A Traitor to Memory (54 page)

“Did you ever hear Katja shout at your little sister?” the policeman asked.

No, I had not.

“Did you ever see her discipline Sonia if she misbehaved?”

No, I had not.

“Did you ever see her do anything a little bit rough with Sonia? Shake her a bit when she wouldn't stop crying? Smack her bottom when she didn't obey? Pull on her arm to get her attention? Grab her leg to move her about when she changed her nappies?”

Sosy cried a lot, I tell him. Katja got out of bed in the night to take care of Sosy. She talked German to her—

“In an angry voice?”

—and sometimes
she
cried as well. I could hear her from my room, and once I got up and looked into the corridor and saw her walking up and down, holding Sosy on her shoulder. Sosy wouldn't stop crying, so Katja put her back in her cot. She took a set of plastic baby keys and jangled them over Sosy's head and I heard her say,
“Bitte, bitte, bitte”
which is German for
please
. And when the keys didn't make Sosy stop crying, she grabbed the side of the cot and gave it a shake.

“You saw this?” The policeman leans towards me across the table. “You
saw
Katja do this? Are you certain, lad?”

And something in his voice tells me I've given an answer that's pleasing. I say I'm certain: Sosy cried and Katja shook the side of the cot.

“I think we're getting somewhere now,” the policeman says.

12 October

How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his memory, Dr. Rose? How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his dreams? How much of what I say to the detective in those hours in the police station comes from what I actually witnessed? How much grows from sources as diverse as the tension I feel between my father and the policeman and my desire to please them both?

It isn't much of a leap from shaking the side of a cot to shaking a child. And from there, it is the work of a moment to fancy having seen a small arm twisted, a small body jerked upright to put a coat on, a small round face squeezed and pinched when someone spits her food on the floor, a tangle of hair yanked through a comb, and legs wrenched into a pair of pink dungarees.

Ah, you say. Your voice is noncommittal and carefully, scrupulously without judgement, Dr. Rose. Your hands, however, rise, pressed together in an attitude that resembles prayer. You place them just beneath your chin. You don't avert your gaze but I avert mine.

I see what you're thinking, and I'm thinking it as well. My answers to that policeman's questions were what sent Katja Wolff to prison.

But I didn't give evidence at her trial, Dr. Rose. So if what I said was so important, why wasn't I called to give evidence? Anything less than the whole truth sworn to in a court of law was like an article appearing on the front page of a tabloid: something to be taken at face value only, something suggesting that further investigation into the matter by professionals might be required.

If I said that Katja Wolff harmed my sister, all that would have come from that is their looking into the allegation. Isn't that the case? And if corroboration existed for what I told them, they would have found it.

That has to be what happened, Dr. Rose.

15 October

I might have truly seen it. I might have been a witness to those things which I declared as having occurred between my little sister and her nanny. If so many sections of my mind are blank when it comes to the past, how illogical is it to assume that somewhere on that vast canvas reside images too painful to be remembered accurately?

Pink dungarees are fairly accurate, you tell me. They come either from memory or from embellishment, Gideon.

How could I embellish with such a detail as the colour of her overalls if she didn't
wear
those overalls?

She was a little girl, you say with a shrug that's not dismissive so much as inconclusive. Little girls often wear pink.

So you're saying I was a liar, Dr. Rose? Simultaneously a child prodigy and a liar?

They're not mutually exclusive, you point out.

I reel from this and you see something—anguish, horror, guilt?—on my face.

You say, I'm not labeling you a liar now, Gideon. But you might have been then. Circumstances may have required you to lie.

What sort of circumstances, Dr. Rose?

You have no answer to give me other than this: Write what you remember.

17 October

Libby found me at the top of Primrose Hill. I was standing before that metal engraving that allows one to identify the buildings and monuments that one can see from the summit, and I was forcing myself to look from the engraving to the view—working from east to west—in order to pick each one out. From the corner of my eye, I saw her coming up the path, dressed in her black leathers. She'd left her helmet elsewhere, and the wind whipped her curls round her face.

She said, “Saw your car in the square. I thought I'd find you here. No kite?”

“No kite.” I touched the metal surface of the engraving, my fingers resting on St. Paul's Cathedral. I studied the skyline.

“What's up, then? You don't look so great. Aren't you cold? What're you doing out here without a sweater?”

Looking for answers, I thought.

She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I'm, like,
talking
to you here.”

I said, “I needed a walk.”

She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn't you?”

I wanted to say that I see you even when I don't see you, Dr. Rose. But I thought that she would misunderstand and take the comment for a patient's obsession with his doctor, which I do not have.

She came round the engraving to face me, blocking my view. She reached across the sheet of metal and touched her palm to my chest, saying, “What's wrong, Gid? How can I help?”

Her touch reminded me of all that isn't happening between us—of all that would have been happening between a woman and a normal man—and the weight of this idea was suddenly too much to bear in conjunction with what was already plaguing me. I said, “I may have sent a woman to prison.”

“What
?”

I told her the rest.

When I had finished, she said, “You were eight years old. A cop was asking questions. You did the best you could in a bad situation.
And
you might have seen that stuff, too. There've been studies on this, Gid, and they say that kids don't make things up when it comes to abuse. Where there's smoke, there's fire. And anyway, someone must have confirmed what you said if you didn't testify in court.”

“That's just it. I'm not so sure that I didn't testify, Libby.”

“But you said—”

“I said I'd managed to remember the policeman, the questions, the station: all of them aspects of a situation that I'd blocked from my mind. What's to say I haven't also blocked from my mind giving evidence at Katja Wolff 's trial?”

“Oh. Yeah. I see.” She looked out at the view and tried to tame her hair, sucking in on her lower lip as she thought about what I'd said. Finally, she declared, “Okay. Let's find out what really went on, then.”

“How?”

“How tough can it be to dig up what happened at a trial that was probably covered by every newspaper in the country?”

19 October

We started with Bertram Cresswell-White, the barrister who'd prosecuted Katja Wolff for the Crown. Finding him, as Libby had promised, presented no problem. He had a room in chambers in the Temple, at Number Five Paper Buildings, and he agreed to see me once I managed to get him on the phone. He said, “I remember the case perfectly. Yes. I'm happy to speak with you about it, Mr. Davies.”

Libby insisted on going with me. She said, “Two heads are better. What you won't think to ask him, I will.”

So we drove to the river and entered the Temple from Victoria Embankment, where a cobblestone lane ducks beneath an ornate archway, which gives access to the best legal minds in the country. Paper Buildings sits on the east side of a leafy garden within the Temple, and the barristers who have chambers there possess the benefit of views of either the trees or the Thames.

Bertram Cresswell-White had views of both, and when Libby and I were ushered into his office by a young woman delivering him a set of pink-ribboned briefs, we found him in an alcove behind his desk, taking advantage of the sight of a barge sailing sluggishly in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. When he turned from the window, I felt confident that I'd never seen him before, that there was nothing I'd deliberately or unconsciously wiped from my mind involving him. For surely I would remember so imposing a figure had he questioned me inside a courtroom.

He must be six feet three inches tall, Dr. Rose, with the sort of shoulders one gets from rowing. He has the frightening eyebrows of a man over sixty, and when he looked at me, I felt the internal jolt one gets from being pierced by a stare that's used to intimidate witnesses.

He said, “I never expected to meet you. I heard you play some years ago at the Barbican.” He said to the young woman as she placed the briefs on his desk where already a stack of manila folders lay in the centre, “Coffee please, Mandy.” And to Libby and me, “Will you have some?”

I said yes. Libby said, “Sure. Thanks,” and she looked round the room with her lips forming a small
O
through which she was blowing air. I know her well enough to see what she was thinking in her California fashion: “Some joint you got here.” She wasn't wrong.

Cresswell-White's room in chambers was designed to impress: hung with brass chandeliers, lined with bookshelves holding well-bound legal volumes, and heated by a fireplace in which even now was burning a gas fire with a realistic arrangement of artificial coals. He gestured us to a sitting area of leather armchairs that were gathered round a coffee table on a Persian rug. A framed photograph stood on this table. In it, a youngish man dressed in a barrister's wig and gown posed at Cresswell-White's side, his arms crossed and a grin on his face.

“Is this your kid?” Libby said to Cresswell-White. “There's a big resemblance.”

“That's my son Geoffrey, yes,” the barrister replied, “at the conclusion of his first case.”

“Looks like he won it,” Libby noted.

“He did. He's just your age, by the way.” This last was said to me with a nod as he set the folders on the coffee table. I saw that
Crown vs. Wolff
was written on each of their tabs. “You were born a week apart at the same hospital, I discovered. I didn't know that at the time of the trial. But later when I was reading about you somewhere—this would have been when you were a teenager, I suppose—the article included the facts of your birth and there it was: the date, place, and time. It's remarkable, really, how connected we all are.”