A History of Forgetting (31 page)

‘No,' said Alison. ‘Please don't.'

On her way down the corridor, she paused at Malcolm's room and, first looking left and right, put her ear to the door. She heard a faint percussion to which she added her light knock.

‘Malcolm?'

No reply, but when she put her ear to the door again, the sound had stopped.

 

He turned over on his side, opening his eyes. Had something
barked? Had someone called him? The girl, he thought. He sat up groggily, retrieved the glass from the floor. Denis? He
looked around the room. Alone.

They'd finished half the bottle, Malcolm on an empty stomach. He'd grown unused to alcohol. It was too pricey a
vice. Sloppily, he served himself another now, raising the glass to toast this vestige of Communism, cheap vodka, and Poland. Outside the window, the rain was coming down in smearing
streaks.

He had to relieve himself, badly. He set the glass on the night table, attempted to stand, tried again and succeeded. Unsteadily, he staggered to the door. It was unlocked, but the prospect of stumbling down the hall to the toilet did not cheer him. Instead, he felt his way sideways to the sink and urinated in it.

Circumambulating the room to make use of the wall's support, he stopped, remembering. Felt his back pocket for
his wallet which, naturally, was missing.

The bed was spinning. Clumsily, he chopped at the pillow, leaned back half propped up, his chin in the glass to catch his drool if it came to that. One hand he kept on the night table trying to still the gyre—uselessly. The night table, too, started turning, spinning down.

The room was dark when he woke again. He woke because he thought he heard someone pounding on the door. ‘Who is it?' he called. ‘What do you want?'

He had shouted out in French.

 

 

 

5

 

THROUGH
ME
ENTER
THE
CITY
OF
WOE

THROUGH
ME
PASS
INTO
ETERNAL
PAIN

THROUGH
ME
COME
AMONG
THE
PEOPLE
OF
LOSS

ABANDON
ALL
HOPE,
YOU
WHO
ENTER

 

The bus suddenly stops at the start of a long road between two high brick walls. Confusion, a babel of tongues, faces pressed to the windows, but no one moves. There is a sign, but what does it mean? The driver pulls a lever and the door opens with
a slap, or maybe it's just the way he bawls out the name of the place. Everyone getting off stands, gathers up guidebooks, bags, ineffectual umbrellas, and stumbles down the aisle—the quiet couple up front whispering Swiss Italian, the clean American boy naive in face and socioeconomic theory, the
two distressed Dutch girls he's been expounding to for the entire hour-and-a-half ride through the green acid-and-history-tainted countryside, the young Canadian woman with long dark hair, travelling with—an uncle? The driver
had yelled at her when she could not understand him ask
ing in
Polish if she wanted a return ticket. You all climb down and in a dark blast of instantly wind-dissipated diesel the bus continues on towards the centre of town with only downtrodden Poles aboard.

Much windier here than in Kraków. Briefly, spontan
eously, all of you turn inward in a circle, almost as if to commune a moment or pray, the Canadian woman's hair lifting
and for a second staying lifted around her head. But you are only zipping jackets and wrapping scarves tighter and when the gust rallies again, it lashes the hair across her surprised face. Her mouth is open and hair fills it like a gag. No one
makes eye contact, not even, it seems, those who have come
together. At once the circle breaks, dispersing, and only you
and the sour dandy of an uncle are left looking at the sign.

MUZEUM, it reads. MUZEUM.

He says something, recites it, but not to you.

Join the trudging, windward-canted line. Across the road, all that can be seen of the convent behind the wall are rooftops and a metal cross on a brick tower. Pass the Canadian woman holding her hair at the back of her neck as she turns to see what is keeping her uncle. The Dutch girls hurry ahead, trying, it seems, to shake off the American. They round the wall and disappear, and when you reach the same point you see that the wall ends where the road meets a parking lot, half full, mostly with tour buses, placards propped up behind windscreens:
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The sidewalk makes a right angle. Ahead is THE STATE MUZEUM IN OŚWIĘCIM, its banal brick-and-glass and concrete entrance just across the parking lot, beyond the taxi stand.

First you must pass a row of little shops. You
enter the last one, where books and pamphlets are on display across a long counter, covers grimly illustrated with barbed and twisted wire, train tracks, guard towers in silhouette. The American boy is just now paying for a set of postcards and making a joke about the absurd denominations of the bills, but the woman behind the counter, stolid, potato-fed and dour, only blinks. It is you who laugh, out loud, so the boy turns to you and grins. Mistaken, his conspiratoriality. You are laughing because of
his lecture on the bus—how the Poles have to change, have
to learn that in a market economy people expect to be served
promptly and with courtesy, just as they are at Disneyland.
Suddenly pictured: the woman handing him in a plastic bag a T-shirt that reads MY BOYFRIEND
WENT TO AUSCHWITZ AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME
WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT and
still
not smiling.

The wind is waiting just outside the door. As you pull the handle towards you to leave, the wind shoulders up against the glass, shoves the door open and storms in past you, straight for the books. It riffles through them, contemptuously—
a denier—
and the woman behind the counter barks. Close the door, she's
saying in Polish. Close the door!

As you approach the entrance a tour bus draws up. It disgorges passengers, a long silent file driven forward by the truncheon blows of wind. Where are the men in black boots? Where are the dogs? Last is a priest, wind swelling his cassock and whipping it about his ankles, trying to make him dance. He holds the door for you, gesturing, ‘After you.'

 

On the walk to the station, Malcolm spoke at last. ‘We are leav
ing the first circle,' he said and Alison, looking back over her
shoulder, wondered if the curved remnant of the medieval wall was what he meant. They managed to find which bus to board.
Alison stumbled down the aisle and took the only empty seat, sliding in first so she wouldn't have to suffer Malcolm thudding his head against the window all the way. Almost immediately the bus pulled out, so maybe the driver had yelled at her
because they'd made him late. Incomprehensible, his fury. It did not subside; every time she glanced up at his reflection
in the rear-view mirror, she saw his lips still moving, forming curses.

Another circle was the ravaged rest of Kraków surrounding
the Planty. In the lower town, some of the buildings seemed no less than charred, crucifixes set in smudged lintels, a decapitated statue of the Virgin and Child sooty in a
recess by a door, again and again on disintegrating walls the black-faced Madonna from the Mariacki Church, head tilted at the precise angle of compassion. But soon they were in the countryside, passing farmhouses, some thatched or wooden with carved, brightly painted staves along the eaves. In a flash of field, Alison saw a dwarf scarecrow berserkly windmilling
its empty sleeves, and behind a grove of trees, on the rise of a hill, three copper church domes floating like balloons. A
woman in a babushka, a rake over her shoulder as she marched
through a ditch, comically interrupted and made bolt a shit
ting cat. It all seemed innocuous and green. Alison could even
smell it. It smelled like spring.

She was smelling her own hair. Last night, she finally showered, then sat before the atonally clanking radiator with
her head bowed, wet hair flipped over her face, a dark tangled veil. She sat combing with her fingers; it took two hours to dry.

After nearly as long a time, the bus stopped and the American finally shut up. For most of the ride he'd been jawing opinions that Alison thought she shared until she heard them voiced over-loudly and
ad nauseam,
with Polish country and western twanging in the background.

‘Sure everything's cheap, but not when you factor in the wait. Time is money, right?' Then, passing the silently imprecating driver and stepping down from the bus, she saw she had been mistaken about him. He hadn't been cursing her at all, but singing with the radio.

Instantly the wind made her hair fly. Standing in the open, she had trouble even restraining it, it whipped so wildly about her head. Alive, she thought. It's alive. She gathered it at her nape, then set off walking the wind-tunnel behind the others.

 

No sense of feeling is found in the:

a) skin b) fingers

c) hair d) lips

 

Back in hairdressing school she had had to memorize a cross-sectional diagram of a hair follicle, epidermis pushing down
into dermis. It had looked like a crocus before it flowers,
which was not so romantic an analogy: at the bottom of the follicle there is a bud. The soft precursor cells are nourished there as they grow and divide. Pushed upward by more cells growing beneath, they die. When she first learned this, Alison could not believe it, that hair, the very growing, shedding, shining, tangling thing which seemed to her most alive about a person was, in fact, dead.

She rounded the wall. Ahead, a row of little shops; in the window of the first, flowers and votive candles. The smell as she entered was funereal and sweet. To the freshest of the limp white carnations the clerk added a sprig of fern browning at the tips, then tied the two stems together with a ribbon curled against a scissor blade and presented it, upside down, to Alison. Malcolm was just coming around the wall as she left the shop, the direction his hair was blowing abruptly changing as he turned; she waited for him to catch up and took his arm.

Just who, thought Malcolm, is leading whom?

The entrance had obviously been built later as part of
the Muzeum. A long wide hall, coat check, book-stand, and behind a glass wall an empty cafeteria, the way it was lit discolouring and surreal. On the wall, the plan of the camps was painted—
Death Block, Extermination, Execution Wall—
then the more complicated circuit-board of Birkenau. After a second set of glass doors, they had to get in line to register. Alison hadn't wanted to come today, would have preferred to wait one more day for the intermittent delirium of jet lag to pass. Yet here she was, feeling exactly as she should: as if she had been dragged off in the middle of the night to a place spoken of only in dire whispers.

‘Two Canadians,' she said.

‘Do you wish to see the film?'

‘Yes.'

‘It will be shown in English in half an hour.'

In the cinema foyer was a tableaux of gypsy prisoners photographed in the three familiar poses, but for some reason they were not in uniform and their heads were unshorn. They
could even have been passport photos, each child scrubbed,
men in suits and ties, the women's hair variously styled, lustrous and black. None were smiling, though neither did they
look afraid. What impressed Alison was their dignity and
how seriously they took it. Turning, she saw people milling, also looking at the tableau or talking hushedly or simply waiting in silence though no sign in four languages commanded quiet. The last and only other time she had been in a room where solemnity had seemed physically present was waiting for Christian's memorial service to begin. Then, too, she had felt this queasy foreboding.

Malcolm had wandered off somewhere. She hoped he would come back.

‘Here is plan of Birkenau to where we shall go to next . . .' she overheard in the hall. It was the same taxi driver who had brought them from the airport, talking to the two American women she had seen yesterday in the hotel.

‘Let us go! We start now the tour!' Clapping fat hands together, he waved them on.

The double doors to the cinema were open now, but Malcolm was still nowhere to be seen. She took a seat and saved him the one beside it by laying the wilting carnation on it. In the foyer, the two American women were arguing with the taxi driver, loud enough for everyone to hear; they wanted to see the film, but he wanted to start the tour. Even after the lights were dimmed and the film began, their disputing voices carried in every time the door was opened.

Many of the pictures in the book turned out to be stills taken from this very film. Just as she had used to lie in bed staring up at the white rectangle on the ceiling and see the images projected from her mind as a slide show, now she
stared straight-ahead and watched her imagination flipping,
rapid-fire, the pages of the book. When the lights came back up, Alison noticed a family sitting in front of her, among them
a little boy. In profile, she saw his cogitating face. He kept
scrunching up his nose, as if he were sniffing. Every time, his glasses lifted.