The Memory Man (10 page)

So many ruptures. So many discontinuities. It was no wonder people didn’t want to talk. Couldn’t make sense of it all, all the layers of accommodation, of writings and rewritings, of lies that became truths, and truths that became lies with changing regimes. Narratives were supposed to make sense, personal memory
somehow
fit into collective memory. Instead there was repression, the state kind as well as the Freudian kind. What you couldn’t speak, or didn’t want to think, you eventually forgot. She didn’t blame Bruno Lind for refusing to allow himself to be interviewed. For not wanting to talk. Words were linear and intended for sense. And there wasn’t much sense to be found in that generation’s past,
awkwardly
bundled in too many ripped and tattered layers of history.

Strangely, her mother was free to say and think anything she wished, now that she could no longer really think in any
conventional
sense. The doubling of that tragic irony was that Irena, who was now free to listen – would even have liked to know – could make little sense of what her mother was saying. Like today, now, with Amelia. ‘Pretty Baby.’ She wouldn’t have known that was a Josephine Baker song unless Amelia had been here. And her mother, who no longer had recourse to a set of explanations that made everyday sense, couldn’t have explained.

‘We can go now, if you like,’ Irena said softly.

Amelia extricated her hand from the old knobbly one that held on to her, smiled, said how nice it had been to meet.

‘And she’s says that it’s been a great honour, and won’t you come again? You’ve made a big impression.’

‘Well, I guess it’s not every day Josephine Baker drops in,’ Amelia laughed as they slipped out of the house. ‘Nice place. Bright. Fresh. I think I had a fantasy of crumbling plaster and lots of cobwebs. And walls of yellowing books and a hideous old hag.’

Irena nudged the omnipresent chip off her shoulder and
managed
to say with wryness in her voice, ‘You should have come ten years ago. Pre-Ikea. Though the old hag wasn’t one yet then. And you put her in a good mood, so she wasn’t even that today.’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I liked her. She’s very sweet. You’re lucky in a way. At least she isn’t in pain.’

‘Your mother was?’

‘For too long. At the end it was ghastly. And she understood everything that was happening to her.’

‘Yes. I guess oblivion is a kind of blessing. I think, though, when the forgetting was beginning to take hold of my mother, she
suffered
it. Suffered from it. Not directly, ’cause you can’t know what you don’t know. But you can know there have been gaps. And there was confusion. That scared her. Panicked her in fact. She was horrible to me then. Always attacking me. As if everything in the world was somehow my fault. Especially the fact that she was no longer who she once was. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with her, so I assumed she was simply being critical of me, hateful in fact. Full of hate. And it was a bad time for me, in any case. So
when the diagnosis came, even if it was a terrible diagnosis, I was somehow relieved. At least she had an illness. Something with a name. It wasn’t only that we hated each other. Sorry, I’m going on. I think we should take the car. It’ll be easier, despite the traffic.’

Irena didn’t usually like to drive with visitors from the West. They always sat a little nervously in the clapped-out old Fiat that had made one too many trips to England in the old days. But she had held on to it. No one bothered to break into it and, apart from needing a push on very wet days, it was pretty reliable. And she had other expenses to consider first.

Amelia curled her long legs into the front seat without so much as a whisper of ‘cute car’ and sat back with admirable ease as Irena pulled out.

‘I had all that Josephine Baker stuff in my head because one of my writers has been doing a script on her. Don’t know if it’ll ever get made. She had this terrific record of Resistance work in France. Altogether an admirable woman.’

‘My mother had a connection with the Resistance here. The AK.
Armija Krajowa
or Home Army. Which was the nationalist
faction
, so it wasn’t much talked about in my youth, ’cause the
Russians
didn’t like to know it had been there, in case they didn’t get the full credit for liberating Poland, and someone reminded Stalin of how he had gone back on earlier promises. I never got the full story from her. And it’s too late now.’

‘You should repeat that for my father’s benefit. Emphasize how sorry you are that you don’t know. Maybe it will nudge him. Is it far, by the way?’

‘On a good day ten minutes. On a bad day, you could get to Vienna sooner.’

Rain started to fall, utterly unexpected. It grew heavier and heavier as the traffic ground to a halt in front of the high-rise
student
city until the Fiat’s old windscreen wipers squealed with the effort of their labour, and the car grew fuggy with steam.

‘So what do you know about Aleksander’s divorce?’ Amelia suddenly asked.

‘His wife left him for a German. Not a happy fate for a Pole.’

‘But a happy fate for a Polish woman, one can only imagine.’

‘Well she’s still there, apparently. It was some years ago. Eight or maybe ten. It happened when Aleksander was working in a lab in Munich.’

‘Munich. Central European Capital of Decadence,’ Amelia intoned.

‘Have you been there?’

‘No. Just joking. I haven’t got a clue.’

‘Well it must have felt pretty decadent back then, compared to Poland. I remember how shocked I was when I first came to London. The freedom. The jokes. Don’t forget, we not only had a fair helping of Soviet Puritanism; we also had the Catholic Church in the background. Anyhow, she met someone and stayed on. With their son. I can’t imagine that made Aleksander very happy.’

‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

Irena shook her head. ‘I’m a singleton in all ways.’

‘Ditto. Though there are three little step-siblings wondering around somewhere who have missed the pleasure of little ole me.’

Irena threw her a quizzical look.

‘I’m adopted. Didn’t you guess?’

‘I didn’t think, no…’

‘You thought sweet-as-sugar Bruno Lind found himself a nice little Josephine Baker and made yours truly? No, sweetheart. That just wasn’t the way. And glad I am of it. ’Cause the woman he found for himself was a real honey of a mom.’

Irena laughed. Amelia had a way with sending herself up. ‘So you were chosen. I used to think I might have been dropped. By some passing bad fairy in the shape of a stork, but that wasn’t the case.’ She veered off into a side street where the trees where so thick it was like a green tunnel. A tunnel that now dripped fat droplets of water everywhere. ‘Sorry I almost missed it. It’s just up this road here.’

This outpost of the Academy of Sciences was an indistinguishable fairly new block that could have been a set of accountant’s offices
as easily as a prestigious set of labs. The only marked difference was that the receptionist behind her wide cloakroom counter addressed them formally and treated them with consummate respect.

Bruno and Aleksander were waiting in the latter’s lab on the third floor. The place wore a cosmetic sheen, as if each counter top and flask and Petrie dish had recently been washed and polished. For some reason, Irena had expected an animal smell, but it was clear that no animal experiments had ever been carried out in these precincts, unless they took place virtually on one of the two
computer
screens visible in a cubicle off the wide bright space.

Their knock had clearly interrupted an intense conversation, the marks of which lay in a pile of unreadable diagrams and
equations
on the table in front of them. She read bits of words: ‘synthetic neurosteroid ganaxolone = 3ß-methylated analogue of allopregnanolone’.

‘Hope you don’t mind. I’ve brought Irena along. Or rather she brought me. And did so most efficiently.’ Amelia hugged her father and threw Aleksander a melting smile.

‘Not at all.’ Bruno gave Irena what she thought was a decidedly weary look. ‘As long as she doesn’t hold up anything I say to public scrutiny.’

‘Pops, how can you? After the woman more or less saved your life.’

‘Indeed, my rescuer. Always grateful.’ Bruno bowed.

‘I’m sorry you don’t want to be written about, Professor Lind. I thought the stages of your rediscovery of Poland might make an interesting feature.’

‘Like the Stations of the Cross.’

Irena flushed. ‘No, no. Certainly not.’

‘Shall we eat?’ Amelia interrupted and looked to Aleksander. ‘I’m ravenous.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He moved his long lanky body into action. Irena could see that his confusion around Amelia was growing with each passing minute. ‘I’ve reserved a small table for us in the canteen. I hope we won’t be too bothered. Professor Lind’s seminar was such a success that I fear we may be.’

‘I’ll act as his bodyguard. I’m used to it. All those students over the years… I’m an old hand.’

Their table in the canteen was next to a large window. The
swaying
trees seemed about to drench them with the weight of the
continuing
rain. Amelia chatted and amused, while they swallowed some indifferent borscht and a tired salad. She told her father about her visit to Irena’s mum.

‘You should go and see her, Pops. She’s a Josephine Baker fan. She can sing “Pretty Baby”. Really. You could take her for a little turn round the room.’

Irena felt this was bordering on bad taste. She shook off the
comment
like an uncomfortable splash of rainwater. The Professor seemed to notice. Or did she imagine his slight twitch before he turned to her with his customary courtesy? ‘Do you have brothers and sisters, Ms Davies – a family to help you? It can be difficult, I know.’

She shook her head.

‘Amelia’s right, as you’ve probably already been told. Music, old familiar music can be very soothing. I had a friend who sadly developed Alzheimer’s, and the only thing which seemed to give him pleasure – or shall we say relief from that process of perhaps somehow feeling one’s brain unravelling, and I don’t doubt that people do experience it in various mysterious ways – was listening to Frank Sinatra. Really, he was transformed when the records, or should I now say CDs, were played.

‘A neurologist recommending a music cure?’

‘Not a cure, no. We have no cures, whatever the miracles the press and indeed some of my peers love to tout every now and again. I think Dr. Tarski will agree. For your mother, I imagine our science will have come too late…’

Irena tried to remember what she had told him about her mother’s state.

He filled in her silence. ‘It’s very painful to deal with. Does she still know you?’

‘In a way.’ Irena wondered why she was lying. She corrected herself. ‘To be more specific, she may not always know I am her daughter, but I suspect she feels she knows that I’m someone who looks after her regularly.’

Bruno nodded, his face chiselled in sympathy, waiting for her to say more. She didn’t. She was thinking that what she had said had
only just recently come to her and never been articulated. It had come with the sudden sense that when she walked into the room, her mother seemed happy to see her although she didn’t really
recognize
her. Except with an animal awareness. And an animal sense in Irena responded. Everything took place on the level of
sensation
. She didn’t want to call her mother an animal out loud.

‘That’s very well put, Ms Davies,’ Aleksander Tarski intervened, as if he had heard what she hadn’t quite said. It was strange that he still addressed her formally, but now called Amelia by her first name. ‘We had a case in my family too.’

‘Your father?’ Irena jumped in.

Bruno spilled his tea. It formed a small torrent as it ran down the table and cascaded into Amelia’s lap.

‘I’m sorry. I do apologize. Hope I didn’t burn you. I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m a bit tired.’

‘It’s nothing.’ Aleksander was dabbing at the table.

‘Don’t worry, Pops.’

‘You were saying…about your father…’ Irena tried to steer the conversation back to where she wanted it. ‘Was he a scientist, by the way?’

‘Yes, yes. He was. A chemist. Though he worked in the
industrial
sector. Altogether different really.’

‘Are you okay, Pops? I think I’m going to take him away from you, Aleksander. He needs a rest.’

‘Why don’t you get me another cup of tea first, Amelia?’

‘I’ll do it.’ Aleksander followed after her.

Irena and the Professor sat in companionable quiet for a moment. Then Bruno asked: ‘And does your mother still talk to you?’

‘She talks. Though I don’t particularly think it’s to me.’

‘That’s good. You know one of the ways people think about the progress of Alzheimer’s is to use a reverse developmental scale. Piaget’s is the favourite. You chart the way a child develops the abilities we largely take for granted in the first months and years – holds up her head, smiles, sits without help, speaks a few words, controls bowels – then on, up through the years where she can dress herself – say, around the age of four or five – and adjust bath
temperature. Then up again until age twelve when she’s mentally sufficient in the sense that she could hold down a job or run a house, more or less. You take these indicators and you apply them to the abilities people with Alzheimer’s lose, moving backwards towards childhood and infancy. So you begin with some memory loss, then the inability to maintain a job, prepare meals, handle finances, say, and then you move back down the developmental scale to points like the inability to dress appropriately, to dress at all, to adjust bath water temperature, to control bowels. Towards the end speech is lost. First there can be a kind of babbling and slurring, then gradually there’s silence. In the last stages, the patient is like the tiniest babe: can’t walk or sit up or smile.’

He paused. ‘I’m depressing you.’

‘It’s getting a little Shakespearean. The seventh age. “Mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”’