She looked back at me, her hauteur suddenly changed to consternation. “Victoria, I’m sorry—I have been selfish, not thinking of the effect of my behavior on you. You do deserve some kind of explanation.”
She sat frowning to herself, as if trying to decide what kind of explanation I deserved. “I don’t know if I can make clear the relationships of that time in my life. How I came to be so close to Max, and even Carl.
“There was a group of nine of us refugee children who became good friends during the war. We met over music; a woman from Salzburg, a violist who was herself a refugee, came around London and gathered us up. She saw Carl’s gift, got him lessons, got him into a good music program. There were various others. Teresz, who eventually married Max. Me. My father had been a violin player. Café music, not the stuff of the soirées Frau Herbst organized, but skillful—at least, I think he was skillful, but how can I know, when I only heard him as a child? Anyway, even though I had no gift myself, I loved hearing the music at Frau Herbst’s.”
“Was Radbuka the name of one of that group? Why does Carl care so much? Is it someone he was in love with?”
She smiled painfully. “You would have to ask him that. Radbuka was the name of—someone else. Max—he had great organizational skills, even as a young man. When the war ended, he went around London to the different societies that helped people find out about their families. Then he—went back to central Europe, looking. That was in—I think it was in ’47, but after all this time I can’t be sure of the exact year. That was when the Radbuka name came up—it wasn’t anyone in the group’s actual surname, you see. But that is why we could ask Max to look. Because we were all so close, not like a family, like something else, perhaps a combat team who fought together for years.
“For almost all of us, Max’s reports came back with devastating completeness. No survivors. For the Herschels, the Tisovs, the Loewenthals—Max found his father and two cousins, and that was another terrible—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.
“I was starting my medical training. It consumed me to the exclusion of so much else. Carl always blamed me for—well, let’s just say, something unpleasant came up around the person from the Radbuka family. Carl always thought my absorption with medicine made me behave in a fashion which he regarded as cruel . . . as if his own devotion to music had not been equally absolute.”
This last sentence she muttered under her breath as an afterthought. She fell silent. She had never spoken to me of her losses in such a way, such an emotional way. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say—or not to say—about the friend from the Radbuka family, but when it became clear she wouldn’t expand on it, I couldn’t press her.
“Do you know”—I hesitated, trying to think of the least painful way of asking the question—“do you know what Max learned about the Radbuka family?”
Her face twisted. “They—he didn’t find any trace of them. Although traces were hard to find and he didn’t have much money. We all gave him a bit, but we didn’t have money, either.”
“So hearing this man call himself Radbuka must have been quite a shock.”
She shuddered and looked at me. “It was, believe me, it’s been a shock all week. How I envy Carl, able to put the whole world to one side when he starts to play. Or maybe it’s that he puts the whole world inside him and blows it out that tube.” She repeated the question she’d asked when she saw Paul on video. “How old is he, do you think?”
“He says he came here after the war around the age of four, so he must have been born in ’42 or ’43.”
“So he couldn’t be—does he think he was born in Theresienstadt?”
I threw up my hands. “All I know about him is from Wednesday night’s interview. Is Theresienstadt the same as what he calls Terezin?”
“Terezin is its Czech name; it’s an old fortress outside Prague.” She added with an unexpected gleam of humor, “That’s Austrian snobbery, using the German name—a holdover from when Prague was part of the Hapsburg empire and everyone spoke German. This man tonight, he’s insisting he’s Czech, not German, by calling it Terezin.”
We sat again in silence. Lotty was withdrawn into her own thoughts, but she seemed more relaxed, less tortured, than she had for the past few days. I told her I’d go up to see what I could learn from Radbuka.
Lotty nodded. “If I feel stronger I’ll come up by and by. Right now—I think I’ll just lie here.”