The Memory Man (5 page)

Amelia was staring at him with all the brave innocence of
someone
who thought both dreams and history were an adventure, a voyage of discovery. As far as she was concerned, when truth came to light it was always for the best. Bruno, despite the scientific optimism behind which he generally breathed, couldn’t rid
himself
of the feeling that this time it wouldn’t be for the best.

And then the woman with the bare arms and the light-brown hair burst from the heavy door like some explosive force and flung a barrage of words at him which at first he could make no sense of. Though the tone of hostility aimed at both him and Amelia was palpable.

As he accustomed himself to the idiom, he realized that the woman was berating him. Berating him because she had acted like a good Christian to save his life, which might have been in danger, when in fact he was only coming here to rob her of her home. She should have let him die on the pavement. Yes, she had read all about it in the papers. And she wasn’t just going to lie down and let it happen. They had paid a good sum in key money for the apartment, and they hadn’t known anything about whom it had belonged to before them, Jews or Nazis or Turks or alien invaders or good Austrians, as she was… It made no difference. Their money had been taken, and she lived here legitimately now. She had two school-age children he should know so she could only hold down a part-time job, and her husband had left her last year for some flibbertigibbet of a vamp in his office that was part of a multinational, so he was now off in Kenya… She threw Amelia a dirty look as if she were somehow a representative of Kenya. So there. And she burst into tears.

‘What’s up, Pops?’

‘She thinks I’ve come to claim the apartment.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll explain later.’

He soothed the woman, politely asked her name, thanked her for ringing the ambulance the other day, told her he had no intention of making a claim, that the newspapers as usual had got things wrong just to fill their pages; and in any case when these things happened, the claim was usually against the state, which had a fund
set up for such matters. He talked and calmed until the woman started to breathe normally and, as she did, he heard himself asking whether they might have a peek upstairs, just for memory’s sake, since she had already come down to greet them. He had spent happy years in the apartment with his parents. And he’d like to show his daughter the childhood home. He patted Amelia’s shoulder.

‘Daughter?’ Frau Berndt looked from one to the other of them with lingering suspicion, now mingled with a bored woman’s curiosity. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Is your daughter in the movies?’

He nodded, letting the little white lie do its work. Amelia had an artless glamour about her that drew the eye. It was there in the long-legged swing of a hip, the casual toss of the head, the wide curling lips and cheekbones. He watched it do its work on Frau Berndt, who might have preferred prejudice but for Hollywood’s power.

With a little flurry of excitement and another glance at Amelia, the woman acquiesced… If he was really certain he had no other intention but to have a look.

‘What did she say?’ Amelia queried.

‘She’s inviting us up. She likes your pretty face.’

‘Good work, Pops. I knew you had it in you. Did you tell her I was Jewish?’ Her broad grin elicited what was almost a smile from an unsuspecting Frau Berndt.

The apartment had either been subdivided or had shrunk – because he had grown or because every corner was stuffed with painted chests and heavy oak wardrobes, sofas and armchairs, as if Frau Berndt ran a second-hand furniture business on the side, which wasn’t doing too well. The whole bore little relation to anything he remembered and he was now disappointed, sorry they had gone to the trouble. Even the rooms seemed to be in different places.

When Amelia, out of politeness, commented on a painted chest, Frau Berndt seemed to understand and explained that it came from
her mother, who had died recently. She pointed to other bits of furniture – a loden-green leather armchair, an ungainly cupboard with clawed feet, a refectory table, all with the feel of a country tavern… He just stopped himself in time from saying it aloud. In case he was wrong. In case Frau Berndt heard the displeasure in his voice. It was then that he realized she was wearing a dirndl, a
peasant
get-up: a piece of folklore in the city. Come to think of it, he had seen other women wearing them too. And they hadn’t been waitresses in mock-country restaurants. Hitler’s handmaidens.

Didn’t they realize what it conjured up?

He needed to get out of here. The place was airless. Like a tomb. His father must be turning in his unmarked grave at the thought of a dirndl-wearing woman in here.

Then suddenly, he heard them. The sound of heavy boots on the stairs, coming closer and closer. The knock. Heavy. Commanding. Threatening. The men bursting in, their uniforms shiny with bars and eagles, their faces cruel. The drawers searched, the house invaded, the money found hidden behind underwear. His father frogmarched away, the sorrowful backward glance, part shame at failure, part courage, consolation, urging future hope.

Bruno shivered with cold perspiration. But he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t been there when they came for his father. The images weren’t his. Not memory of a lived event at all, but memory of an experience imagined, his father’s plight, reinforced by countless films and books, perhaps even by his mother’s narrative or that of others, a memory solidified by repetition, so that it became a part of him, was felt – a collective memory which was also individual, his own. Here. Recorded in these walls.

Flashbulb memories. That’s what they called them in the profession. Shocking, traumatic experiences or images, reproduced by the media time and again, and bringing with them great floods of adrenalin and steroids, picked up by the amygdala and the
hippocampus
, imprinted. Here, inside. In his brain. As if he had lived it himself.

History wasn’t bunk. It was a long trail of flashbulb memories. Countless details coalescing into received images, tableaux, icons, simply because it was these our synapses registered over and over
again, learned, until the emotion which had made them
memorable
in the first instance became trite, third-hand, voided. And then entire sequences disappeared into oblivion until they were discovered afresh.

He forced the racing thoughts away and concentrated on the physical reality of the present.

His childhood home had been airy, uncluttered, modern.
Nothing
like this.

Frau Berndt opened a door into a child’s room and then another and another, a concatenation of doors, and suddenly Bruno had the impression he was running wildly, racing, ducking, pushing one door open and then another, into his sister’s room and then out again and round through another door into his own. Round and round, chased by Stefcia, when Anna was just tiny, a package on a bed. Out of breath, he would nip down behind a chair. Hide and seek. Until Stefcia found him and, laughing, picked him up, called him her little man, he must have been five or six – no, more, more because Anna was there – eight or nine probably. Stefcia tickled him, tickled him until he roared and pleaded with her to stop, and the tears poured from his eyes.

Now that could only be his own memory.

‘You okay, Pops?’

‘Yes, yes. Fine. This was my room, I think.’ He looked up, and there, above where his bed had been, tucked into the corner of the high ceiling, was a single figure from what had been a stencilled frieze: a boy drummer, dressed in blue, beating out a marching rhythm all along the walls of his room. What was the song his mother had sung? Sung in Polish? Yes. Something to do with
freedom.
A horse and freedom. No, no, a little soldier who went off to war with bravery and seven horses and came back with one. Only one… But the words wouldn’t coalesce any more.

‘Did I ever tell you my mother used to talk to me in Polish when we were alone? Sing too.’

‘In Polish? No. No, you didn’t. How come?’ Amelia was gazing at him intently, as if he had suddenly grown a pair of wings or sprouted fins. ‘Maybe we’ve had enough of this for one day, Pops.

Let’s go and grab a cup of coffee. Or something stronger. You look as if you could use it.’

At first they mistook
Philosophie im Boudoir
for a café. But it was a furnishings shop. Salacious sheets and cushion covers were draped over a couch, just a joke’s throw from the Freud house. The only neurologist in history to spawn his own kitsch, Bruno thought, unsure whether he reckoned that was a good or a bad thing.

They had to turn a corner before they found a place, a sizeable establishment with
Jugendstil
flowers etched into its windows. An old ceiling fan had been pressed into service and gave their
conversation
a slow, sultry, timeless feel.

‘So your mother was Polish?’

‘Galician. It’s what the Austrian-ruled regions of Poland were called. Galicia.’

‘Like Spain.’

‘Like Spain and unlike Spain. Cold and wintry, really, but
southern
by Polish standards. The lazy south. Anyhow, my mother’s family was from Krakow. And they had a country place as well… Further east, towards what’s now the Ukraine. Borders shifted a lot in that part of the world.’

‘You’re telling me. One minute I have an Austrian father, the next he’s turned into a Pole.’

‘Does it make any difference?’

‘Maybe it does. I don’t know. I’m just beginning to find out.’ She assessed him with her frank gaze. ‘Good coffee. And you should eat something. You’re looking too white. Can’t be right. Gotta get some colour into you’

Bruno laughed. He loved the banter they had developed about colour. Eve had started them off, always sensitive to the slights Amelia might suffer, acknowledging her difference, but not wanting to make too much of it. Colour, race needn’t be an ultimately defining characteristic, she would argue with a rebellious teenage Amelia, who had abandoned all her white friends for black,
though she didn’t feel at home with them either. Colour wasn’t the whole of her identity. She was also a woman, the child of
middle-class
professionals, a lover of books, a champion swimmer, a layabout with the world’s untidiest room. And when Pops shouted at her, she knew full well it had nothing to do with her being black and everything to do with lip; just as when she shouted at him, he didn’t label her anti-Semitic – it might not be the Jewish bit of him, whatever that was, that she was railing at. As for feeling at home, home was what you turned it into. And so it went on, until adolescence and Amelia’s marriage were over, and they reached the age of jokes.

Then, too quickly, Eve was gone: Eve who had been his cherished companion for all those years, first in Boston, then San Diego, then New York, then back to Cambridge, where the end had come. Too soon. The cancer had eaten her up, until she said to him at last: ‘That’s it. I’m about to lose my most precious sense. Please, please get them to up the morphine. I want to go smiling.’ He didn’t know if she had somehow managed to convince one of her colleagues, but she went soon after that, faded into her pain and out. Leaving him and Amelia clutching at each other, utterly bereft.

‘A penny for those black thoughts that always make you so pale.’

‘The furniture. It got to me.’

‘It wasn’t where you left it?’

‘That too.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I know. I can’t talk about it yet.’

‘Okay. But I’m not leaving you. Not leaving you until I’ve heard a little more about this Polish mother. A lot more, in fact. I need to know, Pops. Really, I do. I never talked to Eve enough about her family, and then she upped and vanished on me. Parents are altogether unreliable, that way.’ She gave him a smile, half rueful, half persuasive.

‘Maybe we should go to Poland too, while we’re so close. You owe me a story, Pops. A big one, I imagine. A history. To think you’ve kept it from me even after I became a half-orphan.’ She
shook her head in mock mournfulness, which did nothing to hide the real feeling beneath. ‘Even after I took on the faith. Well, a bit of it.’

It was true. Some years back – for reasons he didn’t really understand, except that people did these things in the mysterious country that America continued to be to him whenever he paused to consider it – Amelia had decided to join a temple. She had decided to become Jewish, she told him with a lazy smile, because the Jews knew deep down about the workings of prejudice.

There, Bruno had to acknowledge, she had a distinct point. And if he, himself, knew little of belief or faith, he had an intimate acquaintance with the harsher end of prejudice. Beatings, killings, terror, the inner tremblings of disguise, these were not subjects he had ever before taken up with her. Now it looked as if he was going to have to, though he still didn’t feel they were matters that he knew how to broach – even with himself.

He had spent so long dealing with memory as chemistry that having to confront his own past as narrative, whatever the ruptures and blanks, presented itself as a daunting task.

Irena Davies tiptoed quietly to the back of the conference room and slipped out. She’d had enough for one day. Probably enough altogether. Certainly more than enough notes to write an article from. She now knew that the cerebellum and the basal ganglia – which was affected in Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s Chorea – were responsible for controlling tacit or automatic memory, habits and skills, but not memory of facts and events, which was a function of the cortex and that little seahorse called ‘the hippocampus’ and probably lots of other bits as well,
including
electric currents generated by them. She knew that biochemical cascades resulted in structural modifications of synapses and dendrites, and that this was the microscopic trace of learning or laying down memories.

She had also learned that over the ages various metaphors had been used for explaining memory, all of them attempts to
understand
how the mind worked. There were seals leaving traces on soft wax; vast storehouses with many chambers and ranks of pigeonholes, some secret; elaborate palaces with thousands of rooms each named. There were metaphors from photography in which memory acted like a chemical, leaving ghostly images behind; and from archaeology with its shards and relics, all needing sifting and reassembly. Meanwhile, from the digital world came hard and soft discs and neural nets. There were also homunculi and mystic writing pads in which scratchy traces or scars were left on a hard plate that was continually being overwritten. A little like the more recent long- and short-term memory model really – which was a model and not a metaphor, because there had been experiments to test and prove it in a lab.

In all this nobody had told her whether automatic memory was linked to unconscious memory, in the sense that her mother was on automatic pilot when she was remembering something but utterly unaware of what was going on around her. But maybe that wasn’t interesting to the scientists.

On the other hand, she had learned a little about pre- and postsynaptic potentials in cells and the strengthening of links between them – the links being the chemical equivalents of memory. She had also learned about the conditioning of giant slugs, called ‘aplysia’, who had giant neurons easily visible if you knew how to get at them through the goo. And about target receptors, Morris mazes, fearful rats, not to mention various proteins and peptides that played a part in making memories.

And maybe that was quite enough to try and digest. Which only left attending the session Tarski was chairing. And, of course, seeing him on his own for a while – the train home would be perfect for that. He seemed to be rather a good sort, and not all her hopes were quashed, but nor had she let them rage. She would just have to bide her time and put discreet questions to him when the moments came right. Maybe, just maybe…

But for now, what she wanted was a drink, a chance to be on her own for a while and to do some sightseeing. She might never have the opportunity of visiting Vienna again.

She thought of hopping onto a tram that seemed to be going in the right direction but remembered what she had been told about the city’s radial structure and crossed over instead, past the overly impressive Burgtheater into the inner city, where she chose a small unobtrusive café to pop into and down a glass of the cold white wine they called
Heurige.
She wondered why she had refused wine at lunch only to relish it now. She was becoming a secret drinker. Like some aging Edwardian spinster who hoarded her sherry. Maybe it was that she preferred the secrecy to the drink. She rolled the thought round her tongue for a while and decided it was bollocks. The bigger secret, the one she couldn’t bear to divulge until she knew more about it herself, was what drove her to the little one, the drink, which at least had an element of pleasure attached to it. And pleasures were few and far enough between these days.

When she had rung home and spoken to Hela this morning, the friend who had kindly agreed to look after her mother for a few days, Hela’s voice had been full of awe. ‘It’s so mysterious, Irena, and so scary. When I greeted her today, she asked me who I was and my age and where I lived and how my mother was, all in tones of the greatest formal politeness, and as if I were a young girl; then a minute later when I brought breakfast, she asked me again, and again after we’d had a stroll round the room. Then all of a sudden she was telling me about the farm she grew up on and about the wheat harvest, and she started naming all the servants on the estate as if she spoke to them daily.’

Irena had thanked her over and over again.

Yes, this interest in memory must in part be due to a generalized fear that they were all about to lose it, as more and more of the population grew older. Or was it because they had given up so much of it already to devices that did the remembering for them – computers and palm pilots, tapes and CDs?

Irena caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the bar. She could do with a personal organizer. It would beep to remind her to find a present for Hela. She must do that straight away. She wasn’t all that flush this month, because of the painting and maintenance work that had had to be done on the London flat, but still, she would find something lovely for her.

Sometimes she thought that the fact Anthony had left her the Maida Vale flat had been her downfall. Since she had had to come back to Poland for her mother, she had supported them both on the rent it brought in. Though things would soon change, given the rise and rise of prices, it had meant that up until now she hadn’t had to work much, not that work in any case brought in all that much. Though she worried constantly that Anthony would suddenly decide to take the flat away from her. He had always been so much cleverer than she was about such things. And even though she knew from friends that his media company was doing well, and that he hardly needed more income, she worried. Maybe she worried because she no longer knew how to do much else.

Irena downed her wine and strolled out into the sunny streets. It was a fine city, Vienna, the lofty spires rising unexpectedly out
of intimate lanes, the flowers spewing out of window boxes, vibrant against the pale stone. And she liked the higgledy-piggledy quality of it all, the lack of straight lines: the lack too, if she dare admit it, of any real sense of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. It felt as if nothing had changed much since Mozart’s day, certainly Schubert’s. Maybe it was because she had taken the train in, bypassed the airport, and had hardly strayed from hotel and university. The city felt small, intimate, pre-modern. Krakow was like that too.

A moment later, Irena felt she had generalized too soon. To the side of the square upon which she had stumbled stood a strange concrete mound that could only be a piece of contemporary sculpture. There was something frightening about it in the midst of this old square. She walked towards the mound and realized she had happened upon the much-contested memorial to the Austrian victims of the Shoah. The piece was a concrete cast of a library, its volumes eerily visible from the back, inside out, a fitting monument for the people of the book.

No sooner had the thought coalesced than Irena felt the rise of a niggling counter-thought. Why was there no equivalent memorial here, or indeed anywhere, for the Shoah the Nazis had perpetrated on the Poles? In the tide of deaths, three million was hardly a negligible figure, and they too had been part of Hitler’s master killing plan. But no one cared about Poles. She had come to that realization in London. Oh, it was fine and well when for a moment they could be classed as romantic rebels, solidarity workers united against the iron fist of Communism, but as soon as that was over, bye-bye heroism. What stuck far more solidly, like some champion brand of superglue, was that her lot were somehow complicit in the Holocaust, anti-Semites from Hell, akin to the Nazis, their eternal abetters of evil in some absolute scale of good and bad. Oh yes, she had experienced those glassy looks even at London parties, let alone the few trips to New York she had taken with Anthony, where she sometimes thought she might have perpetrated the death of millions single-handedly. But history wasn’t like that. Not unless you bought into some American comic-book version where good and evil tackled each other like Batman and the Joker.

Not that she bought into the cleaner than clean version of Polish patriotic history either, she hastened to tell herself. That was almost as bad. Inside Poland you suffered from the latter, outside from the former. Maybe she was still oversensitive to the former. At least Poles couldn’t be part of the terrorist evil. That was clear. They were the wrong colour of religious. And what would the Pope say?

In fact, after London, it seemed to her that Polish cities had no colour at all.

Right on cue, as if perhaps the subliminal sight of them had prompted the thought, Irena saw Professor Lind and that girlfriend of his. She had to be a girlfriend. She was certainly too young to be his wife…or could one permit oneself such flights if one was a famous scientist? Why not? Why ever not? Certainly, he hadn’t bothered with Irena since the woman had appeared on the scene. And she was beautiful, she had to grant him that. Quite delicious, Anthony would have said. So there was no question that the great Professor Lind was going to pay attention to her little note telling him that Aleksander Tarski would be deeply honoured (though he would never dare ask) if the Professor could make a little time to drop in on his session at the conference. It seemed he was a great admirer of the Professor’s work, etc. etc. It also seemed that Irena had been a fool even to suggest she could work such miracles.

She suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired. There was no point really. No point jollying herself along with her little ploys and silly asides. Even she couldn’t be bothered to muster an interest in herself. No point. Childless women like her might as well be shot when they reached the age of fifty, so as to be put out of their misery. Her only use was in looking after an even more useless mother.

‘Ms Davies. I thought it was you.’ Professor Lind was suddenly upon her. ‘Thank you for your note. Yes, of course.’ He gave her one of his penetrating looks so that she began to wonder if he could secretly gauge the level of alcohol in her, or the state of her hormones. ‘Of course, I’d be happy to attend Aleksander Tarski’s session, if he’d like me there. But wait a minute: you haven’t met Amelia yet. Ms Davies, my daughter, Amelia.’

‘Daughter?’ Irena stumbled over an uneven cobble and
struggled
to right herself. How cynical she must have grown over human relations never to have had that thought even cross her consciousness. She had locked herself in with her mother too much. She must make an effort to get out more, air her prejudices.

Lind helped her steady herself. ‘Yes. I’m a uniquely fortunate man, don’t you think? She flew over to rescue me from the clutches of the hospital I’d already fled.’

‘He’ll do anything to get filial attention.’

Irena didn’t know whether she had heard the sardonic note in this altogether surprising daughter’s words. She stretched out a hand.

‘The Professor is wonderfully resilient. If I’d been the object of that rash skater’s board, I think I’d still be stretched on the hospital bed.’

‘You were there, of course. I should thank you for coming to his rescue. You weren’t to know that Pops has developed a late allergy to hospitals.’

‘I can’t say I blame him. Though the place looked rather more hotel-like than the death pits you get at home.

‘Home?’

‘Ms Davies, despite her accent is from Poland, Amelia. Look, there’s Andrew Wood with Bob Wells. You remember Bob. From San Diego.’ He waved across the square and started to walk in the direction of the two men, who were visibly arguing.

Amelia grinned but she didn’t follow Bruno.

‘Did my father mention, Ms…’

‘Call me Irena, please.’

‘Did he mention that his mother was from Poland?’

‘No, no he didn’t. I had no idea.’ Irena stared at her. ‘But his mother must have been…must have been Jewish.’

‘Does that make a difference?’

‘No, no. Only…yes. During the war…you know…’

‘Well, I’m not altogether sure I do. Not really.’ Amelia looked down at her shoe, which was flat and delicate and striped. ‘I only learned about it today. He hasn’t exactly been advertising the fact.’

‘And your mother?’ For once Irena felt more curious about the present than the past.

‘Dead, I’m afraid. Almost three years ago now. We all miss her. Particularly him. She was a force.’

‘And she was?’

‘Oh, I see. American. A doctor.’ She paused, cast a sidelong glance at Irena. ‘I’m trying to get my father to make a little trip to Poland. To take me there. Now that we’ve come this far already.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just this hunch I have. It would be good for him. Perhaps you could invite him to your Institute.’

Irena giggled. ‘My institute consists of one patient, who happens to be my mother, though it’s true that – as you might say – she’s challenged in the memory department.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault. But I know someone who would be delighted to extend an invitation to your father. Though I fear the Polish Institutes can’t always afford to pay.’

‘That’s not the kind of incentive he needs.’

‘What, then?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘I’m not certain. But anything is worth a try. I just feel that. You know he wouldn’t come with me to the Holocaust Museum in Washington when it opened. A friend of mine worked on it and…but he wouldn’t come.’

‘Maybe he’s had enough of all that.’

Irena felt her uncomprehending stare.

‘But never mind. I’m certain an invitation would be no problem.’

‘Oh, excuse me.’ Amelia dug into her pocket and brought out her ringing telephone. ‘California’s just waking up. I’ll have to take this.’

Irena caught up with the men. Andrew Wood was trying to explain to two Japanese tourists that he didn’t really want to snap a photo of them in front of the memorial to the Jewish dead. It wasn’t appropriate.