The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Bruno apologized, almost in tears. Why hadn’t his grandfather come? What had happened? He could think of nothing else. His original letter hadn’t gotten through. The guard had just pocketed the money and done nothing.

  He didn’t want to consider the alternative.

  Herr Ritter’s bad mood increased in the coming weeks. He too was to be moved east. He wanted to take Bruno with him. Bruno didn’t want to go. He had to find out about his grandfather, take care of him. Not knowing how to say no, he ended up confessing part of the truth to the man: he had an old ailing relative in Krakow whom he helped out. Ritter’s pudding of a face creased with displeasure, but he gave in with a shrug. A week later he was gone.

  A certain Müller, a thin choleric man, replaced him.

  ‘He’s a pig,’ Marysia whispered to Bruno in passing as she piled her tray high with plates. ‘Take care.’

  Bruno had more than noticed the difference. There was no extra food now, no conversation. The kitchen became a place of grim discipline where everything was constantly measured and counted. Everything any of them did was the subject of instant and harsh criticism. After a few days under the new regime, Bruno was moved from the meat section to tend to the huge soup tureens and ever-simmering stews. One day, in Müller’s line of sight, the girl who was bringing over the chopped potatoes for the soups dropped some on the floor. Müller rushed over and berated her, accused her of dropping them deliberately so they could be stolen later. He raised his hand to hit her.

  Bruno intervened.

  ‘That’s not true. We wash the vegetables again and put them into the soup,’ he said in German.

  ‘Wash them and put them into the soup?’ the man roared, giving him a clout across the ear. ‘Was I speaking to you? Are you trying to poison our people?’ A second clout followed, drawing blood. ‘Just tend to your pots. I’ll see to you later.’

  The girl mouthed a thank-you behind Müller’s back, but the next day the violence increased. Müller having tasted the cabbage soup went into a rage and thrust a ladle-full into Bruno’s face. The liquid burned and blistered.

  A few nights later, Marysia stole up to his room and came in soundlessly without knocking. Her face wore a grimmer expression than he had ever seen on it. Without a word, she handed him a folded piece of paper. It looked like a sheet torn from a book, but was in fact overwritten. She waited while he read it.

  ‘Bruno, my treasure. Forgive an old man. I didn’t have the strength to come to you. I am dying and forced to dictate this on the only scraps we can find. The good news is that the Gestapo failed to find and eliminate me on their last roundup of children and the infirm. So I shall die my own death. Please, Bruno. Do exactly as Marysia says. The life of the Ghetto, I fear, is almost at an end. You will live for all of us. All my love. Your grandfather.’

  He held back his tears and instead smashed the battered cup he kept on the windowsill to the floor. The sound resonated in the hush.

  Marysia stared at him from her large soft eyes.

  ‘The note took a while to get to me. It’s over for him, Tomasz. I’m sorry. He was a great man, a good man. He did a lot for people. Remember that. Now listen, Tomasz.’ She seemed to shed her birdlike frailty and grow taller as she spoke. ‘As soon as the weather breaks – one week, two – you’re out of here. It’s too dangerous for you with that Müller. Outside too. The Germans are getting desperate for labour. I was only waiting for word from your grandfather. And you’re needed. You’re a man now.’

  Bruno began to listen through the haze in his mind.

  He had always suspected that tiny Marysia wasn’t altogether who she seemed. She knew too much. She arranged things unflappably, brought news, fixed meetings, came up with forged documents and underground newspapers. People would drop into her remote little house at odd hours. While he was staying there, he had occasionally been sent off into the small garden behind the house while they talked. Packages were delivered. He delivered some for her himself, heavy ones which didn’t rattle. It was through these deliveries that he had got the idea of how to communicate with his grandfather. The tears shadowed his eyes, as he listened to her.

  She would slip him a pass sometime in the next few days. Perhaps tuck it under his lumpy mattress. He was joining Herr Ritter in Tarnopol. In fact, he would get off the train much sooner and walk to his destination. Once there, he was to ask for an André Citroen. There would be a package to deliver too. She would get it to him somehow.

  She came up to him and put her arms around him as he memorized the address and softly repeated instructions. She was as slight as a child and he found it odd that there should be such comfort in her presence. ‘We’ll triumph, Bruno. Remember that. And we’ll meet again when it’s all over.’

  Over the next days he began to squirrel away what food he could for his journey. He watched Marysia carefully when she came into the kitchen for any signs that she might want him. There were none. But on the fourth day, he found an old dishrag under his bed. Inside it was a brown paper package and the travel pass he would need. On the package, a scrawled message read. ‘Friday. Inform Müller.’

  The next day was Thursday. He looked for Marysia so that he could somehow express his thanks and say goodbye. But she didn’t turn up at lunchtime. By mid-afternoon, Müller was fuming at her absence, when a messenger arrived to say that Marysia had been taken in a raid. Bruno hid his despair. It was unlikely that Marysia would ever be returned to the hotel.

  Early the following morning, he stole away, leaving a note for Müller to say that permission had arrived for him to travel east. By the time Müller could check it out, he would have disappeared.

  He left Krakow on a train crowded with Wehrmacht soldiers. Only two carriages were destined for Polish travellers.

  Once more he was cast adrift from everything that had become familiar to him. This time he was full of angry purpose.

  The name and address Marysia had made him memorize took him to a small town in the southeast, closer to the mountains than his grandfather’s country home and in border country once more. The trains were slow, and the best part of the day was eaten up in starts and document checks and longer stops. When he reached the region, it was already dark. He didn’t want to walk by night and get lost or stopped by some German convoy, so he begged a farmer to let him bed down in his barn in return for some hours work the next day. The barn forced thoughts of Mamusia and little Anna on him and led to nightmares that had no need of sleep. He stole away guiltily before dawn, leaving a few coins for the farmer on the windowsill of the house.

  The meadows still wore a covering of morning frost. As the sky grew brighter it unveiled a breathtaking panorama of rolling hills and valleys through which the Carpathian streams and rivers coursed with bubbling energy. His spirits rose and then fell abruptly. He was moved by the beauty that whispered of peace, only to be reminded that there was no peace, let alone anyone to share it with. He hurried on. By late morning, he found himself in what turned out to be a small spa town, nestling in a pretty valley. It would have been idyllic but for the presence of so many German uniforms.

  He walked purposefully as if he knew his direction, all the time on the look out for a fellow civilian. At last, on a small hilly street, he spied a young woman, who rapidly indicated a confusing number of lefts and rights that led him up a hill. The house, when he found it, had the aspect of a prosperous merchant’s house from another time. It filled him with uncertainty. This was exactly the kind of house that would be taken over by Germans. He looked round him to check out an escape route, in case he needed to make one. Marysia might have made a mistake.

  A girl of about his own age wearing a maid’s apron opened the door. He swallowed and somehow stopped himself from blurting out the code name just in time, checking instead on the address. He had indeed made a mistake. He was looking for the lower end of the street, not the upper. Tipping his cap, he raced away.

  The address he wanted was a far more common residence tucked
in at the back of a small courtyard where a lone child played, desultorily flicking pebbles against a wall. The woman who answered was dressed all in black but for a coloured shawl, which she draped over her hair, as if she were on her way to church. She was old and didn’t seem to understand him when he told her he’d brought something for André Citroen. The codename had made him happy since it reminded him of better times and his grandfather’s abandoned car, but now it didn’t produce the desired effect.

  He repeated his words to the woman’s growing consternation and added, with wide-eyed innocence: ‘Have I come to the wrong place?’

  ‘You’re German?’ she said. It was only in part a question.

  Bruno protested and let out a torrent of Polish about how maybe because he’d had to work for them, he’d taken on the voice, but really he came from Krakow, where the winter had been hard; how he preferred smaller towns and he named a few obscure ones, hoping this would convince her he wasn’t part of the enemy camp.

  At last the woman invited him into a small neat parlour, told him to be seated, said she had nothing to offer him except a hot cup of the local waters. The person he wanted to talk to wasn’t in.

  Bruno waited. All the while, the woman made erratic conversation. She asked him more about his place of work in Krakow, about his parents, so that he had to tell her with a thick swallow that he was an orphan now. Evening came, and he was still there, talking about the Hotel Francuski again, saying that his closest friend, a wonderful woman, had just been taken in a German raid. A sudden noise came from a backroom. A man emerged. He was tall and fresh-faced, handsome but for the disfiguring gash of a scar on his left cheek. He stretched out his hand to Bruno and grinned. ‘That’s enough. Welcome. You’ve come to join us.’ He looked Bruno up and down in swift appraisal, shook his hand and then embraced him in a manly hug.

  The old woman smiled at him with a warmth that suddenly gave a vibrant intelligence to a face that had been wan and dull. ‘Yes, welcome. I’m sorry, but we have to be careful.’

  The next months woke Bruno to a different way of life. It was one he felt he had been born to. Gone was the claustrophobia of the hungry decaying city where every glance was a potential betrayal, where boots and armoured cars clattered over cobbles with relentless threat. Now, as the member of a small Partisan band, he lived with friends. They were brave, daring, sworn to secrecy and to a single purpose: to free Poland from the clutches of the murderous occupier. They lived largely in the forests, foraging and hunting for food, breathing in the cool moist air of tall, needle-thin trees and ferns, a smell that for Bruno spoke of freedom.

  As Tomasz Nowak, he was the band’s youngest member, and that first spring and summer, his duties were largely that of a messenger. He knew they were testing his nerve. He was given a work permit that linked him to a farm in the area, run by a man who was attached to the Partisans and who would cover for him if the need arose. He was also given a rickety old bicycle with a large basket and two saddlebags. On this he moved between towns and villages and forest, carrying roughly wrapped packages that could contain anything from sterling supplied by British sources, underground newspapers, food, grenades or guns. He wasn’t always certain of the exact contents of a package, which was just as well. Nor did he know where the orders that came to his group stemmed from. All he knew with certainty was that they were part of a struggle that would soon defeat the Germans.

  He had lost all fear. It had finally gone with his grandfather and with Marysia’s disappearance. For himself, he no longer really cared whether he was dead or alive. He never thought about it. What he cared about with a kind of rabid blindness was the group’s mission. So he was attentive to the details of his bicycle, making sure that there was always enough straw or bits of old burlap and beets or potatoes to mask more important items. On the occasions when he was stopped by German police and checked, he merely pretended to be a dim-witted peasant. Once, for some reason incomprehensible even to him, he had bunched a mass of wild anemones into a bouquet and placed them at the top of his basket. When he was stopped, a bluff German officer scoffed to his fellows about the stupid peasant who had a flower-loving sweetheart. In the midst of the flood of ridicule and laughter, the officer had grabbed away the bouquet and told him to get another for himself. There had been no other questions, nor a search. From then on, Bruno always perched a bouquet of whatever flowers he could find atop his basket.

  Every evening under the stars the band shared news of German defeats and Allied victories. Around the campfire, they sang songs of melancholy longing or rousing cheer. A shield of warm solidarity against the cold of war and night grew up around them. They also talked of more immediate matters – ambushes, assaults on military transports, barracks and tracks, raids on depots, thefts of arms and ammunition.

  Early in the summer, the leader of their group, the man whose mother’s house he had first gone to and asked for Citroen, was killed in an ambush near Krosno. Two others were wounded. Soon after, they had news that their Prime Minister-in-Exile, General Sikorski had died in a plane crash. Sadness pervaded the band until a new leader arrived a week later: a tall man with a pleasant face, but with rather secretive studious gestures. He brought with him a young woman who gradually took over Bruno’s activities and the bicycle. He, instead, was given a rifle, and once it was clear that he knew how to use it, could also master the pin on grenades and even simple explosives, he became a fully fledged fighter. He hid in roadside ditches and held his breath as Nazi supply trucks or cars approached. At the given signal he took aim or flung the grenade. He watched men die. He watched vehicles go up in flames that looked hotter and fiercer than the one he had started at Pan Mietek’s farm all those months ago. Once, wearing a Nazi major’s uniform, he even managed to march past guards at an ammunitions store and fire on them from the back as his comrades rushed in for the heist. All this, plus news of a German rout near Moscow and Italy’s move into the Allied camp, buoyed them up into winter.

  Through it all, he sensed that their new chief, whom they called Andrzej, was suspicious of him. Maybe it was because, unlike the others, he had failed to make up a codename to use in the group. In case they were caught and tortured, they all only ever used first names and these, he suspected weren’t their real ones. Andrzej had reprimanded him as soon as he had found out that the name in his documents was the same as the one he used, but now it was too late.

  Maybe Andrzej was also suspicious of him because Bruno didn’t altogether know how to be a full member of a group. There were Polish songs he hadn’t learned as a child. There was always a slight reserve between him and the others. He was quiet: kept himself to himself, rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. He saw that the others didn’t behave like this, but he didn’t know how to breach his awkward difference. If there was no activity marked out for the day, he liked to go off into the woods by himself, often coming back with some bit of game for their dinner or a stash of mushrooms. Nor did he really like the burning sensation of the various rough vodkas and berry brandies which were drunk by his comrades, especially as the winter cold set in, freezing them despite the crackling bonfires. In particular, he didn’t like the blanket that covered his mind and twisted the world into terrible shapes when he had drunk too much. Within its thick folds, he felt small and alone, and, yes, frightened: frightened of what he might do to batter it away. For all this, he sensed Andrzej didn’t trust him.

  The women in the group, however, were sweet to him, often coming to sit with him while the men drank. Above all, Joasia, the one who had arrived with their new chief, was kind: sewing up his old, ripped gloves, providing rags for him to wrap round his feet in the icy weather. She had deep-set green-gold eyes, and when she wore her fur hat she looked like a princess out of one of those old Russian fairytale books his mother used to read to him.

  Just after the New Year, in the coldest days of the winter, Andrzej came back with a pair of German boots for him. Bruno was astonished. He was less astonished when he h
eard he was about to be sent on a mission past Dukla to deliver a message to another band of Partisans who carried on the struggle near the Slovakian border where the Nazis controlled a strategic mountain pass. He was given an address, a codename and an utterly incomprehensible message to memorize. The message seemed to be a communiqué about plants and flowers and varieties of cow. He was also given a pill, given it secretly while he and Andrzej stood at a distance from the group in the shelter of some snow-laden pine trees. ‘Only if you’re captured,’ Andrzej murmured, looking him directly in the eyes.

  Bruno nodded without exhibiting a single tremor and quickly slipped the pill into an inside shirt pocket.

  Andrzej patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a brave young Jew.’

  At first Bruno didn’t think he had heard him correctly. He didn’t respond, didn’t blink. How could the man know? Had Marysia said anything? No, no. He caught Andrzej’s glance whipping past his flies, and he now realized that he had failed in the very area that Marysia had warned him of, all those months ago when he hadn’t been paying enough attention. In the woods he had let his guard drop. Andrzej must have seen him – seen the telltale mark of his circumcision.

  There was no point protesting. He pretended not to have heard, but he wondered as he set off at dawn whether Andrzej hadn’t specially selected him for the mission so as to get rid of him.

  The journey was cold and treacherous, taking him deep into the Beskid Niski and, as he moved closer to the border, into heavily patrolled terrain. Maybe his burly ragged coat made him look innocuous. Maybe the sudden snow that reduced visibility to a few feet was on his side. Maybe the Nazis had other worries than a muffled and impoverished peasant who walked with the exaggerated limp Bruno had decided to adopt as camouflage, so that he looked unfit for work. In any event, travelling mostly by night and following the line of the river as far as he could, he arrived at the village unharmed and delivered his message to a rosy matron, who offered him sausage and some hot tea brewed from a concoction of thistle and herb, plus a blanketed floor next to her two young sons for the night. Bruno was grateful, and he set off the following afternoon in far better spirits than he had come.