The Memory Man (24 page)

‘Oh no. Please don’t. Here, here.’ Irena was back. She found a tray and quickly placed everything on it, then ushered them to the table. Guests really shouldn’t behave as informally as they had been. ‘Please,’ she said again.

They took their places. Irena’s strained face threw a hush over them. She turned to Amelia first. ‘I don’t mind you hearing this, Amelia. But please don’t think me mad. It’s just that I need to know. Need to clear the air, as I said.’

She stared at the flickering candelabrum then got up again, too restless to sit.

‘Aleksander…’ She paced, refused to meet his eyes.

‘Oh do sit, Irena. He’s not that frightening.’ Amelia tried to lighten the atmosphere. She wasn’t sure she had succeeded.

‘Of course. Of course. The thing is…’ Irena stopped and began again in a great rush, as if she were overcoming a barely
surmountable
hurdle. ‘The thing is that some years ago, before my mother was visibly ill, she told me that my father wasn’t my father. I mean the man I had always thought was my father, Witek Konikow, wasn’t really that at all. My real father was somebody quite different. Somebody called Aleksander Tarski.’

‘What?’ Amelia couldn’t hold back her surprise.

Aleksander said nothing. He was standing there, somewhat rigid.

Amelia looked from one to the other of them. Bewilderment coursed through her. Wasn’t Aleksander much too young to be Irena’s father, since she was older than Amelia? She shook herself, realized that Irena was talking about another generation.

‘So you mean…?’

‘I don’t know quite what I mean.’ Irena’s voice held a sob in
suspension
. ‘I left it all too late, you see. Back then, when my mother first told me, I wasn’t all that interested. I thought it was a kind of joke, really. Something to make my English friends giggle about. I was living in England, which made everything seem different in any case. But now I’d like to know. If my mother still remembered names back then, if she wasn’t yet demented, it could just be that Aleksander’s uncle was my father. Though if he died in the Warsaw Uprising, as I think you said while we were travelling, then his sperm would have had to have been frozen, and the whole thing is completely lunatic. As I suspect it is. Either that or I’m even older than I am.

‘But I have to ask because, well, because I’ve been thinking about it so much. It’s…well, it’s really why I sought you out in the first place, to be brutally frank. I’m no science journalist. Though I’ve learned a lot. I enjoyed it. Meeting you. And Professor Lind, as well.’

She had started to cry in the midst of this, and Amelia put her arm round her shoulder. ‘Don’t be so upset, Irena. I understand. I understand how one has to know. How uncomfortable it all is.’

‘I thought… Well, I thought if she saw you, Aleksander – you said you looked like your uncle – that she might just recognize you. But I don’t think she did. So I don’t know why I’m saying all this. Except that maybe you still have some relatives you could ask. Because I’d like to find out. No one’s altogether clear about who was killed during the Uprising, so maybe in fact your uncle lived on. Went back to the countryside until the war was over, as so many did. I don’t know. Maybe I’d just like some family.’

The tears were streaming now and the plea in her voice brought them to Amelia’s eyes too. She found a hankie and passed it to Irena. It reminded her. Reminded her how upset she’d been all those years back when she went to see her birth mother. The
awkwardness
of it. The sense of abjection. As if one wanted something one wasn’t even sure existed. The reparation of some lost
unconditional
love. But maybe it wasn’t love from that particular person. More like love from some idealized being one had dreamed up.

It was all so strange. The way memory was so crucial to who one was, the very foundation on which identity was built, yet that crucial bit of one’s identity – who one’s birth parents were, even if one had lived with them for some years – was something memory couldn’t deal with. You simply forgot. In those early years of a child’s life, when everything was being learned, memories of that kind weren’t laid down. Not so that you could recognize the person later. So bizarre. Maybe birth parents didn’t really count for much unless they hung on in there until speech kicked in. Genes: yes. But since as her father kept telling her we all shared some ninety-eight percent of our DNA with chimps, not to
mention
some forty percent with a banana, what was a little matter of a gene or two between humans?

Yet here was Irena, desperate to know. As she had been.

‘What can I say?’ Aleksander was staring at Irena, as if he were trying to place a grid over her features. ‘There are some
photographs
. Of my uncle, I mean. We could show them to your mother.’

‘Do I look at all like him?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m told he looked a lot like me. But that was by my grandmother, who had a vested interest.’

‘And were there ever any stories which cast doubt on the timing of his death?’

It was Aleksander’s turn to pace. ‘No, I don’t think so. The
stories
came in dribs and drabs, of course. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Resistance but a nationalist, which might account for that. He lived in Warsaw and rarely visited during the war years unless he was on some kind of mission. But as my grandmother would have it, he came to see her in July of 1944, just before the Uprising, and he was burning with the excitement of it.
Apparently
, she tried to hold him back, get him to stay with her, because she had a feeling that she would never see him again. Her
intuitions
were proved right. She never did. A message came from one of the members of his group in October of ’44 to say that he had died in Warsaw, died heroically. He remained her hero. She would recount his exploits over and over again, while my father’s war experiences were never spoken of. Not until we children prised them out of him. He took his mother’s view. He didn’t count for much. Anyhow, there was never any other account given of my uncle’s death during my childhood.’

Amelia took one look at Irena’s disappointed face and burst out: ‘I’m sure he’d gladly have you as a cousin, in any case, Irena. I know I would.’

Was it really truth that mattered so much in these cases? she wondered. Even if one was adamant about discovering it. She was no longer sure. She wanted to give Irena a hug, but the woman was all prickly tension now.

‘By the way, my uncle was always referred to as Pawel. That was his first name. My father and mother preferred his middle name, Aleksander, so gave me that.’

‘So that’s that.’ The tears welled up in Irena’s eyes. ‘Died too soon and wrong name.’

‘Tarski isn’t an uncommon name.’ Aleksander tried to be
helpful
. ‘And people took on false names during the war. Particularly the partisans. Maybe my uncle chose to be known as Aleksander.’

This last attempt at reassurance seemed to make Irena even more despondent.

Amelia intervened. ‘Is there any one else in your family one could ask?’

Aleksander thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘No, my mother died last year. Though…’ He gave Amelia a quick furtive glance. ‘Before he died, my father talked at length to my former wife. She loved all those family stories, family trees. Probably because of our son… I never really listened. You could, of course, contact her.’

‘No, no.’ Irena’s eyes were veiled in sadness. ‘It’s too silly, really. I’ve made enough of a mountain of it.’

‘No you haven’t,’ Amelia heard herself say. ‘If you’re not satisfied, girl, you go on and pursue it. Ask more questions. Get the bedding off. Air those ancient mattresses.’ She laughed. ‘You know how many children are born on the wrong side of the marital sheets? Some six out of ten of us, depending on whose statistics you decide to believe.’

‘No, no,’ Irena protested. ‘It’s not a matter of illegitimacy. At least, I don’t think it is. I don’t mind about that at all. It’s just that I’d like to know. And I don’t know why I think I’ll find a
satisfactory
answer. It’s not as if anything else in life is clear. Well, not the way things are clear under Aleksander’s microscopes.’

She was right, Amelia thought. At least about this place. In the Californian light, in the scripts she handled there weren’t as many shadows, as many textures, as many uncertainties. And the
histories
had been wiped out, left behind in places like this for others to worry over, so that America could concentrate on the future. Or just not concentrate.

She watched Aleksander, wondered about that former wife of his. He didn’t really want Irena to contact her. The woman still counted in some way. Did her ex count too? Probably, to sensitive external eyes, though she thought he didn’t count at all. She never thought about him. But he must have helped to shape her, produce those diminished expectations, that facade of not giving a damn. Which is why she should make more of an effort with Aleksander, not less. He was reading the remains of a second skin she had grown, a hard, laughing one.

‘You could always,’ Amelia said, knowing as she said it that it was altogether the wrong thing to bring up, ‘you could always both have a DNA test done. It would probably come up with a relationship.’

‘No. Certainly not.’ Irena came as close to snapping as Amelia had ever heard her.

‘Why DNA tests?’ Bruno had just come back into the room.

He looked exhausted, Amelia thought. They should get him back to the hotel. It had been a long day. A very long one for him. Too many ghosts. They had eaten the pounds off him.

‘Oh, it’s nothing.’

‘Irena thinks she may be related to Aleksander through a father her mother only revealed to her a few year’s back. But Aleksander says he doesn’t think so.’ Amelia explained quickly about the Warsaw uncle, his death, the name.

‘I see.’ Bruno gave Aleksander a bizarre look then eased himself into his chair and played with the small glass of vodka in front of him before downing it in a single gulp. ‘I owe you all an apology. You too, Aleksander. And Pani Marta.’

‘Was she all right? Shall I go in to her?’ Irena asked.

‘No, no. I don’t think it’s necessary.’ He smiled at her with a touch of sadness. ‘You must try not to worry so, Irena. I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but death is inevitable. And it has its own logic. Pani Marta is comfortable.’

A shiver crept up Amelia’s spine. She wasn’t sure what had caused it. Was it the way Bruno and Irena were looking at each other? She wanted to clutch at Aleksander’s hand, but he too seemed far away. Maybe, as she had half suspected all along, Bruno planned to inflict a stepmother on her, though she was well past the age of mothers of any degree. Eve would have wanted him to be happy. But she wouldn’t have persuaded him here as Amelia had done, back to the terrain his restless ghosts inhabited. Eve didn’t believe that if you put a narrative to things, they ceased to torment you. Or if she did, she had never told Amelia or ever felt it necessary to persuade Bruno here.

Or was it that the moment had never been right before?

Amelia wondered if Bruno’s nightmares would stop after this visit. Perhaps not. He looked more haunted than ever. And he was saying something she couldn’t quite grasp.

‘So your mother told you that you were related to Aleksander Tarski?’ His voice was so soft she had to strain. ‘It’s not
altogether
impossible.’ He paused. ‘Yes, yes. I owe you all some explanations.’

He got up to pace, his hand rifling his hair then clenching into a tight fist behind his back.

Amelia rushed to his side. ‘You don’t have to give us any
explanations
, Pops. You don’t owe us anything.’

He met her gaze with his steady blue one. ‘Come here, Amelia. Come and sit beside me on the sofa. This may take a while. I do have some debts, you know. I think I may owe Irena’s mother my life. Yes.’

He looked up at the charcoal drawing with its heavy shadows and stormy foliage. ‘Plato asked: can the same man know and also not know that which he knows? The answer is certainly yes. And you don’t need a brain lesion to make it so.’

He paused. He was still looking at the picture. ‘I’m not sure what I recognized first. That drawing. Or maybe it was her voice. Husky, yet somehow precise. Or the gestures. Those large hands with their small neat motion. You know,’ he looked at them all with an air of wonder, ‘I really think I’d all but forgotten that period. Or not remembered it. I needed the trigger. The stimulus of those hands and the murmur. The murmur of, “Little Cousin”.’

The shots in the woods had reverberated all night, coming first from one place, then another. She had lain there, listening to the hideous
rat-tat-tat
of gunfire. The thunder that spelled death and more death. Iniquitous death. Till there would be none of them left. No Jews, no Poles, no Slavs, no gypsies. No one except the Nazis, and then they’d probably have to start killing each other, because the killing habit would have taken hold. Like an opium addiction.
Rat-tat-tat
.

Yes, she had lain sleepless in that cold bed in the draughty house where the wind moaned its displeasure with all their lives. Even more loudly than her father did when the pain took hold of him. Even more loudly than he had when she had taken that Wehrmacht lover who had protected them. Long gone now. How she had loathed him. Loathed his lordly manner with her. His favours. Lord of creation who, with a little help from her, spilled his seed in a flat five seconds. Yes, you could tell a people by how they treated their women. Not that she supposed it was the poor man’s fault. Trapped by stupidity. All of them. They were all responsible, though some were far more responsible than others. Yes.
Rat-tat-tat.

She waited until the shooting had stopped. Had learned over the years to give the silence a chance for an extra hour, so that the armoured cars and the planes were all gone. Then she slipped into the old warm trousers and the worn tweed jacket and cap. She packed the bandages and the remains of the alcohol which served as an antiseptic and the rotgut vodka their neighbour made which could revive a dead pig, if it thought life was still worth living after swilling it. Finally she saddled her horse. Winter had turned him into skin and bone, and she didn’t like attaching the two linked up
child-sleighs that could serve as a makeshift stretcher behind him. But they might prove useful.

The moon had set now, and the light all came from the ground where the snow wore a thin crust of glittering ice. Her horse’s hooves crunched through it. She kept him to a trot and skirted round to the far side of the forest where a track would take her to the old forester’s cabin. He might have news of the partisan band, would know more accurately where the fighting had taken place. But the forester wasn’t in, had probably gone off to help as soon as he heard the Germans receding.

She rode slowly, peering through the trees to see where the snow was disturbed. Yes, Pan Stanislaw had gone ahead of her. She could see his boot prints where the trail branched. Should she follow him or head off to the left? Best to follow, since he wasn’t riding, and there might be some left alive for her to bring out.

She found the forester in a small clearing in the grey light of the earliest dawn. He was cutting fronds from the lowest pines and covering over the bodies. A superficial burial. But the ground was frozen and too hard to dig. There were three of them here. The wild boars would get them soon enough if the buzzards didn’t. She averted her eyes, not wanting to see. She had to protect herself from the nightmares. Had to. Still.

They followed the tracks after that, too many of them. And the telltale markings of blood on snow. Maroon, almost black in the first glimmer of the rising sun. The day would be beautiful. She could feel it. She kept her eyes on the sky and watched the
morning
cloud scuttling above the high trees. She listened to the
birdsong
. She didn’t want to be the first to see the bodies. Even though she was here. Even though she had come to help.

A line of poetry her father had taught her in English when she was still little came back to her. He had loved Shelley and Coleridge, the English Romantics. He had been wonderful then, her father. Before the illness.

So much grief. There was another body now, a fighter stretched in the snow as if sleep had caught him unawares.

The forester kneeled by his side. ‘He’s alive,’ he whispered. ‘Quick.’

She poured the vodka down his throat. He coughed. A strong man. The cold helped. It slowed the blood flow, slowed the heart too. She had read that in the book the doctor had lent her just before the start of the war. Read about the syphilis as well. Her father. She had thought she might study medicine.

They strapped him onto the makeshift stretcher, and slowly she led her horse back to the forester’s cottage. The man opened his eyes as she prodded the wound. They would have to try and get old Dr Zygmunt over. The bullet had gone too deep for simple extraction.

The man was watching them. His lips moved.

‘We should be able to get you fixed up,’ she said softly,
unwinding
the bandages she had made from boiled rags. ‘Take it easy.’

He was speaking again, too softly for her to hear. The forester put his ear to his lips.

‘You want me to get a message through,’ he repeated. ‘From Aleksander Tarski to Bronek Kowalski.’

The man murmured a yes and closed his eyes. There wasn’t much more she could do. She rode off to fetch Dr Zygmunt, while the forester dragged her sleigh back into the woods. There might be other survivors and they would have to move quickly. The
Germans
could well be sending men to scour for their own.

It was then that she saw them. Just as she emerged from the south side of the forest. Tracks glistening with their icy crust that was just beginning to melt. German boot prints. They zigzagged and swerved madly. The body lay at a little distance on the slope of the hill. She kept her horse trotting in a straight line. She wasn’t going to make a detour to help a German bastard: that was for sure.

Then with a shrug she looped back. Some mother’s bastard. And he couldn’t harm anyone in his present state.

There was a shaft of sun right on him, and she found herself marvelling at the beauty of that young golden head, the fine skin. He lay so peacefully asleep, like Icarus fallen from the skies. Or Adonis, yes, more like Adonis, gored by the jealous boar. The blood was caked on his jacket at the shoulder. But the jacket
wasn’t a uniform, she noted in confusion. She slipped off her horse and put her pocket mirror to his lips. Seeing a trace of breath she reached for the vodka flask and simultaneously unbuttoned the jacket to see the wound as much as to check what he was
wearing
and what identification he might have. But she already knew that whatever his nation, she couldn’t leave him here to die in the cold.

She was surprised to find him carrying papers in one of the names the fighter in the forester’s cabin had mentioned. She put her perplexity to one side. The real problem was how to move him. She had to get him home. Out of the cold. A little cold slowed the blood. Too much killed. Could she heave him onto her horse?

He flinched and opened his eyes as she tried to lift him.

‘Can you walk a little?’ she asked in Polish, and he seemed to understand, clung to her as he got to his feet. ‘I’m going to try and mount you on the horse.’

‘Bessie,’ he murmured, as if he had arrived in heaven. ‘Bessie.’ He half fell and half clambered onto the animal with her help, then leaned heavily against her while she held him upright all the way home.

She walked him into the big front room where her father dozed beneath his chequered blankets on the old wooden wheelchair. The canapé he had once used, before the business of moving him to and fro had proved too difficult without help, still stood there not far from the hearth. She helped her patient stretch out, then put more wood on the fire and stoked it into a blaze. She put the kettle on to boil. She thought she could tend to this wound herself. Would have to. If he were a German, old Dr Zygmunt would quite happily let him die.

‘Drink,’ she cut through his mutterings and handed him the flask. He was delirious, she thought. At least the mumblings were in Polish. ‘Drink,’ she ordered again. ‘I’m going to try and get the bullet out.’

She undressed him to the waist, washed the skin that emerged firm and golden around the ugly welt. So unlike her father’s, she marvelled as she cleaned, then prodded and pulled and swabbed with the instruments these last years had taught her to use,
however
ever inadequately. The bullet extracted, she dabbed at the wound with more alcohol, then bandaged the whole area tightly.

His cries had roused her father, who was calling for her in the hoarse groans he used now, interspersed with that hacking cough. These last months, he was mostly off somewhere in his own world. The illness had eaten up so many chunks of him. Almost better he were dead. While she tended to him, she conjured up the handsome witty man he had once been. Just, too, and generous. Had he known what she was doing, he would have approved.

Within a week, her young patient had come back to himself enough so that she was sure he understood her. None too soon, because she had had to hide him in her room while she went about her endless duties. She never knew when Pani Zablonska, the wife of the old family retainer, might trek over from her house and make a pretence of helping out while she spied and scoffed the old man’s gruel. There were few one could trust in these hard times.

She repeated that to her patient. She also said to him: ‘As far as I know, you’re Aleksander Tarski. That’s what your papers say. That’s fine with me, although you look young for your age. I shall tell everyone you’re my little cousin come from the north. Your parents thought you’d be better off in the country and you’ve come to help out. And you will help out. As soon as you’re well. There’s a lot to be done. We have a few cows, here. Fields too. With luck the wheat will grow as golden as your hair. I’m the only one left to work, fulltime. Apart from you. Is that a deal, Little Cousin?’ She thought she might have smiled at him, because he smiled back, a warm endearing smile that illuminated his whole face. She felt it illuminating her too, as if a flame had been lit beneath her heart and sent the blood racing.

‘Little Cousin,’ he repeated, and he gave her his hands to clinch the deal.

Over the next months, though, she worried for him. He did everything he was asked. And more. He even took over the bathing of her father that she had performed ritualistically once a week with old Pani Zablonska’s help in lifting him into the tub. Aleksander had watched her rubbing and rubbing and taken the
cloth from her and copied her movements so that she wasn’t sure whether her father noticed the difference.

Watching, she stilled a leaping desire.

He was good at finding food too, her Adonis. She called him Aleksander out loud, but she was sure it wasn’t his name, since he hadn’t answered to it in his delirium. That other man they had found that day in the clearing who had mentioned the same name was long gone, fetched by a woman with a wagon, Dr Zygmunt had told her.

So she thought of Little Cousin as her Adonis. He was a hunter even though he hadn’t come to her with a gun or a bow and the Germans had long ago taken theirs. But he knew how to lay traps, and he came home with rabbits and game. When the ice broke, there were fish. They hadn’t eaten so well since the Wehrmacht had been with them. He loved riding the old mare too. She wished she had a second horse, so that they could ride together, but of what was left of their stables two had died, and she had given one, together with a cart, to the Jewish family they had hidden in the early years of the war in the decaying wing of the house.

It was because of that old spy, Pani Zablonska, that they had had to go. The woman he had told her in her falsely subservient way that she knew they were there and a danger to all of them. So Marta had packed them off on the cart and hoped that, with the extra cash she had found for them, they would make their way across the border, if not to Hungary, then at least across the river to the Russian zone.

After that, she had told the old crone she had nothing left to pay her with, so she had better find some other means of support. And still she came to sniff around, claiming a loyalty to her father,
supposedly
helping with his personal care but really foraging and stealing beneath her very nose. Now, with her Little Cousin here, she had an excuse to get rid of her for good.

Yes, she worried for him. And not only because of the old witch. She sometimes thought there was something wrong with him. Something wrong in his mind. At first she thought it might be some defect from birth, since he spoke hardly at all. He was simple. But it turned out that he knew how to speak perfectly well,
and in Polish, though only did so in response to direct questions. Then she thought he must be in a state of residual shock, because of the wound and the accompanying fever, or because of
something
else, something that had happened before. She was gentle with him.

Once the skin had healed, leaving only a puckered scar on the golden flesh, she asked him. How had he come by the bullet wound? For the first time, he looked furtive. But oddly so. She wasn’t sure whether he was trying to hide something or find
something
.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked him.

He was quick to say Krakow and then in something like panic, excused himself, told her he had a task to perform.

Mostly they worked side-by-side, not speaking much, but somehow in tune: she in her old workman’s clothes, so that from a distance they probably looked like brothers. He knew about ploughing and sowing. He knew about milking the cows too, though she wouldn’t let him take the milk to the village. It was best if he wasn’t seen too much, she had determined from the start.

One late afternoon she found him in her father’s library, which was directly underneath the room she had given him. He jumped, startled by her approach, and she said, no, no, it was fine for him to be there if he liked to read. She noticed he had taken down a volume of Dickens, and she laughed and said it was an old favourite. They could read together, if he liked, by the fire. Her father might enjoy that too.

As the days grew longer, they read into the evenings. Poetry too. She watched his face, the rapt attention, the play of emotion. No, he wasn’t simple.