I made sure she was well-covered in the afghan Max had provided before turning out the light. When I closed the French doors behind me, I could see across the hall into the front room, where a dozen or so people still lingered over brandy. Michael Loewenthal was on the piano bench, holding Agnes on his lap. Everyone was happy. I went on up the stairs.
Max’s study was a large room overlooking the lake, filled with Ming vases and T’ang horses. It was at the far end of the second floor from where the children were watching videos; Max had picked the room when his own two children were small, because it was well-secluded from the body of the house. When I shut the door no outside sounds could disrupt the tension inside. Morrell and Don smiled at me, but Paul Ulrich-Radbuka looked away in disappointment when he saw it was me, not Max or Carl.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said pathetically. “Are people ashamed to be seen with me? I need to talk to Max and Carl. I need to find out how we’re related. I’m sure Carl or Max will want to know he has a surviving family member.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, as if that would block out his hyperemotional state. “Try to relax, Mr.—uh. Mr. Loewenthal will be with you as soon as he can leave his guests. Perhaps Mr. Tisov as well. Can I get you a glass of wine, or a soft drink?”
He looked longingly at the door but apparently realized he couldn’t find Carl unaided. He subsided into an armchair and muttered that he supposed a glass of water would help settle his nerves. Don jumped up to fetch it.
I decided the only way to get any information out of him would be to act as though I believed in his identity. He was so unstable, leaping up the scale from misery to ecstasy by octaves, weaving straws in the conversation into clothes, that I wasn’t sure anything he said would be reliable, but if I challenged him, he would only retreat into a defensive weeping.
“Do you have any clue about where you were born?” I asked. “I gather Radbuka is a Czech name.”
“The birth certificate that was sent with me to Terezin said Berlin, which is one reason I’m so eager to meet my relatives. Maybe the Radbukas were Czechs hiding in Berlin: some Jews fled west instead of east, trying to get away from the Einsatzgruppen. Maybe they were Czechs who had emigrated there before the war ever started. Oh, how I wish I knew something.” He knotted his hands in anguish.
I picked my next words with care. “It must have been quite a shock to you, to find that birth certificate when your—uh—foster father died. Telling you that you were Paul Radbuka from Berlin, instead of—where did Ulrich tell you you were born?”
“Vienna. But no, I’ve never seen my Terezin birth certificate, I only read about it elsewhere, once I realized who I was.”
“How cruel of Ulrich, to write about it but not leave you with the document itself!” I exclaimed.
“No, no, I had to track it down in an outside report. It was—was just by chance I found out about it at all.”
“What an extraordinary amount of research you’ve done!” I packed my voice with so much admiration that Morrell frowned at me in warning, but Paul brightened perceptibly. “I’d love to see the report that told you about your birth certificate.”
At that he stiffened, so I hastily changed the subject. “You don’t remember any Czech, I suppose, if you were separated from your mother at—what was it—twelve months?”
He relaxed again. “When I hear Czech I recognize it but don’t really understand it. The first language I spoke is German, because that was the language of the guards. Also many of the women who worked in the nursery at Terezin spoke it.”
I heard the door open behind me and held a hand out in a signal to be quiet. Don slid past me to put a glass of water next to Paul. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Max quietly follow Don into the room. Paul, caught up in the pleasure of my attending to his story, went on without paying attention to them.
“There were six of us small children who more or less banded together, and really, we formed a little brigade; even at the age of three we looked after one another because the adults were so overworked and so underfed they couldn’t care for individual children. We clung to one another and hid together from the guards. When the war ended we were sent to England. At first we were scared when the adults started putting us on trains, because in Terezin we saw many children put on trains and everyone knew they went someplace to die. But after we got over our terror, we had a happy time in England. We were in a big house in the country, it had a name like that of an animal, a dog, which was scary at first because we were terrified of dogs. From having seen them used so evilly in the camps.”
“And that’s where you learned English?” I prompted.