Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

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.