The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘That’s a good charcoal.’ She looked over Bruno’s shoulder at a drawing he was studying. It showed an old, rather handsome house, half-hidden by trees. It was the trees that were good. An invisible storm had made the foliage swirl and shake.

  ‘Yes,’ he said absently.

  With a shrug she took the plates towards the kitchen.

  ‘I think I’ll go and give Irena a hand with her mother.’

  ‘You do that. She’ll appreciate it.’ Amelia called after him, wondering again whether he was developing a soft spot for the woman. Irena treated him with great consideration, a careful mixture of respect and admiration. But then she treated Aleksander like that too. Who knew? Who knew anything in this strange country?

  Amelia, piling dishes into the sink, suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder. She shivered. What was it that made skin so susceptible to one touch and not another? Was it because she had known that about Aleksander from the moment they first shook hands, that she had really persuaded Bruno to make this journey. No, no. She mustn’t be that cruel to herself.

  ‘I wish…’ Aleksander’s voice was soft and wondered off on a note of such pure longing that she turned into his embrace despite the water dripping from her fingers. The kiss felt as illicit as his erection. The kitchen was so neat and tiny, her father a matter of a brittle wall away. As if she were an ardent teenager again. Though now she had a clearer picture of what she might want. Not that it seemed any more attainable.

  ‘I wish you could stay. Or that I could come to you,’ Aleksander was whispering. ‘Maybe after this run of experiments…’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. So sorry.’ Irena’s eyes were vast with embarrassment as they met her own over Aleksander’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t mean… I’ll… I was just getting a glass of… I’ll come back.’

  ‘No, please.’ Amelia barely held back a giggle. ‘Please, Irena. I’ll get you a glass. Shall I make some coffee too? We need it, I think.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Good idea.’

  Irena stood there, head lowered, then looked up abruptly. ‘Your father is quite extraordinary with my mother. Better than any of the doctors. Better than I am. He’s so gentle. It’s as if…as if he knows that to get her attention you have to touch her. I’d never quite realized it. But it’s true. Yes. And she focuses on what he says. She doesn’t wander so much.’

  She seemed to be trying to communicate something special. Amelia smiled at her. ‘Leave him with her and come back to us. Maybe he’ll work a miracle. I suspect he’s always had a way with the ladies.’ She winked at Irena, all the while holding on to Aleksander’s hand.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ Irena was now looking up at Aleksander. ‘I need to say something to you. I need to clear the air.’

  Amelia watched her walk away. A sudden suspicion filled her. Had she quite innocently walked into an already burgeoning love affair and somehow broken it up? That’s what Irena was hiding. No, no. She would have realized, wouldn’t she? Or were the cues so different here that she understood nothing at all?

  She hurried to make coffee, could only find some instant then heard her phone ring while she put the kettle on the hob.

  ‘Let me.’

  Aleksander took over. She switched off her phone and watched his gestures. They were precise, instinctively accurate. Did he already know this kitchen? Or was she watching the movements of a large man accustomed to small spaces?

  ‘May I invite you back to my place later?’

  She met the plea on his face. They had only been together in hotels: some good, some ghastly, but always impersonal. Places for unconsidered passion. Despite the sense of slowness, it had all happened so quickly. And she hadn’t been to his apartment yet. Only his lab. Would there be unpleasant secrets hidden away in the bedclothes? No, no, she hoped not. And the invitation was a sign. She nodded.

  ‘Oh no. Please don’t. Here, here.’ Irena was back. She found a tray and quickly placed everything on it, then ushered them to the table. Guests really shouldn’t behave as informally as they had been. ‘Please,’ she said again.

  They took their places. Irena’s strained face threw a hush over them. She turned to Amelia first. ‘I don’t mind you hearing this, Amelia. But please don’t think me mad. It’s just that I need to know. Need to clear the air, as I said.’

  She stared at the flickering candelabrum then got up again, too restless to sit.

  ‘Aleksander…’ She paced, refused to meet his eyes.

  ‘Oh do sit, Irena. He’s not that frightening.’ Amelia tried to lighten the atmosphere. She wasn’t sure she had succeeded.

  ‘Of course. Of course. The thing is…’ Irena stopped and began again in a great rush, as if she were overcoming a barely surmountable hurdle. ‘The thing is that some years ago, before my mother was visibly ill, she told me that my father wasn’t my father. I mean the man I had always thought was my father, Witek Konikow, wasn’t really that at all. My real father was somebody quite different. Somebody called Aleksander Tarski.’

  ‘What?’ Amelia couldn’t hold back her surprise.

  Aleksander said nothing. He was standing there, somewhat rigid.

  Amelia looked from one to the other of them. Bewilderment coursed through her. Wasn’t Aleksander much too young to be Irena’s father, since she was older than Amelia? She shook herself, realized that Irena was talking about another generation.

  ‘So you mean…?’

  ‘I don’t know quite what I mean.’ Irena’s voice held a sob in suspension. ‘I left it all too late, you see. Back then, when my mother first told me, I wasn’t all that interested. I thought it was a kind of joke, really. Something to make my English friends giggle about. I was living in England, which made everything seem different in any case. But now I’d like to know. If my mother still remembered names back then, if she wasn’t yet demented, it could just be that Aleksander’s uncle was my father. Though if he died in the Warsaw Uprising, as I think you said while we were travelling, then his sperm would have had to have been frozen, and the whole thing is completely lunatic. As I suspect it is. Either that or I’m even older than I am.

  ‘But I have to ask because, well, because I’ve been thinking about it so much. It’s…well, it’s really why I sought you out in the first place, to be brutally frank. I’m no science journalist. Though I’ve learned a lot. I enjoyed it. Meeting you. And Professor Lind, as well.’

  She had started to cry in the midst of this, and Amelia put her arm round her shoulder. ‘Don’t be so upset, Irena. I understand. I understand how one has to know. How uncomfortable it all is.’

  ‘I thought… Well, I thought if she saw you, Aleksander – you said you looked like your uncle – that she might just recognize you. But I don’t think she did. So I don’t know why I’m saying all this. Except that maybe you still have some relatives you could ask. Because I’d like to find out. No one’s altogether clear about who was killed during the Uprising, so maybe in fact your uncle lived on. Went back to the countryside until the war was over, as so many did. I don’t know. Maybe I’d just like some family.’

  The tears were streaming now and the plea in her voice brought them to Amelia’s eyes too. She found a hankie and passed it to Irena. It reminded her. Reminded her how upset she’d been all those years back when she went to see her birth mother. The awkwardness of it. The sense of abjection. As if one wanted something one wasn’t even sure existed. The reparation of some lost unconditional love. But maybe it wasn’t love from that particular person. More like love from some idealized being one had dreamed up.

  It was all so strange. The way memory was so crucial to who one was, the very foundation on which identity was built, yet that crucial bit of one’s identity – who one’s birth parents were, even if one had lived with them for some years – was something memory couldn’t deal with. You simply forgot. In those early years of a child’s life, when everything was being learned, memories of that kind weren’t laid down. Not so that you could recognize the person later. So bizar
re. Maybe birth parents didn’t really count for much unless they hung on in there until speech kicked in. Genes: yes. But since as her father kept telling her we all shared some ninety-eight percent of our DNA with chimps, not to mention some forty percent with a banana, what was a little matter of a gene or two between humans?

  Yet here was Irena, desperate to know. As she had been.

  ‘What can I say?’ Aleksander was staring at Irena, as if he were trying to place a grid over her features. ‘There are some photographs. Of my uncle, I mean. We could show them to your mother.’

  ‘Do I look at all like him?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m told he looked a lot like me. But that was by my grandmother, who had a vested interest.’

  ‘And were there ever any stories which cast doubt on the timing of his death?’

  It was Aleksander’s turn to pace. ‘No, I don’t think so. The stories came in dribs and drabs, of course. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Resistance but a nationalist, which might account for that. He lived in Warsaw and rarely visited during the war years unless he was on some kind of mission. But as my grandmother would have it, he came to see her in July of 1944, just before the Uprising, and he was burning with the excitement of it. Apparently, she tried to hold him back, get him to stay with her, because she had a feeling that she would never see him again. Her intuitions were proved right. She never did. A message came from one of the members of his group in October of ’44 to say that he had died in Warsaw, died heroically. He remained her hero. She would recount his exploits over and over again, while my father’s war experiences were never spoken of. Not until we children prised them out of him. He took his mother’s view. He didn’t count for much. Anyhow, there was never any other account given of my uncle’s death during my childhood.’

  Amelia took one look at Irena’s disappointed face and burst out: ‘I’m sure he’d gladly have you as a cousin, in any case, Irena. I know I would.’

  Was it really truth that mattered so much in these cases? she wondered. Even if one was adamant about discovering it. She was no longer sure. She wanted to give Irena a hug, but the woman was all prickly tension now.

  ‘By the way, my uncle was always referred to as Pawel. That was his first name. My father and mother preferred his middle name, Aleksander, so gave me that.’

  ‘So that’s that.’ The tears welled up in Irena’s eyes. ‘Died too soon and wrong name.’

  ‘Tarski isn’t an uncommon name.’ Aleksander tried to be helpful. ‘And people took on false names during the war. Particularly the partisans. Maybe my uncle chose to be known as Aleksander.’

  This last attempt at reassurance seemed to make Irena even more despondent.

  Amelia intervened. ‘Is there any one else in your family one could ask?’

  Aleksander thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘No, my mother died last year. Though…’ He gave Amelia a quick furtive glance. ‘Before he died, my father talked at length to my former wife. She loved all those family stories, family trees. Probably because of our son… I never really listened. You could, of course, contact her.’

  ‘No, no.’ Irena’s eyes were veiled in sadness. ‘It’s too silly, really. I’ve made enough of a mountain of it.’

  ‘No you haven’t,’ Amelia heard herself say. ‘If you’re not satisfied, girl, you go on and pursue it. Ask more questions. Get the bedding off. Air those ancient mattresses.’ She laughed. ‘You know how many children are born on the wrong side of the marital sheets? Some six out of ten of us, depending on whose statistics you decide to believe.’

  ‘No, no,’ Irena protested. ‘It’s not a matter of illegitimacy. At least, I don’t think it is. I don’t mind about that at all. It’s just that I’d like to know. And I don’t know why I think I’ll find a satisfactory answer. It’s not as if anything else in life is clear. Well, not the way things are clear under Aleksander’s microscopes.’

  She was right, Amelia thought. At least about this place. In the Californian light, in the scripts she handled there weren’t as many shadows, as many textures, as many uncertainties. And the histories had been wiped out, left behind in places like this for others to worry over, so that America could concentrate on the future. Or just not concentrate.

  She watched Aleksander, wondered about that former wife of his. He didn’t really want Irena to contact her. The woman still counted in some way. Did her ex count too? Probably, to sensitive external eyes, though she thought he didn’t count at all. She never thought about him. But he must have helped to shape her, produce those diminished expectations, that facade of not giving a damn. Which is why she should make more of an effort with Aleksander, not less. He was reading the remains of a second skin she had grown, a hard, laughing one.

  ‘You could always,’ Amelia said, knowing as she said it that it was altogether the wrong thing to bring up, ‘you could always both have a DNA test done. It would probably come up with a relationship.’

  ‘No. Certainly not.’ Irena came as close to snapping as Amelia had ever heard her.

  ‘Why DNA tests?’ Bruno had just come back into the room.

  He looked exhausted, Amelia thought. They should get him back to the hotel. It had been a long day. A very long one for him. Too many ghosts. They had eaten the pounds off him.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Irena thinks she may be related to Aleksander through a father her mother only revealed to her a few year’s back. But Aleksander says he doesn’t think so.’ Amelia explained quickly about the Warsaw uncle, his death, the name.

  ‘I see.’ Bruno gave Aleksander a bizarre look then eased himself into his chair and played with the small glass of vodka in front of him before downing it in a single gulp. ‘I owe you all an apology. You too, Aleksander. And Pani Marta.’

  ‘Was she all right? Shall I go in to her?’ Irena asked.

  ‘No, no. I don’t think it’s necessary.’ He smiled at her with a touch of sadness. ‘You must try not to worry so, Irena. I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but death is inevitable. And it has its own logic. Pani Marta is comfortable.’

  A shiver crept up Amelia’s spine. She wasn’t sure what had caused it. Was it the way Bruno and Irena were looking at each other? She wanted to clutch at Aleksander’s hand, but he too seemed far away. Maybe, as she had half suspected all along, Bruno planned to inflict a stepmother on her, though she was well past the age of mothers of any degree. Eve would have wanted him to be happy. But she wouldn’t have persuaded him here as Amelia had done, back to the terrain his restless ghosts inhabited. Eve didn’t believe that if you put a narrative to things, they ceased to torment you. Or if she did, she had never told Amelia or ever felt it necessary to persuade Bruno here.

  Or was it that the moment had never been right before?

  Amelia wondered if Bruno’s nightmares would stop after this visit. Perhaps not. He looked more haunted than ever. And he was saying something she couldn’t quite grasp.

  ‘So your mother told you that you were related to Aleksander Tarski?’ His voice was so soft she had to strain. ‘It’s not altogether impossible.’ He paused. ‘Yes, yes. I owe you all some explanations.’

  He got up to pace, his hand rifling his hair then clenching into a tight fist behind his back.

  Amelia rushed to his side. ‘You don’t have to give us any explanations, Pops. You don’t owe us anything.’

  He met her gaze with his steady blue one. ‘Come here, Amelia. Come and sit beside me on the sofa. This may take a while. I do have some debts, you know. I think I may owe Irena’s mother my life. Yes.’

  He looked up at the charcoal drawing with its heavy shadows and stormy foliage. ‘Plato asked: can the same man know and also not know that which he knows? The answer is certainly yes. And you don’t need a brain lesion to make it so.’

  He paused. He was still looking at the picture. ‘I’m not sure what I recognized first. That drawing. Or maybe it was her voice. Husky, yet somehow precise. Or the gestu
res. Those large hands with their small neat motion. You know,’ he looked at them all with an air of wonder, ‘I really think I’d all but forgotten that period. Or not remembered it. I needed the trigger. The stimulus of those hands and the murmur. The murmur of, “Little Cousin”.’

  17

  1944

  The shots in the woods had reverberated all night, coming first from one place, then another. She had lain there, listening to the hideous rat-tat-tat of gunfire. The thunder that spelled death and more death. Iniquitous death. Till there would be none of them left. No Jews, no Poles, no Slavs, no gypsies. No one except the Nazis, and then they’d probably have to start killing each other, because the killing habit would have taken hold. Like an opium addiction. Rat-tat-tat.

  Yes, she had lain sleepless in that cold bed in the draughty house where the wind moaned its displeasure with all their lives. Even more loudly than her father did when the pain took hold of him. Even more loudly than he had when she had taken that Wehrmacht lover who had protected them. Long gone now. How she had loathed him. Loathed his lordly manner with her. His favours. Lord of creation who, with a little help from her, spilled his seed in a flat five seconds. Yes, you could tell a people by how they treated their women. Not that she supposed it was the poor man’s fault. Trapped by stupidity. All of them. They were all responsible, though some were far more responsible than others. Yes. Rat-tat-tat.

  She waited until the shooting had stopped. Had learned over the years to give the silence a chance for an extra hour, so that the armoured cars and the planes were all gone. Then she slipped into the old warm trousers and the worn tweed jacket and cap. She packed the bandages and the remains of the alcohol which served as an antiseptic and the rotgut vodka their neighbour made which could revive a dead pig, if it thought life was still worth living after swilling it. Finally she saddled her horse. Winter had turned him into skin and bone, and she didn’t like attaching the two linked up child-sleighs that could serve as a makeshift stretcher behind him. But they might prove useful.