The Memory Man (4 page)

She went off like some slip of a girl. When she came back, his eyes were narrowed in anger.

‘Have you seen this?’ He jabbed at the newspaper and handed it to her.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t read German.’

‘You don’t need German to recognize the photograph of me. As for the rest, I’ll translate loosely. It says some garbage like the esteemed Professor Lind suffered an accident yesterday on his way to the Freud Museum, home of his precursor in the field of neurology.’

‘I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t. How dare you suggest that…?’

‘Didn’t you? Who talked to them, then? And it gets worse, if that’s possible. “The Professor, who is here for a conference on memory and blah, blah, might have wanted to set eyes on his childhood home, not so far from his predecessor’s. In fact, perhaps he has returned to Vienna in order to lodge a claim for restitution against the city, take memory to court. The theft of an apartment, certainly – and there may be more, an art collection to equal the contested Rieger horde, extracted by the Nazi state when the family left the city. Professor Lind’s father was a well-known social democrat…”’

‘Is all this true?’ She stared at him.

‘If it were true, would I be sitting here fuming, finding my breakfast impossible to digest?’

‘So it’s not true?’

‘It’s a mixture of truth and lies of the kind your colleagues are so good at serving up. An ignorant and offensive mishmash. An invasion of privacy.’

His forehead had grown warm with perspiration. Irena
suddenly
felt frightened for him. ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ she reassured. ‘It’s just insinuation. I promise you I had nothing to do with it. All I did was tell the convenors that you were in hospital. After that…well, it’s not very difficult for some reporter to put two and two together and get five.’

‘It makes me so angry, I could lodge a claim out of sheer rage.’

‘That’s why most people do it.’

‘Current rage. Not past rage.’

‘A claim against the press, then. Which bits fit the facts?’

‘The childhood home. I don’t know about any picture collection. Maybe there was one.’ He grumbled. ‘It’s the tone. It makes everything meaningless. And my father never left the country.’

There was something in his face that didn’t let her press further. He was a man, she thought, who was probably good at rage, though had learned to contain it, maybe deflect it. She sipped her coffee and stirred some honey into the yoghurt she had selected as looking least indigestible.

‘Will you be going to any of the conference sessions today?’ she asked to change the subject.

He didn’t answer, and she let the silence grow. It grew so thick that she was relieved at Aleksander Tarski’s approach. She remembered now that in a garrulous moment – or was it because she was thinking of her article? – she had suggested they breakfast together. She gestured him to the seat beside her, moved away the cone of a napkin so that he could deposit his plate.

‘You have met, haven’t you?’ she said for lack of anything better.

‘Yes, yes. And I had hoped for a quiet moment with you,
Professor
Lind.’ Tarski’s voice dipped, polite with Polish formality over the ‘Professor’. ‘I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the offprint I sent you, the one I wrote for the
British
Neurological
Journal,
four maybe five months ago.’

‘You sent me something? With your name on it?’ Lind gave the man a stare that was almost rude with doubt. ‘No, no. I don’t remember receiving it. You’re certain?’

Irena intervened. ‘Professor Tarski works on cytokines, their role as messengers between immune and inflammatory cells and looks at how they modulate brain activity.’

Tarski gave her an encouraging smile as if he didn’t quite believe her flow of science. ‘Yes, we’re interested in Il-1, Il-6 and TNF, the tumour necrosis factor, and how they contribute to amyloid deposition and tissue destruction in the formation of Alzheimer plaques.’

‘Oh yes?’ Lind’s demeanour was less suspicious now. ‘And how do they?’

After a few minutes, Irena noted, Lind began to wax enthusiastic, and Tarski was gradually transformed, as if the older man’s enthusiasm, slow to be roused, acted as a tonic, stirring the younger one’s face, his mind, even his body, which now seemed more erect, more vigorous. Irena watched, rapt. It was like watching a mental infusion of some magical elixir or the charge of an electric rod. With the new intensity in his face, Tarski had suddenly been turned into an attractive man. Was this what people meant when they talked about ‘so-and-so’s’ particular brilliance at heading a lab, at getting the best out of their post-docs, that slew of younger researchers who seemed to move round the world like an elite corps of scientific backpackers, sussing out through some impenetrable grapevine which beach or lab was the perfect one for them.

She wished that Lind could infuse her with some of his energy. Not that it would necessarily help her penetrate the arcane matter they were now talking about. If she had come here with the veiled hope that she might learn something that would help her deal with her mother, she was fast giving up on the notion. There was a Gobi of blinding sandstorms and unquenchable thirst to cross between these brain scientists’ descriptions and her mother’s experience, let alone her own, of the slow sadistic killer that Alzheimer’s disease was. Would understanding the nature of a cytokine or the biochemical workings of a memory cascade explain why her mother too often insisted Irena was someone quite other than Irena, someone she called out to with love in her voice, only moments
later to sit frozen in terror in the armchair she was increasingly reluctant to leave? Could anything visible only through an
electron
microscope at a ten-thousand time magnification tell her why, when her mother occasionally blundered out of the building, she would lose herself on a street she had walked on daily for too many years, while she could describe in minute and repetitive detail the night of Irena’s birth in a small town hundreds of
kilometres
away, the name of the midwife, the birds and flowers she had listed so as to mute the pain of the labour – names she still chanted with parallel and rising urgency? Would anything gleaned at this conference help her deal with her mother’s sudden rages, so vicious that she felt reduced to pulp when they were over? She doubted it.

If only there were someone to share it all with.

Which is why, of course, she had come. To try again, after all these years. To try and find a possible kin.

Bruno Lind’s voice penetrated her absence. ‘I’m sorry if I was rude, Ms Davies. You’ll have to forgive an old man.’

‘No. No.’ She had no idea what he was talking about.

‘I’ll leave you now. We’ll see each other later, no doubt. You, too, Professor…Professor...’

‘Tarski,’ the man filled in for him.

‘Yes. Yes, of course. Tarski.’

The next time Irena saw Bruno Lind was in the hotel lobby that evening. He was with a striking chocolate-brown woman, who was slightly taller than him and who had her arms round his neck in what could only be called a passionate clasp. Irena tried not to, but she felt a mixture of envy and disgust.

‘I want to see. It’s important that you take me.’

Bruno Lind ushered Amelia away from the crowded conference buffet. All eyes were on them. And he knew exactly what the mental processes behind those eyes were conjuring up.

‘You shouldn’t have come here.’

‘I knew that if I didn’t come, you’d find some excuse. A message left for me at reception. Important paper, blah…blah… More important meeting…’ She laughed her low sonorous laugh. ‘Admit it.’

Bruno threw his head back and joined in Amelia’s teasing laughter. They were outside now, on the busy midday street. A tram rattled past. ‘Am I that transparent?’

She didn’t answer him directly. ‘It’s important. Important for me too. I want to see it all. Particularly after you got me here under false pretences. Which way?’

‘Let’s take a taxi.’

‘I’d rather walk, if you’re up to it. I’ve been sitting too much. Feel as if I’ve been on planes for weeks. And I spent most of last night tossing and turning.’

Bruno nodded and matched his step to her long, loose stride. ‘I didn’t ask them to send for you, you know. The hospital must have found your name under next of kin in my passport. They did it without asking me.’

‘So you’ve already told me. But they had reason. You were out cold. And not exactly in your first youth. They were right.
Altogether
responsible. So stop complaining. Anyhow, I’m thrilled that you’re up and about. I had you nicely stretched out in a long, low coffin by the time the plane finally landed. And when the
hospital managed to explain that they’d lost you, I thought…’ She rolled her eyes like a silent film star. ‘Never mind all that now. I’m thrilled to be here. Overjoyed. You should have asked me in the first place, Pops. I would have come with you in a flash. I did come in a flash.’

She wound her arm through his, and he patted her hand, again aware of the blatantly disapproving stares of strangers. Let them stare. Let them eat their petty hearts out. Let them have fantasies of miscegenation and stoke the ardour of their barely hidden
race-hatred.
He adored the big, black, beautiful woman at his side. He adored his daughter. Loved her throaty voice with its whoops of laughter, her humour, sharp and cajoling by turn, her wit, her long gangling limbs, which still left her with a residue of the
baseball-playing
tomboy she had once so emphatically been before she transformed herself into a bewitching woman.

Now that she was beside him, he realized again how much he missed her now that distance separated them. Easy, spur-of-
the-moment
encounters were out of the question. London and Los Angeles were just a little too far apart for a last-minute dinner or concert or a casual walk. And a disembodied voice on the telephone was good but not the same.

‘Must have been difficult leaving work and…and everyone so quickly?’

She gave him a look of mock severity. ‘I’m a very efficient woman when needs be, Pops. And the Agency provides me with assistants who can talk to the clients well enough. Then there’s always this,’ she patted her jacket pocket where she kept her mobile, ‘for emergencies and for those poor, despairing writers blocking on a sixth rewrite. As for the rest of those “everyones” you’re too polite to ask about, nothing has changed since we saw each other over Christmas. There isn’t one who minds. So I’m all yours.’

It had always puzzled Bruno that this wonderful woman who was his daughter wasn’t besieged by suitors. Unless men had changed so radically that he could fail to identify one, it seemed to him that the choice must be hers. That she kept them at bay after the unhappy episode of her first marriage.

‘I’m all yours, that is, if you don’t go all secretive and moody. I don’t see why you can’t just march me to the old family home and ask to see it properly. I know…I know, the accident was unfortunate, so you’re a little wary. And the memories can’t be of the best… Still… You’ve come to a conference on memory, not
amnesia
. So you’ll just have to follow suit.’

Her voice was an invitation to tell the story he had always avoided, never filling in anything but the barest details. As if he still had the need to hide. Even now. Today. The habit of disguise went deep. He hadn’t shown her the newspaper article with the vile insinuations that had so troubled him. Or confessed that the accident with the skate-boarder had brought graver scenes in its train.

They were crossing a green in front of the massive Votivkirche. His father’s voice suddenly rang in his ears. His father telling him in that sweet serious way he had, as if he were addressing an adult to whom one had to be especially kind, that the massive church with its two monumental steeples had been built on the very spot where Emperor Franz Josef had survived an assassination attempt by a rebellious Hungarian. Bruno heard himself repeating this piece of information to his daughter in the same tone of voice then adding: ‘And this bit of park is named after a one-time neighbour of ours.’

‘Sigmund Freud Park.’ Amelia read the street sign with emphatic disbelief. ‘You never told me he was a neighbour.’

‘The blow on the head must have brought it back,’ Bruno offered with a touch of mischief.

‘Is that a suggestion that I take up beating you?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘You’re strange, you know. You always used to encourage me to look into the past, to find out more.’

‘That was different. You were different. You were curious. You wanted to know. I already know too much. And all of it is bad.’

Without realizing it, his voice had dropped to a murmur.

‘But I like bad. Especially big bad men. Maybe that’s your doing. So I should be told why. And I’m curious about you. Now that I’m old enough to see that you really did manage to be alive before I appeared on the scene.’ Her self-mockery teased him.

They crossed the busy Wahringerstrasse, and Bruno let his feet lead them. This was home ground. His school wasn’t very far away. Had they already taught him the rudiments of English there? No, no. There was a tutor at home, and his mother would sit in on lessons because she too wanted to learn and as she said, her little
Schatzen
, her little treasure of a boy, couldn’t be allowed to be cleverer than her. Not yet, not yet. So they had repeated the names of objects together as an Englishman in a tweed jacket that sported strange brown patches on the sleeves had leaped about the room pointing with a ruler to everything that could bear a tap, including Bruno’s legs and arms.

‘My mother was a very pretty woman,’ Bruno said.

‘I wish you had photographs of her. And your father.’

‘So do I.’

It was difficult to remember the faces of childhood. Perhaps one never did, not formally, as an image in the mind, though one
recognized
faces if they turned up. Remembering and recognizing were not identical functions, as all the experiments showed. What he remembered of his mother was a presence, a gracious turn of face or arm, cool fingers in his hair, a scent spiced with lemon and… No…no. He wouldn’t go any further.

‘It was different for you, Amelia, you know. You never knew your biological parents. And when the time came that you wanted to, it seemed right to encourage you.’

Eve and he had agreed on that. Had agreed way back in the
sixties
when they had adopted the tiny mite who was to grow into the woman beside him. They had always told her, ever since she had begun to ask, what was effectively a child’s version of the truth. That she had been chosen. That her mommy, Eve, couldn’t have babies – she had left it too late, what with the death of her first husband in the war, then her medical training and work. Bruno had met her when she was already forty, six years older than he was, though she looked utterly girlish, a dark, slim, darting creature with curling black hair and red lips that burst into lavish smiles, sunlight after the storms of her cares. The miracle was she had chased him. Had eventually proposed in a matter of fact way, or he would never have thought of it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to settle down. Or that he didn’t like women. There had, in the welter of circumstance, been perhaps too many. His desires seemed not so much unassuageable as somewhat random, unpredictable. Yet he had benefited from the kindness of women. And he had loved them in turn, passionately at times, best as he could at others. But somehow he had never settled. It wasn’t quite an inability to commit, as the modish agony aunts would have it. It wasn’t as if he was even hoping for bigger or better or simply other. It was just that, what with work and the person he then was, a little retarded in some spheres, the whole possibility of anything as wonderfully ordinary as marriage and its supposition of a future didn’t enter his line of vision.

Until Eve put it there squarely, all details pre-considered. She said to him, you want to lay down roots for the future. Roots in the future rather than in the past. He had liked that. It had calmed him. Over the years she had taught him kindness, gentleness, all those qualities the war had destroyed in him. And he had loved her as he hadn’t loved before, perhaps because she had been so open and frank and had refused ploys and mystery, had loved her loyally, responsibly. Had suffered with her when the babies refused to be conceived, had thought at one point that it could just as easily be his problem as Eve’s, since there had been no conceptions yet. In the event, he had readily agreed to adoption.

Eve had arranged everything. Her work in obstetrics meant that she knew about services and agencies. He had also suspected at the time, though he didn’t say anything, since he trusted her to tell him if she wanted to or if it was important, that she already had a baby in view, that she already knew of a prospective mother, that there was a complicated story in the case. He had only really guessed at the story when they had gone to fetch the baby. And by then he didn’t care whether she was black or white or blue. It was love at first sight. The round, staring, rich chocolate eyes, the little folds in arms and legs, the tuft of hair that stood straight out as he folded the mite in his embrace, woke something in him, spoke to him in some deep preverbal tongue so that he knew he would
protect
this babe with his life.

It was only later that he learned Eve had indeed met the mother who was all of seventeen, who was desolate at having conceived as the result of a drunken night’s partying, and who was terrified that her father would kill her when he found out that the youth – who was now off doing army duty in Vietnam – was black. He might kill her in any case, simply for being pregnant. Which was why her mother had brought her from Pittsburgh to Boston, where she had a cousin, on the pretext of enrolling her in a good secretarial college.

All this Amelia had discovered at the age of eighteen, when she set out in search of her birth parents. Her biological mother was by then living in a Philadelphia suburb, and she had agreed, though a little reluctantly, to a meeting with Amelia in town, far from the home she now shared with a husband and three young children. Amelia had described the meeting as the closest thing to a non-event one could imagine between mother and long-abandoned child.

‘I think she took one look at me and that was the full extent of her interest. That and making sure that I wasn’t about to start calling on her at home and making demands and wanting to meet my half-siblings. One hundred percent white siblings, of course. Her husband was a good Christian, she told me at least twenty times; another twenty went to exonerating herself and assuring me that she knew she had put me into good hands, safe hands. Better hands than her own. Well, she was right on that count, at least.’

Amelia’s father, they had learned a little later, had died in Vietnam.

‘Is this it, Pops?’

Bruno hadn’t realized he had slowed his steps to a standstill, and they were standing on the very spot where he had been toppled by the skateboarder, a second toppling. First time as tragedy, second time as farce. Yes, but far better in most instances, it occurred to him, for history to take place as farce.

‘This is it. The Lind family residence from…well, I’m not sure, perhaps my birth until 1938.’

‘Imposing.’

‘Middle-class.’

‘Imposing, whatever class.’

‘We only had one of the apartments on the second floor.’

‘And servants, I bet.’

He tried to remember. Yes there had been a fat housekeeper who always wore black, and when his sister came along, there was also Basia, no, no…Stefcia, a plump playful girl with pale silky braids wrapped round her head, who seemed barely older than he was.

‘There’s a woman staring down at us.’

Bruno looked up. ‘Yes, she was there the other day. That was the apartment.’

‘Why don’t we ask if we can have a look?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Come on. What are you afraid of?’

He met Amelia’s eyes and wondered what indeed he was afraid of. Would there be ghosts lurking in the walls, odours to choke him springing up between floorboards, stray messages from his mother lost behind sofas, like the notes she used to leave lying about signalling a treasure hunt, sometimes in English. Dandy Lion, he suddenly recalled. It was all so long ago. He really didn’t want to go up there. In case there was a fall. Like in the dream.

But what was a dream anyway? Not a sign. Not a prophecy. Just brain activity. Random. There was always more random activity going on up there than in response to any external stimulus. In sleep some of that activity coalesced into images. Fine. There was your dream.

Now researchers believed that memory was ‘consolidated’ in dreams, the short-term somehow becoming long-term. You could tell by the rate of protein synthesis. Okay. Okay. So what had he stored up? What had he learned somewhere along the way that he didn’t any longer recognize? No idea. Not a scrap. Some of them said it was beneficial to dream though. When they cut out the dreaming bit, the bit that also transmitted dopamine, the patients grew listless, apathetic. No more driving urges. Maybe he should have it cut out. Leucotomy. No more dreams. No more falling. Of course these days there was not much cutting either. It would all be done, a little erratically, through drugs.