Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (5 page)

Blacksin turned to the small man. “Mr. Radbuka, how
did you come to discover your true identity? You said in the meeting that it
was in going through your father’s papers. What did you find there?”

“The man who called himself my father,” Radbuka corrected
her. “It was a set of documents in code. At first I paid no attention to them.
Somehow after he died I lost my own will to live. I don’t understand why,
because I didn’t like him; he was always very brutal to me. But I became so
depressed that I lost my job, I even stopped getting out of bed on many days.
And then I met Rhea Wiell.”

He turned to the dark-haired woman with a look of
adoration. “It sounds melodramatic, but I believe I owe my life to her. And she
helped me make sense of the documents, to use them to find my missing
identity.”

“Rhea Wiell is the therapist you found,” Beth prodded
him.

“Yes. She specializes in recovering memories of events
that people like me block because the trauma around them is so intense.”

He continued to look at Wiell, who nodded reassuringly
at him. Blacksin stepped him through some of his highlights, the tormenting
nightmares that he had been ashamed to speak of for fifty years, and his
dawning realization that the man who called himself his father might really be
someone completely unrelated to him.

“We had come to America as DP’s—displaced
persons—after the Second World War. I was only four, and when I was growing up,
this man said we were from Germany.” He gasped for air between sentences, like
an asthmatic fighting to breathe. “But what I’ve finally learned from my work
with Rhea is that his story was only half true.
He
was from Germany. But
I was a—a camp child, camp survivor. I was from some other place, some country
under Nazi control. This man attached himself to me in the confused aftermath
of the war to get a visa to America.” He looked at his hands as if he were
terribly ashamed of this.

“And do you feel up to telling us about those
dreams—those nightmares—that led you to Rhea Wiell?” Beth prompted him.

Wiell stroked Radbuka’s hand in a reassuring fashion.
He looked up again and spoke to the camera with an almost childish lack of
self-consciousness.

“The nightmares were things that haunted me, things I
couldn’t speak out loud and could experience only in sleep. Terrible things,
beatings, children falling dead in the snow, bloodstains like flowers around
them. Now, thanks to Rhea, I can remember being four years old. We were moving,
this strange angry man and I, we were first on a ship and then on a train. I
was crying, ‘My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,’ but the man who
kept saying he was ‘
Vati,
’ my father, would hit me and finally I learned
to keep all those cries to myself.”

“And who was Miriam, Mr. Radbuka?” Blacksin leaned
toward him, her eyes wide with empathy.

“Miriam was my little playmate, we had been together
since—since I was twelve months old.” Radbuka began to cry.

“When she arrived at the camp with you, isn’t that
right?” Beth said.

“We spent two years in Terezin together. There were
six of us, the six musketeers I think of us now, but my Miriam, she was my
special—I want to know she is still alive someplace, still healthy. And maybe
she remembers her Paul as well.” He cupped his face in his hands; his shoulders
shook.

Rhea Wiell’s face loomed suddenly between him and the
camera. “Let’s finish here, Beth. That’s all Paul can handle today.”

As the camera pulled back from them, Dennis Logan, the
station anchor, spoke over the scene. “This sad, sad story continues to haunt
not only Paul Radbuka but thousands of other Holocaust survivors. If any of you
think you know Paul’s Miriam, call the number on our screen, or go to our Web
site, www.Globe-All.com. We’ll make sure Paul Radbuka gets your message.”

“How disgusting,” Carl burst out when Morrell muted
the set again. “How can anyone expose himself like that?”

“You sound like Lotty,” Max murmured. “I suppose his
hurt is so great that he isn’t aware that he’s exposing himself.”

“People like to talk about themselves,” Don put in.
“That’s what makes a journalist’s job easy. Does his name mean something to
you, Mr. Loewenthal?”

Max looked at him quizzically, wondering how Don knew
his name. Morrell stepped in to perform introductions. Don explained that he
had come out to cover the conference and recognized Max from today’s program.

“Did you recognize the guy—Radbuka, wasn’t it? The
name or the person?” he added.

“You’re a journalist who would like me to talk about
myself to you?” Max said sharply. “I have no idea who he is.”

“He was like a child,” Carl said. “Utterly
unself-conscious about what he was saying, even though he was recounting the
most appalling events.”

The phone rang again. It was Michael Loewenthal,
saying that if his father had Calia’s dog to please come home with it.

Max gave a guilty start. “Victoria, may I call you in
the morning?”

“Of course.” I went into the back to get a card from
my case so that Max would have my cell-phone number, then I walked out to the
car with him and Carl. “Did you two recognize the guy?”

Under the street lamp I saw Max look at Carl. “The
name. I thought I recognized the name—but it doesn’t seem possible. I’ll call
you in the morning.”

When I went back inside, Don was in purdah again with
a cigarette. I joined Morrell in the kitchen, where he was washing Carl’s
brandy glass. “Did they tell all away from the prying ears of journalism?”

I shook my head. “I’m beat, but I’m curious, too,
about the therapist. Are you guys going to stay up for the special segment with
her?”

“Don is panting for it. He thinks she may be his
career-saving book.”

“You’d better believe it,” Don called through the
screen door. “Although the guy would be hard to work with—his emotions seem
awfully volatile.”

We all returned to the living room just as the
“Exploring Chicago” logo came up on the screen. The show’s regular announcer
said they had a special program for us tonight and turned the stage over to
Beth Blacksin.

“Thank you, Dennis. In this special edition of
‘Exploring Chicago,’ we have the opportunity to follow up on the exciting
revelations we heard earlier today, exclusively on Global Television, when a
man who came here as a boy from war-torn Europe told us how therapist Rhea
Wiell helped him recover memories he had buried alive for fifty years.”

She ran a few segments from Radbuka’s speech to the
convention, followed by excerpts from her own interview with him.

“We’re going to follow up on today’s extraordinary
story by talking to the therapist who worked with Paul Radbuka. Rhea Wiell has
been having remarkable success—and started remarkable controversy, I might
add—with her work in helping people get access to forgotten memories. Memories
they’ve usually forgotten because the pain of remembering them is too great. We
don’t bury happy memories so deep, do we, Rhea?”

The therapist had changed into a soft green outfit
that suggested an Indian mystic. She nodded with a slight smile. “We don’t
usually suppress memories of ice-cream sodas or romps on the beach with our
friends. The memories we push away are the ones that threaten us in our core as
individuals.”

“Also with us is Professor Arnold Praeger, the
director of the Planted Memory Foundation.”

The professor was given due face time to say that we
lived in an era that celebrated victims, which meant people needed to prove
they had suffered more terribly than anyone else. “Such people seek out
therapists who can validate their victimization. A small number of therapists
have helped a large number of would-be victims remember the most shocking
events: they begin recalling satanic rituals, sacrificing pets that never even
existed, and so on. Many families have been terribly damaged by these planted
memories.”

Rhea Wiell laughed softly. “I hope you are not going
to suggest that any of my patients have recovered memories of satanic sacrifices,
Arnold.”

“You’ve certainly encouraged some of them to demonize
their parents, Rhea. They’ve ruined their parents’ lives by accusing them of
the most heinous brutality—accusations which can’t be proved true in a court of
law because the only witnesses to them are your patients’ imaginations.”

“You mean the only witness besides the parent who
thought he was safe from ever being found out,” Wiell said, keeping her voice
gentle as a contrast to Praeger’s sharp speech.

Praeger cut her off. “In the case of this man whose
tape we just watched, the father is dead and can’t even be summoned to speak on
his own behalf. We’re told about documents in code, but I wonder what key you
used to break the code? And whether someone like me would get the same result if
I looked at the documents.”

Wiell shook her head, smiling gently. “My patients’
privacy is sacrosanct, Arnold, you know that. These are Paul Radbuka’s
documents. Whether anyone else can see them is his decision alone.”

Blacksin stepped in here to draw the conversation back
to what recovered memories actually were. Wiell talked a little about
post-traumatic stress disorder, explaining that there are a number of symptoms
that people share after trauma, whether it’s from battle—as soldiers or
civilians—or experiencing other fragmenting events, like sexual assault.

“Children who’ve been sexually abused, adults who’ve
been tortured, soldiers who’ve endured battle, all share some common problems:
depression, inability to sleep, inability to trust people around them or form
close connections.”

“But people can be depressed and have sleep disorders
without having been abused,” Praeger snapped. “When someone comes into my
office complaining of those symptoms, I am very careful about forming an
opinion of the root cause: I don’t immediately suggest he’s been tortured by
Hutu terrorists. People are at their most dependent and vulnerable with
psychotherapists. It is all too easy to suggest things to them which they come
ardently to believe. We like to think that our memories are objective and
accurate, but unfortunately, it’s very easy to create memories of events that
never took place.”

He went on to summarize research on planted, or
created, memories that showed how people were persuaded they had taken part in
marches or demonstrations when there was objective evidence that they’d never
been in the city where the demonstration was held.

A little before eleven, Blacksin cut the argument
short. “Until we truly understand the workings of the human mind, this debate
will continue between people of goodwill. Why don’t each of you take thirty
seconds to summarize your positions, before we say good night. Ms. Wiell?”

Rhea Wiell looked at the camera with a wide, serious
gaze. “We often like to dismiss other people’s horrible memories, not because
we’re not compassionate. And not because we don’t want to be victims. But
because we’re afraid to look inside ourselves. We’re afraid to find out what
lies hidden—what we’ve done to other people, or what has happened to us. It
takes a lot of courage to take a journey to the past. I would never start
someone on that journey who wasn’t strong enough to make it to the end. I
certainly never let them travel that dangerous road alone.”

After that, Professor Praeger’s rebuttal sounded cruel
and unfeeling. If the rest of the viewing audience was like me, they wanted
Wiell back, wanted her to say they were strong enough to travel to the past,
and good or interesting enough that she would guide them on the way.

When the camera faded to commercials, Morrell switched
off the set. Don rubbed his hands.

“This woman has book, six figures, written all over
her. I’ll be a hero in Paris and New York if I get her before Bertelsmann or
Rupert Murdoch does. If she’s legitimate. What do you two think?”

“Remember the shaman we met in Escuintla?” Morrell
said to Don. “He had the same expression in his eyes. As if he saw into the
most secret thoughts of your mind.”

“Yes.” Don shuddered. “What a horrible trip. We spent
eighteen hours underneath a pigsty outwaiting the army. That was when I decided
I’d be happier working full-time at Envision Press and letting people like you
hog the glory, Morrell. So to speak. You think she’s a charlatan?”

Morrell spread his hands. “I don’t know anything about
her. But she certainly believes in herself, doesn’t she?”

A yawn split my face. “I’m too tired to have an
opinion. But it should be easy enough to check her credentials in the morning.”

I pushed myself upright on leaden legs. Morrell said
he’d join me in a minute. “Before Don gets too carried away with this new book,
I want to go over a few things about my own.”

“In that case, Morrell, we’re doing it outside. I’m
not dueling with you over contracts without nicotine.”

I don’t know how late the two of them sat up: I was
asleep almost before the door out to the porch closed behind them.

Sniffing for a Scent

W
hen I got
back from my run the next morning, Don was where I’d left him the night before:
on the back porch with a cigarette. He was even wearing the same jeans and
rumpled green shirt.