I don’t remember much of the crossing. We had a calm sea, I think, but I was so nervous that my stomach was twisted in knots even without any serious waves. When we landed we looked around anxiously for Minna in the crowd of adults who had come to meet the boat, but all the children were claimed and we were left standing on the dock. Finally a woman from the refugee committee showed up: Minna had left instructions for us to be sent on to London by train, but she had delayed getting word to the refugee committee until that morning. We spent the night in the camp at Harwich with the other children who had no sponsors, and went on to London in the morning. When we got to the station, to Liverpool Street—it was massive, we clung to each other while engines belched and loudspeakers bellowed incomprehensible syllables and people brushed past us on important missions. I clutched Hugo’s hand tightly.
Cousin Minna had sent a workman to fetch us, giving him a photograph against which he anxiously studied our faces. He spoke English, which we didn’t understand at all, or Yiddish, which we didn’t understand well, but he was pleasant, bustling us into a cab, pointing out the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, giving us each a bit of queer paste-filled sandwich in case we were hungry after our long trip.
It was only when we got to that narrow old house in the north of London that we found out Minna would take me and not Hugo. The man from the factory settled us in a forbidding front room, where we sat without moving, so fearful we were of making a noise or being a nuisance. After some very long time, Minna swept in from work, full of anger, and announced that Hugo was to go on, that the foreman from the glove factory would be coming for him in an hour.
“One child and one child only. I told her highness Madame Butterfly that when she wrote begging for my charity. She may choose to roll around in the hay with a Gypsy but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to look after her children.”
I tried to protest, but she said she could throw me out on the street. “Better be grateful to me, you little mongrels. I spent all day persuading the foreman to take Hugo instead of sending him to the child welfare authorities.”
The foreman, Mr. Nussbaum his name was, actually turned out to be a good foster father to Hugo; he even set him up in business many years later. But you can only guess how the two of us felt that day when he arrived to take Hugo away with him: the last sight either of us had then of any familiar face of our childhood.
Like the Nazi guards, Minna searched my clothes for valuables: she refused to believe the penury to which the family was reduced. Fortunately, my Oma had been clever enough to evade both Nazis and Minna. Those gold coins helped pay my fees in medical school, but that was a long way ahead, in a future I didn’t imagine as I sobbed for my parents and my brother.
X
In the Mind Reader’s Lair
When I finally woke the next morning, my head was heavy with the detritus of dreams and difficult sleep. I once read that a year or eighteen months after losing them, you dream of your dead as they were in their prime. I suppose I must sometimes dream of my mother as she was in my childhood, vivid and intense, but last night she was dying, eyes heavy with morphine, face unrecognizable as disease had leached flesh from bone. Lotty and my mother are such intertwined strands in my mind that it was almost inevitable that her distress would overlay my sleep.
Morrell looked at me questioningly when I sat up. He had come in after I went to bed, but I was tossing, not sleeping. His impending departure made him feverishly nervous; we made love with a kind of frantic unsatisfying energy but fell asleep without talking. In the morning light he traced my cheekbones with his finger and asked if it was his leaving that had disturbed my sleep.
I gave a twisted smile. “My own stuff this time.” I gave him a brief synopsis of the previous day.
“Why don’t we go to Michigan for the weekend?” he said. “We both need a breather. You can’t do anything on a Saturday, anyway, and we can give each other better comfort away from all these people. I love Don like a brother, but having him here right now is a bit much. We’ll come back in time for Michael and Carl’s concert on Sunday.”
My muscles unknotted at the thought, and it sent me into the day with better energy than my tormented night warranted. After stopping at home to take the dogs for a swim, I drove into the West Loop to the Unblinking Eye, the camera and video place I use when only the best will do. I explained what I wanted to Maurice Redken, the technician I usually work with.
We ran my copy of the Channel 13 video through one of their machines, watching Radbuka’s naked face as he went through the torments of his life. When he said, “My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,” the camera was right in his face. I froze the image there and asked Maurice to make prints of that and a couple of other close-ups for me. I was hoping Rhea Wiell would introduce me to Radbuka, but if she didn’t, the stills would help Mary Louise and me track him down.