Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (11 page)

“I want the dead past to bury the dead,” she burst
out. “Why are you letting this Don go digging around in it?”

“I’m not letting him, and I’m not stopping him. All
I’m doing is checking to see whether Rhea Wiell is a genuine therapist.”

“Then you’re letting, not stopping.”

She sounded close to tears. I picked my words
carefully. “I can only begin to imagine how painful it must be to you to be
reminded of the war years, but not everyone feels that way.”

“Yes, to many people it is a game. Something to
romanticize or kitschify or use for titillation. And a book about a ghoul
feasting on the remains of the dead only helps make that happen.”

“If Paul Radbuka is not a ghoul but has a genuine past
in the concentration camp he mentioned, then he has a right to claim his
heritage. What does the person in your group who’s connected to the Radbukas
say about this? Did you talk to him? Or her?”

“That person no longer exists,” she said harshly.
“This is between Max and Carl and me. And now you. And now this journalist, Don
whoever he is. And the therapist. And every jackal in New York and Hollywood
who will pick over the bones and salivate with pleasure at another shocking
tale. Publishers and movie studios make fortunes from titillating the comfortable
well-fed middle class of Europe and America with tales of torture.”

I had never heard Lotty speak in such a bitter way. It
hurt, as if my fingers were being run through a grater. I didn’t know what to
say, except to repeat my offer to bring her a copy of the tape the next day.
She hung up on me.

I sat at my desk a long time, blinking back tears of
my own. My arms ached. I lacked the will to move or act in any meaningful way,
but in the end, I picked up the phone and continued dictating my notes to the
word-processing center. When I had finished that, I got up slowly, like an
invalid, and printed out a copy of my contract for Don Strzepek.

“Maybe if I talked to Dr. Herschel myself,” Don said
now, as we sat on Morrell’s porch. “She’s imagining me as a TV reporter
sticking a mike in front of her face after her family’s been destroyed. She’s
right in a way, about how we comfortable Americans and Europeans like to
titillate ourselves with tales of torture. I shall have to keep that thought in
mind as a corrective when I’m working on this book. All the same, maybe I can
persuade her that I also have some capacity for empathy.”

“Maybe. Max will probably let me bring you to his
dinner party on Sunday; at least you could meet Lotty in an informal way.”

I didn’t really see it, though. Usually, when Lotty
got on her high horse, Max would snort and say she was in her “Princess of
Austria” mode. That would spark another flare from her, but she’d back away
from her more extreme demands. Tonight’s outburst had been rawer than that—not
the disdain of a Hapsburg princess, but a ragged fury born of grief.

Four Gold Coins

My mother was seven months pregnant and weak from
hunger, so my father took Hugo and me to the train. It was early in the
morning, still dark, in fact: we Jews were trying not to attract any more
attention than necessary. Although we had permits to leave, all our documents,
the tickets, we could still be stopped at any second. I wasn’t yet ten and Hugo
only five, but we knew the danger so well we didn’t need Papa’s command to be
silent in the streets.

Saying good-bye to my mother and Oma had frightened
me. My mother used to spend weeks away from us with Papa, but I had never left
Oma before. By then of course everyone was living together in a little flat in
the Leopoldsgasse—I can’t remember how many aunts and cousins now, besides my
grandparents—but at least twenty.

In London, lying in the cold room at the top of the
house, on the narrow iron bed Minna considered appropriate for a child, I
wouldn’t think about the cramped space on the Leopoldsgasse. I concentrated on
remembering Oma and Opa’s beautiful flat where I had my own white lacy bed, the
curtains at the window dotted with rosebuds. My school, where my friend Klara
and I were always one and two in the class. How hurt I was—I couldn’t
understand why she stopped playing with me and then why I had to leave the
school altogether.

I had whined at first over sharing a room with six
other cousins in a place with peeling paint, but Papa took me for a walk early
one morning so he could talk to me alone about our changed circumstances. He
was never cruel, not like Uncle Arthur, Mama’s brother who actually beat Aunt
Freia, besides hitting his own children.

We walked along the canal as the sun was rising and
Papa explained how hard things were for everyone, for Oma and Opa, forced out
of the family flat after all these years, and for Mama, with all her pretty
jewels stolen by the Nazis and worrying about how her children would be fed and
clothed, let alone educated. “Lottchen, you are the big girl in the family now.
Your cheerful spirit is Mama’s most precious gift. Show her you are the brave
one, the cheerful one, and now that she’s sick with the new baby coming, show
her you can help her by not complaining and by taking care of Hugo.”

What shocks me now is knowing that my father’s parents
were also in that flat and how little I remember of them. In fact, I’m pretty
sure that it was their flat. They were foreign, you see, from Belarus: they
were part of the vast throng of Eastern European Jews who had flocked into
Vienna around the time of the First World War.

Oma and Opa looked down on them. It confuses me, that
realization, because I loved my mother’s parents so much. They doted on me,
too: I was their precious Lingerl’s beloved child. But I think Oma and Opa
despised Papa’s parents, for speaking only Yiddish, not German, and for their
odd clothes and religious practices.

It was a terrible humiliation for Oma and Opa, when
they were forced to leave the Renngasse to live in that immigrant Jewish
quarter. People used to call it the Matzoinsel, the matzo island, a term of
contempt. Even Oma and Opa, when they didn’t think Papa was around, would talk
about his family on the Insel. Oma would laugh her ladylike laugh at the fact
that Papa’s mother wore a wig, and I felt guilty, because I was the one who had
revealed this primitive practice to Oma. She liked to interrogate me about the
“customs on the Insel” after I had been there, and then she would remind me
that I was a Herschel, I was to stand up straight and make something of my
life. And not to use the Yiddish I picked up on the Insel; that was vulgar and
Herschels were never vulgar.

Papa would take me to visit his parents once a month
or so. I was supposed to call them Zeyde and Bobe, Grandpa and Grandma in
Yiddish, as Opa and Oma are in German. When I think about them now I grow hot
with shame, for withholding from them the affection and respect they desired:
Papa was their only son, I was the oldest grandchild. But even to call them
Zeyde and Bobe, as they requested, seemed disgusting to me. And Bobe’s blond
wig over her close-cropped black hair, that seemed disgusting as well.

I hated that I looked like Papa’s side of the family.
My mother was so lovely, very fair, with beautiful curls and a mischievous
smile. And as you can see, I am dark, and not at all beautiful.
Mischlinge
,
cousin Minna called me, half-breed, although never in front of my grandparents:
to Opa and Oma I was always beautiful, because I was their darling Lingerl’s
daughter. It wasn’t until I came to live with Minna in England that I ever felt
ugly.

What torments me is that I can’t recall my father’s
sisters or their children at all. I shared a bed with five or maybe six
cousins, and I can’t remember them, only that I hated not being in my own
lovely white bedroom by myself. I remember kissing Oma and weeping, but I
didn’t even say good-bye to Bobe.

You think I should remember I was only a child? No.
Even a child has the capacity for human and humane behavior.

Each child was allowed one small suitcase for the
train. Oma wanted us to take leather valises from her own luggage—those had not
been of interest to the Nazis when they stole her silver and her jewels. But
Opa was more practical and understood Hugo and I mustn’t attract attention by
looking as though we came from a rich home. He found us cheap cardboard cases,
which anyway were easier for young children to carry.

By the day the train left, Hugo and I had packed and
repacked our few possessions many times, trying to decide what we couldn’t bear
to live without. The night before we left, Opa took the dress I was going to
wear on the train out to Oma. Everyone was asleep, except me: I was lying rigid
with nervousness in the bed I shared with the other cousins. When Opa came in I
watched him through slits in my closed eyes. When he tiptoed out with the
dress, I slid out of bed and followed him to my grandmother’s side. Oma put a
finger on her lips when she saw me and silently picked apart the waistband. She
took four gold coins from the hem of her own skirt and stitched them into the
waist, underneath the buttons.

“These are your security,” Opa said. “Tell no one, not
Hugo, not Papa, not anyone. You won’t know when you will need them.” He and Oma
didn’t want to cause friction in the family by letting them know they had a
small emergency hoard. If the aunts and uncles knew Lingerl’s children were
getting four precious gold coins—well, when people are frightened and living
too close together, anything can happen.

The next thing I knew Papa was shaking me awake,
giving me a cup of the weak tea we all drank for breakfast. Some adult had
found enough canned milk for each child to get a tablespoon in it most
mornings.

If I had realized I wouldn’t see any of them again—but
it was hard enough to leave, to go to a strange country where we knew only
cousin Minna, and only that she was a bitter woman who made all the children
uncomfortable when she came to Kleinsee for her three-week holiday in the summers—if
I’d known it was the last good-bye I wouldn’t have been able to bear—the
leaving, or the next several years.

When the train left it was a cold April day, rain
pouring in sheets across the Leopoldsgasse as we walked—not to the central
station but a small suburban one that wouldn’t attract attention. Papa wore a
long red scarf, which he put on so Hugo and I could spot him easily from the
train. He was a café violinist, or had been, anyway, and when he saw us leaning
out a window, he whipped out his violin and tried to play one of the Gypsy
tunes he had taught us to dance to. Even Hugo could tell misery was making his
hand quaver, and he howled at Papa to stop making such a noise.

“I will see you very soon,” Papa assured us.
“Lottchen, you will find someone who needs a willing worker. I can do anything,
remember that—wait tables, haul wood or coal, play in a hotel orchestra.”

As the train pulled away I held the back of Hugo’s
jacket and the two of us leaned out the window with all the other children, waving
until Papa’s red scarf had turned to an invisible speck in our own eyes.

We had the usual fears all Kindertransport children
report as we traveled through Austria and Germany, of the guards who tried to
frighten us, of the searches through our luggage, standing very still while
they looked for any valuables: we were allowed a single ten-mark piece each. I
thought my heart would be visible through my dress, it was beating so hard, but
they didn’t feel my clothes, and the gold coins traveled with me safely. And
then we passed out of Germany into Holland, and for the first time since the
Anschluss we were suddenly surrounded by warm and welcoming adults, who
showered us with bread and meat and chocolates.

I don’t remember much of the crossing. We had a calm
sea, I think, but I was so nervous that my stomach was twisted in knots even
without any serious waves. When we landed we looked around anxiously for Minna
in the crowd of adults who had come to meet the boat, but all the children were
claimed and we were left standing on the dock. Finally a woman from the refugee
committee showed up: Minna had left instructions for us to be sent on to London
by train, but she had delayed getting word to the refugee committee until that
morning. We spent the night in the camp at Harwich with the other children who
had no sponsors, and went on to London in the morning. When we got to the
station, to Liverpool Street—it was massive, we clung to each other while
engines belched and loudspeakers bellowed incomprehensible syllables and people
brushed past us on important missions. I clutched Hugo’s hand tightly.

Cousin Minna had sent a workman to fetch us, giving
him a photograph against which he anxiously studied our faces. He spoke
English, which we didn’t understand at all, or Yiddish, which we didn’t
understand well, but he was pleasant, bustling us into a cab, pointing out the
Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, giving us each a bit of queer paste-filled
sandwich in case we were hungry after our long trip.

It was only when we got to that narrow old house in
the north of London that we found out Minna would take me and not Hugo. The man
from the factory settled us in a forbidding front room, where we sat without
moving, so fearful we were of making a noise or being a nuisance. After some
very long time, Minna swept in from work, full of anger, and announced that
Hugo was to go on, that the foreman from the glove factory would be coming for
him in an hour.