The Memory Man (15 page)

Irena had the feeling she had better stop this conversation right now or they would end up in an outburst of nerves and slammed hard against someone’s bumper. German car or not, bumpers had a way of crumpling.

‘Hello… We’re already on the outskirts of Przemysl,’ she said brightly. ‘Why don’t we stop for a coffee and talk then? I’m sure we could all do with one.’

‘Good idea,’ Amelia concurred.

By the time Aleksander could find a convenient place to park, they were already across the river. Perched on its pretty green hill, the town jutted towards them, looking like nothing so much as an Austrian spa complete with Baroque domes and stuccoed cloisters.

Closer to, when they got out to walk the steep streets, it was clear that the post-Soviet reconstruction had only gone so far. Churches and cloisters and their attendant buildings had been restored to their original Renaissance and Baroque glory, but ordinary houses and shops were still awaiting a long-delayed makeover.

Maybe it was this that allowed the Professor to find his way around as if he had left the place yesterday. He walked quickly, almost ran ahead of them. The Furies were biting at his heels. He was reliving it all, a boy again, pursued by Nazis or Soviets or Ukrainians. There had been some trouble here with Ukrainians too, she thought vaguely, or maybe that was now. Yes, they kept stealing across the border, claiming refugee status, or just selling their wares. Whatever the case, Professor Lind had a particularly intent look as he guided them through a courtyard and stopped at its penultimate doorway.

‘Up here,’ he said to Amelia. ‘This is where my grandfather and I moved after my grandmother had died.’

‘Died?’ Amelia asked. ‘Died how?’

He shrugged. ‘It might have just been of despondency or fear or old age…’ He laughed ruefully. ‘Though nowhere near as old as I am now… People aged more quickly then. Or perhaps it’s the child’s eye view. Anyhow, we lived up on the second floor.’

‘Looks lovely, Somehow, I think I’d imagined everything in black and white. Grim. Drab. Like all those wartime films. But in fact it’s in colour.’

‘It didn’t have quite so much colour then, as I remember.’

‘It seems to belong to the church now. Church administration.’ Aleksander was reading a sign.

‘It might even have done so before. Or maybe not, because this was the Russian sector. On the other hand, I do think my
grandfather
might have got the lodgings through a priest.’

‘Befriending priests, was he?’

‘Oh yes,’ he winked at her. ‘If you try me now I might still get through the first bits of the Catechism. In Polish only, of course.’

Irena began to recite: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord. Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost. The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints. The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the body. And life everlasting. Amen.’

They were all staring at her. She laughed. ‘Of course, we all learned it. My generation, I mean. In protest. Against the
Russians
. The Virgin has a more amenable face than Stalin, you have to agree.’

‘I wasn’t questioning. Just surprised,’ Amelia murmured. ‘
Perhaps
surprised at both of you.’

‘This country is full of surprises.’

Irena couldn’t quite tell if bitterness or wryness prevailed in the Professor’s tone.

They followed the curve of the road uphill and ended up in the café in the old castle grounds at the very top of the city. They sat out on the terrace under a large white parasol that sheltered them from the noonday heat. In the distance the river curled beneath graceful trees and when the heat mist cleared, the blue bulk of the Carpathian hills appeared.

‘It’s so hard to yoke moments of time together.’ The Professor was sipping a cold beer. ‘I have this old grid over which everything fits almost perfectly and yet nothing, but nothing, is the same.’

‘But I’m pleased you’ve brought me here, Pops.’

‘You were asking about my parents,’ Aleksander began
hesitantly
. ‘My father once took my sister and me out to the
countryside
to point out this estate he had worked on. He was just a kid during the war. And as soon as we got there, he started crying. He couldn’t stop. Maybe it was the cherry trees in bloom. But he wouldn’t tell us anything. Not even about how the old mill
functioned
. Maybe there wasn’t all that much to tell. Or that could be told.’

Irena was listening intently. Her mother had been in the
countryside
too. She wanted to ask him exactly where all this had taken place. His father had been too young. Maybe that was it. Why her mother had kept it hidden. A child-father. Aleksander as a
child-father
… But he was already hurrying on.

‘I don’t really understand the inner logic of all this, because he did tell me about a later part of the war. He was taken in a
łapanka
, you know one of those raids the Nazis carried out. Mass
kidnappings
, really.’

Irena was sitting opposite Bruno, and she could see his fingers balling into a fist. His shoulders had gone rigid. Maybe it would be better to stop Aleksander now. Too much emotion at his age couldn’t be a good thing. Yet he was the one questioning Aleksander.

‘And where was that exactly?’

‘Krakow, I imagine.’

‘Yes, of course, and what happened to him?’

‘Well, he ended up in Germany. Working in a munitions factory. Slave labour effectively.’

He stumbled and stammered as the word ‘slave’ tumbled from his lips. He had the air of a man who had somehow condemned himself.

Amelia laughed. ‘That’s okay. I’m prepared to learn about other people’s histories of slavery. Nice not to be alone.’

‘So many perpetrators,’ Irena jumped in. ‘Too many. The ancients. All those captives they enslaved. The Africans
themselves
. The Nazis, of course. And our very own Man of Steel,
Stalin. I don’t know if he wasn’t the worse. His slave labour camps, they say, rose to kill some twenty million. And he managed all that with no particular racial prejudice. He killed anyone, really. Democratic in his killing, he was. Though he wasn’t any fonder of Jews than his erstwhile German partner in crime. Nor Muslims. Or Poles, for that matter.’

She stopped. ‘I’m running away with myself. You were talking about your father slaving for the Germans, Aleksander. Sorry. During the war.’

‘Well…’ Aleksander wore a perplexed expression. ‘He claimed that, despite the beatings, it wasn’t so bad. They had a little to eat. There were some pretty girls. No, the worst, ironically, came when the Allied bombing started. There they were, rooting for them, cheering the Allies on, hoping the war’s end would come soon, but with each Allied attack, some of their number got killed. When the factory was evacuated, a few of them escaped. There was no way to get back to Poland, except to walk. So that’s what my father and his friend did. They walked. Avoiding bombs as they went. They were very lucky.’

‘Yes, luck.’ The Professor had his distant face on, like a lone wolf who had left the pack too long ago ever to return.

‘Luck,’ he repeated. ‘Those of us who came through had to have plenty of it. But unfortunately there wasn’t enough luck to go around. Or enough good will amongst our neighbours.’

A silence fell and lengthened. Irena had the distinct feeling that in it the dead were being counted and the whole matter of Poles and Jews was about to explode like some kind of bomb between them. But Aleksander didn’t seem to be aware of it. Maybe he hadn’t spent enough time abroad. Germany was probably
different
. The Germans couldn’t point an accusing finger at the Poles.

Irena knew she should say something, but she didn’t know quite what. Some of her friends at moments like this came out with
stories
about how their families had helped or hidden Jews. One would be forgiven for sometimes thinking that there was a Jew in every Polish wartime closet. But she couldn’t say anything as trite as that.

How did people anywhere in this war-torn world ever make relations ordinary again after these mammoth upheavals? It took so long for the emotions to go. Centuries perhaps.

She shook herself in an attempt to thrust away dismal thoughts. In any case, it was Aleksander’s father she needed to hear more about. Maybe she was also misinterpreting the Professor’s
comment
about good will. After all, Aleksander could hardly be accused of racism. He was with Amelia, which had to exonerate him. So that left her to apologize for the Poles.

Before she could formulate something appropriate, Bruno asked in some disbelief, as if Aleksander hadn’t told them
everything
he knew: ‘So your father got through the war?’

‘I’m the living proof of that.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘What was his first name? Would I have come across him?’

‘Tadeusz. I wouldn’t imagine so.’

‘Tadeusz. It sounds so nice when you say it. Soft.’ Amelia’s voice caressed.

‘Nicer than Aleksander.’ He laughed shyly ‘But my parents decided to name me after my father’s older brother. He was the hero, apparently.’

‘Which means he died young,’ Irena heard herself saying. What she meant was he had died too long before she was born. Could her mother have gotten names confused, named one brother for the other? Would she still remember if Irena prodded her? Was it a one-night stand or…? She felt what was almost a blush coming on. And what if she brought Aleksander to visit her mother? She must ask him somehow if he looked like his father and then bring him to see her.

‘I do think we should get on.’

Bruno pushed back his chair so abruptly that the glass on the rickety table fell over and tumbled onto the gravel beneath. Strangely, it didn’t break. Maybe luck was still with the Professor, after all.

A half-hour later they were walking along a track at the
southernmost
extremity of the town near what all the road signs promised was the Tartar Monument. Tartarus: the ancient site of hell from which the devils rose. The name the Europeans gave to the marauding Tartar hordes. Had she learned that at school? But there was no monument here to explain. No Tartar King whose rampaging legions had laced generations in the region with sparkling narrow eyes.

Instead they abutted at a dilapidated gate with a broken lock. Beyond it was a cemetery devoid of angels or crosses or any adornment. A decaying Jewish cemetery, Irena noted, with ancient mossy tumbling stones on which the writing – even had she been able to read the script – had been scratched away by time, if not by vandals. The unrelieved slabs growing out of the rank vegetation gave off a mournfulness that somehow defied human mourning. Nothing could be made good by mere human care, not here, not for these austere unreachable dead.

The air was unnaturally still. She felt odd, like a voyeur from another realm. Odder still when Bruno Lind looked around him with a vulnerable and bewildered air. Somebody should really take the man’s arm, but Amelia was busy with Aleksander. She moved closer to him.

‘It should be somewhere over that way. But we never laid the stone. We weren’t here long enough.’

She wasn’t sure whether he was addressing himself, the elements or her. Lear on the blasted heath, she thought. Even the clouds were gathering. And the wind had come up, rustling the trees into erratic action. He started to walk quickly through the thick
greenery
, as if he were running from someone in fear. He kept looking abruptly over his shoulder, then from right to left. The old days, she thought. The gestures of the old days. Persecution. Not now. Not now mercifully. He bobbed, veered to the left then disappeared. Like a will o’ the wisp.

She hurried after him then almost fell over when a withered old woman in black appeared in front of her.

Her mind was going, Irena thought. Definitely. Gone, in fact. Now she was conjuring up toothless kerchiefed old hags, who materialized from the air in graveyards.

‘
Dzien dobry Pani, Dzien dobry
,’ Irena said, polite even to ghosts.

The ancient woman barely nodded, and Irena, still wondering about her reality, reached for her purse, took out some coins, mumbled something about ‘for the care of the graves’. When the woman took the coins with a kind of shuffling eagerness, she was consoled. Ghosts didn’t need money.

‘There’s a lot to be done here,’ she thought she heard the woman say, before she hobbled off in the other direction and vanished behind a mouldering stone.

Irena followed the direction she assumed the Professor had taken. She found him bent over on all fours, poking at the ground, lifting away the trailing undergrowth.

‘I think this is it,’ he murmured.

He seemed to be trying to trace the size of a plot from the midst of rampant vegetation and neighbouring slabs. ‘I memorized the names on either side. Grandfather told me to. In case anything happened to him. This one’s Goldblum and there, that’s
Oppenheim
. I wouldn’t have remembered them. But recognition, that’s easier. Remember, I told you that.’ He gave her a sudden vivid smile, altogether belying her earlier worries, and hailed the others.

‘Your great-grandmother, Sarah. We’re going at last to erect a stone for her. Rather more than a year since the funeral. Sixty-two, in fact. But better than never. Irena will know how to go about it.’

Amelia kissed him.

Irena was about to protest but found herself so secretly pleased at the man’s faith in her that she kept quiet, dutifully pulled a pad from her bag and sketched a little map, noting the names on the graves around her.

The old crone appeared from nowhere again, and this time everyone greeted her. So she was definitely real. The Professor, in fact, brought forth a flood of verbiage from her. It seemed she could help with the setting up of a gravestone. A Pan Kwiatowski in Przemysl handled it. Yes, yes, she assisted him. That’s why she was here. From the folds of her tattered skirt, now like some grand angel of mercy, she brought out an utterly modern printed card and handed it to the Professor.