The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  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?

  He didn’t really know how he got to the train station, but it was while he was standing behind a column on the platform and pretending to be invisible, that he heard two women talking excitedly about a fire in the countryside. Was this a new Nazi strategy to bring them low, one of them asked and the other shook her head and said surely not, since they were so avid for what the farms produced. Bruno started to whistle, saw a guard turn round and stopped himself. A train hooted and moments later, the one bound for Krakow pulled into the station. He squeezed onboard.

  The next thing he knew he was walking along the street that led from the station towards the central square and his grandparents’ old house. He didn’t know why he thought they might still be there. But he did. In his mind, he was coming home after a long day at school, and everyone would be there: his grandmother and little Anna, his mother and grandfather, all plying him with questions which he didn’t want to answer.

  The city was crowded with uniforms. Cars raced in the streets. Perfumed women wafted past him, their lips redder than he remembered them. There was German everywhere, and he recalled through his daze that Krakow was the centre of the General Government, the German Occupation’s capital. He had heard his mother talking about it, the way the Governor had installed himself on Wawel Hill in the old palace. His mother. He squared his shoulders and aped a military bearing. If he hadn’t felt so removed from everything, as if the world occupied a space on the other side of an impermeable glass wall, he would have been frightened.

  When he reached the house, the old caretaker, who had grown even more crooked and gnarled, stopped him at the doors. He didn’t recognize him. Some cautionary instinct prevented Bruno from identifying himself. His papers wouldn’t tally. He asked for Pan Torok.

  The dwarf of a man tilted his head towards him suspiciously. ‘Pan Torok hasn’t lived here for several years, young man. There are no Jews in this building now. We are Judenrein.’ The man cackled. ‘Now only pure-blooded Germans live here. The very best. A lady dentist. A factory owner…’

  Bruno stood rigid. He dared a second question, this time dipping into his pocket the way he had always seen his grandfather do when the doorman was asked to wait for a parcel or some such.

  He slipped a coin into the man’s hand. ‘Do you know where Pan Torok can be found?’

  The man gazed at him from beneath his grizzled brow. ‘Where have you come from, young man? Don’t you know anything? If Pan Torok is still to be found, God bless his soul, he was a kind man, it’ll be across the river.’ The man suddenly looked around him warily and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t you know all the Jews have been concentrated?’

  Bruno swallowed hard. Of course, of course, had he thought for one moment, he would have known that. But his grandfather…by this time his grandfather would have another identity. Bruno dipped into his pocket again.

  ‘Pan Torok didn’t by any chance leave anything with you? A forwarding address? A letter perhaps, for friends, old clients, who might want to find him?’

  The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not by any…?’ Furtively, he pulled Bruno into his small quarters away from the gate. It was almost dark in here and he squinted to examine him, his face canny.

  ‘You’re the boy from Vienna, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s me.’

  From outside the door, there were German voices raised high. The old man shivered. Then with sudden determination, he slid open a drawer in a ramshackle old desk, piled high with papers and dirty cups, and pulled out a dog-eared envelope. ‘Here, take it. Go, no wait. Read it, then leave it here.’

  Bruno tore open the envelope while the old man poked his head through the door and mollified the voices. Inside there was a scrap of paper with an address. He memorized it quickly, heard a yapping, was about to hurry away, when the caretaker reappeared with a small dog on a lead. ‘This,’ the old man declared, shaking his head, ‘belongs to the Frau Dentist and for the moment is in my care.’

  Bruno didn’t pause to look at the sausage of a dog. He thanked the caretaker and raced away, realizing too late that he hadn’t asked for directions and he had no idea where the address was.

  He finally reached it at nightfall, when the curfew was already in place and it was treacherous to be on the streets without the appropriate permission. He was exhausted, so exhausted that he hadn’t been able to turn his head in fear every time he heard boots behind him. The fear had come to him at the same time as the overwhelming wish to cry in his grandfather’s arms.

  He was on the outskirts of the city on a lonely little street that he imagined would in a few hundred metres give way to countryside. When he saw the dark-painted door with the number on it, he almost began to shout. He let the knocker fall several times with noisy emphasis and as f
ootsteps sounded, he called out: ‘Grandpa, Grandpa.’

  The door opened on a tiny birdlike woman who at first he thought was a girl, but on second glance seemed to be about his mother’s age. She was wearing a dress with a polka-dot pattern and had no shoes on her feet. He stared at her in dismay for too long before finding his voice.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I’ve come to the wrong place.’ The tears that he had been holding back leaped into his eyes. ‘Sorry. I was looking for…’

  Before he could finish his sentence, she had pulled him into the narrow hall and closed the door behind him.

  ‘You’re Hanka’s son?’

  ‘Yes, how did you know?’

  ‘I must have recognized you. Come in.’

  She led him into a small room cluttered with too much furniture and made sure the heavy curtains were completely drawn.

  ‘Grandfather…’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  Bruno wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. His heart swooped.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. He just…well…we keep in touch.’

  ‘But I need to go to him. I have to go to him.’

  His voice rose, and the woman put a quietening finger to her lips and pointed upstairs.

  ‘I’m afraid it needs arranging. And it’s much too late tonight. Much too late. You look tried. Does anyone know you’re here, do you think?’

  He shook his head and then stopped abruptly. ‘I got the address from…from the caretaker at my grandfather’s old building.’

  She nodded sagely. ‘Would you like something to drink? I could even give you a little food. I took some home from the hotel tonight.’ He followed her into a second room, smaller than the first. It served as a kitchen, though again, the assortment of furniture seemed odd, as if the place were both a warehouse and an apartment. She saw him looking round and smiled again. ‘I’m keeping things. For friends. How is your mother?’

  A single loud sob escaped him. The effort of holding the others back imprisoned his tongue.

  ‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’ She drew him to her, held him. She seemed to know without him saying. ‘You can tell me about it later. Or another time. When you can. I loved her. Loved her very much.’

  He couldn’t bring himself to speak, so she went on.

  ‘Now I want you to drink something. Eat if you can.’ She pulled out a chair for him and brewed a pot of tea. ‘It’s real, so enjoy it. I don’t often get any. But we should talk before my flatmate gets back. She has a late pass tonight. Yes, it’ll be fine,’ she countered his query before he had posed it. ‘You can sleep on the table here. I’ll try and get a message to your grandfather. But it may take a few days. No, no.’ She held up a hand and suddenly looked stern, despite her size. ‘You’re not to try and find him yourself. You’ll only get everyone into trouble. Understood?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What kind of papers have you got?’

  For a moment he didn’t know whether it was a good idea to show her. Then when he took in her expression, he relented and pulled out not only his own papers but inadvertently his mother’s and Anna’s.

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Very hard. Your grandfather too will take it very hard.’ She stared into space for a moment as if there were a window in the middle distance through which something was visible to her. Then she seemed to grow bigger in her chair.

  ‘All right. A couple of questions. Are you in trouble? Should you have new papers?’

  ‘I think I may be dead,’ he said.

  She stared at him but asked nothing more. ‘Tomorrow you don’t set foot out of here. If anyone asks, you’re the son of a friend of mine from the north. You came to bring me news and to see if you could get a job in the city. You speak German, don’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good. I’ll see if I can get you a job in the kitchen of the hotel where I’m working. The Germans use it. The food’s good. The scraps are good. And the head chef likes to be understood, and no one does except me. Okay? You can’t hang around the streets or you’ll disappear in no time. Always look busy. Remember that. Always. Purposeful and busy.’

  ‘But Grandpa…’

  ‘You won’t be able to stay with him. Out of the question.’

  He didn’t dare for the moment ask her why.

  For eight nights he slept on Pani Marysia’s kitchen table. Everyday he asked her about his grandfather, and everyday she said it wasn’t time yet. On the ninth day, she brought him a new identity card in the name of Tomasz Nowak, resident in Krakow, at an address he hadn’t yet visited, and a work permit showing that he had a post at the Hotel Francuski near the Barbican.

  On Sunday, the day before he was to begin work, she told him to wash thoroughly and get spruced up. She herself was wearing a smart suit and a hat with a feather in it that made her face as saucy as her high heels suddenly gave her grandeur. She warned him that he wasn’t to speak unless she spoke first. She took him to church and then for a tram ride.

  The tram ferried them across the Vistula and stopped at the entrance to the Ghetto. The gates where the wall began were crowded with SS men, police in a variety of uniforms and a queue of people having their passes checked. The behaviour of the guards, the pushing and shoving and casual brutality made Bruno clench his fists into tight balls. He kept them like that, even when Marysia tried to divert his attention.

  A Polish Police officer stepped onto the tram and stood on the outdoor step as they moved off. Bruno, staring through dirty glass, held his breath and saw into poor overcrowded tenements and downcast streets. People raced about their business rather than walked, their legs as thin and rickety as sticks. He saw an old woman carrying a package wrapped in brown paper whose weight seemed more than she could bear, a Chassid, his arms crossed behind his back, who stared at the tram as if he were waiting for some miracle. He saw emaciated children and old people lying on the pavement, their hands outstretched.

  A terrible noise erupted. The tram slowed to a crawl and in the street below there was an ear-splitting rattle that he only recognized as gunfire when the bodies fell like marionettes on a stage. Splayed. Crumpled. Except that it was real blood that spilled out of them.

  And then, before he altogether took in what he was seeing, they were out again beyond the other side of the wall, and Marysia prodded him to get off. There had been no stops anywhere in the Ghetto.

  They walked now to nowhere in particular, still not speaking, staring straight ahead. Eventually they hopped onto another tram to make the return journey. It was only when they were out on more familiar streets again and making their way homeward that it occurred to Bruno that the reason for their journey was that his grandfather was somewhere in those dangerous decaying streets of the Ghetto.

  ‘Grandpa,’ he began, and Marysia nodded, cutting him off.

  ‘Now you understand.’

  He understood nothing at all.

  ‘I shall go and see him. I must.’

  ‘No, you wait. He doesn’t want you there. I know. I know him.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Marysia, are you a…?’

  She cut him off. ‘No, I’m not. And don’t ask stupid questions. And don’t go making yourself conspicuous. There are people here, everywhere, everywhere around us, Jews too, in the pay of the Nazis. They’ll turn you in as soon as greet you on the street.’

  She softened the force of her response, by giving him a slice of apfelstrudel when they got back to the house.

  ‘Your mother was a very good friend of mine, Tomek.’ She called him by his new name. ‘So I take the liberty of giving you advice. You have blond hair and a direct blue gaze. So you don’t need to worry too much. You’ve probably grown out of all recognition over the last while, so few in Krakow can recognize you as a Torok. That’s not the case for your grandfather. And here’s some more advice. Tomorrow, at the hotel, remember,’ she lowered her voice and looked round her shoulder to make sure her roommate hadn’t c
ome in, ‘don’t talk to anyone too much. The less said the better in all circumstances. And…and…’ She was suddenly shy. ‘You probably know this, but I repeat it anyhow. Never use the urinals, if there’s anyone else in there. Your mother explained, didn’t she?’

  He didn’t know what she was talking about. Not until later. All he knew was that his mother and sister were dead and his grandfather didn’t want him at his side and had gone to join the dying.

  At night, lying flat on the hard table, every time he shut his eyes, Anna flew from the porch of his grandfather’s house, and his mother screamed and screamed her pain, before an agonizing silence descended on the world.

  14

  There had been another shift in the car’s composition. Amelia sat in the back seat with her father now and held onto his hand.

  It was unclear, Irena thought, stealing a backward glance, who was the parent and who the child. He looked as if he might be asleep, certainly dreaming. He was very pale. The last part of their expedition had been too difficult for him. She almost wished they hadn’t found the spot. And what an announcement. So blunt, so frightening in the peace of that countryside as if to make it almost into a delusion.

  ‘My mother and sister were shot here. In front of my eyes. They’re buried near that tree where the little girl is swinging. My sister played there too. She was barely six-years-old. I promised I’d come back.’

  Her first reaction had been that he was lying. He was making it up. But she knew better from his eyes.

  There had been no marked graves to show them, and he hadn’t wanted to talk to the people who lived there now. Had rejected Amelia’s idea of erecting a stone.

  ‘In this wilderness? Where no one was kind to them? No point.’ He stared at the tree where the child played over the murdered dead, and Irena had wanted to cross herself, just to make some kind of sign, some ritual acknowledgment. Aleksander, intending to comfort, had pointed out that after all these years, there were probably few remains and a memorial in Krakow might be better. The Professor had looked straight through him. The comfort really hadn’t worked for Amelia either.