Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (22 page)

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.

I decided the only way to get any information out of
him would be to act as though I believed in his identity. He was so unstable,
leaping up the scale from misery to ecstasy by octaves, weaving straws in the
conversation into clothes, that I wasn’t sure anything he said would be
reliable, but if I challenged him, he would only retreat into a defensive
weeping.

“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 which 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.”

“That brings us back to where we started,” I said.
“With a document that you alone know about and no way for suspicious detectives
like me to verify your certainty. By the way, who is Sofie Radbuka?”

Paul turned sulky. “She was on the Web. Someone in a
missing-persons chat room said they wanted information about a Sofie Radbuka
who lived in England in the forties. So I wrote saying she must be my mother,
and the person never wrote back.”

“Right now we’re all exhausted,” Max said. “Mr.
Radbuka, why don’t you write down everything you know about your family? I will
get my friend to do the same. You can give me your document and I will give you
the other one. Then we can meet again to compare notes.”

Radbuka sat with his lower lip sticking out, not even
looking up to acknowledge the suggestion. When Morrell, with a grimace at the
clock, said he’d drive him home, Radbuka refused at first to get up.

Max looked at him sternly. “You must leave now, Mr.
Radbuka, unless you wish to create a situation in which you would never be able
to return here.”

His clown face a tragic mask, Radbuka got to his feet.
With Morrell and Don again at his elbows, like wardens in a high-class mental
hospital, he shambled sullenly to the door.

Old Lovers

D
ownstairs,
the party was over. The waitstaff was cleaning up the remains, vacuuming food
from the carpets and washing up the last of the dishes. In the living room,
Carl and Michael were debating the tempo in a Brahms nonet, playing passages on
the grand piano while Agnes Loewenthal watched from a couch with her legs
curled under her.

She looked up when I glanced in the doorway, hurriedly
untangling her feet to run over to me before I could follow Morrell and Don
outside. “Vic! Who is that extraordinary man? Carl has been beside himself over
this intrusion. He went into the sunroom and shouted at Lotty about it until
Michael stopped him. What is going on?”