My forehead felt as though it were squeezed inside a vise. “If he did, that’s between him and me, not you and me. What difference does it make to you?”
“What difference? That he violated a trust, that’s what matters. When he told me about this person at the conference, this man calling himself Radbuka, I said we shouldn’t act hastily and that I would give him my opinion after I had seen the interview.”
I took a deep breath and tried to bring my brain into focus. “So the Radbuka name means something to you.”
“And to Max. And to Carl. From our days in London. Max thought we should hire you to find out about this man. I wanted to wait. I thought Max respected my opinion.”
She was almost spitting mad, but her explanation made me say gently, “Take it easy, Lotty. Max didn’t hire me. This is a separate matter.”
I told her about Don Strzepek’s interest in doing a book about Rhea Wiell, showcasing Paul Radbuka’s recovered memory. “I’m sure he wouldn’t object to sharing the tape with you, but I really don’t have time to do it tonight. I still need to finish some work here, go to my own place to look after the dogs, and then I’m going up to Evanston. Do you want me to tell Morrell that you’ll be coming up to view the tape at his place?”
“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.
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
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.