The Memory Man (8 page)

Impetuously, she squeezed his hand across the table and then exclaimed. ‘Look, look, we’ve reached the Tatras.’

‘The Tatras, Bruno, look. They’re beautiful.’

Bruno refused to look up. His gaze was stubbornly fixed on his knees. They were knobbly. There was a smudge on them. It looked like ink. Why hadn’t they let him put on his long trousers? Grandpa and Grandma, when they came to meet them at the station, would think he was still a baby, like Anna. There she was lying in Mamusia’s arms, not even bothering to stir and look up at the mountains, no matter how beautiful. He could make her look up, though. All it would take was a little prod. Even a big prod. She didn’t cry when she knew it was him. He had been her first word. ‘Bru’, though it sounded like ‘Boo’.

He didn’t want to look up. Didn’t want to see anything. He hadn’t wanted to leave Vienna. Mamusia was wrong. Stefcia was wrong too. It was wrong to go before Papa came back, even if the grandparents were waiting. And the border guards had been horrible, scoffing at them when they came to check their papers, and Mamusia had prompted him again just before to remember to say that he was Polish and going home. As if he could forget after all the times she had told him. Again and again. As if he didn’t already know all his times tables and some Latin and the capitals of most of the countries of the world and kings and emperors and some English alongside German and Polish. As if he would trip up, because they were always on at him not to tell lies and suddenly they were telling him the opposite.

‘Horses, Bruno. Do look. They’re galloping.’ This time it was Stefcia urging.

He looked up inadvertently. The horses were galloping very fast. Two of them. Running away from the noise of the train to the
opposite end of a long field. Their muscles strained. They were moving towards a house with a steep bright-red roof. It glistened like jewels. Behind the house the pines were very tall. Almost as tall as the sky.

Stefcia ruffled his hair and then smoothed it down again. ‘Good horses, aren’t they? Told you so.’

‘I suppose Grandpa will let you ride the stallion this year. When he sees how tall you’ve grown.’

‘Do you think so?’

His mother smiled.

She was so lovely when she smiled that he wanted to stroke the place where her smile made a little crease in her cheek. She hadn’t been smiling much recently. Not really since those boys with the swastika shirts had beat him up. It was horrible. He hadn’t been able to fight back. Only a kick or two and then they had held his legs. There were too many of them, and they were too big. They were everywhere too. Gangs of them. Marching. Looking so proud of themselves. They had beaten him up because he was a Jew.

He had never thought much about being a Jew until some of the boys in school had made it an issue. He had had to ask Papa what it really meant and what was wrong with it, and all Papa had been able to tell him was that mostly everyone had been a Jew until Christ came along. He had muttered that and something else and then told him that Hitler and his Nazi Party with all their police forces were blaming the Jews for Germany’s and now Austria’s problems. All the problems since the last war, including the loss of the last war. It was convenient to have a group to blame things on. But that kind of lazy thinking had to be fought, and his father’s party was fighting it.

Bruno thought that those scary men with their shiny uniforms had come to take his father away because he had gone to fight the boys who had beat Bruno up. Probably their parents, as well. Arthur, his best friend, had said that was silly. His father wouldn’t do anything so stupid. Arthur and his family had left Vienna now. Papa had lent them money and arranged for their papers, for special letters of invitation to come for them from England. Bruno
had overheard his mother talking to him about it. Father had done the same for other people too. There was a drawer in the house he wasn’t allowed to open. High up in the back of the pantry. You had to get a chair. A secret drawer, but his father had told him a few months before that should anything happen to him, he was to open it. There might be money there he could use. Other things. But when he had gone to the place just two days ago, it was empty and his mother had scolded him. She must have been there first.

Mamusia was passing Anna to Stefcia to hold and wrapping her arm round him, urging him to look at the hills, blue and purple in the distance. He didn’t know whether he ought to squirm away and sit up straight. What if the conductor came and saw him all curled up against Mamusia? But he couldn’t resist.

She had tried to make him understand again last night. That Papa wanted them to go, just like Arthur and his other friends. She had cried a little then quickly wiped the tears away. He couldn’t bear to see her crying. It made him angry too. Angry at her. But more angry at everyone else. He mustn’t let her cry again. He would take care of her. And Stefcia. After all, he was in double
figures
now. And he had Papa’s binoculars. They hung black and solid against his chest. He flicked open the snap on the leather case and adjusted them to his eyes, first the little knob in the middle, then the two separate lenses, just like Papa had shown him. Now he could see the trees from up close, could almost make out the details of leaves and yes, a fat brown clump of cones, clinging to the needles of a pine behind. But it was hard to keep it all steady with the chugging of the train.

The Krakow station was noisy with the rattle of porters’ trolleys and voices blaring Polish over loudspeakers. It was hard to
understand
what they said. It was two years, no three, since they had come here, because his grandparents had been to stay with them instead, up in the hills above Vienna so that Papa could come and visit on weekends. But here was his grandfather now, trying to lift him up in his arms and then with a laugh giving up and hugging him instead, his little man. His big moustache was a soft scrubbing
brush tickling Bruno’s face. Grandpa had round smiling eyes, and his hair was cut like a porcupine, all bristly, and he was grinning and grinning, kissing Mamusia, even kissing Stefcia and holding Anna high up in the air and bringing her down again, up, down, so that her curls tumbled round her plump cheeks and she chortled and then laughed that joyous laugh of hers, like some wild bird.

A porter put them and all their things into a beautiful black car. They hadn’t really brought very much, though his mother had allowed his beetle collection, because he wanted to add to it over the summer, and some of his favourite books. The car took them round the big square with its covered central market, the
Sukiennice
, his grandfather said, asking him to repeat it so he did and then passed a church which looked even bigger than the Stephansdom and had a tower topped with lots of spires. He could just see them if he bent forward.

Home, as his mother loudly announced was only a few minutes away, round one corner into a narrow street, then another, and they were there in a big pale yellow house, with curly windows and grandma was inside and the hugging started again. Grandma didn’t look the same. She had grown smaller, and her hair was streaked grey and white and black, but he remembered the softness of her voice, which had a kind of lilting music. He was going to have his own room she told him, but not here. Here he would share with Stefcia, which he didn’t mind at all, since they chatted like old mates way into the night. First though, there was dinner at the huge linen-covered table that sparkled with silver and crystal. He watched his grandmother light candles and mutter some strange incantation as she wafted the smoke of the candles towards her. He noticed his mother and Grandpa exchanging looks and then a shrug and then they were all eating, and Grandma explained to him that she had been praying, welcoming in the Sabbath and thanking God for the good things they were about to eat. His grandfather seemed a little impatient with God and made a joke, saying that women always turned to him and to ritual when their men failed them. His grandfather was always making jokes Bruno wasn’t too sure he understood. But Grandpa gave him wine to drink, which made him feel very grown up.

Later while he was laying out a game of solitaire his grandfather had shown him how to play, he overheard him talking to his mother. Talking about his uncle Pawel whom he had met once but when he was so little he didn’t remember. ‘She holds it against me,’ his grandfather said. ‘Pawel doesn’t want to leave France, even though there are problems with papers, and his law studies are at an end, and there’s little money. He’s taken up with a French woman on top of all that. So she wants me to go and fetch him, bring him home at once, but you know your brother. If he’s set his mind on something, I’m not going to convince him. Maybe Otto would have some effect.’

At which his mother burst into tears. ‘Do you know where those pigs have taken my Otto?’

Bruno rushed over to comfort her. She held him so tightly he couldn’t breathe.

That night, when Stefcia wanted him to say his prayers along with her, he held back. He hadn’t done so before. There had seemed little harm in making Stefcia happy by saying the
occasional
‘Hail Mary’ with her when she popped into a church on a whim. Or offering the evening prayer she recommended. But somehow, the proximity of his grandmother and those other prayers, the whole stormy matter of how he was a Jew, now made these prayers, which he knew were Catholic, seem wrong.

Two days later they were on their way to the country house. Grandpa spent more and more time in the country, now that he had been made to retire from the University in Krakow where he had taught law. He had been made to retire because they were
cutting
the numbers of Jews. ‘Quotas’, his mother called it. But it was also because Grandpa was getting old.

First they boarded a train that said it was heading for Odessa. He knew that was on the Black Sea and they wouldn’t be going as far as that. Instead, they got off after some three hours at a small station surrounded by fields. The sun was high and everything glistened – the wheat and barley, which his grandfather
distinguished
for him, waving gently in the breeze, the tiled rooftops,
the silvery leaves of the birches in the copse, the horse’s
rust-brown
back and paler mane. The women and Anna had gone off in the car, leaving his grandfather, the man who had come to meet them, the luggage and him to the adventure of the clattery wagon.

Grandpa let him hold the reins, showed him how to tug this way and that, how to talk to the horse, coax him along so that he did his bidding. Both men laughed when the old mare suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the road and nothing Bruno could do would urge her up and away until Grandpa’s whip cracked through the air without quite touching her back. By the time they reached the sprawling shaded house, a late lunch had been put out on the old wooden table under the apple tree to the side. They all tucked into cucumber and radishes and soft white cheese on large hunks of buttered bread, followed by berries and cream and
sugar-sprinkled
cake. As if to celebrate, Anna then took her first unaided steps on the prickly grass, racing towards Bruno on plump
uncertain
legs and collapsing in a giggling heap in his waiting
outstretched
arms.

The rest of the summer passed in a dream. He did everything with his grandfather who had decided, against the odds, to turn him into a countryman. Together they collected wood and made bonfires, prodding potatoes under the embers until they were ready to eat, hot and smoky and delicious on the tongue. They fished in the river, catching silver-spangled perch and pink-fleshed trout. He learned to remove their innards in two cuts of his
grandfather
’s army knife, soon earning his own. The fish might find their way onto the bonfire or were brought home for cook to
prepare
. Soon he could handle the oars on the small boat his
grandfather
used on the river when the current allowed.

The knife was also used to fashion a slingshot out of oak twigs. He learned to take aim and earned praise for the keenness of his eye, the summit of which was that his grandfather brought out his rifle and let him practice on a roughly constructed target. He began to feel like a hero out of the Wild West books he adored. Next year, his grandfather promised, he would take him hunting. Boar and lynx and elk. Bruno walked tall, already a marksman in his own imagination.

Best of all, he learned to ride far better than he had ever done before, if not the stallion then a comfortable mare who was closer to his size. He rode and rode and brushed and dressed and curried the animal, sometimes sitting by her side at night and stroking her bristling flank. He named her Bessie after a horse in one of his books.

The children from a neighbouring estate came to visit and after an initial stiffness, they made friends. They plucked cherries and apples from the trees in the small orchard and stuffed them into mouths or pockets. Now, when Bruno wasn’t with his grandfather or spending the obligatory hour with little Anna, he was roaming the countryside with them. They collected beetles in tobacco tins and watched their antics when released. They urged their horses across fields and through woods. They took them for swims,
paddling
alongside them, or holding on to their manes in the swift cold waters. They pretended to be cowboys and Indians, drawing inspiration from Bruno’s collection of Karl May, which his mother had allowed him to bring along, hooting their way through copses, chasing each other madly over dirt tracks. At night, they lay in the long grass and gazed up at the stars, sometimes singing songs in the soft language Bruno increasingly felt was becoming his own.

At home too there was music in the evenings. In the lounge of the house stood a shiny grand piano, its vast extent lovingly
polished
by Grandma herself, who stroked the keys with the same tenderness as she washed Anna’s baby-soft skin. Both Mamusia and grandma played – lilting waltzes, haunting sonatas,
bittersweet
melodies to which his mother sang along in her clear voice. Sometimes there was even a little of that jazz that made you jump up and down and which his father loved. But as the summer wore on, his mother banned the jazz without explaining why.