Total Recall

I drifted for a bit while they talked about South American politics. When Don a

A few minutes before ten he pushed his chair away from the counter. “There should be some coverage of the Birnbaum conference on the ten o’clock news. I’d like to watch, although the cameras probably concentrated on the action out front.”

He helped Morrell scrape the plates into the garbage, then went to the back porch for another cigarette. While Morrell loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the counters, and wrapped leftovers in airtight containers, I went into the living room to turn on Cha

“Events turned stormy at times at the conference on Jews in America being held today at the Hotel Pleiades, but the real surprise came at the end of the afternoon from someone who wasn’t even on the program. Beth Blacksin will have the whole story later in our broadcast.”

I curled up in the corner of Morrell’s couch. I started to nod off, but when the phone rang, I woke up to see two young women on-screen raving about a drug for yeast infections. Morrell, who’d come into the room behind me, muted the set and answered the phone.

“For you, sweet. Max.” He stretched the receiver out to me.

“ Victoria, I’m sorry to phone so late.” Max’s tone was apologetic. “We have a crisis here that I’m hoping you can solve. Ninshubur-that blue stuffed dog Calia takes everywhere-do you have it by any chance?”

I could hear Calia howling in the background, Michael shouting something, Agnes’s voice raised to yell something else. I rubbed my eyes, trying to remember far enough back in the day to Calia’s dog. I had stuffed Calia’s day pack into my case, then forgotten about it in the harassment of getting her to Max. I put the phone down and looked around. I finally asked Morrell if he knew where my briefcase was.

“Yes, V I,” he said in a voice of long-suffering. “You dropped it on the couch when you came in. I put it in my study.”

I set the receiver on the couch and went down the hall to his study. My briefcase was the only thing on his desk, except for his copy of the Koran, with a long green string marking his place. Ninshubur was buried in the bottom, with some raisins, Calia’s day pack, and the tale of the princess and her faithful hound. I picked up the study extension and apologized to Max, promising to run right over with the animal.

“No, no, don’t disturb yourself. It’s only a few blocks and I’ll be glad to get out of this upheaval.”

When I returned to the living room, Don said the suspense was mounting: we were on the second commercial break with the promise of fireworks to come. Max rang the bell just as De

When I let Max into the little entryway, I saw he had Carl Tisov with him. I handed the toy dog to Max, but he and Carl lingered long enough that Morrell came over to invite them in for a drink.

“Something strong, like absinthe,” Carl said. “I had always wished for a large family, but after this evening’s waterworks, I think I didn’t miss so much. How can one small diaphragm generate more sound than an entire brass section?”

“It’s the jet lag,” Max said. “It always hits small ones hard.”

Don called out to us to hush. “They’re finally getting to the conference.”

Max and Carl moved into the living room and stood behind the couch. Don turned up the volume as Beth Blacksin’s pixieish face filled the screen.

“When the Southern Baptists a

“At times, it seemed as though dialogue was the last thing on anyone’s mind.” The screen shifted to footage of the demonstrations out front. Blacksin gave both Posner and Durham equal sound bites, then shifted back to the hotel ballroom.

“Sessions inside the building also grew heated. The liveliest one covered the topic which sparked the demonstrations outside: the proposed Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. A panel of banking and insurance executives, arguing that the act would be so costly that all consumers would suffer, drew a lot of criticism, and a lot of anguish.”

Here the screen showed furious people yelling into the mikes set up in the aisles for questions. One man shouted the insult that Margaret Sommers and Alderman Durham had both made earlier, that the reparations debate proved that all Jews ever thought about was money.

Another man yelled back that he didn’t understand why Jews were considered greedy for wanting bank deposits their families had made: “Why aren’t the banks called greedy? They held on to the money for sixty years and now they want to hang on to it forever.” A woman stomped up to a mike to say that since the Swiss reinsurer Edelweiss had bought Ajax, she assumed Edelweiss had their own reasons to oppose the legislation.

Cha

We watched as a man in a suit that seemed a size too big for him spoke into one of the aisle mikes. He was closer to sixty than fifty, with greying curls that had thi

“I want to say that it is only recently I even knew I was Jewish.”

A voice from the stage asked him to identify himself.

“Oh. My name is Paul-Paul Radbuka. I was brought here after the war when I was four years old by a man who called himself my father.”

Max sucked in his breath, while Carl exclaimed, “What! Who is this?”

Don and Morrell both turned to stare.

“You know him?” I asked.

Max clamped my wrist to hush me while the little figure in front of us continued to speak. “He took everything away from me, most especially my memories. Only recently have I come to know that I spent the war in Terezin, the so-called model concentration camp that the Germans named Theresienstadt. I thought I was a German, a Lutheran, like this man Ulrich who called himself my father. Only after he died, when I went through his papers, did I find out the truth. And I say it is wrong, it is criminally wrong, to take away from people the identity which is rightfully theirs.”

The station let a few seconds’ silence develop, then De