The Memory Man (25 page)

In May, for her birthday, she decided to celebrate. She was twenty-five and, even though she felt a hundred, it was an age worth celebrating. The sound of gunfire had been close again. In the village the news was that the Russians were advancing, the Germans on the retreat. Either death or liberation was on the march. She was no longer altogether sure she remembered what the second meant. In either case, she felt like a celebration.

She boiled some water and washed her hair with the bar of soap
she had hoarded for so long it had developed thick black grainy ridges. She unfolded the silk stockings from their wrapping of tissue paper, found the delicate silver-blue crepe dress she had last worn in the first year of the war and put on the pearl choker which had been her mother’s and which the Nazis had failed to plunder because she had hidden it amidst the down in her pillow. She dressed, brushed her hair to a sheen, applied some old lipstick, put on shoes that weren’t boots and had a heel. She no longer
recognized
herself in the mirror.

There was leftover rabbit stew for supper. It would have to do. But the table would benefit from a cloth. She had stored them away in a chest years ago and listed them in her mind as
unmanageable
household items, like so much else the house had once contained. But now, she went upstairs, up to the attic where she had hidden the linen, and brought a cloth down with her.

Little Cousin was standing at the foot of the attic stairs when she came down. He was all attention, and she realized he thought she might be an interloper. It took him a moment to recognize her and then he seemed to grow even stiller.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she offered in explanation.

‘Birthday,’ he echoed and without looking at her again rushed out of the house.

Sadness filled her. She had frightened him. She shrugged away a sense of desertion and went to set the table. She dawdled, took her time, but still her Adonis didn’t return. She wheeled her father to his place. Sang a desultory song, because she knew it soothed the old man somewhere in those unreachable depths, and she had wanted to celebrate. How she had wanted it. She found the last bottle of wine that dated from what she thought of as her Wehrmacht days, back in ’40 and ’41, when it had become clear that the war wouldn’t be over in six months. Her father had
suddenly
taken a terrible turn then, and she was willing to do anything to keep him alive, to get him the treatments old Zygmunt said he needed. She dusted the bottle off, uncorked it and poured a little for him and herself. They drank. When she had finished her glass, and the dark had set in, she served the stew on the few uncracked plates. She felt more like weeping than like eating.

Then he was there, wiping his feet on the grate, rushing towards
her. ‘Happy Birthday, sweet cousin,’ he murmured. He thrust into her hands a bouquet of tiny spring anemones, all purple and white amidst their moist leaves and still perfumed by the forest.

She smiled. She couldn’t stop smiling. She put the flowers into a low bowl and gazed at them as they drank and ate. She could feel him stealing glances at her, as if he still wasn’t sure she was who she was.

Afterwards she lit the tallow candle, and they read poetry. Shelley, because he was her father’s favourite, and also Adam Mickiewicz. He told her he thought he still remembered how to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in English, his tutor had taught him. Then he stopped himself and went silent, and she was afraid to interrupt the look on his face.

Later, at the top of the stairs, when he said goodnight, she called after him. ‘Thank you, thank you, Little Cousin,’ and he turned, and she stretched out her hand to him. He came towards her, and she held on to his fingers. She led him to her room that was at the opposite end of the hall. Leaning against the door, she kissed him. He didn’t really know how to, not at first, not until later and by then they were lying on her bed and solemnly undressing each other by the moonlight which trailed through her window and left a silver path on her sheets. She taught him everything she knew, but he seemed to know things of his own. He knew how to run his fingers along her skin, how to explore softly, firmly, how to bury his head between her breasts and arch her against him so that she had to stop herself from crying out in case the night woke.

In the morning, he lay asleep tightly curled against her. She watched his beauty and marvelled, moving slightly so that she could take in all of him. Her Adonis. It was then that she saw it. She wanted to laugh out loud. There, there lay the explanation for everything. All the secretiveness, the probable disguises. It made her very happy. Her Adonis found wounded at the cusp of the forest was a Jew. Not a German, but a Jew. And she wouldn’t let anyone, not anyone, take him away from her.

That summer, time, which had grown so thick and sluggish that she could barely wade her way through it, took on a new
consistency
. It was as frothy and light as whipped cream or the seeds on a dandelion, and it flew by without her being able to catch hold of
it. There were poppies, and then the meadow grasses grew and grew until they were waist high and wonderful for rolling in when they could. During the days they worked enveloped in a heat that might have been sun or their own making. At night their passion electrified the air and made everything glow with the burnished gold of the wheat fields.

The serpent in her Eden turned out to be the
rat-tat-tat
that had led her to him. That summer the Partisans of all groupings and colours had intensified their activity. In August they made an attempt to free Warsaw from the Nazis’ clutches, perhaps
anticipating
help from the Russian Army. It did nothing, and the
Uprising
failed. Meanwhile, in their southern corner of Poland, the fear was growing that the Russians, who were beating the Germans back inch by inch with the help of the Partisans, intended to stay. They were occupiers in a different guise. Not liberators.

Their remote corner of the countryside reverberated with
gunfire
and explosions. On top of the Germans and Russians and Poles, there were also the Ukrainians and the Lemks and the Boyks. Several times a week now, she and Little Cousin would go to the forester’s cottage and see if there was any help they could offer the wounded.

One night, it must already have been September because the harvest was in and she had decided to force herself to make jams and preserves against the bitter winter months, they were
surprised
by a knock at the door. They stared at each other. She told him to go and sit with her father while she answered.

A man stood at the door and assessed her. His clothes were worn and mud-spattered. His face wore the marks of exhaustion. ‘Please, madam. Two friends and I. May we sleep in your barn?’

She nodded. ‘Does anyone know you’ve come this way?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’

His tone was polite, educated.

‘Are you hungry?’

He grinned, showing large teeth. ‘Well, perhaps, just a little.’

She invited them in, served them onions and white cheese and thick slabs of bread and the vodka she had just that morning traded for. Little Cousin watched the three men with the nervous
attention of a feral creature. And listened. Listened astutely. As the men relaxed they explained that they had come from the Kielce area to join a band of fighters somewhere in the border country. They were bringing something. But they had gotten sidetracked in their journey by the fighting and were now lost. There was
supposed
to have been a contact in Tarnow who never turned up.

‘I’ll take you,’ she suddenly heard Little Cousin say. ‘I’m a good tracker.’

That night he murmured: ‘I have to go. I have to join them again. I owe it. I’ve let too many die.’

And she thought to herself, now you’ll let me die. I’ll die, if you go. Perhaps she said it aloud, because he answered. ‘I won’t leave you. I’ll be back. As often as I can be. Please.’

She knew she couldn’t hold him.

Time grew heavy again. The time of endless waiting. And he did come back. Came back once, sometimes twice a week, sometimes every two weeks, always with that gleam in his eye, that nervous glance over his shoulder and that visceral exhaustion that made her realize he was more than half elsewhere. She minded, but she
forgave
him. Because he kept his word. He came back when he could.

Then winter arrived, bringing snows and bitter cold. Her father was worse than ever. One night he gave up and died. He had already been a ghost of himself for so long, she didn’t think the pain would be as great as it was. She wept and wept. She rode weeping to the village and arranged for his burial. She wished, she wished beyond anything, that Little Cousin could be by her side during the funeral.

He came, as if he had heard her call. She thought it was a
miracle
. She also thought news of her father’s passing must have
travelled
with the gunfire through the forest. One thought didn’t disqualify the other.

When she looked at his golden face that night, she felt that
perhaps
the years had made him better acquainted with death than with life.

It was not long after that she found out about the baby. She wanted to tell him the next time he came, but the moment wasn’t right. She thought she might wait for spring. When the anemones
burgeoned. When the war would be over. Yes.

But the Russians came first. She had an odd feeling that they might be looking for him. They didn’t find him. But they filled the house with their soldiers. Only enemies of the people usurped so much space for their own use, they told her. On the second night of their stay, when she sensed that rape or perhaps worse was imminent, she saddled the horse she now thought of as Bessie and stole into the forest. She didn’t find him. For a week, she stayed in the forester’s cabin. Then she moved to a room in the village. She watched and waited. Waited and watched. Waited until the war was officially over, though the fighting didn’t stop. Waited with a part of herself which was beyond hope.

Sometime. Somewhere she would see her Little Cousin again. Her Adonis. Her love. He would come. She knew he would come.

Alone on the train to Linz, Bruno thought about the strangeness of the last days – that girl’s voice that emerged from the old woman’s lips, the intensity of the gaze she settled on him that saw into a place in him he no longer altogether knew except in the
passion
of her presence. She awoke it for him with all its troubling uncertainties.

No. Science wouldn’t, couldn’t, give him explanations that dealt adequately with the complexity of the experience of these past weeks. He felt at ease with that knowledge now. Felt strangely light too, in the midst of a sadness, as if he would have liked to immerse himself even more deeply in that recollected world, rather than bear its burdens by avoiding it.

While Eve was still alive, he didn’t think he would have been able really to hear Pani Marta – to listen and recognize that wild, slightly disjointed narrative from another world that emerged from a woman whose grasp on the everyday was far frailer than her body. Nor would he have believed her. Now he felt he should have given it all longer. So that his debt to Pani Marta could at least be in some small part repaid. She had saved him. And more.

But the calls from London had grown ever more pressing, and there was one more thing he felt compelled to do before he returned. Returned fully to the demands of the present.

He had stayed with his sweet cousin for three days. Three days of holding her hands while this old woman, who was and was no more the person he had begun to remember, had talked,
sometimes
coherently, sometimes in a jumble of cascading language, of those lost moments of what he was now convinced had been their shared past in the last year of the war.

Except for those stark murderous images that returned in
evermore
glaring and crystallized form on a loop, the period had all grown so blurred for him. Icons of death and guilty terror were all that remained for him of the war, and they were best avoided. They had displaced much of the lived and daily reality, had
somehow
drawn all the rest into themselves until they too vanished, only to come back in the wake of his wife’s death.

But she, Pani Marta, had remembered. Had remembered a flow of days, a continuity. He had forgotten, and she had remembered. Had even remembered the name he had worn and which had belonged to a man he thought dead, a man he had felt had tried to kill him and he had somehow helped to kill in turn. Aleksander Tarski.

That brutal logic of hatred and revenge, though all too true
emotionally
, he was now almost certain had no grounding in events.

His personal memory had functioned in the spirit of what
collective
memory had made of the time – Poles and Jews mired in hatreds, when the killing machine which made murderers and
victims
of them all had in the first instance been put in place by a Nazi regime that despised them both. That was history.

Yes, he had once been Aleksander Tarski, had stolen the identity of a Partisan leader he had thought dead. And Pani Marta, whom the neurologists would have supposed to have lost her name memory almost first of all, had remembered this through the
tangles
of her own forgetting.

How much longer would she still contain that part of her history?

Had he been less of a sceptic, less of a believer in the observable elements of the material world, he would almost have begun to think that it was Pani Marta, herself, who had called him to her side on the wings of her desire across the miles of time and space and the snarls of her thought processes. She had winged him to her side while some of the electrical currents and chemical compounds in her brain still functioned well enough for her to speak. A
telepathic
feat in the memory of Little Cousin.

Yet at the same time, he wasn’t altogether convinced that she recognized him. Not in the normal way. He was an old man now,
not the golden youth romance had preserved in her. But
something
about him, perhaps it really was the touching of hands, had triggered a supposed recognition and launched the waterfall of speaking memory. Odd, that if he hadn’t been following Aleksander Tarski, which turned out to be the wrong lead, he would never have arrived at the place where her voice stirred his forgotten past.

How much did his own returning recollections echo hers?

Certainly, with the help of the drawing, her house had returned to his mind. A large shadowy place of whose location he was still uncertain, but that he had found himself waking in one day, he wasn’t sure quite how. He was lying beside a decaying old man who never spoke. What was clearest for him was the old man. He frightened him in his glaring speechlessness. And the hearth, the leap of flame. He saw that. Pani Marta only entered his
consciousness
later. He had believed a young man had picked him up near the forest. Their actions had taken place under palpably different descriptions. What memories they had were different as a result. In a certain sense, he was even now making new ones.

What he must have been most aware of then was pain. It was not a sensation one could recapture, though at the time of the
experience
, it blotted out and distorted so much else. The body had to focus on rallying its survival systems.

Bruno stared out the window of the train and realized that if anyone had asked him what he had seen in these last fleeting hours, he would have had no answer. Yet, he had been looking. Only to see in the stream of landscape the workings of his own mind and that of the woman who so many decades ago had been his lover.

Yes. Old Pani Marta had used the name that had probably been instrumental in ferrying him eastwards across the seas of oblivion and bringing him to the conference in Vienna in the first place. He must have been aware of the offprint Aleksander Tarski had sent him without recollecting it, like in those Gallin picture completion tests in which subjects repeatedly denied that they remembered something that their non-declarative memory attested to. So, of course, Tarski was the first name he seemed to hear when he arrived in Vienna.

Why had the name stolen so long ago taken on so much more emotional significance than all the others he had hidden behind during the war? The technical explanation must be that in his super-stressed state of terror in the forest, the very chemical – noradrenaline – that served as the basis for some of their recent experiments must have been pulsing through his brain: through his amygdala, to be exact. It had bound the name in him forever.

Yet, from the outside, his assessment of what had happened in the clearing was utterly confused. In the scene that returned to him, he was convinced he had left Aleksander to die, had
somehow
helped to kill him. Because at the time he hated him, hated him for recognizing Bruno as a Jew, for sending him on a
dangerous
expedition that had resulted in his papers being stolen, for
palpably
wishing him dead. All of which somehow also entangled Aleksander in the responsibility for those earlier deaths of his mother and sister. He wanted this man, who had authority over him and over his people, dead. He wanted to take the place of that authority. And in his confused state, he had lived out his wishes. He hadn’t helped Aleksander to safety. He had kicked him. Left him to die.

In turn, he was left with a terrible redoubled guilt. So many deaths at his door.

Yet Aleksander, if one were to trust the recollections of an old lady with Alzheimer’s, had lived on, had been ferried to a doctor and been saved. Bruno hadn’t helped to kill him. Did he trust these sources more than his own memory, which in this case was a series of hazy images, black and white and grainy like in an ancient newsreel?

He smiled to himself as he remembered Mark Twain’s
wonderful
quip. ‘It is not so astonishing the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember which are not so.’

Yes.

He would have been producing opiods too in those terrible moments in the forest. He had probably been producing far too many of the morphine-like molecules ever since the barbaric attack on his mother and sister. The opiods dulled fear and pain.
They had seen him through. But they also had the effect of making certain things indistinct, producing distortions.

He now wanted to believe that the real Aleksander Tarski had lived on. Not only the youth who had stolen his papers and in some senses become his double, probably ending up in Russian clutches in part because of the activities of the first. Then too, Bruno acknowledged, he now needed to clear his conscience, particularly since he would inevitably be seeing more of a contemporary Tarski, if his daughter had anything to do with it. In fact, he should thank this younger Aleksander for unwittingly leading him here. By some perverse instinct, he had followed a name he didn’t want to think about, and it had led him to a seam of his past he had lost, but not, it now seemed, forever. It had been kept passionately alive for him by an old woman who contained a young one, almost intact.

Bruno took in peaceful meadows and tumbling hills. No, the mountains in the vicinity of Pani Marta’s old house were far less steep than these. How well did he now remember those months with his first love? He had to confess to himself that little was
altogether
distinct. The effect was not unlike what he saw from the train as it picked up speed. Then time, rather than distance, had sped by, first in the daze of his wound and after that in the warm security of the woman’s presence.

He thought that perhaps for the first time in a long, long period, he had felt safe. But he had had no words then, no conceptual framework, no structure with which to recognize the nature of the love she had now revealed to him. After he had mastered his uneasiness about the man in the wheelchair, the elements of that time had all blended into each other, her kind strong face with its loving smile, the fields, the soft downy bed in which they caressed each other, the dusty shadowy house which had far more rooms than his grandfather’s, the purple and green hills. Yes, all merged into a haven from the horrors that preceded and followed it.

It had been different for her.

But he was more than prepared now to adopt the mood of Pani Marta’s fervent recollections and give the name of love to feelings
he had been too young and stupid and callous to recognize. Yes, love: somewhere within that thick carapace he had worn like a suit of clumsy armour over the hair shirt of his shame.

It came to him as he pondered the puzzles of the past that he had gone back to the house to see her only to find there a Russian
barracks
from which he had fled. It must have been shortly afterwards that his first bout in prison, as Partisan Aleksander Tarski, had come.

Perhaps he was prepared to believe the full extent of Pani Marta’s monologue because, in this land of cemeteries, he really did want to recover something that was still alive. Alive,
particularly
for him. A link between past and present. And Pani Marta, who had found him at the edge of the woods and had returned him to life, was exactly that.

She had also, it seemed, given him a daughter. Somewhat
belatedly
. Far beyond the age when fathers mean much. But perhaps he was readier now than he would have been then – when he was nothing more than a troubled child himself.

He liked Irena, liked – now that he had accepted it – to think that they had been subliminally drawn to one another because of a sense of the other’s familiarity. She was not unlike her mother. Perhaps she even wore traces of him, he told himself fancifully.

What was difficult was knowing how to behave with her. There was no pre-existing rulebook marked how to handle a newly
discovered
daughter who was already in her fifties. Both of them had felt rather tentative. As if it wasn’t quite real. As if the coincidence of their meeting at all, as she had said, was a little more than
ordinary
hard realism could swallow. Both of them chasing the will o’ the wisp of a proper name – which turned out to be an utterly improper name, a mere disguise. It was more like one of
Shakespeare
’s comedies than a recovered wartime story. Though one heard plenty of far stranger ones.

She told him about babies flung from trains and raised in
convents
, met again in Baku oilfields. About researchers from Turkey and the US in the Warsaw Jewish archives discovering, as they dug through the past, that they were probably brother and sister. Yes, the stories and coincidences were stranger than fiction would allow. So she was happy simply to know that in her case her
mother hadn’t come up with this story as another hallucinatory figment thrown up by her decaying mind. Biological daughter or not, she was also happy because she had made new friends, had new extensions beyond her narrowing world.

Irena didn’t really want to go in for the hard test, the DNA test, she told him. She preferred, a romantic like her mother, to keep hopes and emotions free. Perhaps he would come to visit her from time to time, and she him. Perhaps he would even grow to like her.

He liked her already, he told her. Secretly, he was also chuffed to imagine that once in his long life he had in fact fathered a biological child.

But what about Amelia in all this? Amelia who was faced with a rather tardy sister? Amelia who had prevailed upon him to make this journey, for which he now felt deeply grateful to her? He had been so reluctant at first, not wanting to rake up all that terrible matter, not wanting to dig through mud and ash and old terrors. But it had been salutary in a way. He understood a little better now, from his distance of age and time, the unspeakable course of that war. Understood particularly his grandfather’s move into the Ghetto, where he knew certain death awaited him. The young Bruno, angry and guilty in equal parts, couldn’t have stopped what was almost a generational resignation in the old man, let alone a wish to embrace his own people.

Strangely, Bruno now felt more benevolent towards himself as well, as if he too might be forgiven his sins, which included
survival
… even if not for much longer.