Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (63 page)

It felt strange to sit behind Lotty’s desk, in the
chair where she had so often greeted me, sometimes brusquely, more often with
empathy, but always with a high energy. I turned over the papers. A letter from
the archivist at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, dated six years
back, telling Dr. Herschel that they regretted not being able to find any
records of the people whom she was trying to trace, Shlomo and Martin Radbuka,
although they could confirm the deaths of Rudolph and Anna Herschel in 1943.
They referred her to several data banks that traced Holocaust victims which
might be more helpful. Her correspondence with those other data banks showed
that no one had had any useful information for her.

Lotty had also left out a stack of newsletters from
the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she’d done her medical training. I
turned over the pages. Stuck between two of the sheets was a photograph. It was
an old picture, the edges creased from much handling, which showed a very young
woman, fair, whose eyes, even in the faded paper, sparkled with life. Her hair
was bobbed and curled in the style of the 1920’s. She was smiling with the
provocative self-confidence of someone who knows herself beloved, whose desires
were seldom denied. It was inscribed on the back, but in German in a heavy
European script which I couldn’t decipher.

I handed it to Max, who frowned over it. “I’m not good
with this old German, but it’s written to someone named Martin, a love message
from—I think it says
Lingerl
—inscribed in 1928. Then she’s rewritten it
to Lotty:
Think of me, dearest little Charlotte Anna, and know that I am
always thinking of you
.”

“Who is this? Dr. Herschel’s mother, do you think?”
Mrs. Coltrain picked up the picture respectfully by the edges. “What a
beautiful girl she was when this was taken. Dr. Herschel should keep it in a
frame on her desk.”

“Perhaps it’s too painful for her to see that face
every day,” Max said heavily.

I turned to the newsletters. They were like all such
documents, filled with tidbits of information about graduates, amazing
achievements of the faculty, status of the hospital, especially under the
severe retrenchments forced by the shrinking National Health budgets. Claire
Tallmadge’s name jumped out at me from the third one I looked at:

Claire Tallmadge, MRCP, has given up her practice and
moved to a flat in Highgate, where she welcomes visits from former students and
colleagues. Dr. Tallmadge’s unbending standards earned her the respect of
generations of colleagues and students at the Royal Free. We will all sadly
miss the sight of her erect presence in her tweed suits moving through the
wards, but the Fellowship being established in her honor will keep her name
bright among us. Dr. Tallmadge promises to keep busy with writing a history of
women’s medical careers in the twentieth century.

The Long Road Back

When I reached the rise overlooking the place, I
couldn’t go on. I couldn’t move at all. My legs suddenly weakened at the knees
and I sat abruptly to keep from falling. After that I remained where I landed,
looking over the grey and blowing ground, hugging my knees to my chest.

When I realized I’d left my mother’s photograph
behind, I’d become frantic. I searched my suitcase at least a dozen times, and
then I called the various hotels where I’d stayed. Many times. “No, Dr.
Herschel, we haven’t found it. Yes, we understand the importance.” Even then I
couldn’t resign myself to its loss. I wanted her with me. I wanted her to
protect me on my journey east as she hadn’t protected me on my journey west,
and when I couldn’t find her picture, I almost turned around at Wien-Schwechat
Airport. Except at that point I couldn’t imagine where I’d go back to.

I walked the city for two days, trying to see behind
its bright modern face the streets of my childhood. The flat on the Renngasse
was the one place I recognized, but when I rang the bell, the woman who now
lived in it greeted me with contemptuous hostility. She refused to let me
inside: anyone could pretend they had been a child in an apartment; she knew
better than to fall for confidence tricksters. It must have been the nightmare
of this family of squatters, someone like me coming back from the dead to
reclaim my home from them.

I made myself go to the Leopoldsgasse, but many of
those crumbling old buildings had disappeared, and even though I knew the right
intersection to look for, nothing looked familiar to me. My Zeyde, my Orthodox
grandfather, had threaded his way through this warren with me one morning to a
vendor who sold ham. My Zeyde traded his overcoat for a greased paper full of
thin-sliced fatty meat. He wouldn’t touch it himself, but his grandchildren
needed protein; we could not starve to death to uphold the laws of
kashruth
.
My cousins and I ate the pink slices with guilty pleasure. His overcoat fed us
for three days.

I tried to re-create that route, but I only ended up
at the canal, staring into the filthy water so long that a policeman came to
make sure I wasn’t planning to jump.

I rented a car and drove into the mountains, up to the
old farmhouse at Kleinsee. Even that I couldn’t recognize. The whole area is a
resort now. That place where we went every summer, the days filled with walks,
horseback rides, botany lessons with my grandmother, the nights with singing
and dancing, my Herschel cousins and I sitting on the stairs peeping into the
drawing room where my mother was always the golden butterfly at the center of
attention—the meadows were now filled with expensive villas, shops, a ski lift.
I couldn’t even find my grandfather’s house—I don’t know if it was torn down or
turned into one of the heavily guarded villas I couldn’t see from the road.

And so finally I drove east. If I couldn’t find a
trace of my mother or my grandmothers in life, then I would have to visit their
graves. Slowly, so slowly other drivers spewed epithets at me—rich Austrian
they took me to be from my rental license plates. Even at my slow pace I
couldn’t help finally reaching the town. I left the car. Continued on foot,
following the signposts in their different languages.

I know people passed me, I felt their shapes go by,
some stopping above me, talking at me. Words flew by me, words in many
languages, but I couldn’t understand any of them. I was staring at the
buildings at the bottom of the hill, the crumbling remnants of my mother’s last
home. I was beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond awareness. So I don’t know
when she arrived and sat cross-legged next to me. When she touched my hand I
thought it was my mother, finally come to claim me, and when I turned, eager to
embrace her, my disappointment was beyond recounting.

You! I choked out a word, not bothering to hide my
bitterness.

“Yes,” she agreed, “not who you wanted, but here
anyway.” Refusing to leave until I was ready to leave, taking a jacket and
wrapping it around my shoulders.

I tried for irony. You are the perfect sleuth,
tracking me down against my will. But she said nothing, so I had to prod, to
ask what clues had led her to me.

“The newsletters from the Royal Free—you left them on
your office desk. I recognized Dr. Tallmadge’s name, and remembered you and
Carl arguing over her that night at Max’s. I—I flew to London and visited her
in Highgate.”

Ah, yes. Claire. Who saved me from the glove factory.
She saved me and saved me and saved me, and then she dropped me as if I were a
discarded glove myself. All those years, all those years that I thought it was
out of disapproval, and now I see it was—I couldn’t think of a word for what it
was. Lies, perhaps.

Carl used to get so angry. I brought him to the
Tallmadges’ for tea several times, but he despised them so much that he finally
refused to return. I was so proud of them all, of Claire and Vanessa and Mrs.
Tallmadge and their Crown Derby tea service in the garden, and he saw them as
patronizing me, the little Jewish monkey they could feed bits of apple to when
it danced for them.

I was proud of Carl, too. His music was something so
special that I was sure it would make them all, but especially Claire, realize
I was special—a gifted musician was in love with me. But they patronized that,
as well.

“As if I was the monkey’s organ-grinder,” Carl told me
furiously, after they’d asked him to bring his clarinet along one day. He
started playing, Debussy for the clarinet, and they talked among themselves and
applauded when they realized he’d finished. I insisted it was only Ted and
Wallace Marmaduke, Vanessa’s husband and brother-in-law. They were Philistines,
I agreed, but I wouldn’t agree that Claire had been just as rude.

That quarrel took place the year after V-E Day. I was
still in high school but working for a family in North London in exchange for
room and board. Claire, meanwhile, was still living at home. She was applying
for her first houseman’s job, so our paths seldom crossed unless she went out
of her way to invite me to tea, as she did that day.

But then, two years later, after she’d finished saving
me that last time, she wouldn’t see me or answer my letters when I returned to
London. She didn’t return the phone message I left with her mother, although
perhaps Mrs. Tallmadge never delivered it—what she said to me when I called
was, “Don’t you think, dear, that it’s time you and Claire led your own lives?”

My last private conversation with Claire was when she
urged me to apply for an obstetrics fellowship in the States, to make a fresh
start. She even saw that I got the right recommendations when I was applying.
After that, the only times I saw her were at professional meetings.

I looked briefly at Victoria, sitting on the ground
beside me in her jeans, watching me with a frowning intensity that made me want
to lash out: I would not have pity.

If you’ve been to see Claire, then you must know who
Sofie Radbuka was.

She was cautious, knowing I might bite her, and said
hesitantly she thought it was me.

So you’re not the perfect detective. It wasn’t me, it
was my mother.

That flustered her, and I took a bitter pleasure in
her embarrassment. Always so forthright, making connections, tracking people
down, tracking me down. Let her be embarrassed now.

My need to talk was too great, though; after a minute
I said, It was me. It was my mother. It was me. It was my mother’s name. I
wanted her. Not only then, but every day, every night I wanted her, only then
most especially. I think I thought I could become her. Or if I took her name
she would be with me. I don’t know now what I was thinking.

When I was born, my parents weren’t married. My
mother, Sofie, the darling of my grandparents, dancing through life as if it
were one brightly lit ballroom; she was a light and airy creature from the day
of her birth. They named her Sofie but they called her the Butterfly.
Schmetterling
in German, which quickly became Lingerl or Ling-Ling. Even Minna, who hated
her, called her Madame Butterfly, not Sofie.

Then the butterfly became a teenager and went dancing
off with Vienna’s other bright young things to go slumming in the Matzoinsel.
Like a modern-day teenager going to the ghetto, picking up black lovers, she
picked up Moishe Radbuka out of the Belarus immigrant world. Martin, she called
him, giving him a western name. He was a café violinist, almost a Gypsy, except
he was a Jew.

She was seventeen when she became pregnant with me. He
would have married her, I learned from the family whispers, but she
wouldn’t—not a Gypsy from the Matzoinsel. So then everyone in the family
thought she should go to a sanatorium, have the child, give it up discreetly.
Everyone except my Oma and Opa, who adored her and said to bring the baby to
them.

Sofie loved Martin in her way, and he adored her the
way everyone in my world did, or at least the way I imagine they did. Don’t
tell me otherwise, don’t feed me the words of Cousin Minna: slut, harlot, lazy
bitch in heat, all those words I heard for eight years of my London life.

Four years after me came Hugo. And four years after
him came the Nazis. And we all moved into the Insel. I suppose you saw it, if
you’ve been tracking me, the remains of those cramped apartments on the
Leopoldsgasse?

My mother became thin and lost her sparkle. Who could
keep it at such a time, anyway? But to me as a child—I thought at first living
with her all the time would mean she would pay attention to me. I couldn’t
understand why it was so different, why she wouldn’t sing or dance anymore. She
stopped being Ling-Ling and became Sofie.

Then she was pregnant again, pregnant, sick when I
left for England, too sick to get out of bed. But she decided to marry my
father. All those years she loved being Lingerl Herschel, coming to stay with
her parents when she wanted her old life on the Renngasse, going to the Insel
to live with Martin when she wanted him. But when the iron fist of the National
Socialists grabbed all of them, Herschels and Radbukas, and squeezed them into
a ball together in the ghetto, she married Martin. Perhaps she did it for his
mother, since we were living with her. So my mother for a brief time became
Sofie Radbuka.

In my child years on the Renngasse, even though I
wanted my mother to stay with me, I was a well-loved child. My grandparents
didn’t mind that I was small and dark like Martin instead of blond and
beautiful like their daughter. They were proud of my brains, that I was always
number one or two in my class in my few years in school. They even had a kind
of patronizing affection for Martin.