Max hunched his shoulders. “They’re too big to be members of a family. Too small to be financial numbers. And anyway, the values jump around quite a bit. They can’t be bank-account numbers, either—maybe they’re the numbers for safe-deposit boxes.”
“Oh, it’s all a big if.” I slapped the papers against the table in frustration. “Did Lotty say anything else? I mean besides going to her office—did she say whether these entries meant anything special to her? After all, the Radbuka name, that’s the one she knows.”
Carl made a sour face. “Oh, she had one of her typical histrionic fits. She doesn’t seem to be any more mature than little Calia, screeching around the living room.”
I frowned. “Do you really, truly not know who Sofie Radbuka was, Carl?”
He looked at me coldly. “I said everything I know about it last weekend. I don’t need to expose myself further.”
“Even if Lotty did have a lover with that name, which I don’t believe—at least, not someone she left school to be with in the country—why would seeing the name make Lotty so jumpy and tormented all these years later?”
“The inside of her mind is as opaque to me as—as Calia’s toy dog. When I was a young man, I thought I did understand her, but she walked away from me without one word of explanation or farewell, and we had been lovers for three years.”
I turned helplessly to Max. “Did she say anything when she saw the name in the book, or did she just leave?”
Max stared in front of him, not looking at me. “She wanted to know if someone thought she needed to be punished, and if so, didn’t they realize that self-torture was the most exquisite punishment yet devised, because victim and tormentor were never separated.”
The silence that followed was so complete we could hear the waves breaking on Lake Michigan from the far side of the park. I gathered my papers together carefully, as though they were eggs which would crack at a false touch, and stood up to go.
Max followed me out to my car. “Victoria, Lotty is behaving in a way that I can’t fathom. I’ve never seen her like this, except maybe right after the war, but then we were all—well, the losses we experienced—for her, as for me, for Carl, for my beloved Teresz, we were all devastated, so I didn’t notice Lotty as particularly so. For all of us, those losses are a wound that always hurts in bad weather, so to speak.”
“I can imagine that,” I said.
“Yes, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell you. In Lotty’s case, in all these years she has never discussed them. She’s always kept herself energetically focused on the task at hand. Not just nowadays, when all our lives keep us busy with the present and a more recent past. But never.”
He smacked my car roof, bewildered, astonished at her reticence. The flat, hard sound contrasted unpleasantly with his low voice.
“Right after the war, there was a sort of shock, and even for some people a sense of shame about those many, many dead. People—at least, Jewish people—didn’t talk about it in a public way: we weren’t going to be victims, hanging around the table for crumbs of pity. Among the survivors of the dead, oh, we mourned in private. But not Lotty. She was frozen; I think it’s what made her so ill that year that she left Carl. When she came back from the country the next winter, she had this patina of briskness that has never left her. Until now. Until this person Paul whoever he is appeared.
“Victoria, after I lost Teresz I never thought I would be in love again. And I never imagined with Lotty. She and Carl had been a couple, a passionate couple; also, my own mind was in the past—I kept thinking of her as Carl’s girl, despite their long estrangement. But we did come together in that way, as I know you’ve seen. Our love of music, her passion, my calm—we seemed to balance each other. But now—” He couldn’t figure out how to end the sentence. Finally he said, “If she doesn’t return soon—return emotionally, I mean—we’ll lose each other forever. I can’t cope right now with more losses from the friends of my youth.”
He didn’t wait for me to say anything but turned on his heel and went back into the house. I drove soberly back to the city.
Sofie Radbuka. “Probably I couldn’t have saved her life,” Lotty had said to me. Was this a cousin who had died in the gas chambers, a cousin whose place on the train to London Lotty had taken? I could imagine the guilt that would torment you if that had happened: I survived at her expense. Her parting remark to Max and Carl, about self-torture.
I was following the winding road past Calvary Cemetery, whose mausoleums separate Evanston from Chicago, when Don Strzepek called. “Vic—where are you?”
“Among the dead,” I said bleakly. “What’s up?”
“Vic, you need to get down here. Your friend Dr. Herschel is carrying on in a really outrageous way.”
“Where’s here?”
“What do you mean, where’s—oh, I’m calling from Rhea’s house. She just left to go to the hospital.”