The Memory Man (7 page)

A few more minutes of prodding and tapping, a bit more history, and a reconfirmation of Bruno’s agility in German and Polish, his smattering of English, and Gilbert asked Bruno whether he had any regular occupation in the camp. He then explained that one of his assistants had received a visa and recently left, so he was now looking for a replacement. He needed someone
who could be trusted not to steal drugs and resell them on the black market, who could follow instructions rigorously, who could translate when necessary and who would be willing to help out daily and sometimes at night. Was Bruno willing?

In return for his stunned ‘yes’ he was told instantly to sign up for the camp’s English classes. He was also presented with a
military
first aid manual, a German-English dictionary and told to read and come back the following week.

Gradually, as he began to work with Dr Gilbert in the infirmary, Bruno received the education the war years had robbed him of. Somehow, amongst the population of the camp Gilbert found people who could tutor him in maths, chemistry and biology. For English, he had a ragbag of teachers, some English, some American, so that his pronunciation always remained a mixed matter.

In the clinic, Dr Gilbert taught as he worked, even at his busiest, even during an outbreak of diphtheria when quarantine units had to be set up.

Bruno worshipped him, gobbled up whatever knowledge came his way like a starving man. He followed Gilbert’s instructions with great precision, worked hard in order to earn a rare smile from his mentor. What he couldn’t admit to Gilbert, barely dared admit to himself, was that he didn’t really like the contact with the sick. But for some reason, he loved assisting in the operating theatre. Watching the cut into flesh, the violence of an incision that was nonetheless benignly administered, calmed him in the way nothing else did. At those times, the images of war that plagued him, still fresh with their horror, receded into a distance where they could somehow be kept at bay: be controlled. One form of physical invasiveness seemed to stem another. The incision made into the body, the tamping of blood, the sewing gave him a kind of low thrum of hope, as if death could be turned back, as if he were penetrating the mystery of life and that dark edge where it faded into something else or nothing at all.

He spent almost two years at the camp. He watched the floating population come and go, a stream of desperate haunted people,
who wanted only to find a place that wasn’t a place of transit. Bruno had begun to feel that he might have found just that at Dr Gilbert’s side.

He did everything the doctor asked of him and more. He would gladly have spent the rest of his days with him, but with his unflinching generosity, Gilbert had managed to get him papers for Canada. On top of that, he had magically organized a place for him on a pre-med course in Montreal. Bruno knew that he couldn’t not go, and before the winter of ’48 closed in, he was on his way, first to Paris then to Le Havre and then across a wave-tossed Atlantic, so savage it felt as if it wanted to wash the war away.

The ship docked at the port of Halifax in Nova Scotia. Once past the immigration controls, Canada felt innocent. As he walked the quiet streets of Montreal, in search of a rooming house
someone
had recommended, he looked around him in a daze. He realized he was looking for those men in uniform, any kind of uniform, who had so dramatically punctuated his existence until now. They were few and far between. He had to adjust his behaviour. It didn’t fit. It wouldn’t do to lurch up and around whenever there was the sound of footsteps behind him. It wouldn’t do to finish everything on his plate in record time, so that his neighbours at the student cafeteria stared. Nor would it do to pretend an arrogant disdain and barge through every obstacle, as he had so effectively learned to do in imitation of the SS officers who had so long been a part of his life. And finally, he had somehow to learn how to put this incommodious past behind him: no one here wanted to know, not really, not after the first moments of bland politeness.

From his lodgings in a sprawling stone house on the lower end of Crescent Street, he could walk to the university buildings sheltered beneath a slope that, for a brief few days after his arrival, was ablaze with red and russet leaves. These gave way to gusting winds. Snows followed in their wake, and the city took on a coat of white. He loved the white and the stillness that came with it. The American bomber jacket he had acquired with pride in the streets of Munich might barely be enough to keep out the biting cold, but on Sundays, when he could, he hitched rides into the
countryside. The rolling hills outside the city had a quiet that seemed to soothe the tumult inside him, and the blinding whiteness obliterated the images he no longer wanted to see.

He was intent on his courses. His first experience of a laboratory came with what he would later call a thrill of recognition. The business of making up a slide – the thin delicate glass, the fine slice of whatever matter, paper-thin, the drop of chemical from the pipette, the second sandwiching glass precisely placed, the microscope adjusted, the moving, crawling, swimming enlarged world within, so remote from anything he had seen, yet intricately related – filled him with a delight he couldn’t name. It was a little like the snow. It swallowed everything outside and made it invisible.

He spent far more than the requisite hours on his stool. As difficult as he initially found it to make contact with students who were mostly younger, certainly less experienced than he was, he had no difficulty in talking to his fellows about the world they shared on the other side of the microscope. He loved its infinite mysteries and the paradox of its containment, its rigorous exactitudes. The business of mixing and observing and measuring felt like a newly acquired and better nature than any he had known.

The problem was he had to earn his keep. Dr Gilbert with whom he corresponded regularly and who kept sending him addresses of new people to visit – which Bruno rarely did – had seen to it during the latter part of his stay at the DP camp that he was paid. But his savings were small and soon run through. It was then that he heard orderlies were needed at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

He knew nothing yet of its famous director, Wilder Penfield. Nor did he have any idea of the work the Institute was engaged on. The inscription above the heavy doors of the imposing
eight-storey
building on the slopes of Mount Royal, gave him pause: ‘Dedicated to the relief of sickness and pain and the study of neurology.’

‘Professor… Professor Lind.’

‘Pops, are you okay?’

Bruno opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized they had been closed.

‘We were thinking of going to have some lunch. Will you join us?’

Bruno blinked over Irena Davies’s words.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes.’ He found his voice and a smile he hoped wasn’t a
grimace
. ‘I think I was awake. I was remembering my early days in Montreal.’

‘Montreal?’ Aleksander Tarski queried. ‘Of course. At Wilder Penfield’s Institute. You must have known him.’

‘You’ve heard of him? I thought he was utterly out of fashion now.’

Tarski grinned. It gave his long, rather pallid face, a raffish air. ‘Under Communism we sometimes learned peculiar things. Not that Penfield is peculiar…only that a distant Canadian should have made it onto our syllabus. He had good early relations with the Soviets, you know. They saw him as someone who was furthering the work of their own great Pavlov and indeed confirming his findings on conditioning.’

‘I see.’ Bruno stood up slowly, testing his legs and his bearings.

‘We were recommended his book on epilepsy and the functional anatomy of the brain.’

‘But you never visited the Institute in Montreal.’

‘No, no, our possibilities of travel were not great. Moscow: yes, when I was a student in the late seventies and eighties. Montreal: no.’

Bruno waited to speak until they had reached the dining car and been shown a table. He found a neutral topic. ‘For some reason I was wondering whether, if Penfield were alive and working now and had the new brain imaging technologies to play with, would these have changed his insights, perhaps even his pursuits?’

‘Inevitably, since tools are never simply that.’ Aleksander’s voice grew warm as he rushed on. ‘Once they’re there, they begin to shape our questions, don’t they? Alzheimer himself would never have made it as a name into the diagnostic manuals if it hadn’t been for the new distortion-free microscopes that magnified tissue by several hundred times. Not to mention Nissel’s new
method for tissue staining. These were what allowed him to see the tangled bundles of fibrils and clusters of plaques that bear his name. See them only after the patient was dead, of course…’

Amelia interrupted, teasing. ‘This calls out for note-taking, Professor Tarski!’

Tarski stopped, as still as a startled creature. He turned his face to the window with a gesture of apology.

Bruno rushed in. ‘No, no. You’re right. Penfield would probably now be busy identifying mutated genes in inherited epilepsy syndromes and certainly in imaging sites of seizure origin, or maybe even moving into gene-chip technology, pioneering implants. You know, Professor Tarski,’ he paused on the discomfort saying the name induced in him, ‘I was half dreaming before about my first visit to the Institute. There’s this frieze…no, no, I’m confusing it with the frieze in the reception hall which shows all the great neurologists, and then at the centre of the back wall there’s a woman pulling back a veil and underneath her, a caption: “
La nature se devoile devant la science.
” “Nature unveils herself before science.”’

‘They wouldn’t dare do that to women now,’ Amelia
challenged.

‘Or perhaps to nature,’ Irena offered and quickly added when there was no response: ‘Our environmentalists would be insulted, no?’

‘I think you’re right.’ Bruno smiled. ‘We were all much more cavalier in our ambitions then.’

‘So your time at the Montreal Neurological proved interesting?’ It was Aleksander’s turn to prompt.

Bruno tried to answer him without hedging. ‘Yes, in a way it made me. It pointed a direction. And Penfield himself… Well, I can only say he was charismatic. A tyrant, of course, but a benevolent and brilliant one. I watched some of his operations – you know the ones in which the patient helped to map brain areas in response to the doctor’s probe. It was most peculiar, humbling too. These people conjuring up forgotten episodes, seeing relatives in the room, finding acute smells, and then everything would disappear when the probe moved. Penfield talked of a storehouse of
memories: a film superimposed on a part of the brain in either or both hemispheres that comes to life when triggered. And pursuing the film language, he talked of flashbacks…’

Bruno stopped abruptly as if the word itself had attacked him. They were lashing back at him these flashbacks, lashing out. They didn’t want to be kept back. People running. Crowds. Children staring. Processions. Whips. Marching. Marching. He speeded them up, sent them on their way. Go away.

‘You don’t see eye-to-eye with Penfield, then?’ Aleksander brought him back.

‘Was I suggesting that? No, no. He was brilliant. He and Milner, after all, led us to discover the strategic role of the hippocampus in laying down long-term memories. Intuitively, I think he was on the right track. No, I was thinking of something else.’ He shook himself into the present. ‘As you know, there’s so much that still remains unexplained. Biochemically, above all. It’s a question of mapping plus much more. Penfield was a great surgeon, by the way. I’m not. I ended up working on the eighth floor. Research. I don’t know if my mentor, Dr Gilbert, would have been pleased. He died just before I made the decision.’

Bruno faltered again, still in the grip of his own memories. He saw Gilbert as he had seen him that last time in Toronto, shrunken to child-size, already gone really, but he had made an effort to squeeze Bruno’s hand, and Bruno had cried his thanks, cried for perhaps the first time since he was a boy. Gilbert had been a good man. A giant.

‘Did Penfield lecture?’ Aleksander asked

‘I think I first heard him at a meeting. The first meeting of the Canadian Neurological Society, which took place in 1949. I slipped in under some pretext… I think I was acting as an usher. And I heard Penfield make one of his rousing claims. Heard him say that the splitting of the atom was child’s play when compared to the task of charting the mechanisms of the central nervous system on which thought and behaviour depend. Guess he was right, there. We’re still at it.’

‘And so you will be. For a long time to come.’ Amelia intervened. ‘The last thing we want is your lot pretending you understand everything. You’ll just feed us more and more pills, pills for everything until the pills go wrong, and we have to take new ones to get over the damage.’

‘But Amelia, if there had been something for your mother to take, you would have been happy.’

‘That’s different, Pops. That was cancer. Not her mind.’

‘Amelia is a pharmaceutical Calvinist,’ Bruno explained.

‘That must make me into a hedonist for once. I would be very happy if there was a pill for my mother’s mind.’

‘Oh.’

They all stared at Irena.

She squirmed. ‘Yes, yes. She has Alzheimer’s.’ She said it softly, quickly, as if she didn’t want anyone really to hear. As if a kind of infectious shame came with it.

‘That’s hard,’ Bruno offered. ‘Hard on her. And everyone around her.’

‘The trouble is,’ Irena burst out, ‘we want mental processes to have a physical base. And at the same time we don’t. We want to be free, not to think of ourselves as utterly controlled by proteins, hormones, chemicals, even genes. But if something goes wrong with our minds, we don’t want that wrong to be attributed to us, to the way we lead our lives. We want the simple chemical
diagnosis,
the instant pill. Well, I do.’ She met Amelia’s stare.

‘Lucky for the pharmacologists amongst us.’ Aleksander turned his hangdog look on Irena. Its irony was uncertain.