The Memory Man (26 page)

For all this he was in debt to Amelia. She had said, with that wonderful infectious laugh he hadn’t heard enough of these last years, that she really rather liked the possibility of a half-sister from sources quite other than she had imagined. Wonderful Amelia with her courageous sense of life. To be honest, she hadn’t been paying quite so much attention to him or to Irena these last days. She had been more engaged in worrying about the real Aleksander…the only one who was real because he was still alive, papers or no papers.

Amelia was relieved to find that what Bruno had against the man was a mere matter of name. Not even the taint of kinship he had suspected. So she didn’t expect him to go round behaving like some raving Montague or Capulet. As for Aleksander’s being Polish, surely Bruno couldn’t hold that against him in any way. It had to be enough that Aleksander was prepared to make up for history and take on board a black Jew who, on top of
everything
else, was an American. So he had strict orders to provide Aleksander with a reference whenever he was asked – something, Bruno chuckled to himself, he had already promised to do on his first visit to Aleksander’s laboratory, whatever his other
suspicions
.

Last night while he had lain in bed considering everything, the nightmare had suddenly confronted him again. The falling figures had risen out of the first moments of sleep. They bathed him in cold sweat as they tumbled down the precipitous incline one after another.

He had begun to think over this last while in which they kept reappearing that perhaps they weren’t his figures at all, but figures that had come with the chilling events of the Twin Towers tragedy. That they had triggered some deep fear in him. His own fear of falling. Of dying. It was the future he was frightened of, even though it wore the aura of the past.

Then last night some of the faces had turned towards him. Without really recognizing them, his dream had put names to them the way dreams do, allowing recognition without
resemblance
. They were Anna and Mamusia and his grandfather. He knew them now. His war-dead. But his wife, Eva, was there too, and he had thought in his night-state of random associations that perhaps her death had brought all the others back, like a train which moved backwards to pick up its passengers.

And then, with a jolt that shook him awake, he had recognized that rock face with its sheer granite drop. Not a skyscraper, no. But a place he had been to: had visited briefly on his journey from Krakow to the Munich refugee camp after the war. Yes, yes. And the site could find no place in his narrative of war, which was a youth’s, and for all its horrors wore a human dimension, even if
these humans were at their barbarous worst. So he had thrust the place away. That visit and the impossibility of containing it in any autobiographical story. He couldn’t have gone on if it had lodged there, accessible to everyday recollection. Its enormity was such that he had to put it out of mind or leave his mind. It was too much, coming on top of everything else. Too much, when the toughened youth he had been was weakened by the sudden
outbreak
of hope. The enormity.

The taxi brought him from the station. It was only twenty
kilometres
from Linz, in the kind of countryside the tourist brochures drooled over. Linz, the town that had given birth to Hitler and which in his last days he had dreamed of as his great ‘city of art’.

The main camp building was a solid stone structure hewn from the quarry beside it. The quarry, a sheer granite drop, nicknamed by the SS ‘the Parachute Jump’, was called the Wiener Graben – like the street he had stayed on those short weeks ago. It had made him edgy. Now he knew why.

His father must have been amongst the first inmates, those forced to build the HQ, the high stone wall and the watchtower in the summer of 1938. There were political prisoners, enemies of the Reich, and there were Jews. His father had qualified as both. There were also eventually Russians and Poles. Polish priests shared the lowest category with the Jews. There were thirty-eight barracks for prisoners and all around the perimeter, electrified barbed wire charged with 380 volts.

Mauthausen and its neighbour, the Gusen complex, plus
forty-nine
linked sub-camps in the region, were amongst the camps in the Nazi’s third category: ‘
Rückkehr unerwünscht
.’ Return not wanted. His father hadn’t returned.

According to eyewitness accounts the prisoners were divided into two groups. One hacked granite, the other carried the twenty-five kilogram slabs that rose to forty-five kilograms after the first journey – a weight designated by Himmler himself – up the 186 steps to the top of the quarry. In one day when
eighty-seven
men were at work, forty-seven died by eleven-thirty in the
morning. Those who were responsible for hacking the granite were at the mercy of SS guards who had pickaxe handles with which to flail them. Combats in gladiatorial style were organized at the top of the quarry. Whichever opponents could push the others down were promised freedom. Instead, they were
summarily
propelled down the Parachute Jump, themselves.

There were other killing methods. In ten degrees Celsius weather, inmates were ordered to undress, hosed down with water and left to freeze. Benzine injections were used in baths. As were operations to remove a part of the brain. All patients died. There was a gas chamber beneath the sickbay. It was smaller than a neighbouring one in Hartheim, where Camp Commandant Franz Ziereis, shot in May 1945 by the camp’s liberators, confessed to the gassing of 1,500,000. He apparently found it worthwhile to boast. Other sources estimate 30,000 deaths in that particular and small gas chamber.

At the camp’s liberation 15,000 bodies were found in mass graves. Three thousand more died after liberation. Their state was beyond repair.

Bruno read and walked. Mostly he stared into the pit. Little waterfalls trickled down the granite. Here and there moss turned the black stone bright green. Flowers peeked from its sheer expanse.

The terrain around him was beautiful. It increased the enormity of what had been put in train here.

He stood in front of the sheer rock face and repeated the words: ‘
Ruckkehr unerwunscht
’. Return unwanted. The meaning slipped to encompass him. He had made his own unwanted return. He had returned after too many years to his father’s grave. And it had cleared something in him. Even if it was also the passage to his own death.

He allowed the childhood tears, never shed, to roll down his cheeks. It was some kind of small memorial.

In its gestation, this book incurred many debts of gratitude. Professor Steven Rose, one of our foremost neuroscientists, valiantly allowed me into the Brain and Behaviour Research Group laboratories at the Open University, where memory research is carried out, and where I could observe and talk with a superb international team of scientists, including Konstantin Anokhin from Moscow. Steven Rose also permitted me to trail him at conferences and to ask far more questions than any man, even a scientist, should have to answer. On top of it all, he was an early and expert reader of the book. For all this I am deeply grateful to him – though he can in no way be held responsible for any of the uses to which I have put neuroscience.

Our work together was made possible by the Gulbenkian Foundation and in particular Sian Ede, who brilliantly weds artists, writers and scientists under the auspices of the ‘The Arts and Science’ programme, which has done so much to bring people from radically different disciplines together, develop ideas and sometimes find common and fruitful ground.

Ever since I wrote a thesis on Proust, I have been interested in memory and forgetting, the tricks and incompleteness of each. It was a boon to be able to place the neuroscientific alongside earlier forms of understanding.

In the writing of this book and well before, I immersed myself in a great many war-time memoirs, both published and unpublished, as well as, once more, in my parents’ memories and stories. The extraordinary resilience and courage, the cruelty and generosity people manifested in these extreme conditions (each in their
own very particular way) is an endless source of wonder. I owe a debt to all of them.

Thanks too are due to my first readers, Eva Hoffman, whose critical eye was a veritable boon, Monica Holmes, Suzette Macedo and of course, John Forrester. Their responses helped, as did those of Stephanie Cabot, my agent. I am also very grateful to Gary Pulsifer and Daniela de Groote of Arcadia Books, my adventurous publishers, and their editor Ken Hollings.

Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy
by Nella Bielski

Translated from the French by Lisa Appignanesi and John Berger

Chekhovian in its deceptive lightness, Nella Bielski’s fiction is a uniquely feminine meditation on death and absence: the absence of the heroine’s husband Paul, of the intense life of her childhood in wartime Russia and her youth in Moscow, of friends and family who have vanished behind the tundra of the Gulag, of her parents who loved her.

‘Nella Bielski writes out of the experience of obstruction, exile and betrayal, but the tone is hopeful and humane’
– Hermione Lee,
Observer

‘The book is flawless, and John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi - both eminent authors in their own right - have produced a wonderful translation’
– Jonathan Self,
Jewish Chronicle

Fiction

Kicking Fifty

Paris Requiem

Sanctuary

The Dead of Winter

The Things We Do For Love

A Good Woman

Dreams of Innocence

Memory and Desire

Non-Fiction

Losing the Dead

Freud’s Women
(with John Forrester)

Simone de Beauvoir

Cabaret

Feminity and the Creative Imagination:

A Study of James, Proust and Musil

Mad, Bad and Sad

Edited Volumes

The Rushdie File
(with Sara Maitland)

Dismantling Truth:

Reality in the Post-Modern World

(with Hilary Lawson)

Postmodernism

Ideas from France

Science and Beyond
(with Steven Rose)

Lisa Appignanesi was born in Poland, grew up in Paris and
Montreal
before moving to Britain. A university lecturer, she was a founder member of the Writers and Readers Publishing
Cooperative
and then, deputy director of London’s Institute of
Contemporary
Arts. She is the bestselling author or eight novels and a number of works of non-fiction, including the family memoir,
Losing the Dead, Freud’s Women
(with John Forrester), and
Cabaret.
She is also a noted broadcaster, critic and cultural commentator. Lisa Appignanesi lives in London and has two children.