The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The moon had set now, and the light all came from the ground where the snow wore a thin crust of glittering ice. Her horse’s hooves crunched through it. She kept him to a trot and skirted round to the far side of the forest where a track would take her to the old forester’s cabin. He might have news of the partisan band, would know more accurately where the fighting had taken place. But the forester wasn’t in, had probably gone off to help as soon as he heard the Germans receding.

  She rode slowly, peering through the trees to see where the snow was disturbed. Yes, Pan Stanislaw had gone ahead of her. She could see his boot prints where the trail branched. Should she follow him or head off to the left? Best to follow, since he wasn’t riding, and there might be some left alive for her to bring out.

  She found the forester in a small clearing in the grey light of the earliest dawn. He was cutting fronds from the lowest pines and covering over the bodies. A superficial burial. But the ground was frozen and too hard to dig. There were three of them here. The wild boars would get them soon enough if the buzzards didn’t. She averted her eyes, not wanting to see. She had to protect herself from the nightmares. Had to. Still.

  They followed the tracks after that, too many of them. And the telltale markings of blood on snow. Maroon, almost black in the first glimmer of the rising sun. The day would be beautiful. She could feel it. She kept her eyes on the sky and watched the morning cloud scuttling above the high trees. She listened to the birdsong. She didn’t want to be the first to see the bodies. Even though she was here. Even though she had come to help.

  A line of poetry her father had taught her in English when she was still little came back to her. He had loved Shelley and Coleridge, the English Romantics. He had been wonderful then, her father. Before the illness.

  Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone,

  But grief returns with the revolving year

  So much grief. There was another body now, a fighter stretched in the snow as if sleep had caught him unawares.

  The forester kneeled by his side. ‘He’s alive,’ he whispered. ‘Quick.’

  She poured the vodka down his throat. He coughed. A strong man. The cold helped. It slowed the blood flow, slowed the heart too. She had read that in the book the doctor had lent her just before the start of the war. Read about the syphilis as well. Her father. She had thought she might study medicine.

  They strapped him onto the makeshift stretcher, and slowly she led her horse back to the forester’s cottage. The man opened his eyes as she prodded the wound. They would have to try and get old Dr Zygmunt over. The bullet had gone too deep for simple extraction.

  The man was watching them. His lips moved.

  ‘We should be able to get you fixed up,’ she said softly, unwinding the bandages she had made from boiled rags. ‘Take it easy.’

  He was speaking again, too softly for her to hear. The forester put his ear to his lips.

  ‘You want me to get a message through,’ he repeated. ‘From Aleksander Tarski to Bronek Kowalski.’

  The man murmured a yes and closed his eyes. There wasn’t much more she could do. She rode off to fetch Dr Zygmunt, while the forester dragged her sleigh back into the woods. There might be other survivors and they would have to move quickly. The Germans could well be sending men to scour for their own.

  It was then that she saw them. Just as she emerged from the south side of the forest. Tracks glistening with their icy crust that was just beginning to melt. German boot prints. They zigzagged and swerved madly. The body lay at a little distance on the slope of the hill. She kept her horse trotting in a straight line. She wasn’t going to make a detour to help a German bastard: that was for sure.

  Then with a shrug she looped back. Some mother’s bastard. And he couldn’t harm anyone in his present state.

  There was a shaft of sun right on him, and she found herself marvelling at the beauty of that young golden head, the fine skin. He lay so peacefully asleep, like Icarus fallen from the skies. Or Adonis, yes, more like Adonis, gored by the jealous boar. The blood was caked on his jacket at the shoulder. But the jacket wasn’t a uniform, she noted in confusion. She slipped off her horse and put her pocket mirror to his lips. Seeing a trace of breath she reached for the vodka flask and simultaneously unbuttoned the jacket to see the wound as much as to check what he was wearing and what identification he might have. But she already knew that whatever his nation, she couldn’t leave him here to die in the cold.

  She was surprised to find him carrying papers in one of the names the fighter in the forester’s cabin had mentioned. She put her perplexity to one side. The real problem was how to move him. She had to get him home. Out of the cold. A little cold slowed the blood. Too much killed. Could she heave him onto her horse?

  He flinched and opened his eyes as she tried to lift him.

  ‘Can you walk a little?’ she asked in Polish, and he seemed to understand, clung to her as he got to his feet. ‘I’m going to try and mount you on the horse.’

  ‘Bessie,’ he murmured, as if he had arrived in heaven. ‘Bessie.’ He half fell and half clambered onto the animal with her help, then leaned heavily against her while she held him upright all the way home.

  She walked him into the big front room where her father dozed beneath his chequered blankets on the old wooden wheelchair. The canapé he had once used, before the business of moving him to and fro had proved too difficult without help, still stood there not far from the hearth. She helped her patient stretch out, then put more wood on the fire and stoked it into a blaze. She put the kettle on to boil. She thought she could tend to this wound herself. Would have to. If he were a German, old Dr Zygmunt would quite happily let him die.

  ‘Drink,’ she cut through his mutterings and handed him the flask. He was delirious, she thought. At least the mumblings were in Polish. ‘Drink,’ she ordered again. ‘I’m going to try and get the bullet out.’

  She undressed him to the waist, washed the skin that emerged firm and golden around the ugly welt. So unlike her father’s, she marvelled as she cleaned, then prodded and pulled and swabbed with the instruments these last years had taught her to use, however ever inadequately. The bullet extracted, she dabbed at the wound with more alcohol, then bandaged the whole area tightly.

  His cries had roused her father, who was calling for her in the hoarse groans he used now, interspersed with that hacking cough. These last months, he was mostly off somewhere in his own world. The illness had eaten up so many chunks of him. Almost better he were dead. While she tended to him, she conjured up the handsome witty man he had once been. Just, too, and generous. Had he known what she was doing, he would have approved.

  Within a week, her young patient had come back to himself enough so that she was sure he understood her. None too soon, because she had had to hide him in her room while she went about her endless duties. She never knew when Pani Zablonska, the wife of the old family retainer, might trek over from her house and make a pretence of helping out while she spied and scoffed the old man’s gruel. There were few one could trust in these hard times.

  She repeated that to her patient. She also said to him: ‘As far as I know, you’re Aleksander Tarski. That’s what your papers say. That’s fine with me, although you look young for your age. I shall tell everyone you’re my little cousin come from the north. Your parents thought you’d be better off in the country and you’ve come to help out. And you will help out. As soon as you’re well. There’s a lot to be done. We have a few cows, here. Fields too. With luck the wheat will grow as golden as your hair. I’m the only one left to work, fulltime. Apart from you. Is that a deal, Little Cousin?’ She thought she might have smiled at him, because he smiled back, a warm endearing smile that illuminated his whole face. She felt it illuminating her too, as if a flame had been lit beneath her heart and sent the blood racing.

  ‘Little Cousin,’ he repeated, and he gave her his hands to clinch the deal.

  Over the next months, though, she worried f
or him. He did everything he was asked. And more. He even took over the bathing of her father that she had performed ritualistically once a week with old Pani Zablonska’s help in lifting him into the tub. Aleksander had watched her rubbing and rubbing and taken the cloth from her and copied her movements so that she wasn’t sure whether her father noticed the difference.

  Watching, she stilled a leaping desire.

  He was good at finding food too, her Adonis. She called him Aleksander out loud, but she was sure it wasn’t his name, since he hadn’t answered to it in his delirium. That other man they had found that day in the clearing who had mentioned the same name was long gone, fetched by a woman with a wagon, Dr Zygmunt had told her.

  So she thought of Little Cousin as her Adonis. He was a hunter even though he hadn’t come to her with a gun or a bow and the Germans had long ago taken theirs. But he knew how to lay traps, and he came home with rabbits and game. When the ice broke, there were fish. They hadn’t eaten so well since the Wehrmacht had been with them. He loved riding the old mare too. She wished she had a second horse, so that they could ride together, but of what was left of their stables two had died, and she had given one, together with a cart, to the Jewish family they had hidden in the early years of the war in the decaying wing of the house.

  It was because of that old spy, Pani Zablonska, that they had had to go. The woman he had told her in her falsely subservient way that she knew they were there and a danger to all of them. So Marta had packed them off on the cart and hoped that, with the extra cash she had found for them, they would make their way across the border, if not to Hungary, then at least across the river to the Russian zone.

  After that, she had told the old crone she had nothing left to pay her with, so she had better find some other means of support. And still she came to sniff around, claiming a loyalty to her father, supposedly helping with his personal care but really foraging and stealing beneath her very nose. Now, with her Little Cousin here, she had an excuse to get rid of her for good.

  Yes, she worried for him. And not only because of the old witch. She sometimes thought there was something wrong with him. Something wrong in his mind. At first she thought it might be some defect from birth, since he spoke hardly at all. He was simple. But it turned out that he knew how to speak perfectly well, and in Polish, though only did so in response to direct questions. Then she thought he must be in a state of residual shock, because of the wound and the accompanying fever, or because of something else, something that had happened before. She was gentle with him.

  Once the skin had healed, leaving only a puckered scar on the golden flesh, she asked him. How had he come by the bullet wound? For the first time, he looked furtive. But oddly so. She wasn’t sure whether he was trying to hide something or find something.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked him.

  He was quick to say Krakow and then in something like panic, excused himself, told her he had a task to perform.

  Mostly they worked side-by-side, not speaking much, but somehow in tune: she in her old workman’s clothes, so that from a distance they probably looked like brothers. He knew about ploughing and sowing. He knew about milking the cows too, though she wouldn’t let him take the milk to the village. It was best if he wasn’t seen too much, she had determined from the start.

  One late afternoon she found him in her father’s library, which was directly underneath the room she had given him. He jumped, startled by her approach, and she said, no, no, it was fine for him to be there if he liked to read. She noticed he had taken down a volume of Dickens, and she laughed and said it was an old favourite. They could read together, if he liked, by the fire. Her father might enjoy that too.

  As the days grew longer, they read into the evenings. Poetry too. She watched his face, the rapt attention, the play of emotion. No, he wasn’t simple.

  In May, for her birthday, she decided to celebrate. She was twenty-five and, even though she felt a hundred, it was an age worth celebrating. The sound of gunfire had been close again. In the village the news was that the Russians were advancing, the Germans on the retreat. Either death or liberation was on the march. She was no longer altogether sure she remembered what the second meant. In either case, she felt like a celebration.

  She boiled some water and washed her hair with the bar of soap she had hoarded for so long it had developed thick black grainy ridges. She unfolded the silk stockings from their wrapping of tissue paper, found the delicate silver-blue crepe dress she had last worn in the first year of the war and put on the pearl choker which had been her mother’s and which the Nazis had failed to plunder because she had hidden it amidst the down in her pillow. She dressed, brushed her hair to a sheen, applied some old lipstick, put on shoes that weren’t boots and had a heel. She no longer recognized herself in the mirror.

  There was leftover rabbit stew for supper. It would have to do. But the table would benefit from a cloth. She had stored them away in a chest years ago and listed them in her mind as unmanageable household items, like so much else the house had once contained. But now, she went upstairs, up to the attic where she had hidden the linen, and brought a cloth down with her.

  Little Cousin was standing at the foot of the attic stairs when she came down. He was all attention, and she realized he thought she might be an interloper. It took him a moment to recognize her and then he seemed to grow even stiller.

  ‘It’s my birthday,’ she offered in explanation.

  ‘Birthday,’ he echoed and without looking at her again rushed out of the house.

  Sadness filled her. She had frightened him. She shrugged away a sense of desertion and went to set the table. She dawdled, took her time, but still her Adonis didn’t return. She wheeled her father to his place. Sang a desultory song, because she knew it soothed the old man somewhere in those unreachable depths, and she had wanted to celebrate. How she had wanted it. She found the last bottle of wine that dated from what she thought of as her Wehrmacht days, back in ’40 and ’41, when it had become clear that the war wouldn’t be over in six months. Her father had suddenly taken a terrible turn then, and she was willing to do anything to keep him alive, to get him the treatments old Zygmunt said he needed. She dusted the bottle off, uncorked it and poured a little for him and herself. They drank. When she had finished her glass, and the dark had set in, she served the stew on the few uncracked plates. She felt more like weeping than like eating.

  Then he was there, wiping his feet on the grate, rushing towards her. ‘Happy Birthday, sweet cousin,’ he murmured. He thrust into her hands a bouquet of tiny spring anemones, all purple and white amidst their moist leaves and still perfumed by the forest.

  She smiled. She couldn’t stop smiling. She put the flowers into a low bowl and gazed at them as they drank and ate. She could feel him stealing glances at her, as if he still wasn’t sure she was who she was.

  Afterwards she lit the tallow candle, and they read poetry. Shelley, because he was her father’s favourite, and also Adam Mickiewicz. He told her he thought he still remembered how to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in English, his tutor had taught him. Then he stopped himself and went silent, and she was afraid to interrupt the look on his face.

  Later, at the top of the stairs, when he said goodnight, she called after him. ‘Thank you, thank you, Little Cousin,’ and he turned, and she stretched out her hand to him. He came towards her, and she held on to his fingers. She led him to her room that was at the opposite end of the hall. Leaning against the door, she kissed him. He didn’t really know how to, not at first, not until later and by then they were lying on her bed and solemnly undressing each other by the moonlight which trailed through her window and left a silver path on her sheets. She taught him everything she knew, but he seemed to know things of his own. He knew how to run his fingers along her skin, how to explore softly, firmly, how to bury his head between her breasts and arch her against him so that she had to stop herself from crying out in case the night woke.

 
In the morning, he lay asleep tightly curled against her. She watched his beauty and marvelled, moving slightly so that she could take in all of him. Her Adonis. It was then that she saw it. She wanted to laugh out loud. There, there lay the explanation for everything. All the secretiveness, the probable disguises. It made her very happy. Her Adonis found wounded at the cusp of the forest was a Jew. Not a German, but a Jew. And she wouldn’t let anyone, not anyone, take him away from her.

  That summer, time, which had grown so thick and sluggish that she could barely wade her way through it, took on a new consistency. It was as frothy and light as whipped cream or the seeds on a dandelion, and it flew by without her being able to catch hold of it. There were poppies, and then the meadow grasses grew and grew until they were waist high and wonderful for rolling in when they could. During the days they worked enveloped in a heat that might have been sun or their own making. At night their passion electrified the air and made everything glow with the burnished gold of the wheat fields.

  The serpent in her Eden turned out to be the rat-tat-tat that had led her to him. That summer the Partisans of all groupings and colours had intensified their activity. In August they made an attempt to free Warsaw from the Nazis’ clutches, perhaps anticipating help from the Russian Army. It did nothing, and the Uprising failed. Meanwhile, in their southern corner of Poland, the fear was growing that the Russians, who were beating the Germans back inch by inch with the help of the Partisans, intended to stay. They were occupiers in a different guise. Not liberators.

  Their remote corner of the countryside reverberated with gunfire and explosions. On top of the Germans and Russians and Poles, there were also the Ukrainians and the Lemks and the Boyks. Several times a week now, she and Little Cousin would go to the forester’s cottage and see if there was any help they could offer the wounded.