The Memory Man Page 13

  Alina, Bruno realized by this time, was the woman who had been wounded in the first days of the war and whom grandfather had picked up on the railway track. Officially, she was employed by his mother as a labourer, both servant and farm worker, but she also worked part-time at an inn the Germans liked to frequent. She was well educated: spoke German too. Bruno didn’t want to ask whether she was Jewish. He didn’t want to ask anything. He was just happy to be with his mother and his little sister in the fields and woods he now considered as home. A whole lifetime seemed to have passed since he had last been here. He sometimes felt he had returned as someone else, but someone who loved them both with an even greater passion than before.

  Mamusia wanted him to go back to Przemysl and somehow fetch her parents. She wanted them all together, though she was worried about whether they would manage through the winter, what with the food shortages. The cooperative, which had quotas to fill for the Germans, never left them much. Still she had a secret stash of pretty things to barter in the attic. She had stored them away after the first raid by passing soldiers and now took pieces out one by one when need was greatest. Antiques. Pictures. Some Germans had a taste for such things, and they could fetch a good winter price. She convinced herself they would manage.

  Bruno didn’t think his grandfather would acquiesce. He had said to him quite firmly one day before he left, that he would prefer to be dead than to suffer humiliation at Nazi hands. He was constantly tormented by the memory of those Jewish men they had seen forcibly marched to their deaths in the early days of the Nazi invasion. Since then, it seemed he had heard worse stories still, which he didn’t want to sully his tongue with or relay to Bruno so as to give him fresh nightmares.

  Bruno explained to his mother, pointed out that if anything, her father wanted him to urge her and Anna to Przemysl.

  Yes, Mamusia finally admitted. She could understand Grandpa’s fears. It was harder for men. She looked at him as if he were one and added that, all things considered, he too was safer on the Russian side of the river, much as she would like to keep him with her. As for Anna and herself, it seemed a little mad to take the risk of moving and finding new premises and new papers, if they were coping here. She also had a feeling that everything would be better soon, that the British would get here at last.

  As she said that, she rushed to kiss Bruno and Anna.

  Bruno had never loved his mother so much. Or trusted her. She was so beautiful, so kind and wise. When he left the country house in September, his sack replete with provisions, it was with a sadness he couldn’t put words to. He had to square his shoulders repeatedly to keep the tears from his eyes.

  Perhaps it was this, or the fact that the women had instilled him with too much confidence, but he was utterly unprepared for the wagon that emerged from the haze on the horizon and stopped short beside him. Two men leaped off its front bench and stopped his progress. One was old and grizzled: the second lame, but with a mean face and a pitchfork that he brought up short at Bruno’s chin.

  ‘You’re the Jewboy, aren’t you? Get up there.’

  He felt a prod of the pitchfork but he stood his ground.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Work,’ the old man grinned to show a single tooth. ‘That’s what we’re talking about. We need another pair of arms. Yours look just right.’

  ‘How much are you paying?’ Bruno heard himself ask.

  ‘Paying,’ the man laughed. ‘You’re paying me. Paying me not to go to the Germans and tell.’

  ‘Just what Germans are we talking about?’ Bruno heard his voice coming out far cooler and more confident than he felt. ‘Major Hans Meyer himself organized my work permit. And if I do some work for you now because you need help with the harvest, the Major will expect me to be paid.’

  ‘Major, ha. I’ll give you “Major”,’ the old man narrowed his eyes cannily and put a remarkably strong hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll talk about pay when we see how you work.’

  Bruno felt another prod of the pitchfork and leaped up on the wagon. But his mention of the major had tempered the man’s tone a little. He decided he would bide his time and then make his escape. He didn’t really want to have to go to the major or anyone else just now with the accusation of ‘Jew’ trailing him. Nor would Mamusia and Anna be served by it.

  He toiled in the fields, bringing in the harvest for a week and slept in the tumbledown wooden barn next to the restless old farm horse. Though the threat of exposure was always there, they didn’t try and steal his rucksack nor particularly mistreat him. He ate onions and bread and an occasional bowl of barley soup with the farmer’s lame son, at least he assumed it was his son, though the man rarely spoke, and Bruno began to think he couldn’t. One overcast night, he made his escape walking for some three hours in what he hoped was the right direction before bedding down in a little copse until a bright clear dawn set him on his way again.

  Military traffic increased as he headed further east and got closer to the main road. He didn’t care. He kept his head high. He whistled. He thought of what the bastards had done to his father and he whistled even louder, making sure his walking stick hit the road in vigorous rhythm. His route landed him straight into what had been the western side of Przemysl. The streets were crowded, the banks of the river equally so. He had forgotten it was Sunday and even the Nazi soldiers seemed to be having a day off in the balmy weather. Hardy swimmers braved the river. Further along fishermen dotted the grassy embankment. He had miscalculated. It was not the right day for trying to make his way to the Russian side of the city.

  He walked on, wondering if he should simply lie down in the sun like everyone else and pretend it was a holiday. Then he saw some boys mucking about with a makeshift raft, diving off it, clambering back up, tugging it towards shore. People had given them a wide berth, preferring quiet to their rowdiness. He watched them for a while, then on impulse took off his cap and waved. When one of them gave him a look that wasn’t altogether hostile, he walked towards them and asked if he might join them.

  The squat, heavy-shouldered youth who seemed to be the ringleader shrugged and said why not.

  ‘Is it stout enough to get across the river?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  He met the boy’s eyes. ‘I want to visit my grandfather. He’s all alone on the other side. I’ll pay you if you just take my stuff across so it’s dry and throw it on the opposite bank. I’ll swim along beside.’

  The squat youth laughed, winked. ‘So no one can see you, right?’

  Bruno shrugged.

  ‘You’re a smuggler.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘What you got in your rucksack?’

  Bruno looked at the boys. At a struggle, if he held on to his stick, he could take them on.

  ‘Sausage. For my grandfather. I’ll give you some right now, in payment.’

  The boys looked at each other.

  ‘Come on. Worse comes to worse, I can speak German.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Show us.’

  Bruno gave them a rendition of a Nazi officer. And added, in Polish. ‘And if you double-cross me, just wait and see what I’ll do to you.’

  ‘Okay, jump in and hold on,’ the squat one said. He seemed keen for an adventure. ‘Just see how fast we’ll get you there.’

  Bruno tucked his clothes into his rucksack, took out a sausage and gave it, together with the sack, to the leader, who seemed to be the one who was going to sit on top of the raft and navigate with his makeshift paddle. The two other boys and Bruno jumped into the cold waters and propelled the raft across the river, only their hands and bobbing heads visible at its side. When they reached the opposite bank, Bruno ducked under the raft and swam towards the shore. As he scrambled up, the leader heaved his rucksack onto the bank and waved. It was all done so quickly, Bruno doubted that anyone had noticed. This side of the river, at some distance from the castle hill, was quiet.

  He felt like f
linging his hat in the air and celebrating. He had managed to get back in one piece. All in all, it had been a heady summer. And the crossing hadn’t been so hard. He would return to see his mother and sister with the first breath of spring. Maybe even earlier, he promised himself.

  9

  The Wisła was high and mud-tossed brown from the recent rain. Bruno Lind, walking along the curve the river made with the old Kazimierz area of Krakow, felt an uncharacteristic spring in his step, like the tingle of limbs set for adventure. The lightness no longer belonged to him. He wondered that the thirteen-year-old Bruno had had it then, in the midst of war, as if his whole youthful existence were a boy’s own story of challenges and feats, while the war itself was merely a bit of history in the background. Was he misremembering, exaggerating his one-time sense of risk and mastery, slipping over the dire grimness because he didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to kneel again by the cow-shit they had on occasion been driven to eat? And because he was already anticipating the worse that was to come when adventure gave way to tragedy. Turning everything into the inevitable dramatic narrative of the great ‘oneself’, which is what memory that tapped autobiography did in story-fed humans.

  But no, he contradicted himself. The thirteen-year-old that was then himself, seen from the inside, would have enjoyed the risks and the opportunity to prove himself. Even the edge of cruelty. He was a boy like any other boy, after all, though already hardened by the loss of his father, his nerves tempered by the brutality he had witnessed. Only if he put the boy into three dimensions plus time, saw him from the back and all around and moving, did his, yes, pleasurable sense of adventure seem incredible to the old Bruno. Like those psychological tests in which the subject is asked to remember from the inside of an action or field and then from the outside. Emotion comes with the first form of recall, and apparent coolness, distance, if not altogether objectivity with the second. Maybe that was one of the differences between history and memory – the first from the outside, the second from the inside – that made it a slippery faculty, prone to distortion and suggestion. But experience was like that. And it carried its own truths.

  Young Bruno hadn’t known when he returned to Przemysl in that autumn of 1940 that in a few brief months, his boy’s-own-story sense of the war would be thrust backward to a period of the war’s innocence. He had no way of knowing that by next June, the Nazis’ pact with the Russians would be at an end and their hideous war machine would be marching east. Nor did he have any way of knowing that their murderous battle against the Jews had only just begun.

  Bruno allowed himself a chuckle. Perhaps if his younger self had kept a diary of that first year in Przemysl, it would have contained more about the girl in the newspaper kiosk and his adolescent longings than anything else. War too had its dailiness, a repetition that, no matter how terrible, blurred in the memory. Humans, it seemed, created habits or went mad. The mundane was a part of war too. But those versions of himself, the boy in love or the bored youth, would have been far more unrecognisable than even what his memory chose to present him with now.

  Bruno paused to lean against the balustrade. Across the river, Podgorze looked pleasant, even pretty. There was nothing to tell him from his present vantage-point that the crammed, disease-infested, wartime Ghetto had eventually been located where those innocuous houses now clustered just south of the river. Geography was an innocent.

  In fact, nothing in what he had seen of the city was familiar. Even though he had recognized the building in which the Torok apartment stood and had pointed it out to Amelia, he felt less than nothing at its sight. Certainly no sense of homecoming. It was as if a giant broom had swept over his childhood topography and rendered it as indifferent and dull as a stretch of new town.

  Yet even if the buildings failed to trigger it, he was nonetheless in the grip of memory. Maybe it was the sound of Polish all around him, though it seemed to have grown harsher with the years, less pleasing than the childhood intonations he thought he remembered. Maternal tones those. Not brutalized by war and years of oppression.

  His own tongue stumbled and blundered over the language now, like some blinded bull. He was unable to come to terms with its sibilant riot of consonants. But its presence everywhere provoked unruly bits of recall – the bristle of his grandfather’s hair, the cool prod of the pitchfork under his chin, the scent of dill on white fish. Such sensations in turn brought scenes. The train had started it all, with its hypnotic motion.

  Bruno followed the curl in the river beyond the Pilsudski Bridge then for some reason turned and retraced his steps in the opposite direction. Coming this way, everything looked different. The distant mound where the camp had been grew clearer. Pigeons swarmed over blackened roofs and settled with a menacing air. Shadows played like falling ash over sand-coloured stucco. Kazimierz itself, so recently anodyne, now filled him with a low thrumming anxiety he couldn’t identify, like the frantic beating of a bird’s wings.

  The black-coated man who emerged to confront him from the shadows of a lane felt as if he had materialized from the floodtide of memory that threatened his mind. He had a long, ragged Chassidic beard, a fur-trimmed hat, and he held his hands crossed on his stomach as if it were a prosperous and capacious one that might at any moment bend and sway in prayer. His skin was paper-pale against the reddish beard. His mild washed-out eyes creased into weary canniness as he addressed Bruno in accented English.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Welcome to our beautiful city. You would like some help, no? Some help in interpreting the remains of what was once the centre of Jewish Krakow?’

  With a click of his heels and a swivel of his hat, he broke into a dance, his long thin lips curling around a mournful Yiddish plaint.

  The bad taste of it grew thick and acrid in Bruno’s mouth. He turned away, walked quickly.

  The man was persistent. He matched his step to Bruno’s like a stray dog that had recognized a likely homeowner. ‘Of course you are interested, sir. I can feel it in you. See it. And I, Pan Marek of Szeroka Street, can show you. Tell you. Tell you everything. The way it was. Tales of kindly tailors who had more lore in their thimbles than all the doctors of the world, and their beautiful wives, their secrets modestly hidden beneath their lowered lashes. Such secrets, sir, buried within these dilapidated walls. Not all the scientists of the new world together could find them.’

  ‘What is this nonsense?’ Bruno erupted.

  ‘No nonsense, kind American sir, but the truth. The truth. For a few dollars more I will deliver you into ancient Kazimierz the way it was. The way it still is for some of us. Its streets dancing with ghosts and wise spirits and fearful dybbuks. I will tell you tales of boys falling in love through the peephole of a window, of fortunes lost and found and lost once more, of the wisdom of the Tzaddik in concluding contracts.’ He started up his infernal melody again, with its comic moans, its Klezmer whines.

  Half hypnotized into helplessness, Bruno pulled some bills from his pocket. He had to get away, but his legs were reluctant. ‘Your name. Marek. Marek who?’

  ‘I see the American sir is knowledgeable. You wish to know if I am a Jew, like you. Believe me, sir, a name is not enough to distinguish us. Pan Marek to you. Come, come, let me take you into forgotten corners, the bathhouses where the pretty damsels bathed, the noble synagogues, the little rooms where study was done…’

  The man had recognized him. That hoary wartime truism leaped into his mind. Poles and Jews recognized each other. Germans were less dangerous. They couldn’t detect the subtle differences. He had once masqueraded as a Pole. This Pole was masquerading as a Jew now that the Jews of Kazimierz had been exterminated. But masquerading as a Jew out of folklore, a stetl Jew wearing fancy dress. It was like watching a minstrel show where the whites blackened their faces to perform a pastiche of black life. Watching it in a slave graveyard.

  Bruno stuffed bills into the man’s hand. ‘Go on. Leave me. I’m not interested in your theatre. Leave me alone.’

&nbs
p; The man scurried away, his coat flapping, his hand on his hat that threatened to pull away from his gathering speed.

  ‘Scum,’ Bruno muttered after him, his voice betraying a bitter anger he hadn’t realized he felt.

  Tiredness suddenly overcame him like a shroud. It made his movements clumsy.

  He hated all this. History become kitsch. This turning of experience into folksiness. Like the Iroquois in Canada when he had first arrived there. Making beads on their reservations. For tourist consumption. Was this the inevitable after-effect of genocide? The unpalatable ghastliness of history transmuted into fairy tale. Dancing, fiddling Chassidim in funny hats. Winged spirits and some whining music to be fed to tourists for their pleasure along with pierogi and borscht. This was the city’s memorial to its Jews. As if six years of gruelling killing history were just a parenthesis with no links to before or after. As if Jews were to be remembered as a costume musical rather than as modernizers, motors of the country’s move into the twentieth century.

  The heritage industry, that’s what he had walked into. Tableaux, living snapshots of the supposed past culled from an intricate continuum and re-presented as attractions. An unruly sea trimmed into a garden pond with a couple of goldfish for effect. This was the memory business at work. The furthest end of it from his, perhaps, but related. And since there were no Jews here, memory with all its distortions was all you got. It was easier, after all, to love the extinct.

  Bruno forced his legs forward over dusty paving stones and uneven grit. That was why he couldn’t face accompanying Amelia to Auschwitz. A different order, that, from his masquerader, of course, but still a form of tourism. A spectacle. This time to be viewed with awe. Silent piety in front of the horror humans were capable of.