The Memory Man (6 page)

Meanwhile, Bob Wells, lean and casual and altogether un-professorial in blue jeans, was reading from his guidebook and pointing at a statue. ‘Gotfried Lessing. A great enlightener. He wrote a book called
Nathan the Wise
that was tolerant towards the
Jews. So when the Nazis came into Vienna, the statue was pulled down. Apparently, a new cast was made just after the War.’

‘But it says right there…’ Bruno pointed, laughed, waved over Amelia, ‘the statue wasn’t put back on its plinth until 1982. Thirty-six years later. Guess they forgot.’

‘Almost a case of wilful amnesia, I imagine,’ Amelia noted as she tucked her phone away.

‘At that rate, my much publicized, if non-existent, case for
restitution
should take until approximately 2040.’

‘We learn our contemporary history through the histories of our monuments,’ Irena heard herself say.

They all looked at her.

‘It’s true. Up they go and down they come, depending on the regime. Up, down, up down. Like a game of musical monuments. Captions graffiti-ed over, changed, rewritten along the way. Just wait till the Lenins start going up again in the Soviet Union.’

‘You really think so?’ Wood looked at her intently.

‘It’s as possible as anything else.’

‘We edit internally too. Don’t we, Andrew?’ Lind intervened. ‘When you pump some 2-Dgal into your chicks or give them an electric shock, they forget what they’ve already learned.’

‘They do, indeed. Though only if they’ve learned it
superficially.
If the memory’s become long-term, it’ll come back with the appropriate triggers.’

They walked on a little and Irena paused to look at a house that was far older than its neighbours. An intricate relief showed a river baptism scene.

‘Strange to have this on the square and so close to the Shoah monument, don’t you think?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘What does it say?’

‘My Latin’s a bit rusty. Something about Baptism in the Jordan ridding one of sin, disease, evil. Ritual cleansing.’

‘Oh, I read about that.’ Bob Wells joined them. ‘The relief describes a pogrom, another great instance of the state using the Jews as scapegoats for various ills. In 1421. Albrecht V, I think it was. He had Vienna’s poorer Jews stripped of the little they
possessed
and forced them down the Danube on rafts, while the richer
ones were tortured until they revealed where they’d hidden their wealth. Then they were burned alive. Many chose suicide instead of torture. It’s one of the great historical instances of ethnic cleansing. According to my book.’

‘I think I’ve had enough history for one day,’ Bruno said quietly.

So had Irena. Pyres had leaped up around the square while the man talked. She could almost smell the charred flesh, hear the screaming children.

She excused herself. ‘I’d forgotten. I’d arranged to meet
someone
. And to buy a present. I’ve got to get back.’ She looked at her watch, made hasty goodbyes.

‘One always forgets things at conferences about memory.’ Andrew Wood threw her a smile that wasn’t altogether reassuring.

Irena had lied. No one was waiting for her. But she had wanted to get away. Away from these Brits and Americans with their certainties about right and wrong, about Jews and Gentiles, blacks and whites. Had she imagined it or were they all staring directly at her when that Bob Wells was going on about that pogrom almost six hundred years ago?

The trouble was they didn’t seem to realize every bit of ground here had been the site of some battle or siege or horror. Some plague of rats or locusts. You never walked except to step over bodies. Turks against Poles, against Austrians, Russians against Poles against Turks against Prussians, Hungarians against
Romanians
against Bulgarians, Lats and Liths and Ruthenians and Moravians and Bohemians and Slovaks and Lemks and Czechs and Croats and Serbs.

And that wasn’t even to get into the French or Italians or
Germans
, let alone the Brits and their ships, ships everywhere, unheard of bits of the world. In her school days, they were given names of battles to memorize, whole lists of heroic resistances against invading Turks and Russians and Germans and Austrians and French. And because the Brits had never been occupied, well not since the Normans, they somehow felt superior. As for the Americans, they promptly forgot all those Indians they’d done
away with and behaved as if they had a monopoly on virtue. That Amelia must know better.

She was tired. Overreacting. She shouldn’t have left them. But all this effort of concentration after being cooped up with her mother was too much. Her mind had gone to seed, had lost its resilience, its agility.

She sometimes really thought her mother’s condition was
contagious.
That she, too, was growing demented. Several days alone in her mother’s presence and the sharp outlines of the real faded, blurred, metamorphosed under the charge of the old woman’s insistent emotion. For several months her mother had been certain that a neighbour was breaking into the house, that he was climbing up onto the roof and lowering himself down a chimney in order to invade her bedroom and her lounge and steal her most precious possessions. She would grip Irena’s arm with the force of panic and breathlessly recount the experience as if a massed raid had taken place. She insisted that the police be called.

Indeed, one day when Irena was out, the poor woman had called them and Irena had found a bemused policeman comforting her mother when she returned. Irena had, first patiently, and then with growing impatience explained that it was hardly likely that the neighbour would break in, that there was nothing to steal, that he was too fat and drunk to get down the chimney, that reason dictated otherwise. But her mother’s nocturnal fear spread through the house and gathered in dark corners.

One sleepless night it leaped out at her, creaked across floorboards, produced ominous shadows that fluttered wildly past
curtains
and pounced on her, so that she thought she would suffocate. She was certain that a burglary was in progress. Unable to get up or reach the phone, she just managed to burrow under bedclothes. She tried not to breathe. When first light finally came, she tiptoed out of bed to see what had been taken, what mess had been left. Nothing had been touched. She had grown as demented as her mother.

Yes, contagion.

On another occasion, her mother had talked of a Jana, who was coming to visit on the weekend. The best china had to be brought
out, something special prepared, because she was a dear, dear old friend. Her mother, who rarely anticipated anything but disaster seemed so happy at the prospect that Irena put extra effort into preparations, bought special food, a good bottle of wine. She wanted to make her mother happy. On the appointed evening, no one came. Irena realized that she had been completely taken in by a fantasy, or a memory, or a hallucination, whereas her mother, when it came to the evening in question, had forgotten all about Jana’s supposed visit.

Yes, Irena told herself, she now inhabited a world of shifting shapes, where the real and the imaginary blended with disquieting effect. It was likely that the story her mother had told her all those years ago when she hadn’t suspected Alzheimer’s or senility or anything at all was as demented as all the rest. Why else, having kept it secret for some forty years, should the woman suddenly decide to orphan her, to tell her that her father wasn’t her father at all, to tell her when all the relevant parties except her mother were probably dead and buried? It was an act of maternal aggression that could be considered certifiable.

Lock her up. Lock her up, a voice in Irena now raged. Yet Irena had accepted it all, at first. She had added a romantic veil and a knight on horseback to her mother’s pedestrian image; had
readjusted
her sense of herself too, had even made some cursory inquiries about a man called Tarski, and then gone back with a new tale to tell Anthony in England. In the light of her life then, filled with future potential, what did all those stories of long ago matter? She wasn’t really interested in distant, dusty fathers buried in Polish soil.

And then since her return to Poland, it had all begun to niggle at her. Now that she could no longer trust any of her mother’s words, it was as if the dementia reached backwards and arched over the years. Every bearing she had grew wobbly, uncertain. Why hadn’t she grilled her mother sooner? She had left everything too late. Why hadn’t she paid better attention to all those stories of her mother’s early life? And whose daughter was she, anyway? Her assumed father’s: Witek Kanikow, the only father she had known, a kind enough man, solid, reliable, a railway engineer who
shied away from rows or even debates, left those to his fierier wife and daughter and seemed happy enough simply to get by?

Or was there really someone else?

She sometimes felt, as she heard her demented mother shuffling along the floorboards of the small house they shared some twenty minutes from the centre of Krakow, that they were two of a kind. While her mother wandered through the cobwebs – or was it plaques and tangles? – of her disintegrating brain, she, Irena, dreamed gossamer dreams, created fantasies of rescue involving rich and interesting fathers and brothers, even sisters, who would whisk her into a new life – or at the very least, help with her mother and provide an anchor against loneliness.

Now that it was clear there would be no children of her own, in her most secret core she wished herself a new family in which she could feel at home.

Yes, they had become horribly similar. Behind the folds and
furrows
the years had brought, she and her mother, with those eerie clear blue eyes turned inward, were just two girls – watchful, fearful, yet somehow innocent – still hoping the world would bring them no harm, perhaps even an occasional kindness.

A sombre cloud had settled over the city with no warning. Moments later a deluge fell on the streets, thick, warm drops like pellets, leaping up where they hit the cobbles. Irena took refuge inside a church, a pretty church with a small baroque dome aflutter with angels and puffball clouds. There was a lingering smell of incense in the air. She kneeled and crossed herself as she had an intense memory of doing in the small country church of her childhood. She offered an unspoken prayer and then lit a candle for her mother

Two days later, without knowing quite how it had happened, Irena found herself sitting on a train bound for Krakow. It was not the sitting that was bizarre, or the train that was as shabby-genteel as the last one with soft, slightly sagging seats, though the windows had been scrubbed, and at least they could see out. The surprise was who was sitting with her in the compartment. For one there
was Professor Aleksander Tarski. Next to him sat Amelia, gorgeous in jeans and a casual jacket with bits of glass beads on it that caught the light. And opposite them by the window, looking out gravely, as if he might conjure up bits of landscape and bring them in for microscopic examination, was Professor Bruno Lind.

For once, Irena thought, coming home held out just a little excitement.

Bruno Lind leaned into his seat. The even repetitive rhythm of the rails produced a dream-like somnolence. Greens and browns and blues of varying hues rose and fell before him A herd of spotted cows came into focus only to disappear just as quickly, followed by a regal house with a vaulted dome, small hillside vineyards, and in the mysterious distance, the purple folds of mist-covered mountains, their shapes as inconstant as their constancy. The train might be moving forward, ploughing towards some destination, but the sensation was that of being held in a capsule, one that lulled, produced a hole in time.

It had been an age since he had spent more than a necessary hour on a train. And those weren’t real journeys. The one before him was.

He still had no idea why he had succumbed to Amelia’s insistence, coupled with Aleksander Tarski’s charming invitation and Irena Davies’s more diffident persuasion. It felt to him a little as if they were all in cahoots. Certainly, the man and his daughter were keeping up some kind of patter now, which he couldn’t quite bother to tune into. But he could see that Amelia was relaxed. That was good. As for this Tarski, if she had any idea of the thoughts he aroused in Bruno, she would probably have dragged her father back to LA in the flash of a credit card. But there was no need for her to know.

If he thought about it, the last time he had been on a train
journey
of any length in Europe must have been in the autumn of 1946. He could barely remember himself then, imagine himself from the inside. His past was inhabited by a stranger bereft of feeling. Though he must have felt something. Must have felt
some hope now that the ghastly war was over. That was what the books said. Liberation. New hope. New beginnings. But if he could conjure up a glimpse of himself, all he could see was a tanned face, an arrogant slit of a mouth and cold blue eyes, eyes that expressed nothing. Except sometimes rage. He had met those eyes in a cracked mirror once or twice. They weren’t his. Had nothing to do with him. There was even something a little mad about them.

He was eighteen, a lean, hardened and filthy youth who hadn’t changed his clothes in months. A wild youth, who knew about guns and knives and explosives and hatred. Who acted, who sometimes even planned his actions, because, yes, he must have planned. He remembered making calculations, the kind which went: ‘If I can hitch a ride on a truck as far as the river, I can then ford over by the bend where no one ever goes except the horses and then…’ Yes, he could plan, but he didn’t think much. That was probably too dangerous. As for hope, if it was there, it didn’t reach his eyes. It was simply part of the body’s instinct, a survival
mechanism
that moved it through the days. If there had been thought or hope, cruelly shattered at so many turns, he probably would have given up, wouldn’t have gotten where he was. Which was to a quasi-clandestine room in Krakow, a small, dusty room with a window so dirty no light came through, where a Zionist organizer was going somehow to get him papers that would take him out of Poland. Away. Away from all this. To Palestine or Cuba or
America
or Timbuktu. Anywhere that was away.

He had come there after a two-day trek from Katowice, sixty kilometres mostly on foot. He had come from a Russian prison where he had been interrogated for what must have been two weeks, though he had lost all sense of time, questioned over and over, day and night at random intervals, about his links with the Polish partisans. Not for the first time. Questioned about names, about plots against the Communists, since the war really wasn’t at an end. It was just in a new phase where the Germans, but not their legacy, were out of the picture. At last, he had given them some names, and they had let him go. They didn’t seem to know that they were the names of the already dead. He had no illusion but that the
next time he was caught, he would be transported to a more serious Soviet prison, a camp on their home soil in the frozen north.

And now, and now this man with a permanent frown on his thin face in this dirty little room in Krakow had taken it into his mind that he was a Pole or a
Volksdeutscher.
A Nazi collaborator
masquerading
as a Jew so that he could more easily become a displaced person and escape retribution.

The man told him to leave. Abramski was his name. Natan Abramski. He was wasting Natan Abramski’s valuable time. He felt like punching him, but he let his hands lie flat, relaxed. He had learned that. And as he stared into the man’s eyes, a figure from his past materialized in front of his eyes. A past that was several worlds away, so long ago did it seem, so innocent did the Bruno who remembered seem. A figure from his childhood. An old man with a long beard. A wise man, his mother said. Two children, three, around him. In Kazimierz. ‘Play with the children,
Schätzchen,
’ his mother said…

‘Is Pan Wilmer still alive?’ Bruno asked Abramski in a low voice ‘And his children, Miriam, Adam? If so, ask him about me. Tell him. Bruno Lind came to see you. The son of Pani Hanka. Grandson of Pan Adek. He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure of it.’

‘Old Wilmer is dead. And the children too, as far as I know.’ Abramski examined him afresh from behind thick spectacles.

‘If I were pretending to be a Jew, don’t you think I’d have taken the trouble to dye my hair black, done more to play the part
adequately?’

The words emerged with a feral laugh and a mad reflection. He had hidden who he was for so long, had masqueraded as an Aryan for so many years, there seemed to be no going back. Lies had grown into truths.

The Nazi logic of race had taken them all over. They were trapped in its stereotypes, its subdivisions of subdivisions – all of them, Poles and Ukrainians and Germans and Jews. ‘You want me to lower my trousers?’ he had said at last, and Abramski had told him to come back the next day, he would make some enquiries.

A bare week later, the necessary pass in hand, he was on his way. On his way to becoming an official displaced person.

A train had taken him part of the distance, a cattle or goods train. Did he know then about those other trains, the ones that abutted at the death camps? Yes, he must have. Had known about the transports, in any case. But he didn’t know the way he knew now, the way one knew in retrospect, a piece of public knowledge made indelible by repetition and photographs and external
confirmation
. Then, suspicion, distrust, one’s own lies had become so much the norm of existence, that a shadow of disbelief hovered over every piece of information, whether because of the brutality it contained or its lack, which appeared as a false hope. The
atmosphere
was such that he sometimes didn’t even trust his eyes. They might not want him to take in what they had seen.

The real could be a moveable feast, in this case a moveable cemetery.

Oh yes, he had known death. Savage, ugly, coming from nowhere death. But his train journey in the boxcar held no special percussive meaning. It was just another uncomfortable way to travel, though through the moving bar at the top of the car, if you were tall enough, you could watch the scenery go by. Where there were no tracks, where they had been bombed or shattered, transport was better. From the back of the trucks that bumped across rutted roads, you could breathe cool air, see storks soar across the sky, sniff fern, sometimes even blueberries and mushrooms which he had foraged for so often that his nose would lead him.

The camp itself was in Germany. Where else could these endless ironies of the supposed post-war take him but through Austria into Germany? The enemy – hated, feared, plotted against, fought, outsmarted too late. He had a feeling the German soil would
belatedly
swallow him up never to regurgitate him.

Reached at nightfall, the camp – not far from Munich – was an ugly affair of huts and disused barracks strung along muddy paths that seemed to stretch as far as the dark distant hills. Its only other salient feature was the queues. Polyglot queues full of poor
specimens
like he now was too, deathly pale with blank inward-
looking
eyes helplessly tuned to an internal slide show. Even the children were like that. Thin, muted, they clung to the arms of kin. When he managed, through some clown’s antic, to make a little
frazzle-haired girl smile, he felt heroic. But he was quickly reduced to the passive indignity of the queue again as a huge American with too many teeth doused him with DDT. Up the sleeves then down the neck. He heard the word ‘deloused’ in
English
for the first time. It was not the last.

The second queue took you to the registration officials.
Members
of UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, who grilled and questioned largely in English with the help of translators. This machine-gun grilling about identity, which felt as if it was calculated to trip you up, turned the interrogators into the kin of the Russian or the Nazi police. Police of any kind. It transformed them into the new enemy, whatever their supposedly good intentions.

The refugees were now doubly displaced, from their homes and by their rescuers, who mostly spoke the languages they didn’t. Yiddish, which Bruno didn’t have, though he eventually learned to adapt his German vowels to a semblance of it, functioned as a lingua franca amongst a good percentage of the displaced and very occasionally worked with an official.

Bruno withstood the initial grilling. He got the right name at the right time with the right history. There were so many. He was handed his displaced person’s official ID, and he got into a third queue. This one led to food tickets. The next, the fourth, led to room numbers and blankets and pillows. As he waited, another queue rumbled before his eyes. The queue with Stars of David on its armbands. He hadn’t joined that one. Everything had colluded in making him refuse. And now here he was: utterly alone. And queuing even so. He didn’t like queues. In his experience, there was rarely anything at the end of them that was worth having.

The quarters didn’t prove him wrong. They lay down an endless track where the grey mud gripped at his shoes, and the rain fell with a melancholy rhythm on tin roofs. The room itself, inside a basic wooden structure, contained three pairs of bunk beds and some metal cabinets, all grimly lit by bare bulbs.

If he hadn’t been so tired, if there had been anywhere to go, he would have fled on that first night. He was somehow more dispirited by the bare ugliness of the camp, its prison-like containment,
than by so much else in these last years. Perhaps because he had let hope trickle through; had lowered his guard. As it was, after a
cursory
greeting to the others in the room, he hoisted himself up into the single remaining empty bunk and promptly fell asleep.

In the morning, he met a few of his fellow roomers. There was a bald, broken old Jew, with a splayed nose, who moved slowly, on limbs that felt unreliable. Kazik. There were two young
Hungarians
, who had spent so much wartime in a cramped cellar that their backs had taken on a permanent curve. They feared they weren’t healthy enough to be accepted into the fighting force for the new Palestine, the Haganah, which was where they wanted to be. This he learned slowly and with difficulty, through their broken German. And there was Janek from Podhale, a bear of a mountaineer who had fought with the Partisans in the Tatras and lost his entire family.

It was Janek who had shown him the warehouse space where he could forage some bits and pieces for himself – a rickety chair, and what looked like the top of a child’s sloping school desk, which he brought back to the room because something about it spoke of home, that early home, before everything else. Janek also told him where he could get a saw, some nails, perhaps some bits of wood to make the desk usable. He accompanied him to the refectory where thin soup was ladled out by German women who looked as if they might recently have served in more nefarious positions. He also eventually took Bruno into a bomb-scarred Munich where a black market thrived, and the care parcels received in the camp with their odd assortment of unheard-of American products – teabags, peanut butter, powdered soup – and cigarettes could be sold or traded for winter clothes. It came to Bruno, late one night, that Janek, who was hoping for a visa to America, thought that he was a Pole like him. Not a Jew. Perhaps more troubling, Bruno also felt more at ease with Janek than with the others.

But it was Kazik, not Janek who told him he should go and see the camp doctor. A cough still trailed him from his weeks in the Russian Prison.

In the infirmary he met the man who was to have a decisive effect on his future. First, though, there was the inevitable queue.
This time his intolerance of the enforced passivity of the process met with someone else’s and got him into trouble. Behind him in the queue that reached outside into the mud under a makeshift tarpaulin, there was a commotion and suddenly two men came racing past him to the front of the line, elbowing women and children in the process. Bruno erupted, shouted at them to get back into their places. Within minutes, there were fisticuffs, and he was on top of a wiry man, beating at him as if he would never stop. Meanwhile the second man had leaped on his back and was pulling at his hair.

Dr David Gilbert might have been undersize, underweight and physically altogether unprepossessing, but when he raised his voice and fixed his unblinking eyes on you, you listened. Within moments, the brawl was at an end. Bruno fully expected another cell. Instead, the men were treated like naughty schoolboys, told to wait their turn, which would now come at the very end of the queue. For the time being, since they didn’t seem to be dying, the sickbay needed its floor swabbed. Mops and pails were in the
cupboard.

When Bruno’s turn with the Canadian doctor finally came, he had the dawning sense he was speaking to someone for the first time in years. Really speaking, which was an act in which another heard you. Intelligence, perspicacity, good will emanated from the man like beams of sunlight after a bitter grey winter. Or so it felt to Bruno when the Canadian doctor gently prodded his chest and with equal gentleness asked him questions about his past, his war experience, his activities in the camp. He asked not in the way of the camp interrogators, but as if he really wanted to listen, as if he fully believed he was speaking to another human being who had an equal grasp on experience. Who wasn’t demented or lying. When Gilbert saw that Bruno was following much of what he said without having to wait for the interpreter, he sent the latter away.