Total Recall
V.I. Warshawski – Book 10
By Sare Paretsky
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
Work Ethic
The cold that winter ate into our bones. You can’t imagine, living where you turn a dial and as much heat as you want glows from the radiator, but everything in England then was fueled by coal and there were terrible shortages the second winter after the war. Like everyone I had little piles of six-penny bits for the electric fire in my room, but even if I’d been able to afford to run it all night it didn’t provide much warmth.
One of the women in my lodgings got a length of parachute silk from her brother, who’d been in the RAF. We all made camisoles and knickers out of it. We all knew how to knit back then; I unraveled old sweaters to make scarves and vests—new wool cost a fortune.
We saw newsreels of American ships and planes bringing the Germans whatever they needed. While we swathed ourselves in blankets and sweaters and ate grey bread with butter substitutes, we joked bitterly that we’d done the wrong thing, bringing the Americans in to win the war—they’d treat us better if we’d lost, the same woman who’d gotten the parachute silk said.
Of course, I had started my medical training, so I couldn’t spend much time wrapped up in bed. Anyway, I was glad to have the hospital to go to—although the wards weren’t warm, either: patients and sisters would huddle around the big stove in the center of the ward, drinking tea and telling stories—we students used to envy their camaraderie. The sisters expected us medical students to behave professionally—frankly, they enjoyed ordering us about. We’d do rounds with two pairs of stockings on, hoping the consultants wouldn’t notice we wore gloves as we trailed after them from bed to bed, listening to symptoms that came from deprivation as much as anything.
Working sixteen or eighteen hours a day without proper food took a toll on all of us. Many of my fellow students succumbed to tuberculosis and were granted leave—the only reason the hospital would let you interrupt your training and come back, as a matter of fact, even though some took more than a year to recover. The new antibiotics were starting to come in, but they cost the earth and weren’t yet widely available. When my turn came and I went to the Registrar, explaining that a family friend had a cottage in Somerset where I could recuperate, she nodded bleakly: we were already down five in my class, but she signed the forms for me and told me to write monthly. She stressed that she would hope to see me in under a year.
In fact, I was gone eight months. I’d wanted to return sooner, but Claire—Claire Tallmadge, who was a senior houseman by then, with a consultancy all but certain—persuaded me I wasn’t strong enough, although I was aching to get back.
When I returned to the Royal Free it felt—oh, so good. The hospital routine, my studies, they were like a balm, healing me. The Registrar actually called me into her office to warn me to slow down; they didn’t want me to suffer a relapse.
She didn’t understand that work was my only salvation. I suppose it had already become my second skin. It’s a narcotic, the oblivion overwork can bring you. Arbeit macht frei—that was an obscene parody the Nazis thought up, but it is possible Arbeit macht bet?ubt—what? Oh, sorry, I forgot you don’t speak German. They had 1984-type slogans over the entrance to all their camps, and that was what they put over Auschwitz: workwill make you free. That slogan was a bestial parody, but work can numb you. If you stop working even for a moment, everything inside you starts evaporating; soon you are so shapeless you can’t move at all. At least, that was my fear.
When I first heard about my family, I became utterly without any grounding at all. I was supposed to be preparing for my higher-school certificate—the diploma we took in those days when we finished high school—the results determined your university entrance—but the exams lost the meaning they’d had for me all during the war. Every time I sat down to read I felt as though my insides were being sucked away by a giant vacuum cleaner.