Total Recall

LII The Face in the Picture

Beth Israel was near enough to the expressway that I took it up to Evanston. It was past ten now, but Max had wanted to talk things over. He was feeling deeply lonely tonight, since Calia and Agnes had left for London and Michael and Carl had flown west to rejoin the Cellini in San Francisco.

Max fed me cold roast chicken and a glass of St. Emilion, something warm and red for comfort. I told him what I knew, what I was guessing, what I thought the fallout would be. He was more philosophical than I about Alderman Durham, but he was disappointed that Posner hadn’t been implicated in any of the scandal.

“You’re sure he wasn’t playing a role somehow? Something that you could expose that would force him away from the hospital?”

“He’s just a fanatic,” I said, accepting another glass of wine. “Although they’re actually more dangerous than people like Durham, who are playing the game-well, as a game-for power or position or money. But if we catch up with Lotty and find those books of Ulrich’s, then we can publicize those life-insurance policies that Edelweiss or Nesthorn sold during the thirties. We can force the Illinois legislature to revisit the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. And Posner and his Maccabees will go back downtown to Ajax or the State of Illinois building, which will get him out of your hair.”

“Lotty and the notebooks,” Max repeated, turning his wineglass round and round in his hands. “ Victoria, while Calia was here and I was concerned about her safety, I wasn’t worrying so intensely about Lotty. Also, I see now, now that he’s gone back to the tour, I was protecting myself from Carl’s scorn. Lotty’s high flair for drama, he keeps calling her recent behavior. The way she disappeared on Thursday-Carl says it’s the same thing she did all those years ago in London. Turning her back, walking away without a word. It’s what she did to him, you know, and he says I am a fool if I think that isn’t what she’s doing to me. She leaves, she says nothing for weeks or months, and then perhaps she returns, or perhaps not, but there’s never an explanation.”

“And you think?” I prodded, when he was quiet.

“I think she’s disappeared now for the same reason she disappeared then, whatever that was,” he burst out. “If I was twenty, as Carl was then, I might be as hurt in my own sense of self and less worried about her: one’s passions run higher at twenty. But I am very worried about her. I want to know where she is. I called her brother Hugo in Montreal, but they’ve never been close; he hasn’t heard from her in months and has no idea what’s going through her head, or where she might have run to. Victoria, I know you are worn, I see it in the fine lines around your mouth and eyes. But can you do anything to find her?”

I massaged my sore shoulders again. “I’m going to the clinic in the morning. Lotty actually did FedEx a packet of dictation to Mrs. Coltrain-she was transcribing it when Fillida Rossy jumped her. Mrs. Coltrain says there’s nothing to indicate where Lotty is-it’s a short tape, leaving instructions about her surgical schedule. But Mrs. Coltrain is going to let me into the clinic in the morning so I can listen to it myself and inspect the wrapping. She hopes it will mean something to me. Also, she says Lotty left papers on her desktop; maybe they’ll tell me something. Beyond that-I can try to ask the Finch or Captain Mallory to pull Lotty’s phone records-they would show who she called the night she disappeared. Airline lists. There are other things I could do, but they won’t happen fast. We’ll hope for something in her own papers.”

Max insisted that I stay the night. “You’re asleep on your feet, Victoria. You shouldn’t be out driving. Unless you’re desperate to go to your own home, you can sleep in my daughter’s old room. There’s even some kind of nightshirt in there that’s clean.”

It was his own fear and loneliness that made him want me there, as much as his concern for my well-being, but both were important reasons to me. I called Mr. Contreras to reassure him of my safety and was glad, actually, to climb one flight of stairs to a bed instead of spending another half hour in my car to reach one.

In the morning, we drove down together to the clinic. Mrs. Coltrain met us at nine, looking as sedately groomed as if Rossys and attempted murder were no more harrowing than sick women and screaming children. Fillida hadn’t broken her arm when she smashed it with the gun stock, but she had given Mrs. Coltrain a deep bruise; her forearm was resting in a sling to protect the damaged area.

She wasn’t quite as calm as she appeared: when she’d settled us at her workstation with the tape player, she confided, “You know, Miss Warshawski, I think I am going to get someone in on Monday to take the doors off those closets in the examining rooms. I don’t think I can go in there without being afraid someone is hiding behind the door.”

That was what Fillida had done: hidden in an examining-room closet until she thought the clinic was empty, and then jumped Mrs. Coltrain at her workstation. When Fillida realized that the notebooks weren’t on the premises, she’d forced Mrs. Coltrain to bring me to the clinic.

Now Mrs. Coltrain played the tape for Max and me, but although we listened to it clear to the end, through half an hour of staticky silence on the second side, neither of us got anything out of it except that Dr. Barber was to take Lotty’s two urgent surgical cases on Tuesday and Mrs. Coltrain was to work with the chief of surgery to reschedule the others.

Mrs. Coltrain took us back to Lotty’s office so I could inspect the papers Lotty had left on her desk. My stomach muscles clenched as we walked down the hall. I expected to find the chaos we’d left behind last night: broken chairs, blood, overturned lamps, and the police mess on top of it. But the broken furniture was gone, the floor and desk were scoured clean, the papers neatly laid on top.

When I exclaimed over the tidiness, Mrs. Coltrain said she had come in early to make things right. “ If Dr. Herschel showed up, she would be so distressed to find all that wreckage. And anyway, I knew I couldn’t face it for thirty seconds, so full of all that violence. Lucy Choi, the clinic nurse, she came in at eight. We gave it a good going-over together. But I kept out all the papers that were on Dr. Herschel’s desk yesterday. You sit down here, Ms. Warshawski, and look them over.”

It felt strange to sit behind Lotty’s desk, in the chair where she had so often greeted me, sometimes brusquely, more often with empathy, but always with a high energy. I turned over the papers. A letter from the archivist at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, dated six years back, telling Dr. Herschel that they regretted not being able to find any records of the people whom she was trying to trace, Shlomo and Martin Radbuka, although they could confirm the deaths of Rudolph and Anna Herschel in 1943. They referred her to several data banks that traced Holocaust victims which might be more helpful. Her correspondence with those other data banks showed that no one had had any useful information for her.

Lotty had also left out a stack of newsletters from the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she’d done her medical training. I turned over the pages. Stuck between two of the sheets was a photograph. It was an old picture, the edges creased from much handling, which showed a very young woman, fair, whose eyes, even in the faded paper, sparkled with life. Her hair was bobbed and curled in the style of the 1920’s. She was smiling with the provocative self-confidence of someone who knows herself beloved, whose desires were seldom denied. It was inscribed on the back, but in German in a heavy European script which I couldn’t decipher.

I handed it to Max, who frowned over it. “I’m not good with this old German, but it’s written to someone named Martin, a love message from-I think it says Lingerl-inscribed in 1928. Then she’s rewritten it to Lotty: Think of me, dearest little Charlotte Anna, and know that I am always thinking of you.”

“Who is this? Dr. Herschel’s mother, do you think?” Mrs. Coltrain picked up the picture respectfully by the edges. “What a beautiful girl she was when this was taken. Dr. Herschel should keep it in a frame on her desk.”

“Perhaps it’s too painful for her to see that face every day,” Max said heavily.

I turned to the newsletters. They were like all such documents, filled with tidbits of information about graduates, amazing achievements of the faculty, status of the hospital, especially under the severe retrenchments forced by the shrinking National Health budgets. Claire Tallmadge’s name jumped out at me from the third one I looked at:

Claire Tallmadge, MRCP, has given up her practice and moved to a flat in Highgate, where she welcomes visits from former students and colleagues. Dr. Tallmadge’s unbending standards earned her the respect of generations of colleagues and students at the Royal Free. We will all sadly miss the sight of her erect presence in her tweed suits moving through the wards, but the Fellowship being established in her honor will keep her name bright among us. Dr. Tallmadge promises to keep busy with writing a history of women’s medical careers in the twentieth century.

Lotty Herschel’s Story:

The Long Road Back

When I reached the rise overlooking the place, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t move at all. My legs suddenly weakened at the knees and I sat abruptly to keep from falling. After that I remained where I landed, looking over the grey and blowing ground, hugging my knees to my chest.

When I realized I’d left my mother’s photograph behind, I’d become frantic. I searched my suitcase at least a dozen times, and then I called the various hotels where I’d stayed. Many times. “No, Dr. Herschel, we haven’t found it. Yes, we understand the importance.” Even then I couldn’t resign myself to its loss. I wanted her with me. I wanted her to protect me on my journey east as she hadn’t protected me on my journey west, and when I couldn’t find her picture, I almost turned around at Wien-Schwechat Airport. Except at that point I couldn’t imagine where I’d go back to.

I walked the city for two days, trying to see behind its bright modern face the streets of my childhood. The flat on the Renngasse was the one place I recognized, but when I rang the bell, the woman who now lived in it greeted me with contemptuous hostility. She refused to let me inside: anyone could pretend they had been a child in an apartment; she knew better than to fall for confidence tricksters. It must have been the nightmare of this family of squatters, someone like me coming back from the dead to reclaim my home from them.

I made myself go to the Leopoldsgasse, but many of those crumbling old buildings had disappeared, and even though I knew the right intersection to look for, nothing looked familiar to me. My Zeyde, my Orthodox grandfather, had threaded his way through this warren with me one morning to a vendor who sold ham. My Zeyde traded his overcoat for a greased paper full of thin-sliced fatty meat. He wouldn’t touch it himself, but his grandchildren needed protein; we could not starve to death to uphold the laws of kashruth. My cousins and I ate the pink slices with guilty pleasure. His overcoat fed us for three days.

I tried to re-create that route, but I only ended up at the canal, staring into the filthy water so long that a policeman came to make sure I wasn’t planning to jump.

I rented a car and drove into the mountains, up to the old farmhouse at Kleinsee. Even that I couldn’t recognize. The whole area is a resort now. That place where we went every summer, the days filled with walks, horseback rides, botany lessons with my grandmother, the nights with singing and dancing, my Herschel cousins and I sitting on the stairs peeping into the drawing room where my mother was always the golden butterfly at the center of attention-the meadows were now filled with expensive villas, shops, a ski lift. I couldn’t even find my grandfather’s house-I don’t know if it was torn down or turned into one of the heavily guarded villas I couldn’t see from the road.

And so finally I drove east. If I couldn’t find a trace of my mother or my grandmothers in life, then I would have to visit their graves. Slowly, so slowly other drivers spewed epithets at me-rich Austrian they took me to be from my rental license plates. Even at my slow pace I couldn’t help finally reaching the town. I left the car. Continued on foot, following the signposts in their different languages.

I know people passed me, I felt their shapes go by, some stopping above me, talking at me. Words flew by me, words in many languages, but I couldn’t understand any of them. I was staring at the buildings at the bottom of the hill, the crumbling remnants of my mother’s last home. I was beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond awareness. So I don’t know when she arrived and sat cross-legged next to me. When she touched my hand I thought it was my mother, finally come to claim me, and when I turned, eager to embrace her, my disappointment was beyond recounting.

You! I choked out a word, not bothering to hide my bitterness.

“Yes,” she agreed, “not who you wanted, but here anyway.” Refusing to leave until I was ready to leave, taking a jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.

I tried for irony. You are the perfect sleuth, tracking me down against my will. But she said nothing, so I had to prod, to ask what clues had led her to me.

“The newsletters from the Royal Free-you left them on your office desk. I recognized Dr. Tallmadge’s name, and remembered you and Carl arguing over her that night at Max’s. I-I flew to London and visited her in Highgate.”

Ah, yes. Claire. Who saved me from the glove factory. She saved me and saved me and saved me, and then she dropped me as if I were a discarded glove myself. All those years, all those years that I thought it was out of disapproval, and now I see it was-I couldn’t think of a word for what it was. Lies, perhaps.

Carl used to get so angry. I brought him to the Tallmadges’ for tea several times, but he despised them so much that he finally refused to return. I was so proud of them all, of Claire and Vanessa and Mrs. Tallmadge and their Crown Derby tea service in the garden, and he saw them as patronizing me, the little Jewish monkey they could feed bits of apple to when it danced for them.

I was proud of Carl, too. His music was something so special that I was sure it would make them all, but especially Claire, realize I was special-a gifted musician was in love with me. But they patronized that, as well.

“As if I was the monkey’s organ-grinder,” Carl told me furiously, after they’d asked him to bring his clarinet along one day. He started playing, Debussy for the clarinet, and they talked among themselves and applauded when they realized he’d finished. I insisted it was only Ted and Wallace Marmaduke, Vanessa’s husband and brother-in-law. They were Philistines, I agreed, but I wouldn’t agree that Claire had been just as rude.

That quarrel took place the year after V-E Day. I was still in high school but working for a family in North London in exchange for room and board. Claire, meanwhile, was still living at home. She was applying for her first houseman’s job, so our paths seldom crossed unless she went out of her way to invite me to tea, as she did that day.

But then, two years later, after she’d finished saving me that last time, she wouldn’t see me or answer my letters when I returned to London. She didn’t return the phone message I left with her mother, although perhaps Mrs. Tallmadge never delivered it-what she said to me when I called was, “Don’t you think, dear, that it’s time you and Claire led your own lives?”

My last private conversation with Claire was when she urged me to apply for an obstetrics fellowship in the States, to make a fresh start. She even saw that I got the right recommendations when I was applying. After that, the only times I saw her were at professional meetings.

I looked briefly at Victoria, sitting on the ground beside me in her jeans, watching me with a frowning intensity that made me want to lash out: I would not have pity.

If you’ve been to see Claire, then you must know who Sofie Radbuka was.

She was cautious, knowing I might bite her, and said hesitantly she thought it was me.

So you’re not the perfect detective. It wasn’t me, it was my mother.

That flustered her, and I took a bitter pleasure in her embarrassment. Always so forthright, making connections, tracking people down, tracking me down. Let her be embarrassed now.

My need to talk was too great, though; after a minute I said, It was me. It was my mother. It was me. It was my mother’s name. I wanted her. Not only then, but every day, every night I wanted her, only then most especially. I think I thought I could become her. Or if I took her name she would be with me. I don’t know now what I was thinking.

When I was born, my parents weren’t married. My mother, Sofie, the darling of my grandparents, dancing through life as if it were one brightly lit ballroom; she was a light and airy creature from the day of her birth. They named her Sofie but they called her the Butterfly. Schmetterling in German, which quickly became Lingerl or Ling-Ling. Even Minna, who hated her, called her Madame Butterfly, not Sofie.

Then the butterfly became a teenager and went dancing off with Vienna ’s other bright young things to go slumming in the Matzoinsel. Like a modern-day teenager going to the ghetto, picking up black lovers, she picked up Moishe Radbuka out of the Belarus immigrant world. Martin, she called him, giving him a western name. He was a café violinist, almost a Gypsy, except he was a Jew.

She was seventeen when she became pregnant with me. He would have married her, I learned from the family whispers, but she wouldn’t-not a Gypsy from the Matzoinsel. So then everyone in the family thought she should go to a sanatorium, have the child, give it up discreetly. Everyone except my Oma and Opa, who adored her and said to bring the baby to them.

Sofie loved Martin in her way, and he adored her the way everyone in my world did, or at least the way I imagine they did. Don’t tell me otherwise, don’t feed me the words of Cousin Minna: slut, harlot, lazy bitch in heat, all those words I heard for eight years of my London life.

Four years after me came Hugo. And four years after him came the Nazis. And we all moved into the Insel. I suppose you saw it, if you’ve been tracking me, the remains of those cramped apartments on the Leopoldsgasse?

My mother became thin and lost her sparkle. Who could keep it at such a time, anyway? But to me as a child-I thought at first living with her all the time would mean she would pay attention to me. I couldn’t understand why it was so different, why she wouldn’t sing or dance anymore. She stopped being Ling-Ling and became Sofie.

Then she was pregnant again, pregnant, sick when I left for England, too sick to get out of bed. But she decided to marry my father. All those years she loved being Lingerl Herschel, coming to stay with her parents when she wanted her old life on the Renngasse, going to the Insel to live with Martin when she wanted him. But when the iron fist of the National Socialists grabbed all of them, Herschels and Radbukas, and squeezed them into a ball together in the ghetto, she married Martin. Perhaps she did it for his mother, since we were living with her. So my mother for a brief time became Sofie Radbuka.

In my child years on the Renngasse, even though I wanted my mother to stay with me, I was a well-loved child. My grandparents didn’t mind that I was small and dark like Martin instead of blond and beautiful like their daughter. They were proud of my brains, that I was always number one or two in my class in my few years in school. They even had a kind of patronizing affection for Martin.

But they thought his parents were an embarrassment. When they had to give up their ten-room flat on the Renngasse and move in with the Radbukas, my Oma-she acted as though she had been asked to live in a cow byre. She held herself aloof, she addressed Martin’s mother formally, as “Sie,” never as “Du.” And me, I wanted my Oma Herschel to keep loving me best, I needed that love, there were so many of us all cramped together, I needed someone to care about me-Sofie was caught up in her own misery, pregnant, sick, not used to any kind of hardship, getting spite from the Radbuka cousins and aunts who felt she’d mistreated their own darling Martin-Moishe-all those years.

But don’t you see, it made me treat my other grandmother rudely. If I showed my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, the affection she craved from me, then my Oma would push me away. On the morning Hugo and I left for England, my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, longed for me to kiss her, and I would only curtsy to her.

I choked down the sobs that started to rise up in me. Victoria handed me a bottle of water without saying anything. If she had touched me I would have hit her, but I took her water and drank it.

So ten years later, when I found myself pregnant, found myself carrying Carl’s child that hot summer, it all grew dark in my head. My mother. My Oma-my Grandmother Herschel. My Bobe-my Grandmother Radbuka. I thought I could make amends to my Bobe. I thought she would forgive me if I used her name. Only I didn’t know her first name. I didn’t know my own granny’s name. Night after night I could see her thin arms held out to hold me, to kiss me good-bye. Night after night I could see my embarrassed curtsy, knowing my Oma was watching me. No matter how many nights I recalled this scene, I could not remember my Bobe’s first name. So I used my mother’s.

I wouldn’t have an abortion. That was Claire’s first suggestion. By 1944, when I was tagging around after Claire trying to learn enough science so that I could be like her, be a doctor, all my family was already dead. Right here in front of us they shaved my Oma’s silver hair. I can see it falling on the floor around her like a waterfall, she was so proud of it, she never cut it. My Bobe. She was already bald under her Orthodox wig. The cousins I shared a bed with, whom I resented because I didn’t have my own canopied bed anymore, they were dead by then. I had been saved, for no reason except the love of my Opa, who found the money to buy a passage to freedom for Hugo and me.

All of them, my mother, too, who sang and danced with me on Sunday afternoons, they were here, here in this ground, burned to the ashes that are blowing in your eyes. Maybe their ashes are gone, as well, maybe strangers took them away, bathing their eyes, washing my mother down the sink.

I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t add one more death to all those dead. But I had no feelings left with which to raise a child. It was only the thought that my mother would come back that kept me going during the war when I lived with Minna. We’re so proud of you, Lottchen, she and my Oma would say, you didn’t cry, you were a good girl, you did your lessons, you stayed first in your class even in a foreign language, you tolerated the hatefulness of that prize bitch Minna-I would imagine the war ending and them embracing me with those words.

It’s true that by 1944 we were already hearing reports in the immigrant world about what was happening-here in this place and in all the other places like it. But how many were dying, nobody knew, and so each of us kept hoping that our own people would be spared. But in the wave of a hand, they were gone. Max looked for them. He went to Europe, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it, I haven’t been to central Europe since I left in 1939-until now-but he looked, and he said, They are dead.

So I felt horribly trapped: I wouldn’t abort the pregnancy, but I could not keep the baby. I would not raise one more hostage to fortune that could be snatched from me at a moment’s notice.

I couldn’t tell Carl. Carl-if he’d said, let’s get married, let’s raise the child, he would never have understood why I wouldn’t. It wasn’t because of my career, which would have been destroyed if I’d had a baby. Now-now girls do it all the time. It isn’t easy, to be a medical student and a mother, but no one says, That’s it, your career is over. Believe me, in 1949, a baby meant your medical training was finished forever.

If I’d told Carl, told him I couldn’t keep the child, he would have always blamed me for putting my career first. He would never have understood my real reasons. I couldn’t tell him-anything. No more families for me. I know it was cruel of me to leave without a word, but I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t lie. So I left without speaking.

Later I turned myself into the saver of women with difficult pregnancies. I think I imagine every time I leave the operating room that I have saved not myself but some small piece of my mother, who didn’t live long after the birth of that last little sister.

So my life went on. I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t dwell on this past. I lived in the present, in the future. I had my work, which rewarded me richly. I loved music. Max and I-I never thought to be a lover again, but to my surprise and my happiness, as well, that happened between us. I had other friends, and-you, Victoria. You became a beloved friend before I noticed it happening. I let you draw close to me, I let you be another hostage to fortune-and over and over you cause me agony by your reckless disregard for your own life.

She muttered something, some kind of apology. I still wouldn’t look at her.

And then this strange creature appeared in Chicago. This disturbed, ungainly man, claiming to be a Radbuka, when I knew not one of them survived. Except for my own son. When you first told me about this man, Paul, my heart stopped: I thought perhaps it was my child, raised as he claimed by an Einsatzgruppenführer. Then I saw him at Max’s and realized he was too old to be my child.

But then I had a worse fear: the idea that my son might somehow have grown up with a desire to torment me. I think-I wasn’t thinking, I don’t know what I thought, but I imagined my son somehow rising up to conspire with this Paul whoever he is to torture me. So I flew to Claire to demand that she send me to my child.

When Claire came to my rescue that summer, she said she would place my child privately. But she didn’t tell me she gave him to Ted Marmaduke. To her sister and her brother-in-law who wanted children they couldn’t have. Want, have, want, have. It’s the story of people like them. Whatever they want, that they must get. And they got my child.

Claire cut me out of her life so that I should never see my son being raised by her sister and her husband. She pretended it was disapproval of my thinking so little of my medical training that I would get pregnant, but it was really so I would never see my child.

It was so strange to me, seeing her last week. She-she was always my model-of how you behave, of doing things the right way, whether at tea or in surgery. She couldn’t bear for me to see she was less than that. All those years of her coldness, her estrangement, were only due to that English sin, embarrassment. Oh, we laughed and cried together last week, the way old women can, but you don’t overcome a gap of fifty years with one day’s tears and embraces.

Wallace, Ted and Vanessa called my baby. Wallace Marmaduke, for Ted’s brother who died at El Alamein. They never told him he was adopted. They certainly never told him he had Jewish ancestry-instead, he grew up hearing all the lazy contempt I used to hear when I crouched on the far side of Mrs. Tallmadge’s garden wall.

Claire showed me a photograph album she’d kept of his life: she’d had some notion she’d leave it for me if she died before me. My son was a small dark child, like me, but then, so had Claire and Vanessa’s father been a small dark man. Perhaps Vanessa would have told him the truth, but she died when he was seventeen. Claire sent me a note at the time, a note so strange I should have realized she was trying to tell me something that she couldn’t put into words. But I was too proud to look behind the surface back then.

Imagine Wallace’s shock when Ted died last fall: he went through Ted’s papers and found his own birth certificate. Mother, Sofie Radbuka instead of Vanessa Tallmadge Marmaduke. Father, unknown, when it should have been Edward Marmaduke.

What a shock, what a family uproar. He, Wallace Marmaduke, was a Jew? He was a churchwarden, a regular canvasser for the Tories, how could he be a Jew, how could his parents have done this to him? He went to Claire, convinced there was some mistake, but she decided she couldn’t extend the lie that far. No mistake, she told him.

He was going to burn the birth certificate, he was going to destroy the idea of his birth identity forever, except that his daughter-you met his daughter, Pamela? She’s nineteen. It seemed to her romantic, the unknown birth mother, the dark secret. She took her father’s birth certificate away with her, she posted that notice on the Internet, that Questing Scorpio you found. When she heard I had shown up, she came at once to my hotel, bold like all those Tallmadges, with the self-assurance of knowing your place in the universe is secure, can never be taken from you.

“She’s very beautiful,” Victoria ventured. “Dr. Tallmadge brought her to my hotel so I could meet her. She wants to see you again; she wants to learn to know you.”

She looks like Sofie, I whispered. Like Sofie at seventeen when she was pregnant with me. Only I lost her picture. I wanted her with me. But I lost her.

I wouldn’t look at Victoria, at that concern, that pity, I would not let her or anyone see me so helpless. I bit my lip so hard it bled salt into my mouth. When she touched my hand I dashed her own away. But when I looked down, my mother’s photograph lay on the ground next to me.

“You left it on your desk among the Royal Free newsletters,” she said. “I thought you might want it. Anyway, no one is truly lost when you carry them with you. Your mother, your Oma, your Bobe, don’t you think that whatever became of them, you were their joy? You had been saved. They knew that, they could carry that comfort with them.”

I was digging my fingers into the ground, clutching at the roots of the dead weeds I was sitting on. She was always leaving me. My mother would come back and leave, come back and leave, and then she left me for good. I know that I’m the one who left, they sent me away, they saved me, but it felt to me as though once again she had left, and this time she never came back.

And then-I did the same thing. If someone loved me, as Carl once did, I left. I left my son. Even now, I left Max, I left you, I left Chicago. Everyone around me should experience the same abandonment I did. I don’t mind that my son can’t endure the sight of me, leaving him the way I did. I don’t mind Carl’s bitterness, I earned it, I sought it. What he will say now, when I tell him the truth, that he did have a son all those years ago, whatever ugly words he showers on me, I will deserve them.

“No one deserves that pain,” Victoria said. “You least of all. How can I feel angry with you? All I have is anguish for your grief. As does Max. I don’t know about Carl, but Max and I-we’re in no position to be your judges, only your friends. Little nine-year-old Lotty, setting off alone on your journey, your Bobe surely forgave you. Can’t you now forgive yourself?”

The fall sky was dark when the awkward young policeman shone his flashlight on us; he did not like to intrude, he said in halting English, but we should be leaving; it was cold, the lighting was bad on this hillside.

I let Victoria help me to my feet. I let her lead me along the dark path back.