A History of Forgetting (28 page)

When the video presentation of the emergency procedures began he was already dozy from the pill. The girl was sitting up straight watching, attentive as a child. She tightened the strap of her seat belt and looked up to see from where in the ceiling the oxygen mask would drop, as if she believed in a
deus ex machina
. He was touched and, for that instant, still
glad he came. Then the plane began to move and the pilot's
voice, staticky and omniscient, told them they were taxiing to the runway.

He clutched her, filled with dread. Briefly, when the plane came to a stop, he let go, only to grab her hand again. Acceleration, tilt and lift, the panicked heart, then the giddy lightening that he associated with death. When next he opened his eyes they were entering the clouds.

The lit seat-belt signs pinged and went out; a hundred buckles simultaneously unclicked. Malcolm was asleep, so Alison extricated herself from his grip. The window seat was wasted on him but, leaning over to peek down, the spectacle of unbaling cloud was all there was to see.

From her handbag she took the guidebook.
‘Dzi-eń
do-bry?'
she sounded out. Dz: ‘D' as in ‘day' rapidly followed by ‘Z' as in ‘zoo', except at the end of the word, where it becomes ‘Ts', or if the ‘Z' is dotted, when it becomes ‘D-sh', or the ‘Z' has a stroke above it, which sharpens the pronunciation, or at the end of the word when it sounds like ‘C' with a stroke above it. She sighed. It would take all day for her to say good day.

And here was a fearsome cluster—
szcz.
A cluster with
teeth.
Szczur.
Rat.

‘Ah,' said the man in the suit who had changed seats with her. ‘You're going to Poland?'

‘Yes. How about you?'

‘I've got business in London.'

She talked to him until dinner, which Malcolm slept right through. Then more drinks were served and the movie started. She watched the moving picture outside the window instead: above the Northwest Territories now the cloud had finally cleared, though it took some time for her to realize it, mistaking for cloud the thousand tiny grey lakes floating in the darker grey of land. What she was watching then, while the rest of them watched the screen, was evening becoming night, the very edge of the sky slowly turning the colour of an old bruise or the inside of a rotten plum—that peculiar yellowy black. Gradually, the colour drained completely and the stars sequining the pale sky blended with the lights of the occasional settlements far below, so she could no longer distinguish where the sky ended and the land began. Now and then the businessman ooh-ed and clucked, as if marvelling at the night's plot.

Malcolm woke to the horizon's seam, visible now as a rusty streak, and the girl's head heavy against his shoulder, her snoring light. He only seemed to blink, but must have slept again; when he opened his eyes he was as blinded as by a photographer's flash. They were inside the clouds, the light reflecting brilliantly.

The flight attendant was offering a Continental breakfast.

‘Yes, coffee,' the girl muttered dopily. ‘Coffee, please.'

The worst of the lines was the one at Heathrow customs where even the congenial businessman looked right through Alison when she waved goodbye. Malcolm staggered along behind her, pulling his suitcase on a leash.

‘What did you do with Grace?' she asked.

He started at the name and stabbed his eyes. ‘Grace is
taken care of,' he said and turned away.

They boarded the bus to Terminal
2
. It took them in a wide circle bounded by a wire fence topped with bales of razor wire strung with shredded litter, all set against a cement sky. Hell, Malcolm remembered from the
Inferno,
was a downward spiral. For the entire ride, the girl kept one hand on her heart, beatifically.

There turned out to be no LOT counter. LOT used a desk at Air France where a woman told them to come back in four hours.

‘Christ,' Malcolm muttered. And what sadist decided on bucket-style chairs, impossible to stretch out on? His watch said it was the middle of the night.

‘Didn't you bring anything to read?' the girl asked.

‘No.'

‘You've read it all?' she joked.

‘No,' he told her. ‘I haven't read Douglas Coupland yet.'

Nearby, a huge board clicked out some kind of tally—numbers, hundreds of thousands, millions. Flight numbers. Gates and times.

 

On the plane to Kraków, she took the window seat. Europe from the air looked to her like a concrete floor covered with puffs of dust. She opened the guidebook.
‘Kiedy odjeżdża pociąg do Oświęcimia ?'

‘Come again?'

‘When does the train leave for Auschwitz?' she translated for Malcolm. ‘
Czy muszę się przesiadać?
Do
I have to change?'

He began, slowly, to thump his head against the headrest.

They landed, stairs wheeled up to the plane, the passengers herded down into the night. Alison was surprised it was so cold. Inside the terminal building, luggage started arriving on a conveyor belt and everyone pitched in to help unload it, grabbing a suitcase, any suitcase, no matter whose. Then, going through customs, every third person was made to step aside. Foreigners turned out to be exempt from official curiosity and Malcolm and Alison were waved on through.

To the currency exchange counter where a young man sat, blank-faced except for an extraordinary number of moles. Immediately, the girl began groping down her front which was, Malcolm realized with disappointment, where her money was and the reason she kept her hand on her heart.

‘I am sorry,' said the spattered man without sounding in the least apologetic. ‘We exchange only banknotes.'

She stared at him, puzzled, as if by the connect-the-dots on his face. ‘But I only have traveller's cheques. Aren't they any good?'

‘Certainly. Traveller's cheques you may exchange at a bank. In Poland, banks generally open at seven-thirty.' She turned to Malcolm. ‘Do you have any money?'

‘A credit card,' he said.

‘How can we get to the bank?' she asked.

The man behind the counter told her, ‘There is a taxi stand outside.'

‘But we don't have any money for a taxi.'

Naturally, she turned to Malcolm again. It panged him: they'd only just arrived and already he'd let her down. In desperation, she found her wallet in her handbag, opened the change purse and overturned it on the counter. Coins wheeled off in all directions. The young man, gazing on blandly, reminded her:
‘
Bank
notes.'

‘I say, come in our cab.'

They turned and saw, shambling towards them, an enormous loose-jointed man with a suitcase in each hand. The girl followed him at once and Malcolm followed her, outside to where a queue of taxis waited at the curb. Cabbies and passengers yelling, arms thrown open, probably in welcome, but in Polish it sounded like umbrage and rancour.

‘Thank you,' said Alison to their hulking saviour.

‘Yoo-hoo, Clive! Clive! Over here!' A woman flagging. ‘Oh,
sharesies!
What a good idea!'

‘They're in a bit of a spot,' said Clive.

‘Francuski! Francuski!' the woman told the driver loading the suitcases in the trunk. She was small and plain with fine, unclean hair. Enthusiastically, she pumped Malcolm's arm.

‘I'm Ronnie. Which hotel are you at?'

‘Pollera,' Alison told the driver.

‘Pollera! Pollera!' Ronnie echoed.

Malcolm got in the back, drawing the girl in after him to buffer him from Ronnie, Clive in front, knees tucked up. From behind, his hair looked like the matted brown plush of a stuffed bear.

As soon as the doors were closed and the taxi had pulled away, Ronnie turned to Alison. ‘So what brings you and your father to Poland?'

‘Oh, he's not my father.'

A hand clapped over her mouth, Ronnie leaned forward to peek at Malcolm.

‘We're going to Auschwitz,' Alison said.

The hand came down. ‘Did you hear that, Clive? Auschwitz-Birkenau.'

‘Ghastly,' said Clive. ‘Birkenau means “a grove of birches”.'

‘Do you have some connection there?'

‘A friend of ours was killed.'

‘There?' asked Ronnie.

‘No. Where we're from. Canada.'

Ronnie looked puzzled.

‘What about you?' asked Alison.

‘Tell them what you're up to, Clive.'

‘Dendrology.'

Alison said, ‘What?'

‘Trees,' said Malcolm.

Ronnie giggled. ‘He's a clever one. Tell them about the
conference, Clive.'

Where the road intersected with the lit highway, the taxi turned. Clive said, ‘International conference in Kraków next year.'

‘Clive's the principal organizer. They're all dying, you see.'

‘Who?' asked Alison.

‘The trees.'

‘Are you a dendrologist, too?'

‘Me? No! I simply tag along. I love Poland. I love the Poles. They've been through
so much.
Haven't they, Clive?'

‘Yes, they have,' Clive agreed and when Alison glanced up, she saw the silhouette of his hunched form against the spreading lights of Kraków.

Fifteen minutes later the taxi was shuttling through the narrow streets, the stone buildings silvery where there was a lamp. They stopped first at the Pollera with its pretty mustard-coloured façade. Across was an empty parking lot and beyond, darkness.

When the cabbie got out to take their bags from the trunk, Clive got out, too, flexing at the knees. He shook their hands.

‘Much appreciated,' said Malcolm.

‘Don't mention it.'

‘We'll pay you back tomorrow,' said Alison.

Ronnie shrilled, ‘Don't you dare!' from the car.

Taking both their suitcases, Malcolm let the girl say goodbye to Ronnie.

‘The Francuski, right?' Alison waved to her.

The cabbie was still standing on the curb, Malcolm saw as he waited in the hotel doorway. He was wearing a tweed cap and a leather jacket, his eyes on the girl, yet deadened and unexpressive. The whole long drive he had uttered not a word, so Malcolm had assumed he couldn't understand them. Absurdly, he had even forgotten he was there, an actual living specimen of the long-suffering Pole. But as the girl was about to walk away, the cabbie stopped her. He touched her arm and held her back.

‘Miss, I can bring you.'

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘To Auschwitz. Four hundred thousand
złoty.
I can bring you.'

 

 

 

4

 

Thi had honeymooned in Paris so knew to warn Alison about jet lag, how she was likely to wake or be overcome by sleep at weird hours. She switched on the lamp and saw by her watch on the night table that it was
4
:
00
a.m. There was no toilet in the room and, too weary to dress, too nervous to walk in her T-shirt and panties down the corridor, she got up and dragged the wooden chair over to the sink instead. She balanced precariously, backward, over the basin, peed, then fell back on the lumpy mattress to sleep.

Hours later, she woke again. Filtering through the gold curtains—dull light and a soft rhythmic whimpering like the denouement of someone's weeping. She reached for the corner of the curtain, tugged. It opened to an explosion of dark wings on the sill outside. Lying there, she thought of Billy and
wondered if this feeling was missing him. No, it was something worse. It was the sickening hollowness of waking in a
country where the Holocaust had happened.

She forced herself to get out of bed, stood a long moment shivering at the window, looking down into the courtyard where, in the rain, little box-like cars were parked around a dying tree.

To leave the room she had to unlock the door from the inside with the key. It was one of those old-fashioned keys that delighted her when they put it in her hand last night, though was less romantic now that she knew how awkward it was to work. She finally got herself out, only to have to struggle with the lock again, and more self-consciously because, at the end of the hall, in the doorway of a windowless storeroom, two maids stood smoking. Their uniforms were possibly the ugliest Alison had ever seen—purple knit dresses with black stripes that on the older, plumper woman fit like a sock, on the younger a sack. Silently, they watched Alison's every clumsy move through eyes narrowed to slits.

The staircase, with its intricate wrought-iron banister, split parenthetically on this floor, the two sides meeting again on the landing below before descending to the lobby as a single broad flight—a cascade of faded threadbare leaf-print.