The Memory Man (20 page)

He didn’t really know how he got to the train station, but it was while he was standing behind a column on the platform and
pretending
to be invisible, that he heard two women talking excitedly about a fire in the countryside. Was this a new Nazi strategy to bring them low, one of them asked and the other shook her head and said surely not, since they were so avid for what the farms
produced
. Bruno started to whistle, saw a guard turn round and stopped himself. A train hooted and moments later, the one bound for Krakow pulled into the station. He squeezed onboard.

The next thing he knew he was walking along the street that led from the station towards the central square and his grandparents’ old house. He didn’t know why he thought they might still be there. But he did. In his mind, he was coming home after a long day at school, and everyone would be there: his grandmother and little Anna, his mother and grandfather, all plying him with
questions
which he didn’t want to answer.

The city was crowded with uniforms. Cars raced in the streets. Perfumed women wafted past him, their lips redder than he remembered them. There was German everywhere, and he recalled through his daze that Krakow was the centre of the General Government, the German Occupation’s capital. He had heard his mother talking about it, the way the Governor had installed himself on Wawel Hill in the old palace. His mother. He squared his shoulders and aped a military bearing. If he hadn’t felt so removed from everything, as if the world occupied a space on the other side of an impermeable glass wall, he would have been frightened.

When he reached the house, the old caretaker, who had grown even more crooked and gnarled, stopped him at the doors. He didn’t recognize him. Some cautionary instinct prevented Bruno from identifying himself. His papers wouldn’t tally. He asked for Pan Torok.

The dwarf of a man tilted his head towards him suspiciously. ‘Pan Torok hasn’t lived here for several years, young man. There are no Jews in this building now. We are
Judenrein
.’ The man
cackled
. ‘Now only pure-blooded Germans live here. The very best. A lady dentist. A factory owner…’

Bruno stood rigid. He dared a second question, this time
dipping
into his pocket the way he had always seen his grandfather do when the doorman was asked to wait for a parcel or some such.

He slipped a coin into the man’s hand. ‘Do you know where Pan Torok can be found?’

The man gazed at him from beneath his grizzled brow. ‘Where have you come from, young man? Don’t you know anything? If Pan Torok is still to be found, God bless his soul, he was a kind man, it’ll be across the river.’ The man suddenly looked around him warily and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t you know all the Jews have been concentrated?’

Bruno swallowed hard. Of course, of course, had he thought for one moment, he would have known that. But his grandfather…by this time his grandfather would have another identity. Bruno dipped into his pocket again.

‘Pan Torok didn’t by any chance leave anything with you? A forwarding address? A letter perhaps, for friends, old clients, who might want to find him?’

The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not by any…?’ Furtively, he pulled Bruno into his small quarters away from the gate. It was almost dark in here and he squinted to examine him, his face canny.

‘You’re the boy from Vienna, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s me.’

From outside the door, there were German voices raised high. The old man shivered. Then with sudden determination, he slid open a drawer in a ramshackle old desk, piled high with papers and dirty cups, and pulled out a dog-eared envelope. ‘Here, take it. Go, no wait. Read it, then leave it here.’

Bruno tore open the envelope while the old man poked his head through the door and mollified the voices. Inside there was a scrap of paper with an address. He memorized it quickly, heard a
yapping
, was about to hurry away, when the caretaker reappeared with a small dog on a lead. ‘This,’ the old man declared, shaking his head, ‘belongs to the Frau Dentist and for the moment is in my care.’

Bruno didn’t pause to look at the sausage of a dog. He thanked the caretaker and raced away, realizing too late that he hadn’t asked for directions and he had no idea where the address was.

He finally reached it at nightfall, when the curfew was already in place and it was treacherous to be on the streets without the appropriate permission. He was exhausted, so exhausted that he hadn’t been able to turn his head in fear every time he heard boots behind him. The fear had come to him at the same time as the
overwhelming
wish to cry in his grandfather’s arms.

He was on the outskirts of the city on a lonely little street that he imagined would in a few hundred metres give way to
countryside
. When he saw the dark-painted door with the number on it, he almost began to shout. He let the knocker fall several times with noisy emphasis and as footsteps sounded, he called out: ‘Grandpa, Grandpa.’

The door opened on a tiny birdlike woman who at first he thought was a girl, but on second glance seemed to be about his mother’s age. She was wearing a dress with a polka-dot pattern and had no shoes on her feet. He stared at her in dismay for too long before finding his voice.

‘Sorry, sorry, I’ve come to the wrong place.’ The tears that he had been holding back leaped into his eyes. ‘Sorry. I was looking for…’

Before he could finish his sentence, she had pulled him into the narrow hall and closed the door behind him.

‘You’re Hanka’s son?’

‘Yes, how did you know?’

‘I must have recognized you. Come in.’

She led him into a small room cluttered with too much furniture and made sure the heavy curtains were completely drawn.

‘Grandfather…’

‘He’s not here.’

Bruno wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. His heart swooped.

‘No. I’m sorry. He just…well…we keep in touch.’

‘But I need to go to him. I have to go to him.’

His voice rose, and the woman put a quietening finger to her lips and pointed upstairs.

‘I’m afraid it needs arranging. And it’s much too late tonight. Much too late. You look tried. Does anyone know you’re here, do you think?’

He shook his head and then stopped abruptly. ‘I got the address from…from the caretaker at my grandfather’s old building.’

She nodded sagely. ‘Would you like something to drink? I could even give you a little food. I took some home from the hotel tonight.’ He followed her into a second room, smaller than the first. It served as a kitchen, though again, the assortment of
furniture
seemed odd, as if the place were both a warehouse and an apartment. She saw him looking round and smiled again. ‘I’m keeping things. For friends. How is your mother?’

A single loud sob escaped him. The effort of holding the others back imprisoned his tongue.

‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’ She drew him to her, held him. She seemed to know without him saying. ‘You can tell me about it later. Or another time. When you can. I loved her. Loved her very much.’

He couldn’t bring himself to speak, so she went on.

‘Now I want you to drink something. Eat if you can.’ She pulled out a chair for him and brewed a pot of tea. ‘It’s real, so enjoy it. I don’t often get any. But we should talk before my flatmate gets back. She has a late pass tonight. Yes, it’ll be fine,’ she countered his query before he had posed it. ‘You can sleep on the table here. I’ll try and get a message to your grandfather. But it may take a few days. No, no.’ She held up a hand and suddenly looked stern, despite her size. ‘You’re not to try and find him yourself. You’ll only get everyone into trouble. Understood?’

He nodded.

‘What kind of papers have you got?’

For a moment he didn’t know whether it was a good idea to show her. Then when he took in her expression, he relented and pulled out not only his own papers but inadvertently his mother’s and Anna’s.

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Very hard. Your grandfather too will take it very hard.’ She stared into space for a moment as if
there were a window in the middle distance through which
something
was visible to her. Then she seemed to grow bigger in her chair.

‘All right. A couple of questions. Are you in trouble? Should you have new papers?’

‘I think I may be dead,’ he said.

She stared at him but asked nothing more. ‘Tomorrow you don’t set foot out of here. If anyone asks, you’re the son of a friend of mine from the north. You came to bring me news and to see if you could get a job in the city. You speak German, don’t you?’

He nodded.

‘Good. I’ll see if I can get you a job in the kitchen of the hotel where I’m working. The Germans use it. The food’s good. The scraps are good. And the head chef likes to be understood, and no one does except me. Okay? You can’t hang around the streets or you’ll disappear in no time. Always look busy. Remember that. Always. Purposeful and busy.’

‘But Grandpa…’

‘You won’t be able to stay with him. Out of the question.’

He didn’t dare for the moment ask her why.

For eight nights he slept on Pani Marysia’s kitchen table.
Everyday
he asked her about his grandfather, and everyday she said it wasn’t time yet. On the ninth day, she brought him a new identity card in the name of Tomasz Nowak, resident in Krakow, at an address he hadn’t yet visited, and a work permit showing that he had a post at the Hotel Francuski near the Barbican.

On Sunday, the day before he was to begin work, she told him to wash thoroughly and get spruced up. She herself was wearing a smart suit and a hat with a feather in it that made her face as saucy as her high heels suddenly gave her grandeur. She warned him that he wasn’t to speak unless she spoke first. She took him to church and then for a tram ride.

The tram ferried them across the Vistula and stopped at the entrance to the Ghetto. The gates where the wall began were crowded with SS men, police in a variety of uniforms and a queue of people having their passes checked. The behaviour of the guards, the pushing and shoving and casual brutality made Bruno
clench his fists into tight balls. He kept them like that, even when Marysia tried to divert his attention.

A Polish Police officer stepped onto the tram and stood on the outdoor step as they moved off. Bruno, staring through dirty glass, held his breath and saw into poor overcrowded tenements and downcast streets. People raced about their business rather than walked, their legs as thin and rickety as sticks. He saw an old woman carrying a package wrapped in brown paper whose weight seemed more than she could bear, a Chassid, his arms crossed behind his back, who stared at the tram as if he were waiting for some miracle. He saw emaciated children and old people lying on the pavement, their hands outstretched.

A terrible noise erupted. The tram slowed to a crawl and in the street below there was an ear-splitting rattle that he only
recognized
as gunfire when the bodies fell like marionettes on a stage. Splayed. Crumpled. Except that it was real blood that spilled out of them.

And then, before he altogether took in what he was seeing, they were out again beyond the other side of the wall, and Marysia prodded him to get off. There had been no stops anywhere in the Ghetto.

They walked now to nowhere in particular, still not speaking, staring straight ahead. Eventually they hopped onto another tram to make the return journey. It was only when they were out on more familiar streets again and making their way homeward that it occurred to Bruno that the reason for their journey was that his grandfather was somewhere in those dangerous decaying streets of the Ghetto.

‘Grandpa,’ he began, and Marysia nodded, cutting him off.

‘Now you understand.’

He understood nothing at all.

‘I shall go and see him. I must.’

‘No, you wait. He doesn’t want you there. I know. I know him.’

‘How do you know him?’

She shrugged.

‘Marysia, are you a…?’

She cut him off. ‘No, I’m not. And don’t ask stupid questions. And don’t go making yourself conspicuous. There are people here, everywhere, everywhere around us, Jews too, in the pay of the Nazis. They’ll turn you in as soon as greet you on the street.’

She softened the force of her response, by giving him a slice of
apfelstrudel
when they got back to the house.

‘Your mother was a very good friend of mine, Tomek.’ She called him by his new name. ‘So I take the liberty of giving you advice. You have blond hair and a direct blue gaze. So you don’t need to worry too much. You’ve probably grown out of all
recognition
over the last while, so few in Krakow can recognize you as a Torok. That’s not the case for your grandfather. And here’s some more advice. Tomorrow, at the hotel, remember,’ she lowered her voice and looked round her shoulder to make sure her roommate hadn’t come in, ‘don’t talk to anyone too much. The less said the better in all circumstances. And…and…’ She was suddenly shy. ‘You probably know this, but I repeat it anyhow. Never use the urinals, if there’s anyone else in there. Your mother explained, didn’t she?’

He didn’t know what she was talking about. Not until later. All he knew was that his mother and sister were dead and his
grandfather
didn’t want him at his side and had gone to join the dying.

At night, lying flat on the hard table, every time he shut his eyes, Anna flew from the porch of his grandfather’s house, and his mother screamed and screamed her pain, before an agonizing silence descended on the world.

There had been another shift in the car’s composition. Amelia sat in the back seat with her father now and held onto his hand.

It was unclear, Irena thought, stealing a backward glance, who was the parent and who the child. He looked as if he might be asleep, certainly dreaming. He was very pale. The last part of their expedition had been too difficult for him. She almost wished they hadn’t found the spot. And what an announcement. So blunt, so frightening in the peace of that countryside as if to make it almost into a delusion.

‘My mother and sister were shot here. In front of my eyes. They’re buried near that tree where the little girl is swinging. My sister played there too. She was barely six-years-old. I promised I’d come back.’

Her first reaction had been that he was lying. He was making it up. But she knew better from his eyes.

There had been no marked graves to show them, and he hadn’t wanted to talk to the people who lived there now. Had rejected Amelia’s idea of erecting a stone.

‘In this wilderness? Where no one was kind to them? No point.’ He stared at the tree where the child played over the murdered dead, and Irena had wanted to cross herself, just to make some kind of sign, some ritual acknowledgment. Aleksander, intending to comfort, had pointed out that after all these years, there were probably few remains and a memorial in Krakow might be better. The Professor had looked straight through him. The comfort really hadn’t worked for Amelia either.

That’s because there was no comfort, Irena thought. No
comfort
for some losses, even in time – that neutral impassive force
that healed most things. Probably by destroying. Destroying the cells that contained the experience. Or at least its trace.
Destroying
the bit that made you care. You might as well call that force God, though she had never heard of people anywhere going to war on behalf of time.

Amelia turned out to be braver than the rest of them. Maybe because she had to confront prejudice upfront and couldn’t
wriggle
out of it like they did. Wriggle and wriggle all the time until the earth turned but looked substantially the same.

So Amelia marched right up to the door of the house and rang a bell. A youngish woman answered. Irena could see that the
explanations
weren’t going well and that the woman was appalled, shaking her head at whatever it was she understood from Amelia’s dramatic gestures. At which point Amelia seemed to grow a metre taller, stamped her feet and showed some rage.

Aleksander, wearing a distinct air of embarrassment, went to her side and started to explain, while Amelia took a pad out of her bag and wrote what Irena later learned was an inscription for a
tombstone
that named the Professor’s dead and added: ‘remembered by Bruno Lind and his daughter, Amelia.’

She then marched the woman over to the tree. The little girl had run off in the meantime, which was just as well, because Amelia pointed emphatically and made a tombstone shape in the air, around it a circle like a small wall or fence. She pulled dollars from her bag. Irena could now hear her words, though not Aleksander’s quieter translation. She was saying that she or one of her friends would be back to check on progress. If her wishes weren’t carried out she would start proceedings to see how this house had in fact been acquired and on whose land it stood. The woman objected, said they had come by it legally, at which point Amelia smiled sweetly and said she was sure they had, but a little digging in the historical record, let alone in the ground, might none the less prove otherwise and what she was asking was simple enough. So she expected her request to be carried out.

And then she marched back to her father and said: ‘Good. That’s done. You’ll feel the better for it. As will I.’

Aleksander had been slightly cowed by this episode, and Irena, when she was gestured by Amelia into the front seat beside him, thought that maybe their first lovers’ misunderstanding was underway. Would they survive a history that had made them so different?

Strangely, she found herself on Amelia’s side. An admiring ‘well done’ had slipped out of her. If only she had been capable of such decision in her life, such confrontation, everything might have been different. Instead she had the Polish gift of pessimism. The romantic mantra: everything for the worse in the worst of all possible worlds. She wore it like a badge of honour, she thought, scoffing at herself and worrying once more about the poor Professor and the sudden presence of his dead, with them now in this lumbering car, like a great curtain of sadness blotting out the sky.

No one had spoken since they had left the house. The silence had grown as oppressive as the mounting heat. It was only when they reached the outskirts of the city that it was broken – and, oddly, by the Professor himself.

‘Thank you. Thank you, Amelia. Of course, you were right,’ he said.

Irena wondered whether he meant right for him or for herself. Perhaps for both or for all of them. She imagined the marker going up in the midst of the flat peaceful countryside. People might stop. Might wonder. Reflect. That was no bad thing. It wasn’t like a state memorial or an official ceremony that inevitably always contained an admixture of contemporary politics. It was personal, an
intimate
record of tragic inhumanity and the grief that attends it.

‘My thanks to all of you,’ the Professor went on. ‘You have been exquisitely patient with an old man.’

Irena turned to smile at him. There was nothing she could think of to say. All the words that came to her felt banal, unequal to that troubled face, the history the man contained.

‘It’s nothing, Professor Lind,’ Aleksander murmured. ‘It was an honour. And for me, in some ways, also an education. We live with
all these scars in our country, but more recent ones have displaced them, so we don’t pause to think back that far. Until there are dramas, like over the massacre at Jedwabne, and then it becomes a national event and we’re pressed to take sides. But somehow the individual stories touch one more nearly.’

‘And we never know quite how or why…’ The Professor was staring at the back of Aleksander’s head. Staring at it in a way that made Irena uncomfortable. She had the distinct impression he didn’t like what he saw.

Abruptly, he shifted his gaze towards her. ‘I was lucky, you know. Unusually lucky for a Jew. And not only because I got through. But in the way I got through. I was young, spoke German, spent part of the war in the countryside. And my
grandfather
was remarkable in his prescience. In keeping us out of the Ghetto… Yes. And I had a chance to act too. To be active. That helped.’ His gaze moved once more to the back of Aleksander’s head.

Irena shifted in her seat. ‘Yes, yes. Passivity is terrible. Like depression. It makes one want to die before one is dead. It’s a state suitable only for saints.’

Bruno turned to her. ‘You understand.’ He paused. ‘You know, I’d like to make up for that awful evening I gave you yesterday. Somehow. Let me take you all out tonight. The best Krakow can offer. You choose. And not one gloomy word will pass my lips.’

‘How kind,’ Irena laughed. ‘But I don’t know if I can. I’d have to check on my mother first. It may be difficult.’

‘You’ll arrange it,’ the Professor insisted. ‘You know how to arrange things. We’ll help. We’ll take you straight to her, won’t we Aleksander?’

‘And I can do my rendition of Josephine Baker for all of you,’ Amelia laughed.

They had almost reached Ida’s house when the Professor
murmured
: ‘There used to be a big bakery around here.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, yes. It serviced the Germans.’ He was growing excited.

‘Did you get your bread from there too, Pops?’

‘No, no. Certainly not that, though I had a taste. Your
grandfather
worked there, I think. Well, I’m not sure if he was in fact working there.’ He grew quiet abruptly, and then they were pulling up in front of Ida’s and there was no time to ask him more.

‘I’ll try not to be long.’

‘I’ll come up with you,’ Amelia offered.

‘Yes, yes. She’ll be pleased to see you.’

But Irena doubted that her mother would remember Amelia at all.

‘Oh Irenka, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened.’ Ida opened the door and instantly threw her arms around Irena.

‘It’s my fault,’ Irena’s goddaughter, Nina, was just behind her. Her heart-shaped face drooped beneath the feathers of bright home-hennaed hair. ‘I only went upstairs to do some homework. I thought she’d be alright…’ She stopped and stared at Amelia, whom she had just taken in.

‘What’s happened?’ Irena’s heart sank.

‘That’s just it. We don’t know.’ Ida was ushering them into the lounge where a television sat in front of a plump sofa. ‘Nina left her in here watching the TV. And when she came back down from her room, she’d gone. Vanished.’

‘Is something the matter?’ Amelia asked.

‘My mother’s gone walkabout. We’ll have to call the police.’

‘It’s done,’ Ida responded in English. ‘An hour…no…more… almost two hours ago. And Adam’s out looking for her as well.’

Nina was still staring at Amelia, and Irena introduced them quickly before dropping onto the sofa.

‘Does she have any favourite places that she likes to go to?’ Amelia asked. ‘Or friends? Friends she might want to visit? Maybe even a hair stylist? My mother used to go to hers to relax, to have her head fondled.’

Irena tried to control her panic. ‘You don’t understand. She doesn’t go anywhere on her own. She can’t find her way.’

‘I see.’

Irena took in that she had been too brusque. ‘Let me think, let me think. The Planty. She likes the Planty, the gardens. But from here…’

‘It’s worth a try.’

‘Yes, I’ll come with you,’ Nina blurted out in careful English. ‘It’s all because of me.’

‘No, no.’ Irena tried to make light of it, but her voice held a sob. ‘Maybe she tried to go home.’

‘So she remembers her address?’

‘I don’t know anymore. She might have it on her, if she took her bag with her. But she doesn’t have the keys.’ The tears gathered in her eyes. Why had she taken her mother’s keys away? Because she kept losing them, of course, losing them anywhere and
everywhere
, even if they weren’t lost but simply gone, like her mind. But Irena hadn’t thought through all the eventualities, her mother’s erratic stubbornness, if that’s what it was. If that’s what going off for a walk meant. No, she should never have left her. If anything happened…

‘She took her bag. I checked. Maybe she hailed a taxi. It’s
possible
,’ Ida said. ‘Did she have some money on her?’

‘Okay, okay,’ Amelia was patting her shoulder. ‘You give me the keys, and Aleksander and I will drive to your place. Drive slowly and keep our eyes open. If we find her, we’ll phone back here. Meanwhile, you head off for the gardens. I’ve got my phone on me.’

‘And I’ll stay here and monitor the phone and any calls from the police.’

‘Take Pops with you. He’s got his phone on him too. Just make sure he turns it on.’

Before Irena could protest or think of a better plan, numbers had been exchanged, and the Professor, Nina, and she were
walking
towards the Planty, while Aleksander and Amelia headed off in the opposite direction in the car.

‘I was fooled by the television, Irenka. I’m so sorry. I could hear it. So I just thought she was still there. She must have slipped out very quietly.’

‘She’s got soft-soled shoes,’ Irena said, feeling stupid. She was examining all the faces around her, as if she might somehow miss
her own mother amidst the strollers who were numerous on this warm evening. At least, her mother wouldn’t get cold. Die of hypothermia.

‘Did she say anything to you before you went off to your room?’ The Professor addressed Nina directly for the first time.

‘Not really. Not specifically.’

They walked on. They could see the Castle Hill in front of them, the low sun glistening over the red roofs.

‘Well, she was a bit confused.’ She shot a glance of teenage uncertainty at the adults. ‘You know, just rambling a bit. She does ramble, doesn’t she, Irenka?’

‘That’s a kind way of putting it,’ Irena reassured her.

‘Yes, well… In the middle of all this rambling, she thought she recognized someone on the television.’

Irena laughed nervously. ‘Yes. She does that sometimes.’

‘It was this man. This presenter. She got a bit excited. She told me to phone the television station and invite him over straight away. She said he was her cousin.’

‘That’s happened before.’

‘Is he always her cousin?’ Bruno asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And have you checked that he might not be?’

Irena shrugged. ‘I didn’t really think… You see, the man she points at, if it’s the same one that she’s pointed at before, is about half, no a third of her age…. So it doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe she’s gone to the television station?’ Nina offered.

Irena stared at her. ‘Surely they would have alerted the police if a batty old lady insisted on seeing her cousin. She didn’t by any chance mention a name, did she?’

Irena waited for her answer with baited breath. The last time her mother had thought she recognized the face on the television it had born a distinct name. It had born the name of the man who was also meant to be Irena’s father. Aleksander Tarski. In her mother’s deranged mind, at least. And the man was far younger than Irena. Did desire persist? she suddenly wondered. Persist through all those other fallings away of body and mind? It was too horrible to contemplate. And she didn’t want to involve her
goddaughter, let alone the Professor, in all this madness. It was shaming somehow.

‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’ Nina answered her question. She was mumbling a bit, you know how she does, as if she might be
talking
to herself. I might have heard a name beginning with an “M”. But all this was well before I left her on her own. She could have seen something else on the screen after.’

‘It might be worth phoning the television station, in any case. You never know,’ Bruno said. ‘The people we think least able are sometimes very determined.’ He passed Irena his telephone, and they paused on the side of the street.