The Memory Man (11 page)

‘But your mother is still talking. So there’s a long way to go.’

‘Today even talking English,’ Irena laughed. ‘When I got back from Vienna, it was a long speech about butter. How there was no more butter. The Germans had taken it all. She kept repeating that. Taken the chickens and the eggs too. She was apologizing to
someone
. Rather desperately. Telling him or her not to despair.’

‘She’s back in the war, I imagine,’ Bruno mused. ‘All that – butter, eggs, any food really – was rather important in wartime. Very important. So sad that it’s the traumatic moments that impress themselves on our brains so violently that we repeat them. A little like the lines of Penfield’s epileptic fits Aleksander and I were talking about. The fits, he saw as he charted the damage in his patient’s brains, would follow pre-marked paths, the paths the
violent
current had taken before. Over and over. Sorry, sorry. I’m babbling. Butter, you said.’

Bruno toppled Anna to the mossy ground: half covering her with his own body, pretending it was a game. The droning was faint but coming closer and louder. He lifted his head just a little and through the tops of the trees he saw the sparkle of a silver body. It was quite low. Much bigger than a stork, but with a shorter beak and this one wasn’t yellow. It wouldn’t eat frogs either. On the fuselage, he could make out a swastika.

Grandpa had warned them to watch out, to take great care, even in the little woods near the house. Yesterday he had ridden to the station to see what news there was. Krakow was being evacuated. The Polish army was moving east, already in retreat after only a few days of war. There were hardly any trains along the track, only hundreds of people trekking eastwards, tired, hungry, carrying small bundles, asking for food of the occasional wary peasant. Then a plane had come: not a large plane. Perhaps the people couldn’t see its markings in the sunlight as Grandpa could from his position. Some waved. The pilot didn’t wave back. Instead the plane emitted a
rat-tat-tat
, and machine gun bullets ricocheted against stone, flailed the ground and pebbles and people. They fell, bleeding to the tracks. Grandpa had brought one young woman home on his horse. He said they would all have to pack up and go east. They could stay in
Przemysl
with his cousins, the Rosenbergs. The Germans wouldn’t get that far.

Mother and Grandma argued that they would wait it out here. Pan Mietek, the neighbouring farmer who managed their fields would help. In any case, the British would come soon. Even if the brave Polish army were no match for the Germans, the British
would certainly be. All that apart, Mamusia added, she had agreed to meet Leszek here and she had to wait for him.

Bruno was torn. He wanted to stay with Mamusia and Anna. And his horse. He was good at helping now. Pan Mietek had said so. He had done a lot of helping these last weeks, because Grandpa was preoccupied. Even if he was a little small for the scythe, he had helped with the tying of the hay, and he was as good as anyone at pulling up potatoes. He wasn’t bad either at milking Pan Mietek’s cow and churning the butter with his wife. But he wanted to go with Grandpa too. Grandpa had been a soldier in the last war and he knew about war. Grandpa said they all had to stay together.

The plane circled overhead once more and then the vibration of its drone moved further afield. He could hear the wood’s own sounds emerging again. The birds and creatures had been
frightened
too. Bruno wished he’d had his Grandpa’s rifle. Maybe he could have hit the plane with it. Brought it tumbling to the ground. He said this to Anna as he tugged her in the direction of the house, and she laughed. She had her funny hat on that made her look like a mushroom, and she threw it up in the air and made a ‘boom-boom’ sound. Then she held on to his hand tightly.

At the house there were soldiers. Polish soldiers. Two of them. Tall and handsome in their uniforms, but they didn’t seem to be sure of anything. One kept saying they should get going, while the other one helped himself to another piece of Grandma’s cake and asked for more coffee. They were requisitioning the car, Grandpa told him, that meant taking it over for the army’s use. They too were heading east, trying to link up with their regiment. All of Poland was heading east.

‘Why don’t we all go together?’ Bruno said.

‘All together,’ Anna repeated.

For some reason that seemed to clinch it.

A few hours later, they were squashed into the car with the few belongings Grandma had packed strapped to the roof and the giant picnic hamper stuffed with food on her lap. It was like going on some outlandish picnic except they had an armed escort. The soldiers trusted Grandpa to drive because, he explained, he knew all the small dirt roads where they were less likely to meet enemy
planes, like the kind that had strafed the tracks. One of the soldiers sat next to Grandpa. The other one came in the back with him and Grandma. Mamusia had refused to come at the last minute. She said she had to take care of Alina, the wounded woman, and in any event there wasn’t room for all of them. She hugged Bruno to her and told him to take care of his grandparents and that she and Anna would see him very soon.

The presence of the soldiers made the parting easier. He didn’t cry, not even when Anna did, clinging onto him like a limpet. He was a man after all, like them.

Closer to the city, the traffic grew so heavy, they decided it would be best to leave the car with a peasant at a small farmhouse. They gave him some money to look after it. Bruno was sad at having to abandon it. But when they rejoined the road, he saw just how necessary it had been. The road was jammed with every kind of vehicle, with horses and carts and wheelbarrows, and with people trudging east.

Only one of the two bridges into town was still functioning in addition to the railway bridge. Even that wouldn’t be there for much longer, Grandpa feared, since the retreating Polish army would want to make life harder for the pursuing Germans. The soldiers were still with them. One of them was carrying Grandma’s hamper, and people stepped aside to allow them to pass whenever this was possible. They didn’t leave them until they had crossed the river.

By the time they reached the cousins’ house, which was up a steep hill, it was dark and very late. Grandma could barely stand on her legs anymore, and Grandpa had to bang hard on the door to get the guardian to open it and then had to pay him for his inconvenience.

The door to the cousins’ apartment posed less trouble. Old Rosenberg hugged Grandpa to him and made them welcome. The place was full of people, all chattering at once, planning,
speculating
, worrying, contradicting each other. It seemed everyone in Poland who knew them had decided to come and make use of the Rosenbergs’ spare beds, sofas and even, for the children, their floor. They were all on their way somewhere: to Russia or to join
the Resistance they had heard about already forming in Hungary or Romania, or to Sweden the long way round, even to Turkey and Palestine.

Bruno camped out on blankets on the floor next to the bed that had been found for his grandparents and the younger man who had been ousted to make room for them. Not that anyone slept much.

In the morning, he went for a foray with Grandpa to gather news and to see an apartment that Pan Rosenberg thought might be available if a sum could be fixed. The old people who lived there wanted to move in with their children. The place was small, cramped and dank, but Grandpa said it would do, as long as they could move in straight away. They did so that very afternoon.

From the window there was a view out over the valley past the river, but Grandma only looked glumly at the grubby walls and dirt-stained floors and ugly furniture the previous inhabitants had left behind. He couldn’t work out whether the fact that there was no light made it worse or better. The electricity had gone off. Grandpa thought the Polish army might have done it on purpose. He didn’t say why, but he looked grim, his eyebrows knitting together with his frown.

The next day, German troops entered the city. Grandpa and Bruno had gone out early to get what provisions they could, when suddenly near the big yellow train station, there was a hail of
bullets
, quickly followed by an explosion. They ducked into a
courtyard
to get out of the way and listened intently to the drone of planes and the blasts of gunfire. When the noise receded a little, they bolted, hiding in doorways, shops that hadn’t quite managed to close, tripping over bodies Grandpa had to pull him away from, arriving home so desperate and out of breath, that they could barely make it up the stairs.

Przemysl was now in German hands. A curfew was imposed. After five o’clock no one without a special pass was allowed out. Grandma worried over Mamusia and Anna. By contrast, she was now pleased that her son had determined to stay in France. The Germans would never dare attack Paris. She wrote to Uncle Pawel with all the news and insisted, one morning when things seemed
relatively quiet, that Bruno go and post the letter. As if the Germans would let letters through, Bruno thought. But Grandpa winked at him, meaning that he had to humour her, and said he would come along.

They went to the big post office. On Mickiewicz Street, one of the town’s busiest, they had to stop at the crossing because of some kind of procession. No, not a procession. People in terrible straits were running past them in a ragged line. Their shirts were torn, their chests naked, raw and bleeding. Their hands were oddly clasped behind their heads. The line was long. German soldiers moved alongside it, bearing whips and revolvers. They hit and beat the running men whenever they slowed. It was horrible.

The men were chanting something. In German. ‘
Juden sind
Schweine
’
. Bruno understood that. He knew those words too well. They were the same as those shouted by the youths who had beat him up in Vienna. Except now it was these poor men, with their torn clothes, who were chanting that Jews were pigs.

His grandfather tightened his grip on his shoulder. ‘Scum. Monsters.’ All around them people were crossing themselves. Bruno did so too, automatically. He couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing. The German soldiers looked so young, so ordinary. Yet they were beating these old bearded men, these skinny, hollow-chested youths.

His grandfather turned him around. ‘Come on. I’m taking you home.’ When he dropped him off at their building, he said quickly and with an intensity that felt as if it was burning itself into Bruno’s temples: ‘Those poor men were Jews, Bruno. That’s the treatment the Nazis intend for us. We have to be careful. Very careful. You go to your Grandma now. If anyone comes to the door, don’t open. If you hear German, reply only in German. Tell your Grandma to be silent. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

When his grandfather returned, he looked grimmer than Bruno had ever seen him. He told them that all the men they had watched earlier had been machine-gunned, their bleeding bodies left in full view on a hilltop of a neighbouring village, where he feared the buzzards would get to them before their wives did.

The humiliation in the streets followed by the massacre was a warning to them. They must take heed. He had already dropped a
note for the Rosenbergs to say it was best to take cover and
pretend
not to know each other until this terrible moment was over. Meanwhile, they would lie low. Few people in Przemysl would recognize them as Jews or as anything else, and that in itself might prove a blessing.

A mixed blessing came from elsewhere first. Two weeks later, the Russians by prior agreement with the Nazis, took over
Przemysl
. The Germans stayed on the western side of the river,
building
a substantial camp there. Well-off Ukrainians who, according to his grandfather made up about a third of the population of the border town, alongside the Poles and the Jews, fled to the Nazi side. Strangely, the town teemed, and the population seemed to increase instead of going down. People, who had initially fled Poland, poured in from the east in the hope of making their way back. Meanwhile Jews, fleeing the Nazis, poured in from the west. To top it all off the new Russian administration arrived in the wake of its soldiers and border patrols, commandeering the best
premises
. After the fighting, many houses were uninhabitable. Soldiers with missing limbs, tattered travellers and the destitute slept rough in streets and squares. The Russian way of dealing with
overpopulation
, the poor and the housing shortage, Grandpa told them wryly, was to expel anyone who wasn’t native to the city or
Russian
enough to deserve one of their passports and the
accompanying
work permit.

From his early childhood, Grandpa could speak some Russian. He felt, as he explained to Grandma and Bruno, that it would be best to stay on the Russian side of the war and the river. The
Russians
had no particular gripe against the Jews. That was one thing that could be said in favour of the Soviets: religion was officially anathema to them.

Bruno watched with fascination the way his grandfather went about obtaining Russian passports for them. First a stamp-maker was found who for a little bribe provided them with a stamp with a Polish eagle on it. Then on a blank page of Grandpa’s existing passport, the blue-inked eagle magically appeared beside an
official
address in the town of Przemysl, half-typed, half written in the same copperplate as the other entries in the pass. Grandma’s and Bruno’s names appeared too, since neither of them had their own
passes. Then Grandpa presented himself at the appropriate office, held himself very straight and looked the clerk in the eye, all the while making use of his best Russian.

A few days later they were issued with the necessary passes.

‘Normal rules don’t apply in wartime,’ Grandpa repeated, always beneath his breath, but always loud enough for Bruno to hear. Bruno recognized that the ability to outwit authority – illegal authorities who ran rogue states through maximum force – was a lesson in survival as important as any his hunting and fishing grandfather had taught him.

Soon after the passes came through, Grandpa, who had been looking for a job since their money had run desperately short, was offered one in the very same issuing office. He had made a good impression; and his translation skills, it seemed, would come in useful. He didn’t tell them he was a lawyer, since the Russians had more respect for ordinary workers.

The first item Grandpa brought home with his pay coupons was a radio. He had traded for it. Coupons came with work and could buy a little food. Some people didn’t have either. They were
fortunate
. Every night now they huddled in front of the radio and
listened
for news.

Food was scarce in the city. Money couldn’t buy it. There weren’t many peasants bringing supplies in because, as Grandpa explained, they didn’t trust money. They were shrewd, and there had been too many changes in recent months, from zlotys to marks to roubles, all of which were worthless and could buy
nothing
, so they preferred to eat what they had and barter the rest for necessaries.