The Memory Man

  Praise for The Memory Man:

  ‘A sensitive examination of memory and history and of whether you can really trust either of them’ – Observer

  ‘It speaks of history and one cannot stop listening’ – John Berger

  ‘Clever, unexpectedly funny, and pegs along at a thrillerish pace …’ – Daily Mail

  ‘Adroit and elegant’ – Edmund White

  ‘Fresh and interesting, conveying a sharp sense of place and period’ – The Times

  ‘Makes us question how memories are made, and fates are formed’ – Gillian Slovo

  ‘A powerful novel about memory, guilt, and parenthood’ – Independent on Sunday

  ‘Appignanesi’s depiction of Nazi Europe is notable for its atavistic sense of place. Madeleine moments are examined with an eye to science as well as the soul’ – Independent

  ‘Lisa Appignanesi’s The Memory Man really stayed with me’ – Helena Kennedy QC, Books of the Year, The Guardian

  ‘Intriguing, entertaining, compelling … an ingeniously conceived plot’ – Jewish Chronicle

  ‘Heartbreaking’ – Late Living

  Lisa Appignanesi

  The Memory Man

  ‘I realized then, he said, how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past … I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory.’

  W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

  ‘Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them … Our self is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits.’

  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Present Tense

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Past Present

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Past Historic

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Return

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Present Tense

  1

  Had Bruno Lind known what awaited him when he returned to the city of his birth, he might not have made the journey. As it was, he wasn’t quite sure what had brought him to visit a Vienna he hadn’t set foot in since childhood. He put it down in the first instance to an old man’s vanity. The city that had once chased him away was now wooing him back. He relished the whiff of perversity in the city fathers having remembered him because they were holding a conference on memory.

  He was a scientist of considerable reputation and more years, not that he suffered from them unduly. He prided himself on the fact that his limbs still carried him unaided, that the pull of gravity wasn’t yet excessive, and that he didn’t normally experience a blind panic when trying to retrieve a name or a bit of knowledge from the recesses of his mind. The deposits the years had left on his brain still seemed to allow some current through, and thoughts were produced. The only difficulty was that he had the sense time was running and running out at an ever-quickening pace. And the past had begun to haunt him, sometimes plague him with its unfinished business.

  At the Vienna-Schwechat airport, a man with a bristling moustache came to meet him. He carried an identifying sign that bore the word ‘Memory’ in curling Gothic print in three languages above Bruno’s name. He didn’t laugh when Bruno said he was happy he had remembered to collect him. In fact, he gave the distinct impression that none of the three languages on the sign were his own. Driving, not conversation, nor jokes, was his business, and he drove the large limousine with sedate pomp.

  Bruno was left to his own devices. He leaned back in his seat and, with a hint of reluctance, looked out the window. The city rose into view through some internal mist then quivered into dim familiarity. Bruno stared at old narrow streets, at buildings of pale stone, at arched sculpture-strewn doorways, at voluptuous goddesses and expansive gods, at graceful domes and vaulting spires. He began to feel they were hieroglyphs in a lost language poised to reveal a long-hidden secret he hadn’t known they contained.

  The animated hotel roused him. The lobby was a confusion of voices and tongues, muted only by the chocolate-box padding of walls and curtains and chairs. Luggage trolleys purred across thick carpets. Youths in dove-grey uniforms signalled to straying guests. Beside Bruno, a woman with an operatic bosom insisted on tickets for that evening’s performance of Parsifal.

  The pert, curly-haired attendant behind the registration desk welcomed Bruno with respectful enthusiasm, adding the ‘Herr Professor Doktor’ to his own unadorned ‘Lind’ and smiling as if she had been waiting for no one else all morning. She explained that his hosts had graced him with their best suite. That if everything was not to his satisfaction, he should ring immediately. Bruno returned her smile with a cordiality he was, in fact, beginning to feel under the shower of her attention.

  It was in the midst of all this, while she was handing him his key and a brochure, that he heard the name. Heard it from behind, so that it insinuated itself into his mind and clutched at him like some tentacle born from the reverie the streets had induced and now given a vivid, unnatural, daytime life.

  ‘Aleksander Tarski?’

  The syllables coiled round him and forced him to turn. Somewhere in him, it seemed, the fear was still alive, despite the passage of years. He stumbled, had to lean against the counter to catch breath and composure like the old man he stubbornly refused to be.

  What was that name doing here rolling off a woman’s lips and abutting in a question? What was it doing here ahead of him?

  He saw now that the syllables had been tentatively aimed at a man who had just risen from one of the silk-cushioned armchairs. He was tall, really far too lank-haired and bedraggled to be standing in this hotel with its veneered pretensions to good taste and better discretion. The woman was more in tune with her surroundings. A slim, rather angular creature with a haughty expression and a long flower-like neck, she was carefully suited and coiffed – yet nervous, judging by the hesitation in her voice.

  The tall man acknowledged that the name had found a home. Bruno relaxed a little. He was curious now and followed the couple with his eyes. This particular ‘Tarski’ had a soft, slightly distracted air, despite the large features and cavernous jaw. His hair was of an indefinite colour. His shoulders in the worn tweed jacket sloped slightly, as he allowed the woman to lead him away. He was both too old and too young, Bruno judged, though judging people was no longer what he did best.

  He took the mirrored lift up to the fourth floor. In his room, he pushed the thick brocade curtains aside and opened the window. The excited noise of the narrow pedestrian street rose towards him. He watched the scurry of passers-by for a moment then stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. A brief rest would restore him.

  But there was no rest. Images from the dream that had plagued him this last while leaped before him with the grainy effect of a battered old film on a loop. Figures kept falling: one after another, larger and smaller. Their faces were turned away from him. They refused recognition. The ground opened beneath them making a short fall into a terrifying drop. Deeper and dee
per they fell, against razor-sharp granite walls, so that he had to open his eyes to stop the plunge and the barrage of German voices that accompanied it, like the deafening incomprehensible rumble of gunfire.

  Bruno rose to look out the window once more. The name of the street came back to him. Graben. Trench, that’s what it meant. In the plague years, it had served as a grave. Someone had told him that. Only the Viennese could turn a communal trench into one of their principal pedestrian arteries. A pleasure haunt for consumers positioned on top of a mass grave.

  ‘Tarski.’ That name overheard in the lobby had come back from the grave too. He, himself, was a dusty ancient dig now. Contained generations of graves, some shallow, some vertiginously deep. Had he been right to come here? After so many years pretending the place had nothing to do with him. Not only the place. The whole region. Central Europe. A cemetery. For years he had been a Canadian, a Californian, a Bostonian, a New Yorker, latterly even a Londoner, which might be a little closer. Anything but a Viennese. And, above all, he had been a scientist, which made him part of a country without borders or geography.

  Bruno glanced at the conference brochure the hotel clerk had handed him. His own face stared out at him in full colour. Blue eyes glinted. The shock of white hair rose from a face where the lines were deeply etched, a road map of the character he had become. Uncanny how it was, yet didn’t feel like his own image. Like some self-deluding woman, he never altogether recognized himself anymore. He skimmed the details of his long scientific career and the précis he had submitted of the keynote speech he would deliver this evening. He had a need to familiarize himself with a life that here, now, no longer quite felt like his own. They would have robbed him of it. But they, he reminded himself, were no longer here.

  The organizers had deftly noted his Viennese birth, alongside the list of honours and titles he had become. Of course. He had entertained no illusions when he accepted the invitation that this was a meeting with a difference. A conference with only a slightly hidden political intent. He would allude to that in his asides. Keeper of the new analogue neurosteroids that promised so much for the ageing individual’s cognitive powers, he had been brought here to prod Austria’s sluggish, often faulty, collective memory into action. Or at least to make it appear to the rest of Europe that Austria wanted to prod at it a little itself, so as to become an acceptable member of the wider community.

  He leafed through the pages of the brochure. There were open sessions aimed at a general public and closed presentations geared specifically at the scientists. Some of the usual suspects were here with papers on semantic dementia and cognitive amnesia, the different processes involved in knowing and remembering. There were others on aspects of synaptic plasticity, the cellular correlate for learning and memory, on APP-related peptides, on intracellular calcium and caspase cascades, on Alzheimer’s plaques and tangles and APOE, that molecular chaperone that many thought escorted the evil beta-amyloid through the brain. The field had so burgeoned in this last decade that even its supposed members sometimes had difficulty understanding each other.

  It was a far cry from the naïve and all-too general question that had seemed so urgent all those years back and which had propelled him into memory work. Why was it that, although our brain cells are always changing, we remember even when we want to forget?

  But the world had been transformed since then. Wanting to forget had been replaced by wanting to remember. Maybe there were too many products on the market, products that didn’t count as pharmaceuticals, to induce oblivion – even if not always reliably. Alcohol, cannabis, Ecstasy, a welter of harder drugs, plunged you into the welcome waters of Lethe more or less at will. As for enhancing the mnesic function when it had grown recalcitrant, there was nothing yet to deal with that. Except perhaps his lab’s synthetic neurosteroids, which had done well so far on the rats. ‘Viagra for the brain’ one of the competing labs had dubbed the compound, though he himself was far more cautious. Slightly worried too about the hype that had infiltrated even his world.

  Bruno searched down the participants’ list until he found the name that had sent him reeling in the hotel lobby. A pharmacologist. From the Academy of Sciences in Krakow. He was leading one of the parallel sessions on Alzheimer’s. Professor Aleksander Tarski. The name hadn’t been on the original participants’ list. Or had he somehow missed it? Or, far more troubling, subliminally seen it and still come here?

  Nothing important, he thought, just an image that fell on his retina, an association: some signals carried by neurons, that’s all. No reason to be agitated. He could almost feel the signals running, leaping from axon to axon across those synapses, after all, he’d examined all this so often, he could almost trace the pathways in his brain… Though this had to do with sound too. ‘Tarski’ ‘TARSKI’: that was what did it, the name… He’d have to check the pathways of words as opposed to images, especially names. Were they supposed to stimulate the same amount of hormonal outflow, or only in certain cases, certain kinds of cases? And what kind of case was he dealing with here? Did it make a difference that it was himself?

  But no one really yet knew exactly how perceptual filtering took place. No one. No matter what they said or pretended.

  Before he realized he had quite made up his mind to it, Bruno Lind was out in the streets and hurrying along with no particular destination. He needed a walk. He needed it more than he needed to return the two voicemail messages that had been waiting for him. Stillness wasn’t his natural mode, though too often of late he found himself in it. Probably because his future was now all in the past.

  The Vienna air was close with the closeness of land-locked climates. Slightly foetid with its very distance from sea. The sky above was too bright. He let the jostle of the quick-paced crowd propel him and found himself in front of Demel’s. The café window brimmed with an astonishing assortment of moulded pastries and rich cream cakes. In a moment, like some child who had been given permission, he found himself greedily inside amidst the imperial grandeur of chandeliers and highly polished wood and a pervasive smell of chocolate. He wondered at the eerie sense of familiarity the place induced in him, despite the dizzying passage of years. The menu still wore the imperial design of the dual monarchy the café had served. ‘K&K. Kakania. Imperial and Royal’, his father had explained so very long ago and simultaneously made it a word to giggle over in modern Republican times.

  Bruno ordered Sacher Torte and a mélange, half-thinking that the first might serve as Proust’s madeleine for him, though would probably only give him indigestion, and not because he had secretly to confess that he had never read the greatest of the literary memory men. The scales didn’t fall from his eyes with the first bite and invest his past with new meaning. Even though it was a scientific truth, now wrested from nature, that taste and smell did indeed lay down some of the earliest synaptic connections. Maybe recollection was the last thing he needed to focus on in his time off. Far better to glory in the sheer sumptuousness of chocolate: so often self-denied. Rich, fragrant chocolate mingled with the tart sweetness of apricot jam.

  Bruno picked a newspaper off a corner rack and read and ate. He was surprised to find that he had selected a local paper, not the Herald Tribune displayed with equal prominence. He learned that the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, which so blithely married alpenstocks to laptops, nationalism to grasping professionalism, had embarked on a new patriotic strategy. In their leader, Jorg Haider’s, stronghold of Carinthia, the road signs would announce only destinations outside the country – presumably so that any of those South Slav foreigners could find their way quickly home or at least to Italy without any prolonged stay in the pure local villages.

  The paper made him aware of the people around him. Apart from the evident tourists, they were mostly old, like him, even older. Thin-lipped but jowly, with small suspicious eyes, their clothes far too warm for the season. A voice screamed inside him: Did you? Did you eat cream cakes while others were torn from their families
, shot? Did you hold the gun?

  He dropped some money on the table and raced out. On the street, a young woman caught his gaze. A young woman with red-gold hair and a spattering of freckles. It came to him that she was addressing the same question to him as he had to the Demel’s clientele. He was the right generation after all, old enough to be her grandfather.

  Bruno laughed out loud. Curious looks came his way. He wondered if he passed as a native? Could one say of a country abandoned at the age of ten that it was one’s native land? Others seemed to think so. But so many places liked to claim him when they chose, when his particular assets suited. Canada, the US, now Britain. They could just as easily not choose, of course, could choose instead to close ranks and call him foreigner. Like these men on a bench here. Raggedy, smoking, too dark for native taste, cast out. Outcasts.

  That name, encountered with no forewarning, had thrust him into a strange state. He even felt, now that he emerged from enclosed streets into the vast neoclassical grandeur of the Heldenplatz, that he had grown smaller and needed an adult hand to cling onto. He felt insubstantial, powerless. He had to force himself to look up at the curving façade of the newest imperial palace, finished too late for the Hapsburgs, but in time for that malevolent usurper of power to stand on its columned terrace and declare the unification of Austria and Germany. Anschluss. He may not have witnessed Hitler’s rallying cry to the Austrians then, but somehow it had etched itself with pictorial realism on his mind, so that he could see the huge massed crowds, the arms lifted in salutes, hear the raucous, hate-filled voice, the stomp of boots beating out a unified rhythm. Like New Yorkers, who vividly remembered the destruction of the Twin Towers as a real event, whereas in fact they had only witnessed it virtually. Did the brain distinguish between registering real death from real-time death, as death on television was oddly called? The answer probably lay in the level of fear – recurring fear.