The Memory Man Page 5

  He nodded, letting the little white lie do its work. Amelia had an artless glamour about her that drew the eye. It was there in the long-legged swing of a hip, the casual toss of the head, the wide curling lips and cheekbones. He watched it do its work on Frau Berndt, who might have preferred prejudice but for Hollywood’s power.

  With a little flurry of excitement and another glance at Amelia, the woman acquiesced… If he was really certain he had no other intention but to have a look.

  ‘What did she say?’ Amelia queried.

  ‘She’s inviting us up. She likes your pretty face.’

  ‘Good work, Pops. I knew you had it in you. Did you tell her I was Jewish?’ Her broad grin elicited what was almost a smile from an unsuspecting Frau Berndt.

  The apartment had either been subdivided or had shrunk – because he had grown or because every corner was stuffed with painted chests and heavy oak wardrobes, sofas and armchairs, as if Frau Berndt ran a second-hand furniture business on the side, which wasn’t doing too well. The whole bore little relation to anything he remembered and he was now disappointed, sorry they had gone to the trouble. Even the rooms seemed to be in different places.

  When Amelia, out of politeness, commented on a painted chest, Frau Berndt seemed to understand and explained that it came from her mother, who had died recently. She pointed to other bits of furniture – a loden-green leather armchair, an ungainly cupboard with clawed feet, a refectory table, all with the feel of a country tavern… He just stopped himself in time from saying it aloud. In case he was wrong. In case Frau Berndt heard the displeasure in his voice. It was then that he realized she was wearing a dirndl, a peasant get-up: a piece of folklore in the city. Come to think of it, he had seen other women wearing them too. And they hadn’t been waitresses in mock-country restaurants. Hitler’s handmaidens.

  Didn’t they realize what it conjured up?

  He needed to get out of here. The place was airless. Like a tomb. His father must be turning in his unmarked grave at the thought of a dirndl-wearing woman in here.

  Then suddenly, he heard them. The sound of heavy boots on the stairs, coming closer and closer. The knock. Heavy. Commanding. Threatening. The men bursting in, their uniforms shiny with bars and eagles, their faces cruel. The drawers searched, the house invaded, the money found hidden behind underwear. His father frogmarched away, the sorrowful backward glance, part shame at failure, part courage, consolation, urging future hope.

  Bruno shivered with cold perspiration. But he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t been there when they came for his father. The images weren’t his. Not memory of a lived event at all, but memory of an experience imagined, his father’s plight, reinforced by countless films and books, perhaps even by his mother’s narrative or that of others, a memory solidified by repetition, so that it became a part of him, was felt – a collective memory which was also individual, his own. Here. Recorded in these walls.

  Flashbulb memories. That’s what they called them in the profession. Shocking, traumatic experiences or images, reproduced by the media time and again, and bringing with them great floods of adrenalin and steroids, picked up by the amygdala and the hippocampus, imprinted. Here, inside. In his brain. As if he had lived it himself.

  History wasn’t bunk. It was a long trail of flashbulb memories. Countless details coalescing into received images, tableaux, icons, simply because it was these our synapses registered over and over again, learned, until the emotion which had made them memorable in the first instance became trite, third-hand, voided. And then entire sequences disappeared into oblivion until they were discovered afresh.

  He forced the racing thoughts away and concentrated on the physical reality of the present.

  His childhood home had been airy, uncluttered, modern. Nothing like this.

  Frau Berndt opened a door into a child’s room and then another and another, a concatenation of doors, and suddenly Bruno had the impression he was running wildly, racing, ducking, pushing one door open and then another, into his sister’s room and then out again and round through another door into his own. Round and round, chased by Stefcia, when Anna was just tiny, a package on a bed. Out of breath, he would nip down behind a chair. Hide and seek. Until Stefcia found him and, laughing, picked him up, called him her little man, he must have been five or six – no, more, more because Anna was there – eight or nine probably. Stefcia tickled him, tickled him until he roared and pleaded with her to stop, and the tears poured from his eyes.

  Now that could only be his own memory.

  ‘You okay, Pops?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Fine. This was my room, I think.’ He looked up, and there, above where his bed had been, tucked into the corner of the high ceiling, was a single figure from what had been a stencilled frieze: a boy drummer, dressed in blue, beating out a marching rhythm all along the walls of his room. What was the song his mother had sung? Sung in Polish? Yes. Something to do with freedom. A horse and freedom. No, no, a little soldier who went off to war with bravery and seven horses and came back with one. Only one… But the words wouldn’t coalesce any more.

  ‘Did I ever tell you my mother used to talk to me in Polish when we were alone? Sing too.’

  ‘In Polish? No. No, you didn’t. How come?’ Amelia was gazing at him intently, as if he had suddenly grown a pair of wings or sprouted fins. ‘Maybe we’ve had enough of this for one day, Pops.

  Let’s go and grab a cup of coffee. Or something stronger. You look as if you could use it.’

  At first they mistook Philosophie im Boudoir for a café. But it was a furnishings shop. Salacious sheets and cushion covers were draped over a couch, just a joke’s throw from the Freud house. The only neurologist in history to spawn his own kitsch, Bruno thought, unsure whether he reckoned that was a good or a bad thing.

  They had to turn a corner before they found a place, a sizeable establishment with Jugendstil flowers etched into its windows. An old ceiling fan had been pressed into service and gave their conversation a slow, sultry, timeless feel.

  ‘So your mother was Polish?’

  ‘Galician. It’s what the Austrian-ruled regions of Poland were called. Galicia.’

  ‘Like Spain.’

  ‘Like Spain and unlike Spain. Cold and wintry, really, but southern by Polish standards. The lazy south. Anyhow, my mother’s family was from Krakow. And they had a country place as well… Further east, towards what’s now the Ukraine. Borders shifted a lot in that part of the world.’

  ‘You’re telling me. One minute I have an Austrian father, the next he’s turned into a Pole.’

  ‘Does it make any difference?’

  ‘Maybe it does. I don’t know. I’m just beginning to find out.’ She assessed him with her frank gaze. ‘Good coffee. And you should eat something. You’re looking too white. Can’t be right. Gotta get some colour into you’

  Bruno laughed. He loved the banter they had developed about colour. Eve had started them off, always sensitive to the slights Amelia might suffer, acknowledging her difference, but not wanting to make too much of it. Colour, race needn’t be an ultimately defining characteristic, she would argue with a rebellious teenage Amelia, who had abandoned all her white friends for black, though she didn’t feel at home with them either. Colour wasn’t the whole of her identity. She was also a woman, the child of middle-class professionals, a lover of books, a champion swimmer, a layabout with the world’s untidiest room. And when Pops shouted at her, she knew full well it had nothing to do with her being black and everything to do with lip; just as when she shouted at him, he didn’t label her anti-Semitic – it might not be the Jewish bit of him, whatever that was, that she was railing at. As for feeling at home, home was what you turned it into. And so it went on, until adolescence and Amelia’s marriage were over, and they reached the age of jokes.

  Then, too quickly, Eve was gone: Eve who had been his cherished companion for all those years, first in Boston, then San Diego, then New York, then back to Cambridge, where the end h
ad come. Too soon. The cancer had eaten her up, until she said to him at last: ‘That’s it. I’m about to lose my most precious sense. Please, please get them to up the morphine. I want to go smiling.’ He didn’t know if she had somehow managed to convince one of her colleagues, but she went soon after that, faded into her pain and out. Leaving him and Amelia clutching at each other, utterly bereft.

  ‘A penny for those black thoughts that always make you so pale.’

  ‘The furniture. It got to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t where you left it?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I know. I can’t talk about it yet.’

  ‘Okay. But I’m not leaving you. Not leaving you until I’ve heard a little more about this Polish mother. A lot more, in fact. I need to know, Pops. Really, I do. I never talked to Eve enough about her family, and then she upped and vanished on me. Parents are altogether unreliable, that way.’ She gave him a smile, half rueful, half persuasive.

  ‘Maybe we should go to Poland too, while we’re so close. You owe me a story, Pops. A big one, I imagine. A history. To think you’ve kept it from me even after I became a half-orphan.’ She shook her head in mock mournfulness, which did nothing to hide the real feeling beneath. ‘Even after I took on the faith. Well, a bit of it.’

  It was true. Some years back – for reasons he didn’t really understand, except that people did these things in the mysterious country that America continued to be to him whenever he paused to consider it – Amelia had decided to join a temple. She had decided to become Jewish, she told him with a lazy smile, because the Jews knew deep down about the workings of prejudice.

  There, Bruno had to acknowledge, she had a distinct point. And if he, himself, knew little of belief or faith, he had an intimate acquaintance with the harsher end of prejudice. Beatings, killings, terror, the inner tremblings of disguise, these were not subjects he had ever before taken up with her. Now it looked as if he was going to have to, though he still didn’t feel they were matters that he knew how to broach – even with himself.

  He had spent so long dealing with memory as chemistry that having to confront his own past as narrative, whatever the ruptures and blanks, presented itself as a daunting task.

  4

  Irena Davies tiptoed quietly to the back of the conference room and slipped out. She’d had enough for one day. Probably enough altogether. Certainly more than enough notes to write an article from. She now knew that the cerebellum and the basal ganglia – which was affected in Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s Chorea – were responsible for controlling tacit or automatic memory, habits and skills, but not memory of facts and events, which was a function of the cortex and that little seahorse called ‘the hippocampus’ and probably lots of other bits as well, including electric currents generated by them. She knew that biochemical cascades resulted in structural modifications of synapses and dendrites, and that this was the microscopic trace of learning or laying down memories.

  She had also learned that over the ages various metaphors had been used for explaining memory, all of them attempts to understand how the mind worked. There were seals leaving traces on soft wax; vast storehouses with many chambers and ranks of pigeonholes, some secret; elaborate palaces with thousands of rooms each named. There were metaphors from photography in which memory acted like a chemical, leaving ghostly images behind; and from archaeology with its shards and relics, all needing sifting and reassembly. Meanwhile, from the digital world came hard and soft discs and neural nets. There were also homunculi and mystic writing pads in which scratchy traces or scars were left on a hard plate that was continually being overwritten. A little like the more recent long- and short-term memory model really – which was a model and not a metaphor, because there had been experiments to test and prove it in a lab.

  In all this nobody had told her whether automatic memory was linked to unconscious memory, in the sense that her mother was on automatic pilot when she was remembering something but utterly unaware of what was going on around her. But maybe that wasn’t interesting to the scientists.

  On the other hand, she had learned a little about pre- and postsynaptic potentials in cells and the strengthening of links between them – the links being the chemical equivalents of memory. She had also learned about the conditioning of giant slugs, called ‘aplysia’, who had giant neurons easily visible if you knew how to get at them through the goo. And about target receptors, Morris mazes, fearful rats, not to mention various proteins and peptides that played a part in making memories.

  And maybe that was quite enough to try and digest. Which only left attending the session Tarski was chairing. And, of course, seeing him on his own for a while – the train home would be perfect for that. He seemed to be rather a good sort, and not all her hopes were quashed, but nor had she let them rage. She would just have to bide her time and put discreet questions to him when the moments came right. Maybe, just maybe…

  But for now, what she wanted was a drink, a chance to be on her own for a while and to do some sightseeing. She might never have the opportunity of visiting Vienna again.

  She thought of hopping onto a tram that seemed to be going in the right direction but remembered what she had been told about the city’s radial structure and crossed over instead, past the overly impressive Burgtheater into the inner city, where she chose a small unobtrusive café to pop into and down a glass of the cold white wine they called Heurige. She wondered why she had refused wine at lunch only to relish it now. She was becoming a secret drinker. Like some aging Edwardian spinster who hoarded her sherry. Maybe it was that she preferred the secrecy to the drink. She rolled the thought round her tongue for a while and decided it was bollocks. The bigger secret, the one she couldn’t bear to divulge until she knew more about it herself, was what drove her to the little one, the drink, which at least had an element of pleasure attached to it. And pleasures were few and far enough between these days.

  When she had rung home and spoken to Hela this morning, the friend who had kindly agreed to look after her mother for a few days, Hela’s voice had been full of awe. ‘It’s so mysterious, Irena, and so scary. When I greeted her today, she asked me who I was and my age and where I lived and how my mother was, all in tones of the greatest formal politeness, and as if I were a young girl; then a minute later when I brought breakfast, she asked me again, and again after we’d had a stroll round the room. Then all of a sudden she was telling me about the farm she grew up on and about the wheat harvest, and she started naming all the servants on the estate as if she spoke to them daily.’

  Irena had thanked her over and over again.

  Yes, this interest in memory must in part be due to a generalized fear that they were all about to lose it, as more and more of the population grew older. Or was it because they had given up so much of it already to devices that did the remembering for them – computers and palm pilots, tapes and CDs?

  Irena caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the bar. She could do with a personal organizer. It would beep to remind her to find a present for Hela. She must do that straight away. She wasn’t all that flush this month, because of the painting and maintenance work that had had to be done on the London flat, but still, she would find something lovely for her.

  Sometimes she thought that the fact Anthony had left her the Maida Vale flat had been her downfall. Since she had had to come back to Poland for her mother, she had supported them both on the rent it brought in. Though things would soon change, given the rise and rise of prices, it had meant that up until now she hadn’t had to work much, not that work in any case brought in all that much. Though she worried constantly that Anthony would suddenly decide to take the flat away from her. He had always been so much cleverer than she was about such things. And even though she knew from friends that his media company was doing well, and that he hardly needed more income, she worried. Maybe she worried because she no longer knew how to do much else.
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  Irena downed her wine and strolled out into the sunny streets. It was a fine city, Vienna, the lofty spires rising unexpectedly out of intimate lanes, the flowers spewing out of window boxes, vibrant against the pale stone. And she liked the higgledy-piggledy quality of it all, the lack of straight lines: the lack too, if she dare admit it, of any real sense of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. It felt as if nothing had changed much since Mozart’s day, certainly Schubert’s. Maybe it was because she had taken the train in, bypassed the airport, and had hardly strayed from hotel and university. The city felt small, intimate, pre-modern. Krakow was like that too.

  A moment later, Irena felt she had generalized too soon. To the side of the square upon which she had stumbled stood a strange concrete mound that could only be a piece of contemporary sculpture. There was something frightening about it in the midst of this old square. She walked towards the mound and realized she had happened upon the much-contested memorial to the Austrian victims of the Shoah. The piece was a concrete cast of a library, its volumes eerily visible from the back, inside out, a fitting monument for the people of the book.

  No sooner had the thought coalesced than Irena felt the rise of a niggling counter-thought. Why was there no equivalent memorial here, or indeed anywhere, for the Shoah the Nazis had perpetrated on the Poles? In the tide of deaths, three million was hardly a negligible figure, and they too had been part of Hitler’s master killing plan. But no one cared about Poles. She had come to that realization in London. Oh, it was fine and well when for a moment they could be classed as romantic rebels, solidarity workers united against the iron fist of Communism, but as soon as that was over, bye-bye heroism. What stuck far more solidly, like some champion brand of superglue, was that her lot were somehow complicit in the Holocaust, anti-Semites from Hell, akin to the Nazis, their eternal abetters of evil in some absolute scale of good and bad. Oh yes, she had experienced those glassy looks even at London parties, let alone the few trips to New York she had taken with Anthony, where she sometimes thought she might have perpetrated the death of millions single-handedly. But history wasn’t like that. Not unless you bought into some American comic-book version where good and evil tackled each other like Batman and the Joker.