Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10

Work
Ethic

The cold that winter ate into our bones. You can’t
imagine, living where you turn a dial and as much heat as you want glows from
the radiator, but everything in England then was fueled by coal and there were
terrible shortages the second winter after the war. Like everyone I had little
piles of six-penny bits for the electric fire in my room, but even if I’d been
able to afford to run it all night it didn’t provide much warmth.

One of the women in my lodgings got a length of
parachute silk from her brother, who’d been in the RAF. We all made camisoles
and knickers out of it. We all knew how to knit back then; I unraveled old
sweaters to make scarves and vests—new wool cost a fortune.

We saw newsreels of American ships and planes bringing
the Germans whatever they needed. While we swathed ourselves in blankets and
sweaters and ate grey bread with butter substitutes, we joked bitterly that
we’d done the wrong thing, bringing the Americans in to win the war—they’d
treat us better if we’d lost, the same woman who’d gotten the parachute silk
said.

Of course, I had started my medical training, so I
couldn’t spend much time wrapped up in bed. Anyway, I was glad to have the hospital
to go to—although the wards weren’t warm, either: patients and sisters would
huddle around the big stove in the center of the ward, drinking tea and telling
stories—we students used to envy their camaraderie. The sisters expected us
medical students to behave professionally—frankly, they enjoyed ordering us
about. We’d do rounds with two pairs of stockings on, hoping the consultants
wouldn’t notice we wore gloves as we trailed after them from bed to bed,
listening to symptoms that came from deprivation as much as anything.

Working sixteen or eighteen hours a day without proper
food took a toll on all of us. Many of my fellow students succumbed to
tuberculosis and were granted leave—the only reason the hospital would let you
interrupt your training and come back, as a matter of fact, even though some
took more than a year to recover. The new antibiotics were starting to come in,
but they cost the earth and weren’t yet widely available. When my turn came and
I went to the Registrar, explaining that a family friend had a cottage in
Somerset where I could recuperate, she nodded bleakly: we were already down
five in my class, but she signed the forms for me and told me to write monthly.
She stressed that she would hope to see me in under a year.

In fact, I was gone eight months. I’d wanted to return
sooner, but Claire—Claire Tallmadge, who was a senior houseman by then, with a
consultancy all but certain—persuaded me I wasn’t strong enough, although I was
aching to get back.

When I returned to the Royal Free it felt—oh, so good.
The hospital routine, my studies, they were like a balm, healing me. The
Registrar actually called me into her office to warn me to slow down; they
didn’t want me to suffer a relapse.

She didn’t understand that work was my only salvation.
I suppose it had already become my second skin. It’s a narcotic, the oblivion
overwork can bring you.
Arbeit macht frei
—that was an obscene parody the
Nazis thought up, but it is possible
Arbeit macht betäubt
—what? Oh,
sorry, I forgot you don’t speak German. They had
1984
-type slogans over
the entrance to all their camps, and that was what they put over Auschwitz:
workwill
make you free
. That slogan was a bestial parody, but work can numb you. If
you stop working even for a moment, everything inside you starts evaporating;
soon you are so shapeless you can’t move at all. At least, that was my fear.

When I first heard about my family, I became utterly
without any grounding at all. I was supposed to be preparing for my
higher-school certificate—the diploma we took in those days when we finished
high school—the results determined your university entrance—but the exams lost
the meaning they’d had for me all during the war. Every time I sat down to read
I felt as though my insides were being sucked away by a giant vacuum cleaner.

In a perverse way, cousin Minna came to my rescue.
Ever since I arrived on her doorstep she had been unsparing in her criticisms
of my mother. The news of my mother’s death brought not even a respectful
silence but a greater barrage. I can see now, through the prism of experience,
that guilt drove her as much as anything: she had hated my mother, been jealous
of her for so many years, she couldn’t admit now that she’d been unfeeling,
even cruel. She was probably grief-stricken as well, because her own mother had
also perished, all that family that used to spend summers talking and swimming
at Kleinsee; well, never mind that. It’s old news now.

I would come home from walking the streets, walking
until I was too exhausted to feel anything, to Minna: you think you’re
suffering? That you’re the only person who was ever orphaned, left alone in a
strange country? And weren’t you supposed to give Victor his tea? He says he
waited for over an hour for you and finally had to make it himself because
you’re too much a lady—“
die gnädige Frau
”—Minna only ever spoke German
at home—she had never really mastered English, which made her furious with
shame—and she curtsied to me—to get your hands dirty doing work, housework or a
real job. You’re just like Lingerl. I wonder how a princess like her lived as
long as she did in such a setting, with no one to pamper her. Did she tilt her
head and bat her eyes so that the guards or other inmates gave up their bread
to her? Madame Butterfly is dead. It’s time you learned what real work is.

A fury rose up in me greater than any I remember
since. I smacked her in the mouth and screamed, if people took care of my
mother it’s because she repaid them with love. And if they don’t care for you
it’s because you’re utterly loathsome.

She stared at me for a moment, her mouth slack with
shock. She recovered quickly, though, and hit me back so hard she split my lip
with her big ring. And then hissed, the only reason I let a mongrel like you
accept that scholarship to high school was on the understanding that you would
repay my generosity by taking care of Victor. Which I might point out you have
failed utterly to do. Instead of giving him tea you’ve been flaunting yourself
at the pubs and dance halls just like your mother. Max or Carl or one of those
other immigrant boys is likely to give you the same present that Martin, as he
liked to call himself, gave Madame Butterfly. Tomorrow morning I’m off to that
precious headmistress, that Miss Skeffing you’re so fond of, to tell her you
can’t continue your education. It’s time you started pulling your weight around
here.

Blood pouring down my face, I ran pell-mell across
London to the youth hostel where my friends lived—you know, Max and Carl and
the rest of them: when they turned sixteen the year before they hadn’t been
able to stay in their foster homes. I begged them to find me a bed for the
night. In the morning, when I knew Minna would be with her great love, the
glove factory, I sneaked back for my books and my clothes—it was only two
changes of underwear and a second dress. Victor was dozing in the living room,
but he didn’t wake up enough to try to stop me.

Miss Skeffing found a family in North London who gave
me a room in exchange for doing their cooking. And I began to study as if my
mother’s life could be redeemed by my work. As soon as I finished the supper
dishes I would solve chemistry and math problems, sometimes sleeping only four
hours until it was time to make the family’s morning tea. And after that, I
never stopped working, really.

That was where the story ended, sitting on a hillside
on a dull October day overlooking a desolate landscape, listening to Lotty
until she could talk no more. It’s harder for me to figure out where it began.

Looking back now, now that I’m calm, now that I can
think, it’s still hard to say, Oh, it was because of this, or because of that.
It was a time when I had a million other things on my mind. Morrell was getting
ready to leave for Afghanistan. I was worrying most about that, but of course I
was trying to run my business, and juggle the nonprofit work I do, and pay my
bills. I suppose my own involvement began with Isaiah Sommers, or maybe the
Birnbaum Foundation conference—they happened on the same day.

Baby-Sitters’ Club

T
hey
wouldn’t even start the funeral service. The church was full, ladies were
crying. My uncle was a deacon and he was a righteous man, he’d been a member of
that church for forty-seven years when he passed. My aunt was in a state of
total collapse, as you can imagine. And for them to have the nerve to say the
policy had already been cashed in. When! That’s what I want to know, Ms.
Warashki, when was it ever cashed in, with my uncle paying his five dollars a
week for fifteen years like he did, and my aunt never hearing word one of him
borrowing against the policy or converting it.”

Isaiah Sommers was a short, square man who spoke in
slow cadences as if he were himself a deacon. It was an effort to keep from
drowsing off during the pauses in his delivery. We were in the living room of
his South Side bungalow, at a few minutes after six on a day that had stretched
on far too long already.

I’d been in my office at 8:30, starting a round of the
routine searches that make up the bulk of my business, when Lotty Herschel
called with an SOS. “You know Max’s son brought Calia and Agnes with him from
London, don’t you? Agnes suddenly has a chance to show her slides at a Huron
Street gallery, but she needs a minder for Calia.”

“I’m not a baby-sitter, Lotty,” I’d said impatiently;
Calia was Max Loewenthal’s five-year-old granddaughter.

Lotty swept imperiously past that protest. “Max called
me when they couldn’t find anyone—it’s his housekeeper’s day off. He’s going to
that conference at the Hotel Pleiades, although I’ve told him many times that
all he’s doing is exposing—but that’s neither here nor there. At any rate, he’s
on a panel at ten—otherwise he’d stay home himself. I tried Mrs. Coltrain at my
clinic, but everyone’s tied up. Michael is rehearsing all afternoon with the
symphony and this could be an important chance for Agnes. Vic—I realize it’s an
imposition, but it would be only for a few hours.”

“Why not Carl Tisov?” I asked. “Isn’t he staying at
Max’s, too?”

“Carl as a baby-sitter? Once he picks up his clarinet
the roof of the house can blow off without his noticing. I saw it happen once,
during the V-1 raids. Can you tell me yes or no? I’m in the middle of surgical
rounds, and I have a full schedule at the clinic.” Lotty is the chief
perinatologist at Beth Israel.

I tried a few of my own connections, including my
part-time assistant who has three foster children, but no one could help out. I
finally agreed with a surly lack of grace. “I have a client meeting at six on
the far South Side, so someone had better be able to step in before five.”

When I drove up to Max’s Evanston home to collect
Calia, Agnes Loewenthal was breathlessly grateful. “I can’t even find my
slides. Calia was playing with them and stuck them in Michael’s cello, which
got him terribly cross, and now the wretched beast can’t imagine where he’s
flung them.”

Michael appeared in a T-shirt with his cello bow in
one hand. “Darling, I’m sorry, but they have to be in the drawing room—that’s
where I was practicing. Vic, I can’t thank you enough—can we take you and
Morrell to dinner after our Sunday afternoon concert?”