The Memory Man (16 page)

Amelia and Irena exchanged glances. Aleksander smiled. Then, as if the old woman had jogged him into speech as well, the
Professor
started to talk. He was talking to Amelia, telling her about his grandparents, the time they had spent in this area all those years ago. Maybe the gracious lady even remembered…

By the time they reached the car, time had folded in on itself, grown viscous, heavy, a neither then nor now time, but both, an in-between state in which this ageing man in search of his dead was also a youth fighting for his life against terrible odds.

Each uphill step towards his grandparents’ apartment increased Bruno’s unease. The buildings with their bullet-scarred stucco seemed to be baring dingy wounds to the reddening sun. Faces emerged from gaping doors like mottled masks on sticks. The streets had grown more twists in them, the ruts in the cobblestone become potholes.

He had been gone some four months. How had his
grandparents
fared in his absence? Would they still be where he had left them? Such thoughts only assailed him now as he was on the point of reaching them.

He had turned thirteen while he was away. His grandmother had told him in a soft voice before he left that his thirteenth
birthday
marked manhood for a Jew. She had talked of taking him to a Rabbi, but his grandfather had grown irate and asked whether she thought she had been transformed into Abraham and was
considering
the offer of more than a ritual sacrifice.

His grandparents often argued over religious matters. He couldn’t help hearing them in their small quarters. Grandma said it was sinful how Grandpa behaved, denying everything, denying his people, denying God. Grandpa said he was denying nothing, simply being expedient. She would thank him later. Meanwhile, she could talk to her God silently and leave the two of them alone.

Only his grandmother was in, when Bruno arrived. She was
sitting
in a chair and gazing out at the dip in the valley that provided their only distant view. Maybe she was talking to God. She stared at Bruno as if he might be a hallucination then whispered his name in a soft voice and held out her hand to him. When he moved towards her, a smile illuminated her face. That face, he realized,
had grown painfully thin, hollowed out so it was all eyes. The hair that cupped it was now utterly white, ghostly.

‘
Brunchen
, my little one. So happy. Tell me, tell me, did you find them? Are they…?’

He hugged and reassured her at the same time. She felt so fragile, he was afraid his embrace might break her.

When Grandpa returned, Bruno felt a sob rising up in him. He too had been transformed into an old man.

Over that winter, his grandmother slowly died. She just
disappeared
into herself and her chair and never re-emerged. The doctor they brought for her could do nothing.

‘Better,’ he said ominously, as if he knew something Bruno didn’t. ‘She’s peaceful. The rest of us are still at war.’

They buried her in the Jewish cemetery. She would have wanted that. It was an auspicious site, Bruno forced himself to think over the tears he refused to shed, just south of the city and not far from the grave of a great Tartar King who would protect her. According to tradition, there would be no stone to mark her resting place for a full year. ‘Memorize the spot,’ his grandfather said to him. He
evidently
imagined the earth would shift, and they would never find her again, so Bruno made a mental note of the names on the
nearest
tombstones and took a good look at the trees in the vicinity.

In direct contradiction of at least his mood at the cemetery, a week later his grandfather announced they were moving. ‘We’re wiping the traces,’ he said, as if all their movements left a rife trail for dogs in hot pursuit, and a great effort had now to be made to send them in a different direction. Every night he listened to the radio for hours, tuning into whatever stations he could get,
comparing
reports, scouring the papers which Bruno brought home for him from the neighbouring kiosk, interpreting propaganda. What he knew and Bruno only learned later was that Nazi troops were massing for a great push east on a variety of fronts and that the Nazi-Soviet pact was in its last moments.

Bruno didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay as close as
possible
to their local paper kiosk. It was run by a young woman who
had become a friend of his. So much of a friend in imagination, that he spent his nights dreaming about her eyes, which appeared to him in improbable places – in the sky as giant stars, in murky
fishponds
as bright lilies.

But they moved. They moved into two tiny rooms not far from one of Przemysl’s many churches which had sprung up over the centuries as if in competition with each other so that each order could outdo the next in grandeur. His grandfather had somehow struck up a relationship with a priest. The clergy were not very well treated by the Russian administration, and the man evidently felt a friend who worked for them might prove beneficial. In turn and for various favours his grandfather didn’t tell him about, but which Bruno was quite certain had been granted, the priest was to provide them with baptismal certificates.

His grandfather had spent hours grilling Bruno about his
experience
of the German
Arbeitsamt
, the labour office, and the papers that were necessary. He had also carefully examined Bruno’s work permit, and as he did so mumbled something about ‘Trust the
Germans
to have papers for everything. And keep records of
everything
. Perfect students of Weber, even the Nazis.’

It sometimes seemed to Bruno that his grandfather had taken on outwitting the Germans as a personal mission. This one old Jew would get them at their own game. In revenge for what he had seen those young thugs in uniform do to those old men. In revenge for what he called their sadism. Their state-sanctioned sadism.

Now that his grandmother was gone, Bruno felt his grandfather talked to him as he had once talked to her, mulling over ideas and strategies late into the evening in the tiny kitchen where they ate their thin broth and tasteless potatoes, unless he had been able to trade more profitably.

One part of the strategy had to do with Bruno going to the priest for weekly tutorials. This time it wasn’t Russian. It was Catholicism that needed to be studied, together with lists of saints and the endless drill of Catechism, Mass and Communion. The priest believed that he was the son of lapsed Catholics, who had tragically died in the first German incursion. Now, however, he was under his grandfather’s aegis, a grandfather who was getting
old and had seen the light despite the pressure of Soviet atheism. He wanted his grandson to embrace the true faith again. Bruno loathed the drill, but he couldn’t go against his grandfather’s will. He sensed that this project was the only thing that gave the old man a taste for life. And he knew that baptismal certificates, when copied into a central register, might not come amiss. The name on his was not to be the one that appeared on his grandfather’s
Russian
pass, but a new name, born from the romance of literature. He was to be Bronislaw Sienkiewicz: Bronek, for short. All traces of the Jewish Bruno were to disappear when his grandfather said the moment was right.

At the end of May, Bruno wanted once more to head off to see his mother and sister. His grandfather insisted that they had to wait for their baptismal papers and the accompanying birth
certificates
before attempting any river crossing. It was too dangerous now. There were too many soldiers about. And this time, they would go together, so they needed to be properly provided for.

The priest gave them the documents on June 19. Before they had got their provisions together for the journey and his grandfather had alerted his office of his impending absence, the Nazis had entered Przemysl. They had come by train from across the river, at first hoodwinking the Russian guards into thinking they were taking just an ordinary delivery of freight. Trainloads of troops followed together with flatcars bearing tanks and armoured cars and motorbikes. Many didn’t bother to stop at Przemysl but
carried
on further east into the Ukraine and Russia. The Russians in the town were surrounded. There was nowhere for them to run.

The fighting in the city was fierce. For two days and nights it raged, making the streets impassable. On the third day, Bruno tried to go out early to rustle up some food. Corpses lay strewn in the streets. The Gestapo marched, breaking into houses, heaving people out, arresting them or shooting them on the spot. They seemed to have a clear picture of where they were going. He raced home and bolted their door, hoping the knock wouldn’t come in this tiny apartment tucked in behind a church. His grandfather just stared out the window and shook his head. Bruno began to think he was taking on his wife’s old role.

Hunger forced him out in the streets again the next day, despite fear. Curiosity too. The German’s didn’t behave like the Russians. As he moved through his familiar haunts, he noted that the City Hall already sported a swastika, as did various other official
buildings
. Streets were closed off. Fierce-looking officers stood in front of them, guns at the ready. Decrees were posted on buildings. Bruno read that all weapons had to be surrendered on pain of death and that a curfew was in place from five in the afternoon till five in the morning. People caught breaking it would be shot. Everyone was to return to work. Or they too would be shot, he added to himself and raced off.

The market was empty. There was nothing to buy or steal or trade anywhere. And though the proclamations called for shops to open immediately, they looked decidedly shut. There was
probably
nothing to put in them. There had, after all, been little enough before, even at the Russian cooperatives.

Finally, not knowing where to turn, Bruno decided to knock at the priest’s door. The man took pity on him and gave him half a stale loaf. Bruno thanked him profusely, added from some perverse instinct that his grandfather had instilled in him, that Christ would thank him too. He rushed home with the bread, hiding it beneath his shirt, and told his grandfather the priest was a good man.

He became his grandfather’s eyes and ears. He ran like
lightning
, forking between ranked German soldiers, scudding up tiny lanes, sniffing out the lie of the land, rushing home to report on what he had seen and the proclamations he had read. His
grandfather
’s role was to interpret the signs he brought him.

The old man decided that he would need to return to his office as the edicts ordered. It would be too dangerous to try and cross the river now. The soldiers would be shooting on sight. If nothing else, it was clear that he would need to earn what he could, since Bruno’s bartering activities were too risky while everything was still in upheaval.

A few days later when he was out in search of food, Bruno noted that a new set of orders had gone up on the walls. These
concerned
Jews. Jews were ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David on them to indicate their nationality. They had to register
immediately with the
Arbeitsamt
for mandatory labour and with something called the
Judenrat
– the new committee that
administered
Jewish life. They were only allowed out on the streets between two and four, unless they had papers showing they were employed. They were forbidden to be near government offices, including the railway station; they couldn’t buy provisions from anyone in town or countryside, nor could they possess any of the new official currency, the German Occupation Marks.

Bruno stared at these proclamations for as long as he dared. He wanted to tear them down, run around the city and rip them from the walls. He couldn’t bear the look on the faces of the two women who were reading beside him. Life was impossible under such orders. Life as a Jew was impossible.

He began to understand more clearly why his grandfather had wanted officially to cut all ties with their Jewish past and why their baptismal certificates were so important. He thought it might be time to take on his new name. He was about to hurry home, using a roundabout route as his grandfather had counselled, to bring him the news, when he determined that, no, he wouldn’t be daunted. He had set out for food, and he must find some.

He hurried on, past the limits of the city. German soldiers were stationed along the country road. Despite protests, they helped themselves to whatever the farmwomen had in their baskets and were bringing to market, then rudely tossed a few pfennigs at them.

In the distance, Bruno spied the red flowered headscarf of one of the women he used to help with her provisions. He ran towards her. She had a basket of radishes in one hand and eggs in another. He asked her if she needed assistance. She shrugged and handed him the radishes under which he spied slabs of butter. He quickly stuffed as much as he could of these into his pockets and under his cap, muttering at her that otherwise, as she probably already knew, the Germans would get the lot for next to nothing. He was right. An arrogant character stopped them and helped himself casually from the baskets. The woman named a price that he merely
harrumphed
at. A few coins were thrust at her, and he told her to hurry along if she didn’t want trouble.

By the time they reached the town, there were only a few radishes left in her basket. Bruno looked round and quickly
emptied
his pockets and cap of the butter and asked if he could have some radishes in return. She gave them willingly, plus an egg that she had hidden and suggested that he come a little further along the road on the morrow to help her out.

At home, his grandfather was eager for news. Bruno gave him the food first and only then, once they had eaten a little, recounted the content of the edicts against the Jews. His grandfather said nothing. He simply sat and stared, his once handsome face lined and dismal. After a while, he patted Bruno’s hand. ‘Remember. If anything happens to me, remember everything I have said. Tomorrow I will report to work. Everyone must work.’

Early the next morning, the sounds of heavy boots clattered up the stairs. They were followed by knocking and raucous calls in German to open the door.

Both of them were dressed, his grandfather in his shabby
work-suit
and tie, ready to go out. He winked at Bruno and started
talking
loudly in German, complaining about this new generation and their lack of manners. ‘
Keine Erziehung
. No respect for the old.’ He pushed back his shoulders that these days were so often slumped and took on his former military bearing, as he pulled open the door.