She gave the ghost of a smile. “Acute of you, my dear. A little of both, I think. But—if you will run the tape for me, maybe I am ready to see it. Max warned me that the man was not prepossessing.”
We went to the back bedroom she uses for television and loaded the tape into the VCR. I glanced at Lotty, but the fear in her face was so acute that I couldn’t bear to watch her. As Paul Radbuka recounted his nightmares and his heartbreaking cries for his childhood friend, I kept my eyes glued to him. When we’d seen everything, including the “Exploring Chicago” segment with Rhea Wiell and Arnold Praeger, Lotty asked in a thread of a voice to return to Radbuka’s interview.
I ran it through for her twice more, but when she wanted a third rerun I refused: her face was grey with strain. “You’re torturing yourself with this, Lotty. Why?”
“I—the whole thing is hard.” Even though I was sitting on the floor next to her armchair I could barely make out her words. “Something is familiar to me in what he’s saying. Only I can’t think, because—I can’t think. I hate this. I hate seeing things that make my mind stop working. Do you believe his story?”
I made a helpless gesture. “I can’t fathom it, but it’s so remote from how I want to see life that my mind is rejecting it. I met the therapist yesterday—no, it was today, it just seems like a long time ago. She’s a legitimate clinician, I think, but, well, fanatical. A zealot for her work in general and most particularly for this guy. I told her I wanted to interview Radbuka, to see if he could be related to these people you and Max know, but she’s protecting him. He’s not in the phone book, either as Paul Radbuka or Paul Ulrich, so I’m sending Mary Louise out to all the Ulrichs in Chicago. Maybe he’s still living in his father’s house, or maybe a neighbor will recognize his picture—we don’t know his father’s first name.”
“How old would you say he is?” she asked unexpectedly.
“You mean, could he be the right age for the experiences he’s claiming? You’d be a better judge of that than I, but again, it would be easier to answer if we saw him in person.”
I took the stills out of the envelope, holding the three different shots so that the light shone full on them. Lotty looked at them a long time but finally shook her head helplessly.
“Why did I imagine something definite would jump out at me? It’s what Max said to me. Resemblance is so often a trick of the expression, after all, and these are only photographs, photographs of a picture, really. I would have to see the man, and even then—after all, I’d be trying to match an adult face against a child’s memory of someone who was much younger than this man is now.”
I took her hand in both of mine. “Lotty, what is it you’re afraid of? This is so painful for you it’s breaking my heart. Is it—could he be part of your family? Do you think he’s related to your mother?”
“If you knew anything of those matters, you would know better than to ask such a question,” she said with a flash of her more imperious manner.
“But you do know the Radbuka family, don’t you?”
She laid the pictures on the coffee table as if she were dealing cards and then proceeded to rearrange them, but she wasn’t really looking at them. “I knew some members of the family many years ago. The circumstances—when I last saw them it was extremely painful. The way we parted, I mean, or anyway the whole situation. If this man is—I don’t see how he could be what he says. But if he is, then I owe it to the family to try to befriend him.”
“Do you want me to do some digging? Assuming I can get hold of any information to dig with?”
Her vivid, dark face was contorted with strain. “Oh, Victoria, I don’t know what I want. I want the past never to have happened, or since it did and I can’t change it, I want it to stay where it is, past, dead, gone. This man, I don’t want to know him. But I see I will have to talk to him. Do I want you to investigate him? No, I don’t want you near him. But find him for me, find him so I can talk to him, and you, you—what you can do is try to see what piece of paper convinced him his name was really Paul Radbuka.”
Late that night, her unhappy, contradictory words kept tumbling through my mind. Sometime after two, I finally fell asleep, but in my dreams Bull Durham chased me until I found myself locked up with Paul Radbuka at Terezin, with Lotty on the far side of the barbed wire watching me with hurt, tormented eyes. “Keep him there among the dead,” she cried.
Lotty Herschel’s Story: