The Memory Man (18 page)

They gave the man a bed, but before bunking down they talked. He talked mostly to Pani Alina though Bruno listened intently. Things were hard in the cities. All of them. Even Warsaw. Food was scarce. Everything was scarce – for Poles too. The Germans had instituted a blistering regime run by their own people. Those they didn’t like, the visitor looked at them intently, they forced behind guarded walls, concentrating a great many in very little space, so that conditions were foul, and disease spread like
wildfire
. They were well off here, he said. There was air. At least the illusion of freedom. That’s why he was going off into the woods. He turned to Bruno again as he said this. If he ever went walking, they might bump into each other again. It was always good to bring extra food along on such trips. It was also better not to
mention
to anyone that a stranger had been through.

In the morning, without so much as a single bark from Bolivar, the man was gone, together with the bread and sausage and onion Alina had put out for him. If Bruno hadn’t had his mother’s letter next to his bed, he might have thought he had dreamed his passage.

His mother returned with the first chill nights of autumn. They were so pleased to see her that Anna determined to bake a cake to celebrate her arrival. She stood on a stool and carefully broke two eggs into flour, added some spoons of blueberry jam Alina had made and three crinkly apples from the garden tree which they had carefully stored in the cold room alongside the potatoes and pears and dried mushrooms. The result was so sumptuous that they all declared Anna was now to be their chief baker.

Despite their joy at the reunion, it was clear that Mamusia was unwell. Her cheeks were sallow. The hollows in them had grown very deep, and her eyes had lost their sparkle. But she was still, Bruno thought, exceedingly beautiful: a grand lady in her pretty dress. He had forgotten what elegant women looked like.

He wanted to ask her what the doctor had said, what was wrong with her, but the moment didn’t present itself. He hoped too, that being home would soon revive her.

Mamusia had brought with her a small hoard of German
Occupation
Marks that Grandpa had earned, she wouldn’t tell them how. She hoped that might see them through the next months. They needed to move for the winter, though not to Krakow. Too many people knew her there.

‘But what about Grandpa?’ Bruno asked.

He was cleverer than she was. And it was better to separate so none would give the other away. The Nazis had become more stringent in their searches. That was another reason they needed to move. Now that her major had left, the new local authority was not to her liking. She had papers for herself and for Anna in the name of Lind, which could pass as an Austrian or Galician name. And the young Pan Sienkiewicz, her nephew, she knew was already taken care of. But the local farmers had known them for too long. And Alina was a worry. The major hadn’t been able to see to her
Kennkarte
before he had been transferred. She would start making enquiries in the next weeks.

With the first snows, Mamusia came home triumphant. Because of her German, she had landed a job in the Labour Office in the substantial neighbouring town of Tarnow, far enough away and big enough for no one to know them. It was potentially a good job too, since she could do some good in it. She had also found them lodgings. They would be cramped, but no matter. Alina would have to stay behind until Mamusia could find new papers for her. Or she might even be able to devise something herself, once she saw how the office functioned. Then a transfer from the cement factory to a new job in the District of Tarnow should prove no problem. None the less, after that, for the same reasons she had already given, it was best that they not see each other.

Mamusia had tried to warn him in subtle terms he hadn’t
altogether
understood that there were two real problems with Tarnow. The first was that he would now be going to technical school, the only kind of secondary education available under the Nazi
Occupation
. She wasn’t worried about his ability. An accounting course would hardly stretch him. But she wanted him to be careful with the other children. He mustn’t give anything away. She looked at him a little oddly as she said this, and he reacted quickly, saying that of course he wouldn’t, but he would far prefer to work and bring in money, he was old enough. No, she was firm on that point. They would try school first. A job would be far more
arduous
. But at school, he wasn’t to get too friendly with the other boys.

The second problem with Tarnow was that it contained a large ghetto. It was the first time Bruno had heard the word but when he had seen even a little of the reality, it seared itself into his mind, more indelibly than the rubber stamp with which his grandfather had simulated the authority of the Soviet State.

The Tarnow Ghetto stretched to the east of the old part of the city which was dotted with craters from the first days of the war when the Nazis had destroyed a large synagogue and other
buildings
belonging to the town’s sizeable Jewish community. The Ghetto gate lay just past Ulica Kupiecka. Bruno had little reason to go there. But he would sometimes make a detour on his way to school and stand and watch the guards, whether Polish or German, as they brutally pushed and prodded long queues of
huddled
people off to their work-sites in the morning. They all wore the telltale armband with its Star of David that somehow seemed to obliterate their status as humans, suck attention into itself and away from the all-too-human face. The Star meant they could be beaten without mercy. The guards, even if they were rigorous in checking traffic as it went in and out of the Ghetto, behaved quite differently when they didn’t have the Star to focus on.

Sometimes a smell would rise from the Ghetto gates like the odour of dead flesh in the woods, a sweet nauseating stink. One day, a little way past the main gate, Bruno saw a child crawl out of a hole under the wall, which had been covered over with rubble.
She caught his eye then ran away on stick legs. She wasn’t much bigger than Anna.

Another day, it was after school and getting late so that he should have been rushing, he saw a youth hurl a bundle over the wall. It just skimmed the barbed wire and toppled over onto the other side. The youth strolled nonchalantly away pretending not to see Bruno. He wondered what the bundle contained and
imagined
it must be food.

The following Sunday, after church, which Mamusia insisted they all had to go to, instead of accompanying his mother and sister for a walk and smiling stupidly at all the churchgoers, he rushed home, packed up some bread and cheese and a cabbage, wrapped them in a cloth and rushed out again. He had been told to place a coin in the priest’s collection tray. Now he would place another coin. He walked until he found a quiet bit of wall and with a heave sent his package hurtling across. He did this several
Sundays
in a row until Mamusia began to complain that he was eating them out of hearth and home and she couldn’t come by enough food to keep him.

‘Send me to work,’ he challenged her, and then Anna piped up. ‘He gives it away. He gives it to the poor.’ His mother stared at him. After a moment she said: ‘You are not, I repeat not, to go there. You’re just like your grandfather. Do you want us all to be shot?’

‘And what about you?’ he retorted. ‘What about all those little work permits you give out to…?’ She hugged him, so as to seal his lips. Maybe she didn’t want Anna to know. Maybe she thought it was bad luck to say anything out loud. The walls had ears.

Yes. There were eyes and ears all around them. At home, in the streets, at school. What they saw and what they heard had only one possible outcome. Death. Mamusia had admitted it at last.

On the other side of the level crossing, the road stretched like a taut shimmering ribbon between the variegated greens of infinite fields. An ancient horse with a long sagging back faced them across the tracks. He was tugging at a rickety wooden farm cart, atop it a driver with a battered hat and a face so toothless and weathered, he could have posed for Death in an old engraving. Time had stopped. Even the train whose passage had been announced had given up on it and refused to arrive.

Aleksander turned the car’s engine off, and the stillness around them felt as palpable as the growing noonday heat. Bruno knew they must all be losing patience with him.

Last night, they had almost been pushed off the road by a police car in hot pursuit. They were its inconceivable object. The men of the supposed law, enforced by visible weapons, had pulled them out of the car and lined them up by the side of the darkened road. No threats of reports to the American Embassy had served any purpose. Amelia, in particular, had been roughly handled by the thugs. Aleksander’s raised voice didn’t help, and Bruno began to think that only a few dollar bills folded into his passport would. Like in the old days. Bribery oiled the wheels of both civil and uncivil society. He was about to pull out his wallet when Irena brought a cold penetrating voice out of herself, like a headmistress carrying a hefty ruler.

‘If you stop for a minute and use your torches, you’ll see very quickly that no one here is from Bielorus or the Ukraine, let alone Georgia or Chechnya. Just think. Think, or I’ll have you reported through my newspaper straight to HQ for assaulting important visitors.’ 

The uniforms backed away, apologizing. Police had to patrol the borders, they grumbled. Mafia, drugs, illegal immigrants – Poland was beset by problems.

They had driven to Tarnow with an unpleasant taste in their mouths and then spent a fruitless hour scrambling through shabby Soviet-era streets in search of nothing but faceless ruins. The only open restaurant he had been able to locate afterwards had been a veritable disaster.

Yes, the whole expedition was proving a waste of everyone’s precious time. And on top of it all, he found it almost impossible to talk to Amelia about the family, about the past, in front of that man. Yes, that man. Tarski. It was his own fault for chasing him to Poland. And now he was even beginning to see a resemblance.

For a split second Bruno felt something like a sob forming in his throat. He sent it back to where it belonged. He was growing mawkish. And all because… No. It wasn’t the journey into a lost time. It was because of what this Irena beside him had said. She of the gracefully swaying neck and slightly hooded eyes. Clever woman. Pretty too. Could she be interested in him? Plucking at strings he hadn’t known he had. Saying that life really was unspokenly hard for men. First they couldn’t have their mothers,’ cause father or brother was in the way, and then they couldn’t have their daughters either, because all these suitors arrived to steal them away. He had laughed, but it had thrust him into a
self-pitying
mood, as if he really were becoming an old fool, an old Lear.

He should clear the air by asking this Tarski outright. But he wasn’t ready for his answer. And it would probably mean going to see the rest of his family.

That he would have to speak at some point, he had no doubt, given the way things seemed to be going with Amelia. But he wasn’t ready. And he was half-hoping circumstances would
somehow
save him, and he never had to be.

He looked at her fine-boned profile. Her eyes were tightly shut. Almost as if she were concentrating on sleep. She had done that as a child, screwing up her eyes to block out the world at will until sleep took her over. She probably hadn’t had any last night – and
not only because of the hotel’s damp sheets and heavy curtains which smelled of mould and pressed dust.

Yes, they were all losing patience with him. Even his
second-
in-command
at the London laboratory had asked him when he had rung to check in yesterday morning, on what exact date he was planning to return. Something had come up. No, not in the
experiments
they were running. All was going according to plan so far. No major disasters. No delays in acquiring materials or
refrigeration
breakdowns or any of the other thousands of minor cock-ups that plagued laboratories everywhere. But there was a query he couldn’t answer from their backers – about the timing of results. The moneymen, it sometimes seemed these days, were even more intractable than the material world. They wanted everything before it was anything at all.

Yes, patience was running out. Most of all his own. A whole morning spent blundering through the countryside, and he hadn’t been able to locate his grandparents’ house. No one they had asked had been able to help either. It was as if the landscape itself had shifted, taking with it distance and a sense of measure. So he didn’t know where to begin. Hamlets had vanished or grown into unrecognisable villages or changed their names with new times and a succession of heroes. Or maybe it was the roads that had moved, new ones replacing the old in a generational sequence that couldn’t be reversed. On top of it all in those days, he travelled largely by foot so that time and space were bound in a different, more intimate relation.

He was taking them all on a wild goose chase of the most
ridiculous
kind, the geese having all flown or been served up for a Christmas dinner. He no longer even knew why it had come into his head that he needed to find the house. More years than he liked to count had passed by without the need so much as hinting at its existence. And now…now it had grown into a huge carbuncle of stubbornness blinding him to everything else.

With an abrupt rush of movement, Bruno pushed open the door of the car and strode out.

‘Pops.’

‘Professor.’

He could hear the cacophony of voices behind him, telling him to stop, setting up a stir in the country quiet as he moved quickly across the tracks. Maybe they thought he was playing at Anna Karenina.

The wizened peasant with his battered hat was watching him from narrowed eyes. The last of a disappearing breed, Bruno thought. They might have withstood the roll of the centuries and the Communist years, but they wouldn’t withstand the demands of European union and modernization.

As he walked towards him, Bruno had the uncanny feeling that the old farmer wouldn’t mind seeing him mowed down by the Krakow-Odessa Express, if only to relieve the monotony of the day. But he managed to reach the other side safely and now
suspicion
played over the man’s features. He didn’t raise his hat, and by way of greeting Bruno gave the horse’s hot flank a pat. That clean childhood odour of mingled straw and manure scratched
pleasantly
at his nostrils.

‘
Dzien dobry Pan, przepraszam. Czy Pan…
’ the words flowed from his lips with no seeming intervention from his will. He was asking the man if he could remember way back, his parents might have told him, there was a Krakow family living somewhere around here, the Toroks. Pan Adolf Torok. A fine figure of a man. Loved hunting. Fishing too. Planted a small orchard. Cherries. Apples.

The peasant stared at him, stared until a distant rumble at last announced the arrival of a train. ‘
Toroki, tak, tak.
Jews. Yes. That mad old woman used to grumble that they’d taken her for
everything
. Burned her out. Even her home-made vodka.’ He winked.

‘Mad old woman,’ Bruno echoed, disbelief rising in him along with a thick gob of hatred mingled with fear.

‘Yes, yes. What was her name? We were scared of her. Always muttering. Full of malice. Threw things at us. A hag. Ancient.’ He laughed suddenly, soundlessly, baring his gums. ‘Probably not as ancient as I am now.’ He took out a small hip flask and raised it in Bruno’s direction in a toast, before taking a swig.

Bruno’s lips trembled. ‘Are we near…are we near that farm, then?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘It’s far, then?’

‘No, quite near as the stork flies. But not all that near by road.’ The peasant pointed in a diagonal across a sea of swaying grains and grasses. ‘About eight or ten fields over that way. But you’ll have to go round. Right round. Past the cooperative.’ He formed a broad lazy arc with his arm.

Bruno took in the instructions. He was perspiring, his thoughts muddled.

‘Not much to see,’ the old man added, as the train whooshed past them. ‘Your lot are they? Planning to build a house?’

As Bruno shrugged noncommittally, he grumbled, ‘Too many new houses around here. Not for us, though. Rotten government. Going to sell us out. They’re…’

The rest of his mounting diatribe was lost in noise.

As soon as the dust-cloaked train raced past them, the peasant whisked his horse into action and clattered away.

They pulled up on a muddy dirt track to the side of the road just past a little wood. He knew those woods. He was certain of it. He could feel it in the dryness of his mouth, in the erratic rhythm of his heart. And in his mind, the thickets where the rabbits hid took on a visual precision, so that each twig and bramble had an unnatural clarity. Yes he was certain of it. A brisk walk past the neighbouring fields would yield his grandparents’ house.

Everyone piled out and insisted on walking with him, despite his protests. After what they considered the madness at the level crossing, they were unwilling to let him stray on his own. Perhaps they were right, but Bruno wasn’t sure he really needed to be held onto the way Amelia was doing now, her arm tightly draped through his. He stopped an impulse to shake it off and had a
flickering
sensation of his mother at his side, silent but gravely present, observing his every motion, and his need both to thrust her aside and simultaneously keep her there.

The generations were swirling through him like a blizzard, one indistinguishable from the next, so that he tripped over his own feet, no longer sure of their size.

Behind him, he could hear Aleksander and Irena talking. He focussed on the snippets of their conversation that floated towards him. She seemed to be asking the man what his mother had been like, whether she had been much younger than his father. He
wondered
why she was pressing him, when she suddenly giggled
girlishly
and offered that her own father in rowdy moments had persecuted her mother with stories of early conquests, all – it seemed – far more appetizing than she was.

He couldn’t hear Aleksander’s response, though he strained his ears because now Amelia was addressing him, taking him away from the flow of that other language.

‘What you thinking about, Pops?’

‘Not sure. Not sure I’d call it thinking.’

‘Is the terrain looking familiar, Pops?’

Bruno nodded.

‘Despite these?’

She didn’t need to point. Coming up on their left were three brashly new houses with sloping roofs of bright-red simulated tile.

‘It’s further,’ he said with assurance, setting aside a trail of
irritation
and disappointment. ‘And, I imagine, to our right.’ He closed his eyes for a moment to capture an inner topography and was suddenly confronted with an unsettling image from another part of his life. He couldn’t shake it off, nor did he know why it had suddenly invaded these flat fields so far from its source.

The image was of a woman in an operating theatre, so long ago that the equipment looked almost Victorian, even heavier and more antiquated than those old room-size computers. She was lying on her side on a table surrounded by doctors and nurses, and her eyes were wide open. They were staring directly at him. The peculiarity was that one half of the woman’s head was shaven and her brain lay exposed to the doctor’s electric probe and
soft-spoken
command.

Bruno knew where the image came from. He was in the operating theatre of the Montreal Neurological back in the late forties or early fifties. It must have come back to him because Aleksander and he had, a few days ago, been talking about Penfield and his pioneering work on mapping the brain. But why
this particular woman, with her solemn intense gaze focussed accusingly on him?

He tried to blink the image away and was rewarded with
floating
red spots at the corner of his eyes, the kind the epileptics used to talk about as signals of forthcoming seizures. Just what he needed, he scoffed at himself.

‘It’s a scorcher of a day. You okay in this heat?’ Amelia was gentle.

‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘You’re sweet to pamper me like this.’

‘Your very own Cordelia. You’re a lucky man.’

‘Never doubted it.’

‘Pops, what’s special about this place?’

‘I spent a lot of time here. More than anywhere. Good times as well as bad. With my little sister too. And my mother.’ He squeezed her hand.

She picked a tall blade of grass from the roadside and whistled softly through it. ‘What was she like? Your mother, I mean.’

‘A thoroughly modern woman. Independent. Full of inner resources. Brave. Very brave. Now that I think of it as an adult, though, I didn’t have enough perspective as a child to see that. Or much else. You would have liked her. And she was quite unlike her own mother. More like her Dad. Though both she and her mother played the piano. Played wonderfully. My mother even gave us the occasional racy number.’ He laughed as he put adult words to it. There was that other matter he hadn’t had words for then either. Lovers and abortions and racy music.

That was it. Music. Of course. The woman on the operating table. A right osteoplastic craniotomy. The incision was made just to the side of her ear. A Rahm stimulator was used with a strength of one and half volts. On the temporal lobe the strength was increased to three and then four volts. As the probe moved along the contours of the brain the patient felt tingling in her thumb, then lip, then tongue. On the cut surface of the first temporal
convolution
the patient heard music.

Bruno shivered. An aural hallucination of a remembered song. She was certain an orchestra was playing in the operating room. What was the song? She had sung lines of it over and over when
that particular region was stimulated. Something about walking along, perhaps. Walking along as he was doing.