The Memory Man (23 page)

The women in the group, however, were sweet to him, often coming to sit with him while the men drank. Above all, Joasia, the one who had arrived with their new chief, was kind: sewing up his old, ripped gloves, providing rags for him to wrap round his feet in the icy weather. She had deep-set green-gold eyes, and when she wore her fur hat she looked like a princess out of one of those old Russian fairytale books his mother used to read to him.

Just after the New Year, in the coldest days of the winter, Andrzej came back with a pair of German boots for him. Bruno was astonished. He was less astonished when he heard he was about to be sent on a mission past Dukla to deliver a message to another band of Partisans who carried on the struggle near the
Slovakian
border where the Nazis controlled a strategic mountain pass. He was given an address, a codename and an utterly
incomprehensible
message to memorize. The message seemed to be a communiqué about plants and flowers and varieties of cow. He was also given a pill, given it secretly while he and Andrzej stood at a distance from the group in the shelter of some snow-laden pine trees. ‘Only if you’re captured,’ Andrzej murmured, looking
him directly in the eyes.

Bruno nodded without exhibiting a single tremor and quickly slipped the pill into an inside shirt pocket.

Andrzej patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a brave young Jew.’

At first Bruno didn’t think he had heard him correctly. He didn’t respond, didn’t blink. How could the man know? Had Marysia said anything? No, no. He caught Andrzej’s glance
whipping
past his flies, and he now realized that he had failed in the very area that Marysia had warned him of, all those months ago when he hadn’t been paying enough attention. In the woods he had let his guard drop. Andrzej must have seen him – seen the
telltale
mark of his circumcision.

There was no point protesting. He pretended not to have heard, but he wondered as he set off at dawn whether Andrzej hadn’t specially selected him for the mission so as to get rid of him.

The journey was cold and treacherous, taking him deep into the Beskid Niski and, as he moved closer to the border, into heavily patrolled terrain. Maybe his burly ragged coat made him look innocuous. Maybe the sudden snow that reduced visibility to a few feet was on his side. Maybe the Nazis had other worries than a muffled and impoverished peasant who walked with the
exaggerated
limp Bruno had decided to adopt as camouflage, so that he looked unfit for work. In any event, travelling mostly by night and following the line of the river as far as he could, he arrived at the village unharmed and delivered his message to a rosy matron, who offered him sausage and some hot tea brewed from a concoction of thistle and herb, plus a blanketed floor next to her two young sons for the night. Bruno was grateful, and he set off the following afternoon in far better spirits than he had come.

The light was bright and crisp above the freshly fallen snow. For some kilometres he considered whether, given Andrzej’s words, it might be better for him to disappear than to return. But he
couldn
’t face abandoning the group that had become his home, his family, his country, all in one. Where would he go?

He had been concentrating so hard on his thoughts that he hadn’t been paying attention to the path in front of him, where two soldiers suddenly appeared from nowhere and ordered him to
halt and show his papers. With an effort Bruno drew out his
identification
.

‘Krakow,’ one of them barked. ‘What are you doing here so far from home?’

Bruno pretended not to understand the German. He pointed to his work permit, which showed him attached to a farm at some distance from the group’s camp in the woods. It was also,
unfortunately
, at an inexplicable distance from where he now found himself.

‘Take him in,’ the other soldier muttered. ‘He’s got no reason to be here. No travel pass.’

Bruno started telling them a complicated story of how he had been to visit his grandmother, but it did no good. They marched him off to their police barracks in a neighbouring village. All the while he dragged his leg, fearful that this encounter might end up in his being shipped off either to a German ammunitions factory or far worse. He had the pill, he reminded himself. He had no compunction about using it. The only thing he would regret is that he had promised himself as soon as spring came to gather a large bouquet of forest flowers for beautiful Joasia.

When they reached the village and were about to enter the
barracks
, they met a convoy on its way out, and a superior barked at the two soldiers. This was no time for the checking of insignificant peasant passes. A fire had started at the local oil installation.

Bruno found himself abandoned in mid-street. He considered his position. He no longer had any papers. The Wehrmacht
soldiers
had kept them. In the commotion, there was no question of asking for them back. And now, he had to get away. Night was falling. He wasn’t altogether sure of his bearings. He decided that if he proceeded downhill he would eventually come to the river that would lead him north. The stars would help. But the stars were blotted out by the thick smoke that must be rising from the fire the Nazi officer had referred to. He wondered if it had been started by Partisans.

It took him another day and night to reach more familiar terrain.
By then, the snow had started again, light dry flurries now which occasionally blurred one’s view but didn’t blot it out into
sameness
the way thicker flakes did. Even so, when he reached the
location
where he was certain the campsite had been within the uneven circle marked out by nine pines, there was no trace of it. The space was desolate, empty, as if he and his friends had never existed. The ground was covered, pristine, not even marred by the ashes of a bonfire. In the distance an owl hooted.

His spirits plummeted. He followed them, sinking down into the snow. He gazed up into the night. The high wolf pines wore silvery cloaks and swayed gently. The birches danced in their icy finery. Only they hadn’t abandoned him: left him for softer climes. He was alone, utterly alone with the tall trees and the snow.

The sudden crack in the darkness startled him. Several more
followed
. This wasn’t the crack of a branch breaking in the cold or with the heaviness of snow. This was gunfire. It was ricocheting through the woods, echoing around him now, even if muted by snow. And it seemed to be coming closer, whizzing with the wind through the trees.

Silently Bruno padded towards the shelter of thicker woods. It was then that he tripped over the body. It was sprawled in the snow, face down, legs and arms askew. He called softly, but there was no response. With a shudder of realization he lifted the head and in the light the snow cast, saw the features of one of the band. Janusz. Glimmering against white ground next to him was a streak of red, almost black. A grim certainty took hold of him. The Nazis must have found their camp. The falling snow had covered the traces of struggle, but in another part of the woods the battle was still in progress.

Veering between trees, Bruno moved stealthily towards the rattle of gunfire. Further on, a glimmer of dawning light showed three bodies splayed on the snow like large fallen birds. He gazed at them. They must have been hit as they ran. A massacre. There were no guns on the ground around them. Stolen. He moved closer and recognized Joasia from the raven gleam of her hair. He stared at her poor inert form, turned her over and saw the pool of blood spreading on whiteness like some strange bloom. He
kneeled down beside her and put his ear to her lips. No sound. No whisper of a breath. She was dead, cut down in mid-flight. Like the others. A moan escaped him, as low and throbbing as a wounded animal’s, and suddenly he saw his mother lying there and Anna too. His grandfather. His father. All of them murdered,
slaughtered
. All of them lying dead in the snow: helpless, inert.

He started to scream, to shout at the very top of his lungs so that the woods echoed with his savage wail. He ripped a branch from a tree, wielded it like a weapon, ran, thwacking the stick against trunks, creating a havoc of pain and sound. Through the trees he thought he saw the glint of a uniform. Another. Nazis. Other
figures
too. All coming towards him. He screamed with banshee wildness and flung himself in their direction, hitting out.

The flash, the sudden low whine and crack of bullets didn’t deter him. He rushed forward through a small clearing, his stick flailing, thrashing above his head like a whip.

The impact knocked him over, flung him backwards into the snow. He seemed to fall for an eternity. Above him the trees whirled round and round, lashing him with their fronds. In their midst, a face appeared. Andrzej’s face. Huge above him. Mouthing ‘you fool’. Scowling with hatred. And then everything was black.

He woke with a terrible pain in his shoulder and arm and chest. His flesh burned and his mind with it. Everything was confusion. Confusion trapped in searing pain He tried to move and had a dim sense that the burning was the cold: a freezing tundra had
overtaken
his body. He forced himself to move again, to sit up.

A streak of pure icy light illuminated the clearing. Daylight. It hurt his eyes. He could only move one hand to shade them. When he did, he saw the body stretched out beside him. Joasia, he thought through a haze. But it wasn’t Joasia. This body was too big. A man’s body. He crawled towards it on tottering knees and leaned forward. Andrzej. Why was Andrzej lying here? Had someone fired at him in turn? Yes. After he had shot Bruno. Of course. Bruno, the Jew. Bruno, the fool. And now Andrzej lay
here. Motionless. Dead. Dead while Bruno, whom he had shot at, moved.

Had the pain and the blinding storm in his head allowed it, he would have laughed at the ironies fate had in store for them.

He managed to give the body a kick. A kick of pure vicious hatred. And another, and another – one for his mother, one for his sister, one for his grandfather and one for himself – until the pain took over and he could kick no more.

He crawled towards the edge of the small clearing, gripped a tree trunk to pull himself up. He stood quietly for a moment and took deep painful, breaths. He waited for the world to stop moving, waited for the dizziness to settle. Summoning a
superhuman
effort, he moved back towards Andrzej, rifled through the man’s pockets and found the pouch beneath his shirt where he stored his papers. These he took with him and stumbled away through the woods, lurching, clutching onto trees, going as far as his legs could carry him. He had reached open ground when they gave way.

And then he fell. Fell farther than he had ever thought possible.

When consciousness floated back after an eternity of emptiness his first sensation was of hands rubbing his, rubbing and rubbing. He opened his eyes to a blue dark-ringed gaze above him. It came from beneath a peaked cap.

‘You have such cold hands,’ the youth said. ‘Such very cold hands.’

The flicker of candlelight gave Irena’s small dining room, with its assortment of good prints and drawings, better gold-rimmed china and sparkling white cloth, a romantic glow. In the
circumstances
, it hardly seemed appropriate. There was no romance in the air. Not the teeniest little bit of it, Amelia thought, even if you got down on your hands and knees and searched under the table to where it might have sunk in fear of rearing its charm. What they had was one silent and sweetly demented woman who had not removed her weird blue eyes from Bruno’s face throughout the entire evening.

He, on the other hand, was in one of his moods, by turn abstracted and curmudgeonly. He had barely uttered a word all evening, and when he did look up from his plate – which couldn’t swallow the untouched Chinese takeaway – he seemed as absent as the woman at his side. Maybe Polish-Chinese wasn’t his thing, though she didn’t think that was it.

Had she been wrong to induce him to come here, to go through all this chasing of lost souls? Today had been too much for him: that was clear. Too much for her too, if she thought about the coldly brutal murders he had conjured up, the dead woman who might have been a grandmother to her. The poor dead child.

Now that he had started to talk, she recognized her own ambivalence. She had wanted to hear, wanted to know, but she also wanted to block her ears to the horror. It wrapped itself round you like a dirt- and lice-infested coat, at once too heavy to wear and too heavy to throw off. It made the world so sorry a place. That whole deadly history of race-hatred and race-murder. With its
own quota of slavery, as Irena had underscored for her, though no one bothered to pay for the train-transported folk at the point of arrival.

It was probably because all that was in his bones that she always felt Bruno understood her so well. He knew intimately what it was like to enter a room preceded by your skin colour or the length of your nose. He knew about the murderous logic of appearances that meant that you walked into a wall of stereotyping prejudices well before you began to exist as an individual. He had learned to hide bits of himself, to use disguise, which wasn’t something she could do as effectively, though both of them knew how to disguise pain. The difference was he had lived within a terrifying regime that officially made race a killing attribute. She hadn’t had to
confront
that, not personally.

For that she thanked her lucky stars.

In her first day here, she had done some quick online research on Polish history and had been interested to find that of the
pre-war
Polish population, Jews had made up some ten per cent, just slightly less than the percentage of Blacks in the US. At various points through the centuries, Poles had also effectively instituted various principles of multicultural equality. But the war years had obliterated all that. Obliterated millions of people too.

So she probably shouldn’t have entreated Bruno to re-enter his own killing fields. It had been selfish of her to want to know. But the fear that he would disappear before she had a grasp on his prior life, had taken hold of her ever since he had left America for
Britain
. Though selfishness wasn’t the whole of it.

Over Christmas, which she had spent with him in London, Bruno had seemed in a bad way. She could hear him tossing and turning through the night in the room next door and occasionally calling out in panic in some incomprehensible language that had turned out to be this one. She was no Freud, but she knew when a guy was unsettled, even if that guy was her dear old dad. And she had really hoped that revisiting the damaging past would help. From the look on his face now, it had certainly not achieved that. If she thought it would do any good, she would throw her arms around him and drag him home this very minute.

Amelia’s gaze moved round the table. Irena. The woman had felt remote at first, maybe even a little contemptuous. But she liked her now. There she was doing her hard-working best to keep people’s spirits up, which meant chattering nervously or
dramatically
to cover up the gaps and failings in everything and everyone else. A little like some party organizer who had taken on the responsibility for everyone’s life and was adamantly going to make it cheerful. Not cheerful in an American way, of course. But at least amusing, which could entail some scathing ironies or mock theatrics.

She wondered why she always had the feeling Irena was hiding something. Maybe it was just the extent of her mother’s madness, but Amelia had also begun to think that hiding might be one way of simply being yourself around here. You never knew who might be watching and tell on you. Her father had a bit of that.

Worst of all there was Aleksander, who had somehow contrived not to meet her eyes once since they had sat down. At least she knew what that was about. It was about her announcement that she would have to go home either tomorrow or the next day. She had told him while they were driving to and fro in search of Irena’s mother. He hadn’t taken it the way she had hoped. Hadn’t protested or asked her to prolong or said he would zoom right over and visit her in LA. He had only hunched his shoulders and gone quiet, his face more hangdog than ever. As if she were already gone and he was mourning her departure. The man had a genius for melancholy.

But then he was probably right. This was no place for a
long-legged
black gal who looked less at home in these streets than a prowling tiger inside a Carmelite convent. The nuns were all lined up, looking too. No, that wasn’t accurate. Nuns were the only blacks she had seen around here. And that condition certainly wasn’t what drew her to this country. No, the whole situation was utterly impossible. If she hadn’t managed to make things work with a black man close to home, she could hardly make things work with a white, and a foreigner to boot.

She looked at Bruno, as if he could read her thoughts. She knew the lecture he would give her, if only he liked Aleksander. She
knew it from beginning to resolute end. He would point out that skin and race and all those things one was born with didn’t matter, not ultimately, not conclusively… After all, the brain changed throughout life, was constantly evolving in response to
experience
and environment. Even clones would have individual
configurations
of neuronal connections that mirrored their personal experience.

But it was clear that Bruno hadn’t taken to Aleksander. So there would be no lecture.

Amelia took a sip of the indifferent wine and imagined herself trying to live in a tidy little house like this one, cooking dinners for Aleksander, waiting for him to come home from the lab…

The retrograde fantasies made her laugh in self-mockery. She hid the laugh in a cough. She had never, never imagined herself doing that for any man anywhere in the world. Impossible. And she’d never learn the language with all its soft slurring, all those rather flirtatious hesitations that Irena used. So she wouldn’t be able to work, even if there was a job for her to do. Which was probably a bigger daily problem than race.

No, Aleksander was right. There was no point even discussing it. A little holiday fling. Soon to be forgotten.

He raised his eyes and met hers. The longing in them. No, not soon to be forgotten. She had fallen hard. It wasn’t only the planes of his face and those soft deep-set eyes with the expression of a serious teddy bear. It wasn’t only the quality of his appreciation: the slow step-by-step nature of his approach to her, as if each moment on the path to love gave off its own sweetness that had to be savoured. It wasn’t even that everything wasn’t shadowed by a sense of performance, a kind of baseline competitiveness that engendered more and more from both of them so that life became a question of winning or losing, though you were never sure quite what and simply got exhausted in the process. Aleksander knew how to be still.

She sighed. She hadn’t realized it was so vocal until everyone lifted their eyes to her, even old Pani Marta, who murmured ‘Pretty Lady’ so that Amelia felt called upon to smile broadly. In that smile her spirits lifted just a little.

If only Bruno could be prevailed upon to do his bit and call in some favours. Then Aleksander would eventually be brought a little closer to home. She needed to see him on her own turf so that she could ground her perceptions. And those feelings that were flying up all over the place and out of control. But Bruno had decided not to like him. And it didn’t even feel like his ordinary hesitation towards any man she came up with. Maybe he thought this was all a little over-determined. A scientist. A Pole. No, Bruno didn’t think like that, just acted it.

She wished her mother were around. Eve could always cajole him and make him see what he was blind to. She missed her.

Probably Bruno thought Aleksander was only interested in her because of what Bruno could do for him. A scientific
fortune-hunter
. That would be like him, though there was nothing really wrong with fortunes in this case. Yet she sensed there was more. It had to do with that impenetrable tangled matter Bruno was
carrying
around with him and probably came down to a prejudice against Poles. She couldn’t blame him, really, but she wished it could be otherwise. She would work on him. Work on him when he was a little more present than he was now.

‘You know, Professor Tarski,’ Irena was saying, ‘quite a few
letters
arrived at the
Tygodnik Powszechny
in response to the article.’

‘Tarski,’ Pani Marta said in eerie echo. ‘Aleksander…’ But she was looking towards Bruno and getting all agitated. Her fingers worked away at her buttons.

Irena handed her a glass of water. She pushed it aside,
inadvertently
spilling it over her cardigan.

‘So sorry,’ Irena said. Her voice quivered a little. ‘It’s been a long day for her. I had better get her to bed.’

With low soothing murmurs of the kind mothers used to their children, she led Pani Marta away.

Bruno got up too, paced the length of the small room, pausing to examine the array of prints and drawings that hung on the walls. That left her and Aleksander looking at each other uncomfortably with nothing to say that they could say in front of her father, so she got up as well and started to pile the dishes and make desultory conversation.

‘That’s a good charcoal.’ She looked over Bruno’s shoulder at a drawing he was studying. It showed an old, rather handsome house, half-hidden by trees. It was the trees that were good. An invisible storm had made the foliage swirl and shake.

‘Yes,’ he said absently.

With a shrug she took the plates towards the kitchen.

‘I think I’ll go and give Irena a hand with her mother.’

‘You do that. She’ll appreciate it.’ Amelia called after him,
wondering
again whether he was developing a soft spot for the woman. Irena treated him with great consideration, a careful mixture of respect and admiration. But then she treated Aleksander like that too. Who knew? Who knew anything in this strange country?

Amelia, piling dishes into the sink, suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder. She shivered. What was it that made skin so susceptible to one touch and not another? Was it because she had known that about Aleksander from the moment they first shook hands, that she had really persuaded Bruno to make this journey. No, no. She mustn’t be that cruel to herself.

‘I wish…’ Aleksander’s voice was soft and wondered off on a note of such pure longing that she turned into his embrace despite the water dripping from her fingers. The kiss felt as illicit as his erection. The kitchen was so neat and tiny, her father a matter of a brittle wall away. As if she were an ardent teenager again. Though now she had a clearer picture of what she might want. Not that it seemed any more attainable.

‘I wish you could stay. Or that I could come to you,’ Aleksander was whispering. ‘Maybe after this run of experiments…’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. So sorry.’ Irena’s eyes were vast with
embarrassment
as they met her own over Aleksander’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t mean… I’ll… I was just getting a glass of… I’ll come back.’

‘No, please.’ Amelia barely held back a giggle. ‘Please, Irena. I’ll get you a glass. Shall I make some coffee too? We need it, I think.’

‘Yes, yes. Good idea.’

Irena stood there, head lowered, then looked up abruptly. ‘Your father is quite extraordinary with my mother. Better than any of the doctors. Better than I am. He’s so gentle. It’s as if…as if he knows that to get her attention you have to touch her. I’d never
quite realized it. But it’s true. Yes. And she focuses on what he says. She doesn’t wander so much.’

She seemed to be trying to communicate something special. Amelia smiled at her. ‘Leave him with her and come back to us. Maybe he’ll work a miracle. I suspect he’s always had a way with the ladies.’ She winked at Irena, all the while holding on to
Aleksander
’s hand.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Irena was now looking up at Aleksander. ‘I need to say something to you. I need to clear the air.’

Amelia watched her walk away. A sudden suspicion filled her. Had she quite innocently walked into an already burgeoning love affair and somehow broken it up? That’s what Irena was hiding. No, no. She would have realized, wouldn’t she? Or were the cues so different here that she understood nothing at all?

She hurried to make coffee, could only find some instant then heard her phone ring while she put the kettle on the hob.

‘Let me.’

Aleksander took over. She switched off her phone and watched his gestures. They were precise, instinctively accurate. Did he already know this kitchen? Or was she watching the movements of a large man accustomed to small spaces?

‘May I invite you back to my place later?’

She met the plea on his face. They had only been together in hotels: some good, some ghastly, but always impersonal. Places for unconsidered passion. Despite the sense of slowness, it had all happened so quickly. And she hadn’t been to his apartment yet. Only his lab. Would there be unpleasant secrets hidden away in the bedclothes? No, no, she hoped not. And the invitation was a sign. She nodded.