Meanwhile, but a single ray of brightness had lit Howard’s life since Ben was whisked from him: the girlfriend he saw on his trips to Germany. Why he had not brought her to meet the family remained a mystery.

Chapter Six

Before 1985 drew to a close, a young Viennese relative whom the clan had not known existed presented himself on Laura’s doorstep.

‘You are Laura Kohn the photographer?’ he inquired politely.

‘What can I do for you?’ she replied warily.

Even a caller as presentable as this lad could be up to no good nowadays, and she had as always left the chain on the door.

‘I am not wishing for you to do anything,’ he said with a smile. ‘Only to introduce myself to you. My name is Kurt Kohn, and I say to you, how do you do?’

‘Kurt Kohn was my paternal grandfather’s name,’ Laura said when she found her voice, ‘and if I seem astonished, I am!’

She undid the door chain and ushered him inside. ‘My father isn’t going to believe this,’ she told him on the way to the living room. ‘He thought all his relatives died in the Holocaust.’

‘Except for your father and mine, it is true that they did,’ the boy confirmed, ‘and Father will be so happy to learn that his cousin, Peter, survived. He too thinks himself the only one of his family who did. I shall telephone tonight to Vienna to tell to him this wunderbare news. I am unable to reach him in the daytime.’

Laura could barely control her excitement. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable, Kurt. You and I have a lot of catching up to do. My father lives in Tel Aviv. He and his second wife – my parents divorced – have a restaurant there. My stepmother does the cooking. What does your father do?’

‘He is a surgeon. My mother also. And it is not guaranteed that I shall reach him on the telephone tonight. It is not unknown for them both to be called in the evenings and from their beds to operate.’

‘And his name is Leopold, isn’t it? It would have to be, since my dad told me he had only one male cousin.’

‘What mine told to me,’ said Kurt with a laugh, ‘is that he and Peter, when they were young, found it necessary to ally themselves in a family full of girl cousins who enjoyed to make fun of them.’

A shadow flitted across Laura’s pleasure in meeting Kurt. The girls he had just mentioned were her family too. She would not let herself dwell upon how their short lives had ended.

She forced herself to smile when Kurt said in his pedantic English, ‘It is now definitely established that we are relatives.’