The Memory Man (14 page)

‘What else fathers are for,’ she took up his banter in a more
serious
vein, ‘is introducing their children to the history that made them.’

‘It’s not like that, Amelia.’

‘Because the history that made them gets passed down,
willy-nilly
.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Even if you don’t talk about it, it’s there. It’s there in your silences, in your gestures, in the odd things that make you angry, like filling in forms. In your sudden starts. In the way that you used to hug me as if I might disappear down an Alice hole at any minute.’

He stared at her. Uncomfortable. Did he? More so than other parents?

‘I want to understand. You’re a mystery I want to understand. I want you to take me to Auschwitz.’

‘I told you, Amelia. I have no interest in going. I’m not a great visitor of public memorials. Nor do I want to read explanatory captions beside mountains of shoes or words on stone. All of this is hard enough as it is. I understand that for you it’s different. And you must go. Yes, you must.’

He had had to clear his throat over the mountains of shoes. As if the words wouldn’t come out. Why? Only a few hours ago he had paused in front of a shabby shop window and seen just that – a mountain of shoes, all displayed higgledy-piggledy on top of each other and making plenty the only aesthetic. The mass, not the individual. That had made him think of the killer camps, as if somewhere there might be a link. But he didn’t want to think about that. Enough emotional energy had gone into that kind of thinking all those years ago.

Amelia burst into his thoughts. ‘You’re not kidding it’s different. I may be one of the few Polish Jewish Blacks in unrecorded history, and my father’s too scared to take me to Auschwitz some fifty-five years after it closed for business.’

He studied her, decided that she was serious despite the
mock-hyperbolic
tone. They were quiet as the waiter deposited their plates, quiet for longer than usual as they ate.

At last he said: ‘It’s not quite the way you think, Amelia. I… No, no, that’s not right. I suspect you think there’s a trauma
somewhere
. A trauma that I won’t talk about. That I can’t confront. That will somehow get better if I do. If I put a narrative to
emotion
, even if the narrative isn’t quite right. But can you imagine the opposite? Can you imagine that one of the reasons I don’t want to go is that I’m afraid of feeling nothing? Nothing? Nothing at all? No emotion that can possibly meet the measure of those times?’

He gazed at her incomprehension. ‘Yes, that’s right. And the second reason may be that what I don’t want to confront, certainly don’t want to share with you, is something as simple, as ghastly, as banal, as self-hatred. Not guilt. Just self-hatred.’

‘You have no reason to hate yourself.’

‘I think I’m the only judge of that.’

She examined him. ‘Is this linked to why you don’t like Aleksander? Does he remind you of yourself?’

Something like panic rose up in him. He swallowed hard, scrambled for a voice. ‘What makes you think I don’t like him. I do. I do.’

‘The man doth protest too much. What do you think of his science?’

‘Why?’

‘I slept with him.’

‘I see.’ He didn’t see at all, but he blundered on. ‘Does this have anything to do with his science?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s a way of telling you.’

‘Telling me you like him?’

‘I do.’

‘I don’t understand… It’s strange.’

He could see that the words that had dropped out of him
inadvertently
made her unhappy, wary. She looked as if she might bite back, be rude, the way she had done as an adolescent if he said
anything
even slightly critical about her boyfriends. These bumped along erratically between effete East-coast preppies and druggie ghetto youths, roadside mirrors in whom she hoped to see herself, but who never reflected her adequately.

‘His science is fine.’

She looked at him for a moment without responding. ‘Does that mean as fine as your being here? Less fine? Or more?
Nobel-standard
fine?’

‘I’m not locking you out, Amelia.’ He made an effort, though his mind was racing with this other news. If Tarski was who his fears suggested, then he shouldn’t be with his daughter.

‘It’s just…this whole trip, it’s not what I expected, that’s all. Though I don’t know quite what I did expect. You see…my own history was very particular. It doesn’t quite fit into the most
prevalent
narratives. And there isn’t much I can show you except for buildings. They’re not what make a city. Not really. It’s the people. And the people aren’t here. When I was last in this particular
square, as a child, it was teeming, noisy. Crowded and noisy with the babble of Yiddish, which I didn’t really understand. There were Jews like me, ordinary, western, business-suited, and Jews like I really didn’t know them. Exotic. They all argued and
gestured
and did business and tugged at their beards and haggled, and there were synagogues chock-a block at every corner and street hawkers, barrels of herring and pickles, bread stalls, horses and carts, women with headscarves or elegant feathered hats and almond-shaped eyes…and now, well now there’s this – a car park with a few half-restored buildings. A few shards of the past, like at some archaeological dig, even though it’s less than a lifetime away. And the ghosts have hardly begun to talk to me.’

‘I don’t think you’re telling the whole truth.’ She mimicked the childhood words she would throw at him and Eve when they
simplified
things for her. Kept the bad in the world at an adult
distance
.

‘You’re right.’ He heard himself sigh, and his voice had a sudden hoarseness. ‘You see, all this, the past, it was never part of the world I shared with your mother. She was a way of leaving it behind. She didn’t belong here. With her, I didn’t either. And you…well…I can’t make myself feel you’re part of this. You’re too good.’

Amelia made a funny face and squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay, Pops,’

‘But I will take you somewhere. Yes I will. Not Auschwitz. But somewhere. I’ve just remembered. Deaths of a more ordinary kind.’

He was mumbling, talking almost to himself, in the grip of a force that was greater than him. It led him by the hand, so that he seemed to know the way. First south, then into a lane, where he vaguely thought the ramshackle youth centre might once have been a synagogue whose name escaped him, then north along a wide street where the trams clattered and east along Miodowa and under a tunnel across into the New Cemetery. The new Jewish Cemetery that was as old as the 1800’s. His grandfather had told him that. His grandfather was holding his hand. His guide.

Amelia stopped to look at the memorial to the local Holocaust dead by the entrance gate where old tombstones lined a wall, but
his grandfather didn’t pause there. He took him into the depths of the graveyard: a dense green, overgrown and shadowy with patches of falling sunlight that shimmered through the tall leafy trees and raked over slabs. They grew alive with movement. In the distance a mist rose from moist vegetation, brooding over
moss-covered
sandstone, marble and granite. Carved and faded Hebrew inscriptions he couldn’t read indented the tombs.
Sometimes
German or Polish peeked out at him.

‘It’s this way.’ He heard his grandfather’s voice, but it was his own burbling in the wrong tongue to Amelia, so that he caught himself and had to translate.

They turned and twisted along paths, sometimes dark,
sometimes
light, little purple and yellow wild flowers spreading to their sides amidst the dense greenery, until they came to a tall marble slab between two pillar scrolls. The name ‘Torok’ engraved in large letters sprang out at them, followed by a family line inscribed in German.

‘This is my mother’s family,’ Bruno murmured.

‘Torok?’

He nodded.

‘You never told me the name before.’

Amelia read.

But she’s not here?’

‘No, she’s not here.’

‘The last person in the family to be buried here was during the First World War.’

‘That’s right. My grandparents aren’t here. No Adolf. No Sarah.’

Amelia said nothing. She picked up some pebbles from the path they had left and carefully placed them on the tomb.

‘Who told you about that?’ he asked.

‘Stones. So the dead don’t leave their tombs to haunt us. And wait peacefully for the Second Coming. I’m not as much of a stranger as you choose to think.’

‘Your great-grandmother would have been proud of you. She was full of such lore. Her husband didn’t have much patience for it.’

‘Adolf?’

He nodded.

‘You never talk about the other side of the family. Your father’s side. The Austrian side.’

‘Moravian, in fact. Another lost country. I didn’t know them. My father, or so the story went, fell out with them. Over politics, I suspect. Or maybe it was religion. He was an adamant atheist. All before my time. So I have no idea what happened to them. They may even have died before the war. He was a good deal older than my mother, though I’ve only just thought about that now.’

They walked slowly side by side, pausing to look at the
occasional
tomb. She was waiting for him to say more. He didn’t quite know where to begin. He had never thought he would come here again. Not this city, nor this cemetery; and as he stole a glance at his daughter, he wondered again what had driven him. Was it the presage to his own old age, as all the memory commentators said, a move into the past because the present had become less distinct? The blood wasn’t getting through to his frontal lobes. They were shrinking. He needed some of his own as yet untested medicine. Had he come for the stimulus of recognition since pure recall no longer worked as well as it might?

Trite thoughts, he chastised himself. Another way of not talking properly to Amelia.

‘This place was vandalized by the Nazis, I read somewhere. They used the tombs as paving stones for the road to the camp at Plaszow. In November 1942.’

He nodded, pleased that she had made an effort with the history he wouldn’t speak.

‘I’m glad they left the Toroks.’

‘Left them something,’ he heard himself muttering, as if some of that old anger was still intact.

She thrust him a curious glance then stopped abruptly.

‘Look, Pops.’

She was pointing to a tall, narrow, white tombstone that looked more recent than its neighbours and as if it had been pressed out of concrete. It had something like a slate attached to its front. A list of names appeared on it. Amongst them was that of Adolf Torok.

‘What does it say?’ She gripped his hand, a small whispering girl.

He didn’t answer immediately. He read down the list over and over. ‘Disappeared in the Nazi terror’ the inscription at the top noted. None of the names seemed to stand in any relation to each other, except for that. Disappeared. A euphemism for killed in a manner unknown – in the camps, in a street raid, in a random shooting. Death was inventive in wartime. Above Adolf Torok’s name was the epitaph – ‘he helped many’. Below, the inscription noted that he had died at the age of sixty-eight. Younger than Bruno was now.

Bruno gazed at the stone and then into the distance and back again. A shroud obscured the light. The graves had lost their
outlines
and seemed to be moving in and out of the gloom like
square-cut
figures on a vast receding chessboard. Forward, back, sideways, lifted by invisible fingers and thrust down again
willy-nilly,
vertiginously, without rule or reason. He held on to Amelia’s shoulder for balance.

Her voice came from far away, blurring as it moved through gloom. ‘Do you think it’s him?’

He nodded. ‘Could be. It says he died, or rather disappeared, towards the end of 1942, which is probably right.’

‘But we don’t know how.’

‘They didn’t know how.’

Stumbling, Bruno explained that this tombstone had been the gift of someone who had survived and was remembering friends. His grandfather had helped him or her, it seemed, others too. Bruno knew that was true.

He wanted to sit down at the edge of the tomb and put his face in his hands and weep. Weep as he might have done as a small boy, before everything had gone wrong. Before he had grown a thick carapace that didn’t know about tears. Before those deaths.

‘There’s somewhere else I’d like to go. I’d like to take you,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll hire a car. Tomorrow. Or the next day.’

The dead were murmuring to him, talking. He hadn’t visited them for a very long time.

They had ended up in Aleksander’s car, which was bigger and more comfortable than hers. That was just as well, Irena thought, since the Fiat wasn’t really up to long journeys anymore. Not that the Professor had told her quite how long this one was going to be. Maybe he didn’t know himself. The turn-off he had pointed to just past Tarnow and then so abruptly changed his mind about required a screech of brakes and a presence of mind neither her car nor she was up to. The Professor’s hippocampus was evidently in decline. Wasn’t that what he had told her about her mother’s inability to find her way anymore – the disappearance of the
internal
map? Presaging the disappearance of the terrain it charted probably…

She was pretty good on the hippocampus now, and knew a little about the amygdala too, that almond-shaped bit deep in the brain with its lateral nucleus that controlled what they called emotional conditioning – or really whatever it was one remembered best. The bits of memory that came with strong emotion. Not
necessarily
utterly accurate, mind, and often narrow in focus, the Professor had warned her, but intense and image-based – the source of those images that recur and recur. The scenes that form traumatic memory. She wondered if the break-up scene with Anthony qualified. She could still see him altogether perfectly, like in a snapshot, fixed in time forever with his sorrowful face on, that pretend sorrowful face that was supposed to bring out the pity in her so that she wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t want him to be hurt, whereas in fact he was busy stomping all over her.

No, maybe that didn’t qualify for the amygdala, since she could hear him clearly too. She’d have to ask the Professor. Not that any
of it made a blind bit of difference to one’s life. She might as well store the scene in her big toe so that she could tread on it, for all the difference it made. Though if it all went wrong, you’d want to know. Like with her mother. Bits of knowledge to grasp onto for comfort, if nothing else.

The Professor was sitting in the front with Aleksander Tarski, whereas she was in back with Amelia. She liked the Professor for liking to explain things to her. He was an enthusiast, a wonderful teacher. She’d always loved her teachers. Particularly her English teacher, who could recite great chunks of Shakespeare and Byron. And she was glad to have been asked along. It meant he trusted her, trusted her not to write about him. Maybe the visit to her paper,
Tygodnik Powszechny
, tucked in as it was by the
university
, had impressed him. That warren of dusty offices and serious looking people hardly had the markings of a tabloid. He had complimented her on her article on the conference too. Though she wasn’t sure he had really read it all through, because of the Polish, which couldn’t be easy for him anymore. But perhaps he would change his mind about letting her write about him now.

Meanwhile all this was quite pleasant, really, and something of an adventure; and she was building herself up to asking Aleksander the relevant questions. It should be easy enough, given that they were obviously travelling into the Professor’s past. And one past would lead to another. That was always the way.

The only difficulty was that no one was certain when they would get back to Krakow. She had taken her mother to her friend Ida’s where between the children and herself and her husband there would be someone around all the time to keep an eye on her. But, even though Ida, who had known her forever, had been
altogether
willing, Irena was nervous about the arrangement. It was always unclear how her mother would behave, particularly when she left her known quarters. Still, she mustn’t spend the entire journey worrying about her. It occurred to her as the ultimate mother-daughter irony that her mother was now paying her back for all those occasions on which she had murmured: ‘Oh Irena, you make me worry
sooo
.’

The countryside was flat here. The flatness of the great central European plain that stretched and stretched eastwards over fields and forests largely unchanged over centuries. Always a flat and open invitation to invading armies. A perfect stamping ground. No wonder the Germans had just blitzed across. Nothing to stop them.

At least the houses were slightly better than she remembered them when she had last come this way, oh so long ago now, before she had gone to England. They had probably been built by the returning American Diaspora, the Chicago Poles, who seemed now to have a monopoly over Krakow airport. Or maybe the houses were just the fruit of all those moonlighting Polish builders she’d met over the years in London? Whatever. They were an improvement over the rundown wooden shacks that used to be the lot of the peasants. Personally, she preferred the views a little further south, in the foothills of the Bieszczady Mountains. But she knew this journey wasn’t about views, whatever occasional exclamations came from Amelia.

Amelia was growing more mysterious by the day. Irena, who prided herself on her understanding of people, couldn’t make her out at all. She had this way of curling up into herself as if all the wisdom and patience of the ages were hers – not at all like what one expected of a high-powered LA agent, who was beautiful to boot, all in casual whites today, except for a little throw-away blue in her cardigan. Maybe all this was just an amusing diversion for her, Aleksander included: Poland as the exotic. Though reachable by mobile phone – one which juddered acutely with particular
frequency
after four in the afternoon. It made Irena want to laugh.

‘Here, here,’ Bruno exclaimed. ‘We want to turn here.’

‘I don’t think that goes anywhere,’ Aleksander murmured. ‘It certainly won’t take us into Przemysl.’

‘Maybe not. But I’m curious. I’m almost certain my grandfather left a car in some person’s house just off this road. Back in ’39, of course.’ He burst out laughing. Amelia joined him.

‘You mean you had a car back then?’

‘A beautiful old black Citroen. It was a dream of a vehicle. I used to hop onto the running board and hang on for dear life. My
grandfather allowed it. He was something of an adventurous sort. Then when we were fleeing east, we had to abandon the car here because the road was so crowded with refugees. Polish soldiers too. We just couldn’t get through.’

Bruno had a faraway look on his face and a sudden impish
quality
. ‘I’ve always missed that car. It was beautiful. So elegant. And the smell the leather seats gave off was extraordinary…’

The road was shaded with tall trees. There was an occasional cherry, brashly in bloom near a dacha-like house, all far too new to have been there before the war. So he would probably have to carry on missing that car, Irena reflected.

Oh, those lost objects of childhood that one would never recover. Never. She had one too, though it was hardly as
spectacular
as a car. Hers was a violin, a tiny gleaming child’s violin, with a blue-velvet lining in its case. Her mother had brought it home from school where some child who had left the city had
abandoned
it. She must have been four or five when the violin arrived, and it was love at first sight and sound. She had cherished that violin more than any doll. She had picked out notes with her
fingers
and learned to pass the little bow across its strings so that it cried or sang. She had carried it with her everywhere, like some beloved younger sister. It even slept next to her bed, and yes, she tucked it into its blue velvet every night, leaving the case open, of course. The violin watched over her.

Then the people to whom the violin belonged came back, and it had to be returned. She cried and cried. There was no solace. She’d missed that violin ever since – that perfect shape, the gleaming mahogany, the sound. A borrowed object. Maybe like her
borrowed
father.

‘Yes, a Citroen Rosalie, or something like that. My grandfather told us that André Citroen had acquired a patent for a gear-cutting technique invented right here in Poland. Something to do with producing smooth quiet gears with chevron-shaped teeth. That’s where the car got its double chevron emblem.’ Bruno laughed,
evidently
pleased with himself. ‘I’ve just remembered that, but I can’t say any of these houses look familiar. Maybe young boys are
better at cars than at architecture. They encode their shapes better. Or the thrum of the engine, in any case.’

‘I think you’ve got yourself a Nobel-prize winning gender-
disapproved
theory there, Pops,’ Amelia giggled from the back seat. ‘He sounds a treat, your grandfather. A real character.’

‘The road bends here, and then there’s a turn-off away from the river,’ Aleksander announced.

Bruno shrugged. ‘Let’s try it. Nothing looks the same. I think it’s the trees. Some are new. Some are sixty years taller.’

‘I think we may have more luck in town.’

‘Probably. But humour me. Just carry on for a few more minutes.’

Aleksander drove slowly, until Bruno shook his head. ‘No, it’s no use.’

His tone was so despondent that Irena had a sudden acute sense that what was just a jaunt for the rest of them – interesting but still a pleasure jaunt – was indeed something altogether different for the Professor. Of course. She had been insensitive. The fragments of the past he was trying to piece together must have been
terrifying
to experience, and the car represented one of the happier moments. Hence, its importance.

She gave herself an inward shake. It was true. She had grown insensitive over these last years. It was partly to do with steeling herself against this sad life with her mother, not letting the cares get her down, the knowledge that the only future was death. And this steeling of oneself poured over into other domains, silting them over. Denying one set of emotions meant blotting out a whole set of them. So one became unsympathetic. Yes, upright and insensitive. The way that maiden aunts always appeared in books. Nasty and narrow and disapproving. That was the fate she had to guard against now. Life had all these unhappy little twists in store for one. She who used to bring home injured birds, gather up strays, weep over Dickens until there were no tears left…

‘Wait a minute.’ Bruno took a deep breath.

Aleksander braked, and Irena caught the sudden eagerness on the Professor’s face.

‘We have lots of time, Professor. There’s no rush. Really.’

They all clambered out into high grass rampant with cow parsley.

‘That particular rectangle of a field there. You see, the broken fence, the old struts? It makes the shape of a paddock.’

‘And children, of whatever gender, remember anything to do with horses. Right?’

‘You’re right, darling. I was mad about horses.’

‘But there’s no house to address oneself to.’

‘No, that must have gone,’ Bruno said sadly. ‘There was so much fighting everywhere around here. But this field. I’m almost sure… There was a kind of half-open stable over there, and we pulled the car up into it. And covered it. Camouflaged it. We had this innocent hope that we would be able to come back soon and fetch it. Funny how at all points over those six long years,
everyone
seemed to think the war was about to end at any moment.’

‘The car was probably taken by the first German who came along,’ Aleksander said. ‘They had few compunctions about appropriation. We were nether beings, after all. Didn’t deserve anything except hard labour and death.’

He was more passionate than Irena had ever heard him. She cleared her throat. ‘Your family had a bad time, then?’

‘No, no. Not as far as it went. Not compared to others.’

‘Look,’ Amelia was pointing towards the sky. Two large birds soared above them, their broad wings silver-tipped in the sun.

‘They’re buzzards.’ There was a look of revulsion on Bruno’s face.

‘They’re beautiful.’

‘Let’s carry on.’

Irena intercepted the questioning look Amelia gave him. She didn’t understand his gruffness, his disappointment at the car’s not being here. At its leaving no trace. Irena understood that. There was so little in this scarred world to bring back innocent
childhood
pleasures, happier golden times.

Maybe it was just that she was more intent on Aleksander. Her hand slipped along his arm. It was a proprietary gesture. A soothing gesture.

So it had already happened, Irena thought, stilling an unwanted pang of jealousy. Good for Amelia. Come to think of it,
Aleksander
looked the better for it too. He was standing straighter. What a tall man he was. A good haircut, a better suit, and he would be distinctly handsome.

She asked him as soon as they were on the move again. ‘So were your parents both in the Krakow area during the war,
Aleksander
?’ In the intimacy of the car, she had started to use his first name.

‘My father was, in part.’ Aleksander didn’t elaborate. They were rejoining the main road, and the traffic was heavy.

It wasn’t like an interview, so she didn’t want to press him, but luckily Amelia had her ears tuned now. She too was curious.

‘In part… That’s a little mysterious. What about the other parts?’

Aleksander shot a hasty glance at the Professor, and Irena had a sudden feeling that maybe this line of questioning was going to go all wrong. What if this purported father of hers was some kind of nasty? A criminal? A Nazi collaborator? What if that was why her mother had never mentioned any of it to her earlier? Her biological father, a criminal.

Professor Lind’s face had turned pasty, or was she imagining it? He suddenly reprimanded Amelia, as if she were a naughty child. ‘You can’t push people on these things, Amelia. It always begins to feel like a criminal trial.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘No, of course, you didn’t.’ Aleksander’s voice was soft.

‘None the less, Amelia assumes that all fathers, except hers, have told their children everything about their war years.’

‘Oh, Pops.’

‘In fact, my parents did tell us some things…if not always
wittingly
.’ Aleksander turned away from the wheel to look at Amelia and defend her from her father.