The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Two days later they were on their way to the country house. Grandpa spent more and more time in the country, now that he had been made to retire from the University in Krakow where he had taught law. He had been made to retire because they were cutting the numbers of Jews. ‘Quotas’, his mother called it. But it was also because Grandpa was getting old.

  First they boarded a train that said it was heading for Odessa. He knew that was on the Black Sea and they wouldn’t be going as far as that. Instead, they got off after some three hours at a small station surrounded by fields. The sun was high and everything glistened – the wheat and barley, which his grandfather distinguished for him, waving gently in the breeze, the tiled rooftops, the silvery leaves of the birches in the copse, the horse’s rust-brown back and paler mane. The women and Anna had gone off in the car, leaving his grandfather, the man who had come to meet them, the luggage and him to the adventure of the clattery wagon.

  Grandpa let him hold the reins, showed him how to tug this way and that, how to talk to the horse, coax him along so that he did his bidding. Both men laughed when the old mare suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the road and nothing Bruno could do would urge her up and away until Grandpa’s whip cracked through the air without quite touching her back. By the time they reached the sprawling shaded house, a late lunch had been put out on the old wooden table under the apple tree to the side. They all tucked into cucumber and radishes and soft white cheese on large hunks of buttered bread, followed by berries and cream and sugar-sprinkled cake. As if to celebrate, Anna then took her first unaided steps on the prickly grass, racing towards Bruno on plump uncertain legs and collapsing in a giggling heap in his waiting outstretched arms.

  The rest of the summer passed in a dream. He did everything with his grandfather who had decided, against the odds, to turn him into a countryman. Together they collected wood and made bonfires, prodding potatoes under the embers until they were ready to eat, hot and smoky and delicious on the tongue. They fished in the river, catching silver-spangled perch and pink-fleshed trout. He learned to remove their innards in two cuts of his grandfather’s army knife, soon earning his own. The fish might find their way onto the bonfire or were brought home for cook to prepare. Soon he could handle the oars on the small boat his grandfather used on the river when the current allowed.

  The knife was also used to fashion a slingshot out of oak twigs. He learned to take aim and earned praise for the keenness of his eye, the summit of which was that his grandfather brought out his rifle and let him practice on a roughly constructed target. He began to feel like a hero out of the Wild West books he adored. Next year, his grandfather promised, he would take him hunting. Boar and lynx and elk. Bruno walked tall, already a marksman in his own imagination.

  Best of all, he learned to ride far better than he had ever done before, if not the stallion then a comfortable mare who was closer to his size. He rode and rode and brushed and dressed and curried the animal, sometimes sitting by her side at night and stroking her bristling flank. He named her Bessie after a horse in one of his books.

  The children from a neighbouring estate came to visit and after an initial stiffness, they made friends. They plucked cherries and apples from the trees in the small orchard and stuffed them into mouths or pockets. Now, when Bruno wasn’t with his grandfather or spending the obligatory hour with little Anna, he was roaming the countryside with them. They collected beetles in tobacco tins and watched their antics when released. They urged their horses across fields and through woods. They took them for swims, paddling alongside them, or holding on to their manes in the swift cold waters. They pretended to be cowboys and Indians, drawing inspiration from Bruno’s collection of Karl May, which his mother had allowed him to bring along, hooting their way through copses, chasing each other madly over dirt tracks. At night, they lay in the long grass and gazed up at the stars, sometimes singing songs in the soft language Bruno increasingly felt was becoming his own.

  At home too there was music in the evenings. In the lounge of the house stood a shiny grand piano, its vast extent lovingly polished by Grandma herself, who stroked the keys with the same tenderness as she washed Anna’s baby-soft skin. Both Mamusia and grandma played – lilting waltzes, haunting sonatas, bittersweet melodies to which his mother sang along in her clear voice. Sometimes there was even a little of that jazz that made you jump up and down and which his father loved. But as the summer wore on, his mother banned the jazz without explaining why.

  One day, they made a trip to the neighbouring town of Przemysl, close to the Ukrainian border. For some reason that no one explained to him, his mother had business to do with a solicitor. The rest of them walked around the hillside town while Grandpa explained about Ukrainians and Ruthenians, Tartars, Poles, Russians and Austrians and how all had vied throughout history for this pretty little place, whose sole misfortune was that it lay on an important trade route east and more or less marked a border. Stefcia went off to offer a prayer at one of the huge churches that flanked the slopes, while the rest of them admired the three bells at the side of the Uniate Church and even had a peek inside to gaze at the ornate pulpit shaped like a ship. At the top of the town, stood the remains of King Kazimierz ancient Castle and fort all but destroyed during the Russian siege in the Great War. From here, they could see the dark folds of the Carpathian Mountains in the distance, a dream landscape half covered in mist.

  Two days later, in less time than it takes to crack a whip, the idyll was over. When Bruno returned from a morning’s riding with his friends, his mother was gone. She must have been planning to go, but she hadn’t told him. Hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. His stomach churned, and he was sent to bed. He lay there, the curtains drawn, staring at the ceiling. He felt both bereft and betrayed. The abruptness of it all, the failure to take him into her confidence worked and worked on him. Nothing could mitigate his desolation: the excuse that she hadn’t wanted to worry him, that he had been taken up with other things, that she would be back soon, no promise that he could ride the stallion or that cook would prepare his favourite apple cake.

  Why had she gone without telling him? Why hadn’t she taken him along? No one would say where she had gone, but he knew in his bones. Knew that she must have gone to Vienna. Because of his father. It was clear that his mother had been worrying while he wasn’t paying attention, was enjoying himself. It was his own fault that she hadn’t taken him with her. That made him doubly desolate.

  A week later, the day after his grandfather took him on his first mushrooming expedition, Stefcia was gone too. Her father came to fetch her to bring her home. She was needed there. And there might be a marriage in view. Stefcia cried. She didn’t want to leave. She cut off a piece of her silky plait and gave it to Bruno. He sobbed. He couldn’t see his way to dinner. He hid his tears in the room, stored the plait in a tin.

  After those two departures, nothing any longer brought any pleasure. He gave up seeing his friends. He did what his grandparents asked, but no more. He sat listlessly for long hours with Anna, turning over cards, or watching her root around in the grass for the tiny things she seemed intent on finding. At the end of August they left for Krakow, and still Mamusia didn’t return. There was a letter from her for him and Anna, but it said little except that she hoped they were well.

  Grandpa said he had to go to school. Bruno didn’t want to go to school here. He wanted to go back to Vienna. He was tired of addressing everyone as ‘Pan’ and ‘Pani’ instead of ‘Herr’ and ‘Frau’. He was tired of bowing politely to all and sundry, tired of Polish and Poland.

  Grandpa told him he was unreasonable, that these were difficult times for all of them and they had to make do as best they could. He expected Bruno to help out with the women, not make more difficulties. At this Grandpa winked, hoping for a taste of that jolly complicity that had reigned all summer between them.

  School was impossible. Bruno didn’t listen. He could speak Polish, but he couldn’t write it, and the teach
ers were always on at him. Then came the anti-Semitic barbs, which somehow got confused with anti-German ones when he tried to explain that he could spell perfectly well in German. His grandfather moved him to a school in Kazimierz, where the population was largely Jewish though most of them didn’t seem like him at all. In fact, some of them were distinctly exotic. They both attracted and repelled him.

  The men wore strange, round, fur-trimmed hats, long black coats and big untidy beards. The boys had long curls at the sides of their cheeks, and their lips were very red against faces that were very pale. With study, his grandfather filled in for him, as he filled in about the origin of the coats and hats, what he called the Chassidic style, though it seemed more serious than a style to him, since it never changed. They also talked a language he didn’t know, which had German strewn through it and large hand gestures and loud exclamations. His grandfather took him to the synagogue with the big dome, where they all prayed in what seemed like random murmurings and wails and bobbed up and down to their own rhythm. They stayed around in the courtyard afterwards talking to all and sundry, but even then Bruno felt shy. It was difficult to make friends.

  His grandfather hired a young law student to teach him written Polish. The law student was a dreamy sort of fellow who made him read fat romantic novels about Polish history. Bruno now spent days pretending illness so that he could lie in bed and gobble up books by Zeromski and Sienkiewicz. His grandmother, he discovered, was happy to discuss Quo Vadis for hours while she did the darning. Her eyes glowed then, almost as much as when little Anna bellowed out one of her laughs. Though she did that less and less the longer Mamusia stayed away.

  At the end of September they told them in school that Hitler had signed an agreement in Munich that guaranteed peace. The Poles were protected by their great allies, the British. Grandfather didn’t share the teacher’s optimism. When a bare week later, the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland, he shook his spiky head in a manner that said his pessimism had been proved right, though it didn’t make him happy. Not even the fact that the Poles had grabbed back a piece of Silesia at the same time could do that.

  Then on November 9 the papers and the radio brought news of the terrible attacks throughout Germany and Austria on Jews and their enterprises. In Vienna alone, eighteen synagogues were razed. Kristallnacht, they called it, because of the sound of breaking glass, his grandfather said. The sound brought Mamusia home three days later. She was thin, white as a sheet, her eyes and nose too large, and she held on to Bruno’s hand as if she might fall over at any moment or he might vanish. He suddenly knew with a grim certainty, though she said nothing, that his father was dead, that he would never see Papa again. He was afraid to ask, in case she disappeared again at his questioning.

  Little Anna should have been pleased to have her mother back. Instead, she grew increasingly fretful, sometimes pretending that Mamusia wasn’t in the room and running to Bruno instead. Maybe she didn’t recognize her after all this time. Or because she had grown so thin and didn’t look like herself. Grandma must have thought that was it, because she fed Mamusia non-stop, standing over her as she consumed borscht thick with sour cream, dumplings stuffed with meat and cabbage or apples and jam, morning cups of buttermilk to supplement the preferred coffee.

  By March, Mamusia had regained some of her colour and her composure. Little Anna went to her willingly. Bruno decided that he could now venture to ask her directly about his father.

  She met his eyes for a moment with a fierceness that seemed to leave his skin blistered. ‘Your father is dead,’ she said softly. ‘He died a hero. When times are better, we’ll raise a monument to him.’

  When he could find breath enough, he asked how he had died. ‘The Nazis killed him,’ she said in the same soft monotone. ‘Never forget that. They killed him in cold blood. Shot him like a dog because he opposed them. At one of their camps. At Mauthausen.’ Then she turned away.

  Three weeks later she brought a stranger home with her. A lawyer, a Pan Leszek, she said had helped her while she was in Austria. Bruno didn’t like him. He didn’t like his dark stiffly waving hair. He didn’t like the lemony scent of him, like a woman. Even less did he like his bluff good humour that promised favours. One day, Bruno saw him hurrying away as he was coming home from school. He hid at the street corner. When Pan Leszek passed him, he aimed his slingshot at his back. He had the pleasure of watching the man stop and look round him in confused annoyance.

  Soon Mamusia had a job. She went to work in the lawyer’s office. She left home early and came back late.

  His grandparents discussed it all in low voices.

  ‘It’s good for her,’ Grandpa claimed. ‘It keeps her busy, as well as bringing in some money. So she feels useful. And she’s young. She can’t mope for the rest of her life.’

  ‘But it isn’t good for the children,’ Grandma said in a stubborn voice. ‘It isn’t good…’ She stopped talking when she saw Bruno and gave him a forced version of her quiet smile. He was carrying a protesting Anna, who could speak quite a lot now, a garbled form of speech, but speech it was. Polish speech in which she often asked for her Mamusia.

  Grandma deflected her by taking off her amber necklace, in which ancient insect fossils lodged, and putting it round Anna’s neck. Anna loved that, but Bruno could only think about what he had heard. He doubted he could ever agree with Grandpa about this. He tried. He tried not to mind when Mamusia didn’t come with them to the country house for the summer. She had to work, she told them. She would join them later on in August.

  Three days after she joined them war erupted, trapping them in South-Eastern Poland. For a brief while Bruno lived with the secret thought that war wasn’t so bad, if it kept that horrid lawyer away from Mamusia.

  7

  ‘He said “no”. And I wondered…I wondered whether you might try to persuade him.’

  Irena gave the lemon in the tea she had ordered a little prod then sipped without meeting Amelia’s hazel eyes. Their pallor was disconcerting. As was the woman’s beauty. Passers-by in the square gawked. And it wasn’t only because seeing a black person in Krakow was a relatively rare occurrence. Maybe they thought she was an emanation of the black virgin of Czestochowa and would perform a minor miracle.

  ‘Me?’ Amelia had an astonished air. She gestured for the waiter, who for the first time in Irena’s memory came running.

  They were sitting at one of the terraces in what Irena called the tourist side of the central Krakow square, the side of the Sukiennice on which the flower vendors displayed their wares beneath bright yellow parasols. The side from which you could see the full splendour of the Mariacki Church. The other side of the old cloth hall, now a jewellery market, Irena and her friends thought of as theirs, because it housed the cellar which had served them as cabaret and meeting place during the emergency years and through the eighties. It was here she had first met Anthony. So better not to go there, really. Better not to remember. Better to sit here with Amelia in Krakow’s rediscovered splendour, shown to best effect on this limpid spring day.

  ‘He doesn’t listen to me, you know. Not unless I put my best bully’s attitude on and rarely even then. He’s hardly talked to me in fact since we got here, was it three days ago? Certainly not about the past. Either he walks about in a more or less stony silence or he spends his time with Aleksander at the Academy of Sciences, so I have to go there if I want to see him. Not that I think he likes Aleksander, but at least it’s science and not the past. I might join them there for lunch. Want to come?’

  Irena shook her head. ‘I have to see to my mother. And I should finish this piece on Aleksander and the conference. Though I still need to ask him some questions.’ A lot of questions, Irena thought. Her best-laid plans had been scuppered by the presence of Bruno Lind and his daughter. The journey home on the train hadn’t provided the solitary moments she’d hoped for. And now, her brilliant idea of doing a feature on Lind was going nowhere as well. She had even imagined doubling it u
p as a radio feature for the World Service. She still had a good enough tape recorder, and she had learned so much about his field, it seemed a waste not to use it.

  ‘It would make such an interesting piece.’

  ‘The conference?’

  ‘No.’ Irena hadn’t realized she had spoken aloud. ‘I was thinking of your father. Polish scientist revisits…oh, forget it.’

  ‘The great Bruno Lind is allergic to journalists. Didn’t he tell you? Always has been. And I imagine that dumb piece in Vienna did your cause no good.’

  ‘I wouldn’t produce lies.’

  ‘Not even the occasional half-truth?’ Amelia teased. ‘But it’s not that. He just won’t talk. Can’t, maybe. During our walks he’s been meticulous about describing the occasional building or giving me a disquisition on Leonardo’s lady and her sexy ermine in that old house museum of yours but not a word about the war years. Not since Vienna. I thought being here would launch him into it. But it hasn’t. Not yet, in any case. Even when he took me to his grandfather’s house. It’s not far from here, by the way. Nor will he go to Auschwitz with me. I’m trying to be patient. Meanwhile the hotel’s allowed me access to their office and email late at night, so I can catch up with California days and ways.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘I had a late start this morning.’

  ‘I understand, really. They’re all a bit like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The people who went through the war here. Or maybe it’s the same with any war. Any period that transports you too brutally out of the norm. Equivalences can’t be found with which to convey all those terrible emotions, which you probably want to forget, in any case. What those who know say is that the survivors may have talked at first, but nobody listened much ’cause it was time to concentrate on the present, which was terrible enough here in a different way, what with the Soviets. All that pain and turmoil, shameful things too. Acts of cowardice or blindness or avoidance. Better to put it behind one.’ Irena paused. ‘It was like that with my mother. When I was little, and she talked, I would tell her to stop going on about it. Then she stopped. And by the time I came back from Britain, when I wanted to hear, there wasn’t much sense in anything she said.’