Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

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.

But they thought his parents were an embarrassment. When they had to give up their ten-room flat on the Renngasse and move in with the Radbukas, my Oma-she acted as though she had been asked to live in a cow byre. She held herself aloof, she addressed Martin’s mother formally, as “Sie,” never as “Du.” And me, I wanted my Oma Herschel to keep loving me best, I needed that love, there were so many of us all cramped together, I needed someone to care about me-Sofie was caught up in her own misery, pregnant, sick, not used to any kind of hardship, getting spite from the Radbuka cousins and aunts who felt she’d mistreated their own darling Martin-Moishe-all those years.

But don’t you see, it made me treat my other grandmother rudely. If I showed my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, the affection she craved from me, then my Oma would push me away. On the morning Hugo and I left for England, my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, longed for me to kiss her, and I would only curtsy to her.

I choked down the sobs that started to rise up in me. Victoria handed me a bottle of water without saying anything. If she had touched me I would have hit her, but I took her water and drank it.

So ten years later, when I found myself pregnant, found myself carrying Carl’s child that hot summer, it all grew dark in my head. My mother. My Oma-my Grandmother Herschel. My Bobe-my Grandmother Radbuka. I thought I could make amends to my Bobe. I thought she would forgive me if I used her name. Only I didn’t know her first name. I didn’t know my own granny’s name. Night after night I could see her thin arms held out to hold me, to kiss me good-bye. Night after night I could see my embarrassed curtsy, knowing my Oma was watching me. No matter how many nights I recalled this scene, I could not remember my Bobe’s first name. So I used my mother’s.

I wouldn’t have an abortion. That was Claire’s first suggestion. By 1944, when I was tagging around after Claire trying to learn enough science so that I could be like her, be a doctor, all my family was already dead. Right here in front of us they shaved my Oma’s silver hair. I can see it falling on the floor around her like a waterfall, she was so proud of it, she never cut it. My Bobe. She was already bald under her Orthodox wig. The cousins I shared a bed with, whom I resented because I didn’t have my own canopied bed anymore, they were dead by then. I had been saved, for no reason except the love of my Opa, who found the money to buy a passage to freedom for Hugo and me.

All of them, my mother, too, who sang and danced with me on Sunday afternoons, they were here, here in this ground, burned to the ashes that are blowing in your eyes. Maybe their ashes are gone, as well, maybe strangers took them away, bathing their eyes, washing my mother down the sink.

I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t add one more death to all those dead. But I had no feelings left with which to raise a child. It was only the thought that my mother would come back that kept me going during the war when I lived with Minna. We’re so proud of you, Lottchen, she and my Oma would say, you didn’t cry, you were a good girl, you did your lessons, you stayed first in your class even in a foreign language, you tolerated the hatefulness of that prize bitch Minna-I would imagine the war ending and them embracing me with those words.