‘It’s further,’ he said with assurance, setting aside a trail of irritation and disappointment. ‘And, I imagine, to our right.’ He closed his eyes for a moment to capture an inner topography and was suddenly confronted with an unsettling image from another part of his life. He couldn’t shake it off, nor did he know why it had suddenly invaded these flat fields so far from its source.
The image was of a woman in an operating theatre, so long ago that the equipment looked almost Victorian, even heavier and more antiquated than those old room-size computers. She was lying on her side on a table surrounded by doctors and nurses, and her eyes were wide open. They were staring directly at him. The peculiarity was that one half of the woman’s head was shaven and her brain lay exposed to the doctor’s electric probe and soft-spoken command.
Bruno knew where the image came from. He was in the operating theatre of the Montreal Neurological back in the late forties or early fifties. It must have come back to him because Aleksander and he had, a few days ago, been talking about Penfield and his pioneering work on mapping the brain. But why this particular woman, with her solemn intense gaze focussed accusingly on him?
He tried to blink the image away and was rewarded with floating red spots at the corner of his eyes, the kind the epileptics used to talk about as signals of forthcoming seizures. Just what he needed, he scoffed at himself.
‘It’s a scorcher of a day. You okay in this heat?’ Amelia was gentle.
‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘You’re sweet to pamper me like this.’
‘Your very own Cordelia. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Never doubted it.’
‘Pops, what’s special about this place?’
‘I spent a lot of time here. More than anywhere. Good times as well as bad. With my little sister too. And my mother.’ He squeezed her hand.
She picked a tall blade of grass from the roadside and whistled softly through it. ‘What was she like? Your mother, I mean.’
‘A thoroughly modern woman. Independent. Full of inner resources. Brave. Very brave. Now that I think of it as an adult, though, I didn’t have enough perspective as a child to see that. Or much else. You would have liked her. And she was quite unlike her own mother. More like her Dad. Though both she and her mother played the piano. Played wonderfully. My mother even gave us the occasional racy number.’ He laughed as he put adult words to it. There was that other matter he hadn’t had words for then either. Lovers and abortions and racy music.
That was it. Music. Of course. The woman on the operating table. A right osteoplastic craniotomy. The incision was made just to the side of her ear. A Rahm stimulator was used with a strength of one and half volts. On the temporal lobe the strength was increased to three and then four volts. As the probe moved along the contours of the brain the patient felt tingling in her thumb, then lip, then tongue. On the cut surface of the first temporal convolution the patient heard music.
Bruno shivered. An aural hallucination of a remembered song. She was certain an orchestra was playing in the operating room. What was the song? She had sung lines of it over and over when that particular region was stimulated. Something about walking along, perhaps. Walking along as he was doing.
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.
13
1942
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, cl
utching 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.
The Memory Man Page 19
