cruel… as if his own devotion to music had not been equally absolute.”
This last sentence she muttered under her breath as an afterthought. She fell silent. She had never spoken to me of her losses in such a way, such an emotional way. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say-or not to say-about the friend from the Radbuka family, but when it became clear she wouldn’t expand on it, I couldn’t press her.
“Do you know”-I hesitated, trying to think of the least painful way of asking the question-“do you know what Max learned about the Radbuka family?”
Her face twisted. “They-he didn’t find any trace of them. Although traces were hard to find and he didn’t have much money. We all gave him a bit, but we didn’t have money, either.”
“So hearing this man call himself Radbuka must have been quite a shock.”
She shuddered and looked at me. “It was, believe me, it’s been a shock all week. How I envy Carl, able to put the whole world to one side when he starts to play. Or maybe it’s that he puts the whole world inside him and blows it out that tube.” She repeated the question she’d asked when she saw Paul on video. “How old is he, do you think?”
“He says he came here after the war around the age of four, so he must have been born in ’42 or ’43.”
“So he couldn’t be-does he think he was born in Theresienstadt?”
I threw up my hands. “All I know about him is from Wednesday night’s interview. Is Theresienstadt the same as what he calls Terezin?”
“Terezin is its Czech name; it’s an old fortress outside Prague.” She added with an unexpected gleam of humor, “That’s Austrian snobbery, using the German name-a holdover from when Prague was part of the Hapsburg empire and everyone spoke German. This man tonight, he’s insisting he’s Czech, not German, by calling it Terezin.”
We sat again in silence. Lotty was withdrawn into her own thoughts, but she seemed more relaxed, less tortured, than she had for the past few days. I told her I’d go up to see what I could learn from Radbuka.
Lotty nodded. “If I feel stronger I’ll come up by and by. Right now-I think I’ll just lie here.”
I made sure she was well-covered in the afghan Max had provided before turning out the light. When I closed the French doors behind me, I could see across the hall into the front room, where a dozen or so people still lingered over brandy. Michael Loewenthal was on the piano bench, holding Agnes on his lap. Everyone was happy. I went on up the stairs.
Max’s study was a large room overlooking the lake, filled with Ming vases and T’ang horses. It was at the far end of the second floor from where the children were watching videos; Max had picked the room when his own two children were small, because it was well-secluded from the body of the house. When I shut the door no outside sounds could disrupt the tension inside. Morrell and Don smiled at me, but Paul Ulrich-Radbuka looked away in disappointment when he saw it was me, not Max or Carl.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said pathetically. “Are people ashamed to be seen with me? I need to talk to Max and Carl. I need to find out how we’re related. I’m sure Carl or Max will want to know he has a surviving family member.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, as if that would block out his hyperemotional state. “Try to relax, Mr.-uh. Mr. Loewenthal will be with you as soon as he can leave his guests. Perhaps Mr. Tisov as well. Can I get you a glass of wine, or a soft drink?”
He looked longingly at the door but apparently realized he couldn’t find Carl unaided. He subsided into an armchair and muttered that he supposed a glass of water would help settle his nerves. Don jumped up to fetch it.
“Do you have any clue about where you were born?” I asked. “I gather Radbuka is a Czech name.”
“The birth certificate that was sent with me to Terezin said Berlin, which is one reason I’m so eager to meet my relatives. Maybe the Radbukas were Czechs hiding in Berlin: some Jews fled west instead of east, trying to get away from the Einsatzgruppen. Maybe they were Czechs who had emigrated there before the war ever started. Oh, how I wish I knew something.” He knotted his hands in anguish.
I picked my next words with care. “It must have been quite a shock to you, to find that birth certificate when your-uh-foster father died. Telling you that you were Paul Radbuka from Berlin, instead of-where did Ulrich tell you you were born?”
“ Vienna. But no, I’ve never seen my Terezin birth certificate, I only read about it elsewhere, once I realized who I was.”
“How cruel of Ulrich, to write about it but not leave you with the document itself!” I exclaimed.
“No, no, I had to track it down in an outside report. It was-was just by chance I found out about it at all.”
“What an extraordinary amount of research you’ve done!” I packed my voice with so much admiration that Morrell frowned at me in warning, but Paul brightened perceptibly. “I’d love to see the report that told you about your birth certificate.”
At that he stiffened, so I hastily changed the subject. “You don’t remember any Czech, I suppose, if you were separated from your mother at-what was it-twelve months?”
He relaxed again. “When I hear Czech I recognize it but don’t really understand it. The first language I spoke is German, because that was the language of the guards. Also many of the women who worked in the nursery at Terezin spoke it.”
I heard the door open behind me and held a hand out in a signal to be quiet. Don slid past me to put a glass of water next to Paul. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Max quietly follow Don into the room. Paul, caught up in the pleasure of my attending to his story, went on without paying attention to them.
“There were six of us small children who more or less banded together, and really, we formed a little brigade; even at the age of three we looked after one another because the adults were so overworked and so underfed they couldn’t care for individual children. We clung to one another and hid together from the guards. When the war ended we were sent to England. At first we were scared when the adults started putting us on trains, because in Terezin we saw many children put on trains and everyone knew they went someplace to die. But after we got over our terror, we had a happy time in England. We were in a big house in the country, it had a name like that of an animal, a dog, which was scary at first because we were terrified of dogs. From having seen them used so evilly in the camps.”
“And that’s where you learned English?” I prompted.
“We learned English bit by bit, the way children do, and really, we forgot our German. After a time, maybe it was nine months or even a year, they started finding homes for us, people wanting to adopt us. They decided we were mentally recovered enough that we could stand the pain of losing one another, although how can you ever stand that pain? The loss of my special playmate, my Miriam, it haunts my dreams to this day.”
His voice broke. He used the napkin Don had put under the water glass to blow his nose. “One day this man arrived. He was large and coarse-faced and said he was my father and I should go with him. He wouldn’t even let me kiss my little Miriam good-bye. Kissing was weibisch-a sissy thing-and I must be a man now. He shouted to me in German and was furious that I didn’t speak German anymore. Over and over as I was growing up he would beat me, telling me he was making a man out of me, beating the Schwule und Weiblichkeit out of me.”
He was crying freely, in obvious distress. I handed him the glass of water.
“That must have been very horrible,” Max said gravely. “When did your father die?”
He didn’t seem to notice Max’s sudden appearance in the conversation. “You mean, I presume, the man who is not my father. I don’t know when my birth father died. That is what I am hoping you can tell me. Or perhaps Carl Tisov.”
He blew his nose again and stared at us defiantly. “The man who stole me from my campmates died seven years ago. It was after that when I started having nightmares and became depressed and disoriented. I lost my job, I lost my bearings, my nightmares became more and more explicit. I tried various remedies, but-always I was being drawn to these unspeakable images of the past, images I have come to recognize as my experience of the Shoah. Not until I started working with Rhea did I understand them for what they were. I think I saw my mother being raped and pushed alive into a pit of lime, but of course it could have been some other woman, I was so little I can’t even recall my mother’s face.”
“Did your foster father tell you what became of-well, his wife?” Morrell put in.
“He said the woman he called my mother had died when the Allies bombed Vienna. That we had lived in Vienna and lost everything because of the Jews, he was always very bitter about the Jews.”
“Do you have any idea why he tracked you down in England? Or how he knew you were there?” I was struggling to make sense of his narrative.
He spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “After the war-everything was so unsettled. Anything was possible. I think he wanted to come to America, and claiming he was a Jew, which he could do if he had a Jewish child in hand, that would put him at the head of the queue. Especially if he had a Nazi past he wanted to conceal.”
“And you think he did?” Max asked.
“I know so. I know so from his papers, that he was a vile piece of drek. A leader of the Einsatzgruppen.”
“What a horrible thing to uncover,” Don murmured. “To be a Jew and find you’ve grown up with the worst of the murderers of your people. No wonder he treated you the way he did.”
Paul looked at him eagerly. “Oh, you do understand! I’m sure that his bestial behavior-the way he would beat me, deprive me of food when he was angry, lock me in a closet for hours, sometimes overnight-all that came from his terrible anti-Semitism. You are a Jew, Mr. Loewenthal, you understand how ugly someone like that can be.”
Max sidestepped the remark. “Ms. Warshawski says that you found a document in your-foster father’s-papers that gave you the clue to your real name. I’m curious about that. Would you let me see it?”
Ulrich-Radbuka took his time to answer. “When you tell me which one of you is related to me, then perhaps I will let you see the papers. But since you will not help me, I see no reason why I should show you my private documents.”
“Neither Mr. Tisov nor I is connected to the Radbuka family,” Max said. “Please try to accept that. It is a different friend of ours who knew a family with your name, but I know as much as that person does about the Radbuka family-which I’m sorry to say isn’t a great deal. If you could let me see these documents, it would help me decide if you are part of the same family.”
When Radbuka refused in a panicky voice, I intervened to ask if he had any idea where his birth parents came from. Apparently taking the question as agreement to his Radbuka identity, Paul recounted what he knew with a return of his childlike eagerness.
“I know nothing whatsoever about my birth parents. Some of our six musketeers knew more, although that can be painful, too. My little Miriam, for instance, poor soul, she knew her mother had gone mad and died in the mental hospital at Terezin. But now-Max, you say you know the details of my family life. Who of the Radbukas would be in Berlin in 1942?”
“No one,” Max said with finality. “No brothers, nor parents. I can assure you of that. This is a family whi
ch emigrated to Vienna in the years before the First World War. In 1941 they were sent to Lodz, in Poland. The ones who were still alive in 1943 were sent on to the camp where they all perished.”
Paul Ulrich-Radbuka’s face lit up. “But perhaps I was born in Lodz.”
“I thought you knew you’d been born in Berlin,” I blurted out.
“There are so few reliable documents from those times,” he said. “Perhaps they gave me the paper of a boy who died in the camp. Anything like that is possible.”
Talking to him was like walking in the marshes: just when you thought you had a fact to stand on, the ground gave way.
Max looked at him gravely. “None of the Radbukas in Vienna had special standing: they weren’t important socially or artistically, as was typically true of people who were sent to Theresien-to Terezin. Of course there were always exceptions, but I doubt you will find them in this case.”
“So you’re trying to tell me my family doesn’t exist. But I can see it’s just that you’re hiding them from me. I demand to see them in person. I know they will claim me when they meet me.”
“One easy solution to the problem is a DNA test,” I suggested. “Max, Carl, and their English friend could give blood, we could agree on a lab in England or the U.S. and send a sample of Mr.-Mr. Radbuka’s blood there, as well. That would resolve the question of whether he’s related to any of you or to Max’s English friend.”
“I am not uncertain!” Paul exclaimed, his face pink. “You may be; you’re a detective who makes a living by being suspicious. But I will not submit to being treated like a laboratory specimen, the way my people were in that medical laboratory at Auschwitz, the way my little Miriam’s mother was treated. Looking at blood samples is what the Nazis cared about. Heredity, race, all those things, I won’t take part in it.”
Total Recall Page 16