Amelia laughed. ‘That’s okay. I’m prepared to learn about other people’s histories of slavery. Nice not to be alone.’
‘So many perpetrators,’ Irena jumped in. ‘Too many. The ancients. All those captives they enslaved. The Africans themselves. The Nazis, of course. And our very own Man of Steel, Stalin. I don’t know if he wasn’t the worse. His slave labour camps, they say, rose to kill some twenty million. And he managed all that with no particular racial prejudice. He killed anyone, really. Democratic in his killing, he was. Though he wasn’t any fonder of Jews than his erstwhile German partner in crime. Nor Muslims. Or Poles, for that matter.’
She stopped. ‘I’m running away with myself. You were talking about your father slaving for the Germans, Aleksander. Sorry. During the war.’
‘Well…’ Aleksander wore a perplexed expression. ‘He claimed that, despite the beatings, it wasn’t so bad. They had a little to eat. There were some pretty girls. No, the worst, ironically, came when the Allied bombing started. There they were, rooting for them, cheering the Allies on, hoping the war’s end would come soon, but with each Allied attack, some of their number got killed. When the factory was evacuated, a few of them escaped. There was no way to get back to Poland, except to walk. So that’s what my father and his friend did. They walked. Avoiding bombs as they went. They were very lucky.’
‘Yes, luck.’ The Professor had his distant face on, like a lone wolf who had left the pack too long ago ever to return.
‘Luck,’ he repeated. ‘Those of us who came through had to have plenty of it. But unfortunately there wasn’t enough luck to go around. Or enough good will amongst our neighbours.’
A silence fell and lengthened. Irena had the distinct feeling that in it the dead were being counted and the whole matter of Poles and Jews was about to explode like some kind of bomb between them. But Aleksander didn’t seem to be aware of it. Maybe he hadn’t spent enough time abroad. Germany was probably different. The Germans couldn’t point an accusing finger at the Poles.
Irena knew she should say something, but she didn’t know quite what. Some of her friends at moments like this came out with stories about how their families had helped or hidden Jews. One would be forgiven for sometimes thinking that there was a Jew in every Polish wartime closet. But she couldn’t say anything as trite as that.
How did people anywhere in this war-torn world ever make relations ordinary again after these mammoth upheavals? It took so long for the emotions to go. Centuries perhaps.
She shook herself in an attempt to thrust away dismal thoughts. In any case, it was Aleksander’s father she needed to hear more about. Maybe she was also misinterpreting the Professor’s comment about good will. After all, Aleksander could hardly be accused of racism. He was with Amelia, which had to exonerate him. So that left her to apologize for the Poles.
Before she could formulate something appropriate, Bruno asked in some disbelief, as if Aleksander hadn’t told them everything he knew: ‘So your father got through the war?’
‘I’m the living proof of that.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘What was his first name? Would I have come across him?’
‘Tadeusz. I wouldn’t imagine so.’
‘Tadeusz. It sounds so nice when you say it. Soft.’ Amelia’s voice caressed.
‘Nicer than Aleksander.’ He laughed shyly ‘But my parents decided to name me after my father’s older brother. He was the hero, apparently.’
‘Which means he died young,’ Irena heard herself saying. What she meant was he had died too long before she was born. Could her mother have gotten names confused, named one brother for the other? Would she still remember if Irena prodded her? Was it a one-night stand or…? She felt what was almost a blush coming on. And what if she brought Aleksander to visit her mother? She must ask him somehow if he looked like his father and then bring him to see her.
‘I do think we should get on.’
Bruno pushed back his chair so abruptly that the glass on the rickety table fell over and tumbled onto the gravel beneath. Strangely, it didn’t break. Maybe luck was still with the Professor, after all.
A half-hour later they were walking along a track at the southernmost extremity of the town near what all the road signs promised was the Tartar Monument. Tartarus: the ancient site of hell from which the devils rose. The name the Europeans gave to the marauding Tartar hordes. Had she learned that at school? But there was no monument here to explain. No Tartar King whose rampaging legions had laced generations in the region with sparkling narrow eyes.
Instead they abutted at a dilapidated gate with a broken lock. Beyond it was a cemetery devoid of angels or crosses or any adornment. A decaying Jewish cemetery, Irena noted, with ancient mossy tumbling stones on which the writing – even had she been able to read the script – had been scratched away by time, if not by vandals. The unrelieved slabs growing out of the rank vegetation gave off a mournfulness that somehow defied human mourning. Nothing could be made good by mere human care, not here, not for these austere unreachable dead.
The air was unnaturally still. She felt odd, like a voyeur from another realm. Odder still when Bruno Lind looked around him with a vulnerable and bewildered air. Somebody should really take the man’s arm, but Amelia was busy with Aleksander. She moved closer to him.
‘It should be somewhere over that way. But we never laid the stone. We weren’t here long enough.’
She wasn’t sure whether he was addressing himself, the elements or her. Lear on the blasted heath, she thought. Even the clouds were gathering. And the wind had come up, rustling the trees into erratic action. He started to walk quickly through the thick greenery, as if he were running from someone in fear. He kept looking abruptly over his shoulder, then from right to left. The old days, she thought. The gestures of the old days. Persecution. Not now. Not now mercifully. He bobbed, veered to the left then disappeared. Like a will o’ the wisp.
She hurried after him then almost fell over when a withered old woman in black appeared in front of her.
Her mind was going, Irena thought. Definitely. Gone, in fact. Now she was conjuring up toothless kerchiefed old hags, who materialized from the air in graveyards.
‘Dzien dobry Pani, Dzien dobry,’ Irena said, polite even to ghosts.
The ancient woman barely nodded, and Irena, still wondering about her reality, reached for her purse, took out some coins, mumbled something about ‘for the care of the graves’. When the woman took the coins with a kind of shuffling eagerness, she was consoled. Ghosts didn’t need money.
‘There’s a lot to be done here,’ she thought she heard the woman say, before she hobbled off in the other direction and vanished behind a mouldering stone.
Irena followed the direction she assumed the Professor had taken. She found him bent over on all fours, poking at the ground, lifting away the trailing undergrowth.
‘I think this is it,’ he murmured.
He seemed to be trying to trace the size of a plot from the midst of rampant vegetation and neighbouring slabs. ‘I memorized the names on either side. Grandfather told me to. In case anything happened to him. This one’s Goldblum and there, that’s Oppenheim. I wouldn’t have remembered them. But recognition, that’s easier. Remember, I told you that.’ He gave her a sudden vivid smile, altogether belying her earlier worries, and hailed the others.
‘Your great-grandmother, Sarah. We’re going at last to erect a stone for her. Rather more than a year since the funeral. Sixty-two, in fact. But better than never. Irena will know how to go about it.’
Amelia kissed him.
Irena was about to protest but found herself so secretly pleased at the man’s faith in her that she kept quiet, dutifully pulled a pad from her bag and sketched a little map, noting the names on the graves around her.
The old crone appeared from nowhere again, and this time everyone greeted her. So she was definitely real. The Professor, in fact, brought forth a flood of verbiage f
rom her. It seemed she could help with the setting up of a gravestone. A Pan Kwiatowski in Przemysl handled it. Yes, yes, she assisted him. That’s why she was here. From the folds of her tattered skirt, now like some grand angel of mercy, she brought out an utterly modern printed card and handed it to the Professor.
Amelia and Irena exchanged glances. Aleksander smiled. Then, as if the old woman had jogged him into speech as well, the Professor started to talk. He was talking to Amelia, telling her about his grandparents, the time they had spent in this area all those years ago. Maybe the gracious lady even remembered…
By the time they reached the car, time had folded in on itself, grown viscous, heavy, a neither then nor now time, but both, an in-between state in which this ageing man in search of his dead was also a youth fighting for his life against terrible odds.
11
1940
Each uphill step towards his grandparents’ apartment increased Bruno’s unease. The buildings with their bullet-scarred stucco seemed to be baring dingy wounds to the reddening sun. Faces emerged from gaping doors like mottled masks on sticks. The streets had grown more twists in them, the ruts in the cobblestone become potholes.
He had been gone some four months. How had his grandparents fared in his absence? Would they still be where he had left them? Such thoughts only assailed him now as he was on the point of reaching them.
He had turned thirteen while he was away. His grandmother had told him in a soft voice before he left that his thirteenth birthday marked manhood for a Jew. She had talked of taking him to a Rabbi, but his grandfather had grown irate and asked whether she thought she had been transformed into Abraham and was considering the offer of more than a ritual sacrifice.
His grandparents often argued over religious matters. He couldn’t help hearing them in their small quarters. Grandma said it was sinful how Grandpa behaved, denying everything, denying his people, denying God. Grandpa said he was denying nothing, simply being expedient. She would thank him later. Meanwhile, she could talk to her God silently and leave the two of them alone.
Only his grandmother was in, when Bruno arrived. She was sitting in a chair and gazing out at the dip in the valley that provided their only distant view. Maybe she was talking to God. She stared at Bruno as if he might be a hallucination then whispered his name in a soft voice and held out her hand to him. When he moved towards her, a smile illuminated her face. That face, he realized, had grown painfully thin, hollowed out so it was all eyes. The hair that cupped it was now utterly white, ghostly.
‘Brunchen, my little one. So happy. Tell me, tell me, did you find them? Are they…?’
He hugged and reassured her at the same time. She felt so fragile, he was afraid his embrace might break her.
When Grandpa returned, Bruno felt a sob rising up in him. He too had been transformed into an old man.
Over that winter, his grandmother slowly died. She just disappeared into herself and her chair and never re-emerged. The doctor they brought for her could do nothing.
‘Better,’ he said ominously, as if he knew something Bruno didn’t. ‘She’s peaceful. The rest of us are still at war.’
They buried her in the Jewish cemetery. She would have wanted that. It was an auspicious site, Bruno forced himself to think over the tears he refused to shed, just south of the city and not far from the grave of a great Tartar King who would protect her. According to tradition, there would be no stone to mark her resting place for a full year. ‘Memorize the spot,’ his grandfather said to him. He evidently imagined the earth would shift, and they would never find her again, so Bruno made a mental note of the names on the nearest tombstones and took a good look at the trees in the vicinity.
In direct contradiction of at least his mood at the cemetery, a week later his grandfather announced they were moving. ‘We’re wiping the traces,’ he said, as if all their movements left a rife trail for dogs in hot pursuit, and a great effort had now to be made to send them in a different direction. Every night he listened to the radio for hours, tuning into whatever stations he could get, comparing reports, scouring the papers which Bruno brought home for him from the neighbouring kiosk, interpreting propaganda. What he knew and Bruno only learned later was that Nazi troops were massing for a great push east on a variety of fronts and that the Nazi-Soviet pact was in its last moments.
Bruno didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay as close as possible to their local paper kiosk. It was run by a young woman who had become a friend of his. So much of a friend in imagination, that he spent his nights dreaming about her eyes, which appeared to him in improbable places – in the sky as giant stars, in murky fishponds as bright lilies.
But they moved. They moved into two tiny rooms not far from one of Przemysl’s many churches which had sprung up over the centuries as if in competition with each other so that each order could outdo the next in grandeur. His grandfather had somehow struck up a relationship with a priest. The clergy were not very well treated by the Russian administration, and the man evidently felt a friend who worked for them might prove beneficial. In turn and for various favours his grandfather didn’t tell him about, but which Bruno was quite certain had been granted, the priest was to provide them with baptismal certificates.
His grandfather had spent hours grilling Bruno about his experience of the German Arbeitsamt, the labour office, and the papers that were necessary. He had also carefully examined Bruno’s work permit, and as he did so mumbled something about ‘Trust the Germans to have papers for everything. And keep records of everything. Perfect students of Weber, even the Nazis.’
It sometimes seemed to Bruno that his grandfather had taken on outwitting the Germans as a personal mission. This one old Jew would get them at their own game. In revenge for what he had seen those young thugs in uniform do to those old men. In revenge for what he called their sadism. Their state-sanctioned sadism.
Now that his grandmother was gone, Bruno felt his grandfather talked to him as he had once talked to her, mulling over ideas and strategies late into the evening in the tiny kitchen where they ate their thin broth and tasteless potatoes, unless he had been able to trade more profitably.
One part of the strategy had to do with Bruno going to the priest for weekly tutorials. This time it wasn’t Russian. It was Catholicism that needed to be studied, together with lists of saints and the endless drill of Catechism, Mass and Communion. The priest believed that he was the son of lapsed Catholics, who had tragically died in the first German incursion. Now, however, he was under his grandfather’s aegis, a grandfather who was getting old and had seen the light despite the pressure of Soviet atheism. He wanted his grandson to embrace the true faith again. Bruno loathed the drill, but he couldn’t go against his grandfather’s will. He sensed that this project was the only thing that gave the old man a taste for life. And he knew that baptismal certificates, when copied into a central register, might not come amiss. The name on his was not to be the one that appeared on his grandfather’s Russian pass, but a new name, born from the romance of literature. He was to be Bronislaw Sienkiewicz: Bronek, for short. All traces of the Jewish Bruno were to disappear when his grandfather said the moment was right.
At the end of May, Bruno wanted once more to head off to see his mother and sister. His grandfather insisted that they had to wait for their baptismal papers and the accompanying birth certificates before attempting any river crossing. It was too dangerous now. There were too many soldiers about. And this time, they would go together, so they needed to be properly provided for.
The priest gave them the documents on June 19. Before they had got their provisions together for the journey and his grandfather had alerted his office of his impending absence, the Nazis had entered Przemysl. They had come by train from across the river, at first hoodwinking the Russian guards into thinking they were taking just an ordinary delivery of freight. Trainloads of troops followed together with flatcars bearing tanks and armoured cars and motorbikes. Many didn’t bother t
o stop at Przemysl but carried on further east into the Ukraine and Russia. The Russians in the town were surrounded. There was nowhere for them to run.
The fighting in the city was fierce. For two days and nights it raged, making the streets impassable. On the third day, Bruno tried to go out early to rustle up some food. Corpses lay strewn in the streets. The Gestapo marched, breaking into houses, heaving people out, arresting them or shooting them on the spot. They seemed to have a clear picture of where they were going. He raced home and bolted their door, hoping the knock wouldn’t come in this tiny apartment tucked in behind a church. His grandfather just stared out the window and shook his head. Bruno began to think he was taking on his wife’s old role.
Hunger forced him out in the streets again the next day, despite fear. Curiosity too. The German’s didn’t behave like the Russians. As he moved through his familiar haunts, he noted that the City Hall already sported a swastika, as did various other official buildings. Streets were closed off. Fierce-looking officers stood in front of them, guns at the ready. Decrees were posted on buildings. Bruno read that all weapons had to be surrendered on pain of death and that a curfew was in place from five in the afternoon till five in the morning. People caught breaking it would be shot. Everyone was to return to work. Or they too would be shot, he added to himself and raced off.
The market was empty. There was nothing to buy or steal or trade anywhere. And though the proclamations called for shops to open immediately, they looked decidedly shut. There was probably nothing to put in them. There had, after all, been little enough before, even at the Russian cooperatives.
Finally, not knowing where to turn, Bruno decided to knock at the priest’s door. The man took pity on him and gave him half a stale loaf. Bruno thanked him profusely, added from some perverse instinct that his grandfather had instilled in him, that Christ would thank him too. He rushed home with the bread, hiding it beneath his shirt, and told his grandfather the priest was a good man.
The Memory Man Page 16
