The Memory Man (9 page)

One day, they made a trip to the neighbouring town of Przemysl, close to the Ukrainian border. For some reason that no one explained to him, his mother had business to do with a solicitor. The rest of them walked around the hillside town while Grandpa explained about Ukrainians and Ruthenians, Tartars, Poles, Russians and Austrians and how all had vied throughout history for this pretty little place, whose sole misfortune was that it lay on
an important trade route east and more or less marked a border. Stefcia went off to offer a prayer at one of the huge churches that flanked the slopes, while the rest of them admired the three bells at the side of the Uniate Church and even had a peek inside to gaze at the ornate pulpit shaped like a ship. At the top of the town, stood the remains of King Kazimierz ancient Castle and fort all but destroyed during the Russian siege in the Great War. From here, they could see the dark folds of the Carpathian Mountains in the distance, a dream landscape half covered in mist.

Two days later, in less time than it takes to crack a whip, the idyll was over. When Bruno returned from a morning’s riding with his friends, his mother was gone. She must have been planning to go, but she hadn’t told him. Hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. His stomach churned, and he was sent to bed. He lay there, the
curtains
drawn, staring at the ceiling. He felt both bereft and betrayed. The abruptness of it all, the failure to take him into her confidence worked and worked on him. Nothing could mitigate his desolation: the excuse that she hadn’t wanted to worry him, that he had been taken up with other things, that she would be back soon, no promise that he could ride the stallion or that cook would prepare his favourite apple cake.

Why had she gone without telling him? Why hadn’t she taken him along? No one would say where she had gone, but he knew in his bones. Knew that she must have gone to Vienna. Because of his father. It was clear that his mother had been worrying while he wasn’t paying attention, was enjoying himself. It was his own fault that she hadn’t taken him with her. That made him doubly
desolate
.

A week later, the day after his grandfather took him on his first mushrooming expedition, Stefcia was gone too. Her father came to fetch her to bring her home. She was needed there. And there might be a marriage in view. Stefcia cried. She didn’t want to leave. She cut off a piece of her silky plait and gave it to Bruno. He sobbed. He couldn’t see his way to dinner. He hid his tears in the room, stored the plait in a tin.

After those two departures, nothing any longer brought any pleasure. He gave up seeing his friends. He did what his
grandparents
asked, but no more. He sat listlessly for long hours with Anna, turning over cards, or watching her root around in the grass for the tiny things she seemed intent on finding. At the end of August they left for Krakow, and still Mamusia didn’t return. There was a letter from her for him and Anna, but it said little except that she hoped they were well.

Grandpa said he had to go to school. Bruno didn’t want to go to school here. He wanted to go back to Vienna. He was tired of addressing everyone as ‘Pan’ and ‘Pani’ instead of ‘Herr’ and ‘Frau’. He was tired of bowing politely to all and sundry, tired of Polish and Poland.

Grandpa told him he was unreasonable, that these were difficult times for all of them and they had to make do as best they could. He expected Bruno to help out with the women, not make more difficulties. At this Grandpa winked, hoping for a taste of that jolly complicity that had reigned all summer between them.

School was impossible. Bruno didn’t listen. He could speak Polish, but he couldn’t write it, and the teachers were always on at him. Then came the anti-Semitic barbs, which somehow got
confused
with anti-German ones when he tried to explain that he could spell perfectly well in German. His grandfather moved him to a school in Kazimierz, where the population was largely Jewish though most of them didn’t seem like him at all. In fact, some of them were distinctly exotic. They both attracted and repelled him.

The men wore strange, round, fur-trimmed hats, long black coats and big untidy beards. The boys had long curls at the sides of their cheeks, and their lips were very red against faces that were very pale. With study, his grandfather filled in for him, as he filled in about the origin of the coats and hats, what he called the
Chassidic
style, though it seemed more serious than a style to him, since it never changed. They also talked a language he didn’t know, which had German strewn through it and large hand gestures and loud exclamations. His grandfather took him to the synagogue with the big dome, where they all prayed in what seemed like random murmurings and wails and bobbed up and down to their
own rhythm. They stayed around in the courtyard afterwards talking to all and sundry, but even then Bruno felt shy. It was
difficult
to make friends.

His grandfather hired a young law student to teach him written Polish. The law student was a dreamy sort of fellow who made him read fat romantic novels about Polish history. Bruno now spent days pretending illness so that he could lie in bed and gobble up books by Zeromski and Sienkiewicz. His grandmother, he
discovered
, was happy to discuss
Quo Vadis
for hours while she did the darning. Her eyes glowed then, almost as much as when little Anna bellowed out one of her laughs. Though she did that less and less the longer Mamusia stayed away.

At the end of September they told them in school that Hitler had signed an agreement in Munich that guaranteed peace. The Poles were protected by their great allies, the British. Grandfather didn’t share the teacher’s optimism. When a bare week later, the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland, he shook his spiky head in a manner that said his pessimism had been proved right, though it didn’t make him happy. Not even the fact that the Poles had grabbed back a piece of Silesia at the same time could do that.

Then on November 9 the papers and the radio brought news of the terrible attacks throughout Germany and Austria on Jews and their enterprises. In Vienna alone, eighteen synagogues were razed.
Kristallnacht
, they called it, because of the sound of
breaking
glass, his grandfather said. The sound brought Mamusia home three days later. She was thin, white as a sheet, her eyes and nose too large, and she held on to Bruno’s hand as if she might fall over at any moment or he might vanish. He suddenly knew with a grim certainty, though she said nothing, that his father was dead, that he would never see Papa again. He was afraid to ask, in case she
disappeared
again at his questioning.

Little Anna should have been pleased to have her mother back. Instead, she grew increasingly fretful, sometimes pretending that Mamusia wasn’t in the room and running to Bruno instead. Maybe she didn’t recognize her after all this time. Or because she had grown so thin and didn’t look like herself. Grandma must have thought that was it, because she fed Mamusia non-stop,
standing over her as she consumed borscht thick with sour cream, dumplings stuffed with meat and cabbage or apples and jam, morning cups of buttermilk to supplement the preferred coffee.

By March, Mamusia had regained some of her colour and her composure. Little Anna went to her willingly. Bruno decided that he could now venture to ask her directly about his father.

She met his eyes for a moment with a fierceness that seemed to leave his skin blistered. ‘Your father is dead,’ she said softly. ‘He died a hero. When times are better, we’ll raise a monument to him.’

When he could find breath enough, he asked how he had died. ‘The Nazis killed him,’ she said in the same soft monotone. ‘Never forget that. They killed him in cold blood. Shot him like a dog because he opposed them. At one of their camps. At Mauthausen.’ Then she turned away.

Three weeks later she brought a stranger home with her. A lawyer, a Pan Leszek, she said had helped her while she was in Austria. Bruno didn’t like him. He didn’t like his dark stiffly waving hair. He didn’t like the lemony scent of him, like a woman. Even less did he like his bluff good humour that promised favours. One day, Bruno saw him hurrying away as he was coming home from school. He hid at the street corner. When Pan Leszek passed him, he aimed his slingshot at his back. He had the pleasure of watching the man stop and look round him in confused
annoyance
.

Soon Mamusia had a job. She went to work in the lawyer’s office. She left home early and came back late.

His grandparents discussed it all in low voices.

‘It’s good for her,’ Grandpa claimed. ‘It keeps her busy, as well as bringing in some money. So she feels useful. And she’s young. She can’t mope for the rest of her life.’

‘But it isn’t good for the children,’ Grandma said in a stubborn voice. ‘It isn’t good…’ She stopped talking when she saw Bruno and gave him a forced version of her quiet smile. He was carrying a protesting Anna, who could speak quite a lot now, a garbled form of speech, but speech it was. Polish speech in which she often asked for her Mamusia.

Grandma deflected her by taking off her amber necklace, in which ancient insect fossils lodged, and putting it round Anna’s neck. Anna loved that, but Bruno could only think about what he had heard. He doubted he could ever agree with Grandpa about this. He tried. He tried not to mind when Mamusia didn’t come with them to the country house for the summer. She had to work, she told them. She would join them later on in August.

Three days after she joined them war erupted, trapping them in South-Eastern Poland. For a brief while Bruno lived with the secret thought that war wasn’t so bad, if it kept that horrid lawyer away from Mamusia.

‘He said “no”. And I wondered…I wondered whether you might try to persuade him.’

Irena gave the lemon in the tea she had ordered a little prod then sipped without meeting Amelia’s hazel eyes. Their pallor was
disconcerting
. As was the woman’s beauty. Passers-by in the square gawked. And it wasn’t only because seeing a black person in Krakow was a relatively rare occurrence. Maybe they thought she was an emanation of the black virgin of Czestochowa and would perform a minor miracle.

‘Me?’ Amelia had an astonished air. She gestured for the waiter, who for the first time in Irena’s memory came running.

They were sitting at one of the terraces in what Irena called the tourist side of the central Krakow square, the side of the
Sukiennice
on which the flower vendors displayed their wares beneath bright yellow parasols. The side from which you could see the full splendour of the Mariacki Church. The other side of the old cloth hall, now a jewellery market, Irena and her friends thought of as theirs, because it housed the cellar which had served them as cabaret and meeting place during the emergency years and through the eighties. It was here she had first met Anthony. So better not to go there, really. Better not to remember. Better to sit here with Amelia in Krakow’s rediscovered splendour, shown to best effect on this limpid spring day.

‘He doesn’t listen to me, you know. Not unless I put my best bully’s attitude on and rarely even then. He’s hardly talked to me in fact since we got here, was it three days ago? Certainly not about the past. Either he walks about in a more or less stony silence or he spends his time with Aleksander at the Academy of
Sciences, so I have to go there if I want to see him. Not that I think he likes Aleksander, but at least it’s science and not the past. I might join them there for lunch. Want to come?’

Irena shook her head. ‘I have to see to my mother. And I should finish this piece on Aleksander and the conference. Though I still need to ask him some questions.’ A lot of questions, Irena thought. Her best-laid plans had been scuppered by the presence of Bruno Lind and his daughter. The journey home on the train hadn’t
provided
the solitary moments she’d hoped for. And now, her brilliant idea of doing a feature on Lind was going nowhere as well. She had even imagined doubling it up as a radio feature for the World
Service
. She still had a good enough tape recorder, and she had learned so much about his field, it seemed a waste not to use it.

‘It would make such an interesting piece.’

‘The conference?’

‘No.’ Irena hadn’t realized she had spoken aloud. ‘I was thinking of your father. Polish scientist revisits…oh, forget it.’

‘The great Bruno Lind is allergic to journalists. Didn’t he tell you? Always has been. And I imagine that dumb piece in Vienna did your cause no good.’

‘I wouldn’t produce lies.’

‘Not even the occasional half-truth?’ Amelia teased. ‘But it’s not that. He just won’t talk. Can’t, maybe. During our walks he’s been meticulous about describing the occasional building or giving me a disquisition on Leonardo’s lady and her sexy ermine in that old house museum of yours but not a word about the war years. Not since Vienna. I thought being here would launch him into it. But it hasn’t. Not yet, in any case. Even when he took me to his
grandfather
’s house. It’s not far from here, by the way. Nor will he go to Auschwitz with me. I’m trying to be patient. Meanwhile the hotel’s allowed me access to their office and email late at night, so I can catch up with California days and ways.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘I had a late start this morning.’

‘I understand, really. They’re all a bit like that.’

‘What?’

‘The people who went through the war here. Or maybe it’s the same with any war. Any period that transports you too brutally
out of the norm. Equivalences can’t be found with which to convey all those terrible emotions, which you probably want to forget, in any case. What those who know say is that the survivors may have talked at first, but nobody listened much ’cause it was time to concentrate on the present, which was terrible enough here in a different way, what with the Soviets. All that pain and turmoil, shameful things too. Acts of cowardice or blindness or avoidance. Better to put it behind one.’ Irena paused. ‘It was like that with my mother. When I was little, and she talked, I would tell her to stop going on about it. Then she stopped. And by the time I came back from Britain, when I wanted to hear, there wasn’t much sense in anything she said.’

‘Why do you think you suddenly wanted to hear?’

Irena laughed, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Because my future was all behind me, and I was ready for the past.’

‘Do you think that’s why I want to hear?’

‘No, no.’ Irena was mortified. ‘It’s different. Different for you. It’s a different time now too, what with Communism gone.
Everything
’s more open. To foreigners. And about the past. On top of that, the survivors are growing so old, they’ll be gone soon, so we want to know before it’s too late.’ She was already blushing so she felt she might as well plunge on. ‘And you’re American… It’s such a distance to…well, to travel into that time. And you all seem to have this cultural thing about finding roots, ’cause your country’s so new, so disparate. Here, we have the sense of having been rooted for so long that we don’t always want to know how tangled and warped those roots can be. We prefer blaming things on our various invaders.’

Amelia stared at her. ‘You speak very good English.’

‘I spoke little else for a long time.’

‘There’s a love story in there, I can feel it.’

‘Can you?’

She nodded, slipped her sunglasses down to the end of her nose and peered over them playfully in the guise of a wise professor. ‘I have an infallible instinct.’

Irena managed to laugh.

‘So what do you think of this Aleksander Tarski?’

‘I’ll give you the article when I’m done. Maybe tonight. Your father can translate.’

‘I wasn’t really referring to his scientific acumen.’ Amelia put down her coffee cup. ‘Why don’t I come home with you and keep you company while you see to your mother? Then we can both go off to the Academy.’

Irena stared at her.

‘Am I being forward? It would be fun. I haven’t been inside a Polish place yet. And I doubt anyone’s going to invite me.’

‘Of course, of course. You’re welcome. But it’s not going to be a barrel of laughs.’

‘Try me.’

They took a tram on Amelia’s insistence from the other side of the tree-lined Planty, a ring road of gardens. On her return from London, Irena had used her store of capital to buy a small house on a leafy street, not too far from the centre. Everything had been so cheap then with sterling to hand. Here her mother could have a ground floor to herself, while Irena was still free to have
something
of a life. That had been the theory in any case. But with her mother’s growing infirmity, Irena was often too afraid to leave her on her own for very long. So she had set up a workspace in a tiny backroom downstairs.

Children were playing on the street in front of the house. Her mother was sitting on the porch with another old lady whom Irena paid to stay with her on occasion, though she suspected that in this last year Pani Maria had grown almost as batty as her mum. Still, she managed to make a cup of tea and carry it to the table. And she picked up the telephone, which her mother had ceased to do, as if the object had grown utterly unfamiliar to her and she didn’t know which bit to put to her ear. When Irena had tried to show her, she grew frightened at the voices she heard at the other end.

For the moment, the two old women looked benign enough, resting in the sunlight in their floral dresses topped with cardigans and staring out at the children. Irena, who had long wondered why old ladies wore only patterned dresses or dark colours now
had a theory that it had to do with how much food flowers and dark colours could absorb before demanding a wash. Maybe if she had had children, she would have already known about these things. But then, maybe if she had had children, she wouldn’t have been here now. Anthony had never wanted any. Before had been too soon. And now it was too late.

‘Do you have children?’ she suddenly asked Amelia, who shook her head.

‘I’d like some, though. Trouble is, I’d rather have them with a man. And before you ask, I’m divorced.’

‘A common enough state. I’m divorced. Aleksander Tarski is divorced too.’

‘I suspected as much. He has the air of a man who’s been hurt by women.’

‘Only one official one as far as I know.’

‘To give him his due, unlike some of my fellow Americans, he hasn’t already told me all about it and complained vociferously about the settlement. Are you interested in him?’

‘Interested in him? What do you…? Oh, I see.’ Irena calmed her rising panic. For a moment she had thought that Amelia could mind-read. ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Good. ’Cause I find him intriguing. Which is a rare event these days. And he seems gentle.’

‘Pani Irenka.’ Plump smiling Maria was waving at them and
getting
her mother to raise her arm and do the same.

‘Is that your mother?’

‘The taller one. The one who isn’t calling out. Yes. Marta. Marta Kanikowa. Kanikow is the family name.’

‘What a handsome woman. Wonderful bones. She must have been a great beauty.’

Irena hadn’t thought of her mother’s beauty for a long time. She tried to see her through Amelia’s perspective, which was unclouded by familial anxiety, and saw wispy grey hair neatly clasped in a bun, a jaw line that was still firm and clear blue eyes. These for the moment had a dreamy serenity about them.

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she was. When I was in my teens, my friends used to say she was pretty. But she never did anything for herself. Not that in those days there was much we could do, unless you had those extra privileges that came with being part of the party machinery.’

Irena introduced Amelia to the two old women. Both of them stared at her, which in her mother’s case, Irena reflected, meant that, despite the rudeness, at least she was paying attention, and the present-tense barrier had been scaled.

Amelia stopped her apologies. ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t bother me.’

Irena ushered them all into the house. Suddenly from behind her back she heard her mother say: ‘Pretty baby.’ She veered round. Her mother had spoken in English. Distinctly in English. Though her mother didn’t speak English.

‘Pretty baby,’ she said again with a lilt in her voice and a rolled ‘R’ as Pani Maria helped her into her customary chair beside the table. She was still staring at Amelia.

‘She’s singing,’ Amelia said. ‘How nice.’

‘She doesn’t sing. Or at least she hasn’t for years and years.’

‘Well, she’s singing now, honey chile. She sure is trying to sing. She’s singing Josephine Baker’s “Pretty Baby”.’ Amelia laughed, altered her voice, chameleon-like, so that it came out as a croon, high-pitched.

‘Beautiful…marvellous.’

Her mother started to move her head from side to side in a swaying motion to Amelia’s rhythm. Her lips were definitely eking out some English syllables in the midst of an audible hum. The words were like a birdcall or a child’s song, at once eerie and joyous.

‘Pretty little baby, I love you.’

‘Hey Irena, your mom is a Josephine Baker fan. She’s a swinger. Would you like to hear Bessie Smith, Pani Marta? I do a mean Bessie.’

Marta, who was still humming, had what was almost a smile on her face, though Irena had thought her facial muscles had
disappeared
,
and she couldn’t anymore. It was so long since she’d seen a smile.

‘She’s happy.’ Pani Maria said to Irena. ‘She’s really happy. Look.’

Irena translated and added: ‘Carry on with Josephine Baker, while I get some food together for her.’

Amelia sang, sashayed round the room.

‘You should get her some CDs. I can send them to you if they’re not available here. Better still, I’ll order them online for you tonight. She loves it. Just look at her go. My dad once told me about this experiment they did with old people who had Alzheimer’s. In a home somewhere. The music is really good for them.’

Irena had a sudden wave of guilt. Why hadn’t she thought of that for her mother? It was true that she was always calm when there was some Mozart or Chopin playing, but it had never occurred to Irena to try her on music from her personal past. She would do that now. Almost too late.

Luckily, Pani Maria didn’t have to go home to look after her grandchildren and could stay for a few hours. So Irena quickly prepared a large omelette with yesterday’s potatoes and put some cold meats on the table, together with a pitcher of blackcurrant juice, a glass and the slowing-down of Alzheimer’s tablet her mother took supposedly to inhibit the breakdown of
acetylcholine
, a chemical which allowed neurons to talk to each other. They didn’t much, as the disease progressed.

Maybe the pill was working a little at last, since her mother was talking to Amelia with some enthusiasm, even though the woman had no idea what she was acquiescing to with all her nods and smiles. In fact, her mother was asking Amelia whether she was from Paris and how kind of her to come and visit and wouldn’t she come again please, since she was sure her father would love to hear her sing. She held on to Amelia’s hand like a talisman.

Irena didn’t know what pocket of time she was caught in, but since she seemed to be happy in it, it really made no difference. For a good many months now, she had stopped trying to reason her
mother into the present. Or indeed to insist that she was her daughter and not any other figure in the repertoire her mother conjured up. Most recently, she had realized, her mother often addressed her as her own. They had switched roles. Sometimes she would say she wasn’t feeling very well in her throat, and could mama possibly have cook prepare some broth with noodles in it.

It was the first time that she firmly took on board that there had been numerous servants in her mother’s early home. Now she could add to this knowledge the uncertain fact that her
grandfather
had enjoyed the songs of Josephine Baker. She remembered now, something that she had known as a child, known in that
half-grasped
way which children have since there’s no repertoire for them to fit the knowledge into: that her grandfather had indeed been to France in the thirties. In a mournful tone, when Irena was just a little girl, her mother would repeat, ‘How I would have loved to go to Paris, like your grandfather. How I would have loved to take you. What stories he told us when he returned.’ Then she stopped talking about it. There was no use in having a father who had been a diplomat, not in the depths of the Soviet days. Even a dead diplomat might prove dangerous. It was better not to know about anything foreign, in fact: particularly if one worked, as most people did one way or another, for the state. Her mother worked as a junior schoolteacher, and that made her particularly susceptible to stray words or bits of unwanted information. So she ‘forgot’ her past. Forgot it, instrumentally. Until now.