The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ Irena rushed on. ‘Dukla. That means taking a train. That means we’ll never find her.’

  ‘We could go to the station,’ Nina suggested. ‘We’re not far. At least we can find out what trains have left for Dukla.’

  ‘I don’t imagine there’s a direct line. She’ll be stranded somewhere in the countryside. She’ll have forgotten where she’s heading.’ The disasters mounted in front of Irena’s eyes with far greater speed than the people now teaming out from the underpass that separated the Planty from main roads and the station. She saw her mother huddled in a carriage unable to explain where she was heading, her ticket lost, her panic mounting even faster than Irena’s own. She saw some kind conductor trying to ask her where she lived and her mother not knowing. Did she even still remember her name? Irena wondered. It wasn’t the kind of thing one asked one’s mother. ‘Hello, what’s your name? Where do you live?’

  If they found her, she crossed the fingers of both hands and hid them behind her back, if they found her, she would practice with her everyday, like scales. Name, address. Name. address. The Professor had already told her in Vienna that it wasn’t impossible to lay down new memories in old age. It just took repetition. More repetition than previously. Like conditioning one of those slugs the memory physiologists always talked about. The ones with huge neurones. Aplysia. Like a Polish name. But her mother wasn’t a slug.

  The station was busy with commuter traffic. Messages blared over the loudspeakers. People were scurrying in all directions, holding sandwiches, drinks, babies. Concentrating, Irena hurried towards the first yellow schedule board she could see. It was complicated. Dukla was a small place, probably not on a main line, so there would have to be a connection. Through Tarnow perhaps. Ridiculous. They might even have waved to each other from some level crossing.

  ‘Why don’t we ask at the information desk?’ Bruno suggested.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Nina offered.

  ‘No, no, there’ll be a huge queue and here, here, I’ve just found it. She’d have to go to Krosno first. The last train is in about an hour.’ Irena ran her finger up the complicated list and took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think she could have made the earlier one. Come on, let’s go and have a look at the platform.’

  They hurried down some stairs and then up again. The platform was a double-sided one and not too crowded, but as Irena looked around, her momentary hopes sank. ‘I’d forgotten. There’s nowhere for her to sit and wait. She’d have collapsed.’

  They walked to the far end of the platform, which was a long way, and back again. Just to the other side, the street market was still active, and noise echoed over concrete and tracks.

  Suddenly Nina stopped and tugged at Irena’s sleeve. She pointed at some gritty ancient carriages parked at a platform to the far side of the station. ‘I might have dreamed it, but I think out of the corner of my eye while we were passing, I saw someone in there. A shadow…something. It could just have been Pani Marta.’

  They retraced their steps.

  Sure enough, at the dirt-spattered window of the final old carriage, there was a woman. She had her head bent. Irena squinted in an attempt to make out her features. An incoming train bumped past, blocking her view. But her pulse had already started to race.

  ‘Come on, it’s worth a look.’

  They went back down the stairs to the station underpass and came out at the furthest platform. It was no longer altogether easy to determine which carriage the woman they had seen was in, since she had been sitting at the opposite window; but at a quick calculation, Irena decided it must be the second one from the back. The train door here stood partially ajar.

  The Professor saw it at the same time as she did and gallantly held it open for her.

  In the last compartment Irena found her mother.

  She was sitting there quite calmly, as if she were in her chair at home. Her grey-white hair was neatly coiffed and pulled back to reveal a scrubbed, fine-skinned face, almost free of wrinkles. Her fingers tugged mechanically, as they so often did, at the top button of her cardigan or strayed restlessly over a bit of lint. Her blue eyes were uncannily clear, though distant. As if she were blind to the world around her and yet seeing something. She manifested no particular surprise as she looked at Irena.

  A shiver of fear ran through her. It had a different quality from her earlier panic. It had to do with finding a point of connection with her mother. She wanted an answering mind, some recognition.

  Disappearance could take so many forms. These last weeks, whenever she called out to Marta, she was never sure what form of acknowledgement, if any, she would get.

  ‘Mama. Mama. What a relief to find you.’

  Her mother didn’t answer, and Irena filled in for her silence, embarrassed as always that others would witness her vacant state. ‘We looked everywhere. We didn’t know where you’d got to. How are you feeling? Do you think you can get up now, so that we can take you home? I’ll find us a taxi.’

  Marta didn’t move or speak.

  Irena felt a tap on her shoulder, and the Professor excused himself, walked past her and sat down opposite her mother. He met Marta’s eyes and then, after a moment, put his hands out to her.

  Marta confided her own to his. Irena was startled by the change that came over her face. Her mother’s lips began to curl in a small smile. One eyebrow arched slightly, and she looked out shyly at the Professor – almost, had it not been so odd to think it, flirtatiously.

  They sat like that for a moment. Then Marta said softly in a voice rich with endearment, ‘Little Cousin. Oh, Little Cousin. I knew you would come, Little Cousin. I was waiting.’

  ‘And you see, I’m here.’

  ‘Your hands are so warm.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, Little Cousin. I’m so glad you’ve come. So glad.’

  Return

  15

  1942

  The cold had set in, damp and bitter, so that it cut right through his jacket like a knife. The sky was an unrelieved grey. The wind had come up too, biting at his face and ears where they weren’t quite hidden by his cap. He was pleased. The cold meant everyone walked even more quickly than usual and kept their eyes to the ground. Tomasz Nowak – until not so long ago Bronislaw Sienkiewicz and before that Bruno Lind, though sometimes Torok – did likewise. He had received very specific instructions.

  He was to go to the bakery south of the Castle Hill, nip into the lane on the right and round the back, where he would find a series of sheds. He was to slip into the third shed. There he would see bags of flour piled on the floor. He was to go straight to the back of the storehouse and tuck himself behind the flour sacks. At six-fifty am precisely. If anyone stopped him, he was to show his pass and say he had a message for Pan Tadeusz.

  Bruno was only stopped once at the main gate. He arrived as precisely as the watch his father had given him all those years ago in a forgotten Vienna permitted. He had held onto it, even in the hungriest days. He was glad now.

  He stole over the creaky wooden floor and casually dipped behind a stack of sacks. No sooner had he stopped than he heard his name called from beneath him. A trapdoor opened, and a ghost emerged covered in what looked like white ash. It took him a moment to recognize his grandfather through the veil of white that powdered the air when he moved. Soon Bruno too was covered in flour. They held each other for a long time.

  When his grandfather spoke, it was in a choked whisper. ‘Marysia got the news to me. You’re a brave boy, Bruno.’

  ‘No, Grandpa. No.’ It all came out in a rush, though he hadn’t meant to say it like that, because he was sobbing, how he had let his mother and sister die, how the Nazis had killed them. With Pan Mietek’s help. He had betrayed them. Pan Mietek. Yes. But he had taken revenge for that, at least. That, at least.

  His grandfather held him and rocked him as if he were still a babe, not a man now as tall as he was, hushing him, crooning slightly. And then he forced him to look int
o his eyes. ‘Listen Bruno, I haven’t got long.’

  Bruno interrupted. ‘I want to stay with you.’

  ‘No, that’s impossible. I can’t allow that. I love you, Bruno. We brought you up to be free. As bad as it is out here, it’s a hundred times worse in the Ghetto. I want you to stay alive to carry on the family honour. I depend on you for that. Understand? Promise me. You will leave Krakow. Marysia will give you instructions.’

  ‘You’ll come with me.’

  ‘No, dear boy. No. It’s no longer possible. I’m too weak now. In any case, the world after won’t be for me. I made my decision some months back. For your grandmother’s sake, perhaps. For other reasons too. I’m old now. I’ve thrown in my lot with my people. In the Ghetto. It was the only path my conscience allowed. Life is getting harder there every day. Sometimes I can help just a little from the inside because I know how the system works, know people on the outside, know the dragnet of corruption and bribery. For you it’s different. You must live. But remember everything I’ve taught you.’

  For the first time Bruno took in how dreadful his handsome grandfather looked beneath the fine covering of flour. He was paper-thin, his face reduced to a skeletal outline, his neck under the overall a web of stringy tissue. His eyes had lost their old fire.

  Bruno clutched at him. ‘And you?’

  His grandfather didn’t seem to hear him. ‘I say it again, more strongly after what you’ve told me. You can’t stay on in the city. I know your temperament. It will only end in trouble for everyone. Marysia will arrange things. Listen to her. She isn’t one of us, but she’s utterly reliable. I want you to tell her too, that a new stage has begun. The old, the infirm, the children, they’re being singled out for special treatment. Tell her to spread the news. Goodbye, my darling boy.’

  ‘Special treatment?’

  ‘Yes.’ His grandfather had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘They’re moving us ever closer to God.’

  Two tears trickled down his cheeks as he stuffed rolls into Bruno’s pockets and patted him on the back.

  ‘No. No, you keep them. And I almost forgot. This is for you.’ He took out all the money he had wrapped into his rucksack on leaving the country house. He had hoarded it and spent little.

  ‘No, Bruno.’

  ‘Please. Please. I’m working. And they feed us in the hotel. Will you get messages to me?’

  His grandfather nodded. ‘And this will go a long way. Thank you.’ He met his gaze with something of his old spirit and with another hug, disappeared down the trap door.

  Bruno stood there for a long moment, before shaking himself awake. He was mad. Why had he let his grandfather go? Listened like a docile child? They would kill him. They were killing everyone. He pulled open the trapdoor and raced down the stairs into darkness. He called out his grandfather’s name. A moan of an echo was his only answer.

  He was in a long corridor. Moisture oozed from the walls. His footsteps squelched through wet earth. The darkness grew thicker with each step. It was hopeless. He would need a torch to find another trapdoor. He ran his fingers along the low ceiling in an attempt as he moved. Nothing. His grandfather had vanished into thin air. At last he bumped into the corridor’s end. Here was a door. He tried it, rattled it, knocked, pushed. But it was securely locked and no answer came to his call. With tears in his eyes, he blundered back, now doubly frightened. He would never get out of here. And his grandfather would die. He wouldn’t find the first trapdoor. But he stumbled upon it, tripping over the rickety stairs, and managed to ease it open.

  Another few minutes saw him making his way swiftly along the cold streets. A thin snow was falling, floating in the air like the flour in the bakery and settling on the ground in stark patches of white.

  He was late for work. Even later than he had anticipated. The delay was a boon. A few minutes sooner, and he would have been right at the centre of the crossroads where a łapanka was in full progress, the roadblock already half-formed. Loudspeakers blared, their orders raucous, trapping all the people in the vicinity in a deafening ring of terror. Rifle-toting soldiers jumped from armoured cars and trucks. They screamed, pushed, shoved. Bruno scooted into a narrow doorway. From the corner of his eye he could see the Wehrmacht soldiers brutally herding people together then with equal venom forcing them into two distinct groups. A mother shrieked as she was prised from her daughter; another woman had to be dragged from the side of an old man who promptly fell on his knees and started to pray. A rifle prodded him until he doubled over onto the icy wet of the street where a boot found his gut. The snow turned scarlet.

  Bruno flattened himself against the wall and inched in the opposite direction. A hairbreadth stood between him and a journey to some munitions factory in Germany as slave labour. He had no doubt in which line his youth would place him, unless his Jewishness was discovered, and then there would be no more lines at all.

  The Nazi habit of separating out one thing from another came home to him with the force of a death knell. Yes. Jews from Poles from Germans, old from young, mothers from children, fit from unfit. This latest separating-out within the Ghetto, which his grandfather had announced, would lead to even more murders. As each separation seemed to.

  Why had he been so feeble and not forced his grandfather with him? A habit of obedience had taken him over.

  Now, a pit of despair threatened to swallow him. He should just let the Germans take him this time. Sooner rather than later. What did it matter? Get it over with. There was nothing to go on for. Nothing and no one. No one at all any more. And the war would never be over. It had become a permanent state. An endless Occupation, whatever Marysia murmured about the Nazi defeats in the east. All of them had got used to the daily horror and its accompanying indignities. They were ground down, abject, barely human.

  Without thinking he picked up a loose stone from the street and was about to fling it in the direction of the Gestapo when a hand touched his shoulder. He lurched around, ready to aim his fists, to kick, to yell.

  A woman’s hushed voice stopped him. ‘In here, quick. You’ll be out of the way.’

  Within seconds, he was in a small courtyard, well hidden from the long reach of the Germans and with a stout door firmly interposed between them.

  ‘Just let yourself out when you think it’s over.’ The woman smiled at him gently from beneath a beret pulled low over her brow. ‘Take care.’ She rushed up the staircase opposite.

  ‘Thank you,’ he called after her.

  The simple act of kindness saw him through the next weeks. He remembered the stranger every time his spirits sank to a level so intolerable that the knife he wielded daily in the kitchen of the hotel tempted him to extreme measures.

  It wasn’t that the job was so bad. Stout and spectacled, Herr Ritter, who ran the kitchens with more organization than the march on Russia and more anxiety than a mother nourishing a sick child, was a reasonable employer. For a German he seemed almost human. The kitchens were warm. Bruno was fed and given scraps to take home. His particular role – slicing up and preparing the carcasses which were delivered to the hotel every week, despite hunger everywhere else – turned out to be one he had a knack for once he had served a necessary apprenticeship with the German and learned the names of the various butcher’s cuts. Herr Ritter appreciated the fact that he could speak German, particularly since Marysia was mostly occupied out of the kitchen. He often used him to translate instructions to the other kitchen workers – four women and two old men. They kept their distance from Bruno, as a result.

  Sometimes Ritter even confided in him, telling him he had a son of his age at home, worrying about what would become of the boy. In Tomasz Nowak, Bruno had grown younger. He was now once again barely fourteen.

  On the day of the łapanka, which he used as an excuse for his lateness, Ritter offered Bruno a tiny room in the attic of the hotel. Bruno wondered whether he could stand being in constant proximity with Germans, but in the end he acquiesced. Marysia’s kitchen table had g
rown increasingly uncomfortable, and it was clear that her flatmate’s initial welcome was reaching its irritated end. It was better not to irritate Poles now that the Germans had blaringly announced the death penalty for anyone who helped Jews.

  And, away from Marysia’s constant watchful eye, he felt he could probably sneak into the Ghetto and see his grandfather.

  It was after Christmas by the time he had his scheme in place. He had stolen some stationery from the hotel, and now he wrote a letter under the name of Major Schmidt, who sometimes came into the hotel kitchens to talk to Ritter. This he brought to the Ghetto gates, as soon as Herr Ritter granted him an hour’s leave. Here, pretending to be Major Schmidt’s messenger, he paid a guard to make sure that the letter was delivered to his grandfather. The letter, written in German, asked Lawyer Torok to make himself available at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning at the gates to discuss a legal matter pertaining to a property transaction.

  Bruno counted that another bribe would see him past the guards and within the Ghetto walls, where his grandfather would be waiting for him on Sunday. He would then plead his desire to stay or devise a plan to see him out. They had to be together. He was certain he could convince Herr Ritter to come up with another cubicle at the hotel as a temporary measure. All his grandfather had to do was shed his telltale Star.

  But on that bitterly cold Sunday morning, his grandfather didn’t appear at the Ghetto gates. Bruno waited and waited, making himself small amidst the commotion. Brusquely interrogated by a blue guard, he went off, only to return minutes later. In this way he waited until mid-afternoon, well past the time off he had begged. And still his grandfather didn’t come. At last, his feet two blocks of ice in his worn shoes, he returned to the hotel to an angry Herr Ritter who had twice sent for him. He needed extra help in the kitchen tonight. Not less. There was to be a banquet. Two of the senior Wehrmacht officers had been posted east.