The Memory Man (19 page)

Was it about that patient or another that Penfield had made the comment that so struck him, struck him probably with too much force because his own nerves were still palpably in disarray
whatever
he did to hide the fact? Yes. They wouldn’t describe it the same way now, but the truth of the matter stood. Penfield had commented that previous epileptic discharges – electrical storms in the temporal lobes Bruno imagined them as – made the cortex more susceptible to subsequent stimulation. So that recollections could temporarily alter, interfere with, present experience.

The patient, remembering her song, insisted that it was being played out there, not in here, in her memory, by her brain. And she found things in the room to confirm her inner experience.

The doctor cut out the area affected by the brainstorm. Was it after this that he made his decision to work in neurology? The hope that a bit of him could be cut out too?

The contained violence of the operating theatre seemed to suit him then. As it had in the DPP camp. A contained violence to echo the uncontained violence of the near past. Yes. He needed the edge of danger, the whiff of brutality, the cut, to make him feel alive. Since he was mostly dead. Mostly with his dead. And then the change came. He couldn’t hack it anymore. Literally couldn’t hack it. The impossibility of it all. So he had moved sideways. Into the lab, a more enduring love, which demanded not drama, but an intense quiet patience and a deferred hope: that the next step, or the one after that, or the one after that would shine a bright light through the gossamer shroud of the unknown.

‘Over there, Pops. What do you think?’

An old truck rattled past them, raising dust and leaving a cloud of fumes in its wake. When the air cleared, he saw a house
surrounded
by a cluster of trees coalescing out of smoke. He stopped in his tracks. It wasn’t his grandparent’s house. There were no deep wings. And yet there was something in the geometry of land and house and trees that had an aching familiarity.

They walked towards it slowly, Irena coming up behind them to say that, of course, so much had changed it might be impossible to
recognize anything. There had been bombing, after all, Nazi tanks invading and then fleeing, the Russians arriving, surrounding. Raping too: the women always talked of the Russians as fearful rapists. And the Partisans in the midst of it all, exploding, setting fire, doing what they could with their limited means. She didn’t think the Ukrainians had come this far, but maybe. So much
terrain
around here had been aggressively contested. Or so she
presumed
. Though she was hardly an expert. Her mother had told her something about what it was like not so very far from here.
Further
south, towards the mountains where she had spent much of the war years.

She deferred to Aleksander, who nodded and shrugged and let his hand rest on Amelia’s shoulder and mumbled something about how one could only wish it would never, never happen again and how lucky they were to have been born after.

Bruno was only half listening. Confusion mounted in him with each step. It wasn’t the house. Even if you discounted the onetime wings. The windows here were regular. And the trees were too tall. There was dappled shade everywhere. Everything was too small or too big or too hazy. Yet there was something, a feeling about the place. And as they came closer a gnarled old apple tree that had been half-hidden moved into view, its leaves ruffled slightly by the wind. A little girl sat in an old swing tied by a heavy coiled rope to one of its thick branches. She had golden hair, dishevelled by her swinging, and she sang in a small clear voice.

Vertigo took him over. A mad motorized kaleidoscope, moving too quickly for focus. He clutched at Amelia’s arm, a life raft in the storm of his mind. Childhood images swirled, invaded by dreams and the operating theatre, the woman with her brain exposed, little Anna playing, figures falling, falling into ever-deeper pits, his mother at the piano, or with a kerchief round her hair, pulling potatoes, waiting for him to come back with the catch. He should have been back earlier. He shouldn’t have tarried. He should have been able to do something. He should have intervened. Stopped them. Shouted, screamed, run, hit out. He should have. He should have.

As soon as the warm weather came, Mamusia sent him back to the country. She said it was important that the summer fields be ploughed. Pan Mietek would need a hand with that and the sowing. The house needed to be prepared for their arrival too. There was no help now. She and Anna would join him as soon as she could get some leave. She piled on the reasons. But Bruno knew why she sent him off. He knew it was because she was afraid that curiosity or something else would draw him increasingly into the orbit of the Ghetto.

A few days before he left, he had wrapped a parcel of food to take to the Ghetto wall. It was then that he had seen them, crowded together just behind the gates, a throng of Jews, whole families, clutching suitcases and possessions, as if they were bound for a journey. He had questioned his mother about it, and she had thrown her arms round him. ‘They’re being sent further east.’ The way she said the word ‘east’ created a pit in his stomach. Ever after, it carried an aura of death.

Despite the separation, he was relieved to say goodbye to the city. He had found school difficult. Not the courses. Some of these he enjoyed, particularly the illicit ones in Polish history and literature in which the teachers bravely engaged, an eye on the door, when they were meant to be doing some Nazi-approved subject. No, what was difficult was the pressure of contending with other youths he was meant to be civil but neither friendly nor assertive with. He had to restrain both his chatter and his punches. This had proved as hard in its way as the daily struggle for food in those first years in Przemysl, which were already receding into a haze like the one that sometimes sat over the
countryside and made the fields melt into each other as the horizon shifted and bled.

The house was hostile with cold and damp and sheer emptiness. He opened windows, brushed away cobwebs and lit a fire with twigs that were still wet. They sizzled and smoked, but slowly they banished the musty smell of the rooms. The pantry was empty. Only two jars of plums and one of cherries remained hidden behind a cloth. He set out the few provisions he had brought with him then went to the barn where the horses used to be stabled and mourned their disappearance. Mice scuttled beneath his feet. Pan Mietek had inherited the rooster and Bolivar when they left. They had eaten the chickens, so now there was only him and the mice to be counted amongst the living. He
determined
to see if he could buy or trade for some more. But first he had to report to Pan Mietek and get Bolivar back. Bolivar would be his friend in loneliness.

Pan Mietek was more curmudgeonly than ever. His kerchiefed wife, to whom Bruno had always been polite and who used to give him warm cups of milk straight from their cow or chunks of sausage from the pig they killed each year, didn’t even bother to greet him. He wondered what had gone wrong.

‘That stupid beast vanished, went off when we were short of food in the winter,’ she told him. ‘Just as well. We had nothing to give him.’

Bruno had the hideous feeling they had eaten Bolivar
themselves
. He barely restrained his anger. But his mother had warned him to be civil, so he murmured something innocuous and said he was ready to begin work on the fields the next day.

‘None too soon,’ the old man replied. ‘I was about to ask for help from the cooperative.’

Bruno worked, turning the fields, planting the buckwheat and beetroot in return for nothing more than hunks of bread, white cheese and the occasional onion. When he wasn’t working, he fished and laid traps in the woods for rabbits, trading what he caught for whatever he could get for their own kitchen garden from Pan Mietek and two, more distant, farmers. One day, when he had had a particularly good catch, he went off to the village and
managed to trade the rabbits for a chicken, which he brought home in great delight. The clucking kept him company in his loneliness.

A few days later Anna and his mother arrived. Miraculously, a cow came in their wake. Mamusia had acquired it through some act of unspoken shrewdness. She was worried about Anna, who had developed a persistent cough. They had come earlier than anticipated because Mamusia hoped that country air and
buttermilk
would cure it more effectively than anything else.

As he tugged at the cow’s warm udders and tended to his
day-long
array of duties, Bruno sometimes had the odd sense that the war had receded. He was happy. Both Mamusia and little Anna were blooming in the country air. In the balmy evenings, they would all sit and gaze up at heavens replete with stars, and
Mamusia
would tell them stories about all the constellations and the ancient heroes whose names they had taken.

Mamusia always dressed Anna warmly in the evenings and fussed over her. She wouldn’t let her go off into the woods with Bruno either. It wasn’t warm enough, she said, or the mossy earth would be too damp or she would end up running which exhausted her. Bruno sometimes felt she was trying to make up for all that time during which she had been forced to leave little Anna to her own devices. He liked to stay close to them too and would often rush back from his necessary expeditions at double speed.

One day towards the end of summer, Mamusia told him she was expecting visitors probably tomorrow and anything he could catch would be more than welcome. Bruno went out early to check his traps and lay some fresh ones then trudged straight on to the river.

When the sun rose high, he grew impatient with the fish that were too lazy to bite and made his way home. He saw the German military vehicle from a distance and wondered whether these were the visitors his mother had mentioned and they had come sooner than expected. This might be the major she was always talking about. Her early benefactor. But he wasn’t in the mood for
Germans
. He hated them too much. And his mother would want him to be polite. Always polite.

He stretched out at a little distance beneath the birch and watched the sky through rustling leaves. He chewed on a bit of dry bread and bided his time.

Suddenly he heard shouts: loud, guttural, commanding. As he looked up, he saw two men in Gestapo uniform pulling Mamusia out of the door and down the stairs of the porch. Their voices were raucous, ordering, hectoring. Behind her came little Anna. Before he could get to his feet there was the sound of a revolver, and Anna fell, dropping from the porch like a bird from the sky, toppling, her arms akimbo. His mother shouted a piercing shout. It exploded inside him like a bomb. And then there was the rattle of gunfire, and she fell over too, crumpling to the ground like a dancer crushed by a giant fist. The two men hulked over her, emptying their guns and before he could run or cry out, they were back in their vehicle and racing away while he stood there, his breath knocked out of him, his whole world revolving vertiginously before his eyes, a paltry creature, open-mouthed, gutted, useless.

He was only able to move after what felt like an eternity trapped in stone. He stumbled. The blood was terrible. Terrible.
Everywhere
and terrible. He gasped, felt himself retching. Retching unstoppably.

At last, like some automaton he had no relation to, he went and fetched a bucket of water from the well and with a cloth carefully washed his mother and sister. Little Anna was staring at him, her eyes wide in surprise. What’s wrong, she seemed to be asking. Pleading. Her head was shattered in the back, grey ooze visible beneath golden locks that were bloodied and bullet-charred.

The tears poured down his face, mercifully blinding him.
Overhead
he could hear the scavenging birds beginning to circle and caw. He cleaned and wiped at his mother and sister madly, as if the business of tending would bring them back to life. Would force the birds away. Finally, not knowing what else to do, he went upstairs and fetched clean sheets. He covered them up to their faces then rushed in again and came back with little Anna’s mushroom hat, which he gently perched on her shattered head. He sat there,
looking
at his mother and his sister, staring at their interrupted beauty, burbling he didn’t know what words.

When it grew dark, he closed their eyes and forced himself up. He fetched a spade and, finding a space near the old apple tree where Anna had always liked to play, he dug. Dug for hours round roots and stone. One large hole. They would be together. He would have liked to lie next to them. But then there would be no one to cover them over, protect them from the predators. He
carried
first Mamusia, then Anna’s body to the grave. He wanted to say some prayer, sing some song. But nothing came to him, so he fetched one of his mother’s favourite books, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, from the small bookcase by her bedside and his sister’s old rag doll and carefully placed them beside the bodies. Then he
covered
the graves and lay down beside them. He hoped he would never have to wake.

Birdsong broke the stillness, high, shrill. Bruno stirred. At first he didn’t know why his bed was moist beneath him, moist and gritty and too hard. It took the breath of wind on his cheek to wake him more fully. To make him realize what he didn’t want to know: that he was lying in the damp earth by the graves of his mother and sister.

In the distance he heard the clatter of a wagon. And voices coming closer. In the milky light, he made out Pan Mietek. Beside him there was a bulky form that could only be his wife. He was surprised to see them both, confused too. What were they doing here so early? He was about to cry out when something stopped him. They were making for the house without calling so much as a greeting. Nor did they knock before pushing the door open. Someone must have told them, told them about the tragedy. But who? No one had been here during the night. Maybe they had found out from the Gestapo. He got up and again almost called out. No, no. He was being a fool. He was being a child. Why on earth would the Gestapo bother with old Pan Mietek and his wife?

But somehow they knew, for there was old Mietek now
dragging
their kitchen table out of the house with the chairs and piling them up on his wagon. And that old witch, he couldn’t believe it, she had wrapped his mother’s coat around herself and was tugging
an armful of her clothes through the front door. It came to him with the force of an illumination. Of course, of course. They were the ones. There had been so much bile these last months. It was they who had alerted the Nazis. Old Mietek. And he hadn’t even waited for the earth to dry on the family’s graves before coming to rob and steal.

Bruno should have realized. Should have suspected that they would do something, shouldn’t have put up mutely with their
rancour
. But he had been wrapped in a cocoon of summer security. And he hadn’t thought. Not that.

They had reported the Jews. As all good Poles were now meant to do. Reported them to the Nazis out of malice and envy and hatred. He would smash Pan Mietek’s face in. His witch of a wife’s too. Yes, now. Immediately. Beat them to a pulp. They assumed him dead. That’s why they had dared to come here so openly. To steal, after the Gestapo had done the dirtier work.

He started up, spade in hand, then stopped himself.

No, no. Bruno had a better idea. They had to suffer. He would give them a taste of the terror they had inflicted. Let them die slowly, painfully.

He threw a stone at the kitchen window, then another at the bedroom and started shouting in German. Bellowing, Hollering, in the manner he had heard so often. ‘
Raus! Schweine. Achtung!
’

As he shouted, he ran from place to place in the garden, making himself into a squad, until the two old people came out trembling and pleading. They had dropped everything they were carrying to put their hands up before their invisible assailants. But now, not seeing anyone, they made a dash for their wagon and whipped their old horse into action while Bruno continued his savage howls and screams.

That night, after having banished the hikers who had turned up earlier and asked for his mother, he did worse. He went to Pan Mietek’s house and silently, stealthily led the old mare and the cow from the barn into the fields. Then he set fire to the rickety
structure
and threw a bale of burning hay in front of the door of their old wooden house. He watched the fire take: grow into a blaze. He could feel the heat on his face. He was tempted to hurl himself
inside the flames. But he wanted to see the old people rush out, screaming. The way his mother had screamed. The way little Anna had screamed. When they didn’t, he led the horse and cow back to his grandfather’s house.

It was only at daybreak, as he brushed the old horse down, that he realized his madness. If the horse and two cows were found here, it would be clear to all and sundry who had done the
burning
. Did he care? Wasn’t that what he wanted? No, no, he didn’t want to be shot in cold blood by the Gestapo. Far better to shoot them. Far, far better.

Regretfully, he took the animals into a field between the two properties. He wished he could sell them, but that would draw too much suspicion. They might be after him soon.

On his way back to the house, he stopped by Mamusia and Anna’s grave again. He bent to kiss the moist earth and murmur to his dear ones. He would avenge them, he promised. They could trust him. Then he would join them.

He looked around, at a loss for something to mark the graves with. There was nothing, nothing…. Finally, he managed to heave a rough-hewn stone from the edge of the well and roll it towards the spot. With his penknife, he scratched the names ‘Mamusia’ and ‘Anna’ into the stone. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He would come back. He vowed to come back.

He returned to the house and packed his rucksack with all the food that could be squashed into it. Catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror, he saw that he was filthy. Hurriedly, he washed
himself
, slicked down his hair, found a cleaner shirt and a jacket. The jacket was a good one. It had belonged to his grandfather. Always look your best, his grandfather had told him during the bad days in Przemysl. It was his grandfather’s voice that also counselled him to roll up his winter coat and put it in his bag. He would be back, but he couldn’t be certain when. At the last, remembering himself, he packed his ID and inside the coat placed Mamusia’s and little Anna’s, together with all the money in the house and a number of the photographs that sat innocently on the piano. He was crying again. How would he ever stop crying?