The Memory Man Read online

  If he thought about it, the last time he had been on a train journey of any length in Europe must have been in the autumn of 1946. He could barely remember himself then, imagine himself from the inside. His past was inhabited by a stranger bereft of feeling. Though he must have felt something. Must have felt some hope now that the ghastly war was over. That was what the books said. Liberation. New hope. New beginnings. But if he could conjure up a glimpse of himself, all he could see was a tanned face, an arrogant slit of a mouth and cold blue eyes, eyes that expressed nothing. Except sometimes rage. He had met those eyes in a cracked mirror once or twice. They weren’t his. Had nothing to do with him. There was even something a little mad about them.

  He was eighteen, a lean, hardened and filthy youth who hadn’t changed his clothes in months. A wild youth, who knew about guns and knives and explosives and hatred. Who acted, who sometimes even planned his actions, because, yes, he must have planned. He remembered making calculations, the kind which went: ‘If I can hitch a ride on a truck as far as the river, I can then ford over by the bend where no one ever goes except the horses and then…’ Yes, he could plan, but he didn’t think much. That was probably too dangerous. As for hope, if it was there, it didn’t reach his eyes. It was simply part of the body’s instinct, a survival mechanism that moved it through the days. If there had been thought or hope, cruelly shattered at so many turns, he probably would have given up, wouldn’t have gotten where he was. Which was to a quasi-clandestine room in Krakow, a small, dusty room with a window so dirty no light came through, where a Zionist organizer was going somehow to get him papers that would take him out of Poland. Away. Away from all this. To Palestine or Cuba or America or Timbuktu. Anywhere that was away.

  He had come there after a two-day trek from Katowice, sixty kilometres mostly on foot. He had come from a Russian prison where he had been interrogated for what must have been two weeks, though he had lost all sense of time, questioned over and over, day and night at random intervals, about his links with the Polish partisans. Not for the first time. Questioned about names, about plots against the Communists, since the war really wasn’t at an end. It was just in a new phase where the Germans, but not their legacy, were out of the picture. At last, he had given them some names, and they had let him go. They didn’t seem to know that they were the names of the already dead. He had no illusion but that the next time he was caught, he would be transported to a more serious Soviet prison, a camp on their home soil in the frozen north.

  And now, and now this man with a permanent frown on his thin face in this dirty little room in Krakow had taken it into his mind that he was a Pole or a Volksdeutscher. A Nazi collaborator masquerading as a Jew so that he could more easily become a displaced person and escape retribution.

  The man told him to leave. Abramski was his name. Natan Abramski. He was wasting Natan Abramski’s valuable time. He felt like punching him, but he let his hands lie flat, relaxed. He had learned that. And as he stared into the man’s eyes, a figure from his past materialized in front of his eyes. A past that was several worlds away, so long ago did it seem, so innocent did the Bruno who remembered seem. A figure from his childhood. An old man with a long beard. A wise man, his mother said. Two children, three, around him. In Kazimierz. ‘Play with the children, Schätzchen,’ his mother said…

  ‘Is Pan Wilmer still alive?’ Bruno asked Abramski in a low voice ‘And his children, Miriam, Adam? If so, ask him about me. Tell him. Bruno Lind came to see you. The son of Pani Hanka. Grandson of Pan Adek. He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Old Wilmer is dead. And the children too, as far as I know.’ Abramski examined him afresh from behind thick spectacles.

  ‘If I were pretending to be a Jew, don’t you think I’d have taken the trouble to dye my hair black, done more to play the part adequately?’

  The words emerged with a feral laugh and a mad reflection. He had hidden who he was for so long, had masqueraded as an Aryan for so many years, there seemed to be no going back. Lies had grown into truths.

  The Nazi logic of race had taken them all over. They were trapped in its stereotypes, its subdivisions of subdivisions – all of them, Poles and Ukrainians and Germans and Jews. ‘You want me to lower my trousers?’ he had said at last, and Abramski had told him to come back the next day, he would make some enquiries.

  A bare week later, the necessary pass in hand, he was on his way. On his way to becoming an official displaced person.

  A train had taken him part of the distance, a cattle or goods train. Did he know then about those other trains, the ones that abutted at the death camps? Yes, he must have. Had known about the transports, in any case. But he didn’t know the way he knew now, the way one knew in retrospect, a piece of public knowledge made indelible by repetition and photographs and external confirmation. Then, suspicion, distrust, one’s own lies had become so much the norm of existence, that a shadow of disbelief hovered over every piece of information, whether because of the brutality it contained or its lack, which appeared as a false hope. The atmosphere was such that he sometimes didn’t even trust his eyes. They might not want him to take in what they had seen.

  The real could be a moveable feast, in this case a moveable cemetery.

  Oh yes, he had known death. Savage, ugly, coming from nowhere death. But his train journey in the boxcar held no special percussive meaning. It was just another uncomfortable way to travel, though through the moving bar at the top of the car, if you were tall enough, you could watch the scenery go by. Where there were no tracks, where they had been bombed or shattered, transport was better. From the back of the trucks that bumped across rutted roads, you could breathe cool air, see storks soar across the sky, sniff fern, sometimes even blueberries and mushrooms which he had foraged for so often that his nose would lead him.

  The camp itself was in Germany. Where else could these endless ironies of the supposed post-war take him but through Austria into Germany? The enemy – hated, feared, plotted against, fought, outsmarted too late. He had a feeling the German soil would belatedly swallow him up never to regurgitate him.

  Reached at nightfall, the camp – not far from Munich – was an ugly affair of huts and disused barracks strung along muddy paths that seemed to stretch as far as the dark distant hills. Its only other salient feature was the queues. Polyglot queues full of poor specimens like he now was too, deathly pale with blank inward-looking eyes helplessly tuned to an internal slide show. Even the children were like that. Thin, muted, they clung to the arms of kin. When he managed, through some clown’s antic, to make a little frazzle-haired girl smile, he felt heroic. But he was quickly reduced to the passive indignity of the queue again as a huge American with too many teeth doused him with DDT. Up the sleeves then down the neck. He heard the word ‘deloused’ in English for the first time. It was not the last.

  The second queue took you to the registration officials. Members of UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, who grilled and questioned largely in English with the help of translators. This machine-gun grilling about identity, which felt as if it was calculated to trip you up, turned the interrogators into the kin of the Russian or the Nazi police. Police of any kind. It transformed them into the new enemy, whatever their supposedly good intentions.

  The refugees were now doubly displaced, from their homes and by their rescuers, who mostly spoke the languages they didn’t. Yiddish, which Bruno didn’t have, though he eventually learned to adapt his German vowels to a semblance of it, functioned as a lingua franca amongst a good percentage of the displaced and very occasionally worked with an official.

  Bruno withstood the initial grilling. He got the right name at the right time with the right history. There were so many. He was handed his displaced person’s official ID, and he got into a third queue. This one led to food tickets. The next, the fourth, led to room numbers and blankets and pillows. As he waited, another queue rumbled before his eyes. The queue with Stars of David
on its armbands. He hadn’t joined that one. Everything had colluded in making him refuse. And now here he was: utterly alone. And queuing even so. He didn’t like queues. In his experience, there was rarely anything at the end of them that was worth having.

  The quarters didn’t prove him wrong. They lay down an endless track where the grey mud gripped at his shoes, and the rain fell with a melancholy rhythm on tin roofs. The room itself, inside a basic wooden structure, contained three pairs of bunk beds and some metal cabinets, all grimly lit by bare bulbs.

  If he hadn’t been so tired, if there had been anywhere to go, he would have fled on that first night. He was somehow more dispirited by the bare ugliness of the camp, its prison-like containment, than by so much else in these last years. Perhaps because he had let hope trickle through; had lowered his guard. As it was, after a cursory greeting to the others in the room, he hoisted himself up into the single remaining empty bunk and promptly fell asleep.

  In the morning, he met a few of his fellow roomers. There was a bald, broken old Jew, with a splayed nose, who moved slowly, on limbs that felt unreliable. Kazik. There were two young Hungarians, who had spent so much wartime in a cramped cellar that their backs had taken on a permanent curve. They feared they weren’t healthy enough to be accepted into the fighting force for the new Palestine, the Haganah, which was where they wanted to be. This he learned slowly and with difficulty, through their broken German. And there was Janek from Podhale, a bear of a mountaineer who had fought with the Partisans in the Tatras and lost his entire family.

  It was Janek who had shown him the warehouse space where he could forage some bits and pieces for himself – a rickety chair, and what looked like the top of a child’s sloping school desk, which he brought back to the room because something about it spoke of home, that early home, before everything else. Janek also told him where he could get a saw, some nails, perhaps some bits of wood to make the desk usable. He accompanied him to the refectory where thin soup was ladled out by German women who looked as if they might recently have served in more nefarious positions. He also eventually took Bruno into a bomb-scarred Munich where a black market thrived, and the care parcels received in the camp with their odd assortment of unheard-of American products – teabags, peanut butter, powdered soup – and cigarettes could be sold or traded for winter clothes. It came to Bruno, late one night, that Janek, who was hoping for a visa to America, thought that he was a Pole like him. Not a Jew. Perhaps more troubling, Bruno also felt more at ease with Janek than with the others.

  But it was Kazik, not Janek who told him he should go and see the camp doctor. A cough still trailed him from his weeks in the Russian Prison.

  In the infirmary he met the man who was to have a decisive effect on his future. First, though, there was the inevitable queue. This time his intolerance of the enforced passivity of the process met with someone else’s and got him into trouble. Behind him in the queue that reached outside into the mud under a makeshift tarpaulin, there was a commotion and suddenly two men came racing past him to the front of the line, elbowing women and children in the process. Bruno erupted, shouted at them to get back into their places. Within minutes, there were fisticuffs, and he was on top of a wiry man, beating at him as if he would never stop. Meanwhile the second man had leaped on his back and was pulling at his hair.

  Dr David Gilbert might have been undersize, underweight and physically altogether unprepossessing, but when he raised his voice and fixed his unblinking eyes on you, you listened. Within moments, the brawl was at an end. Bruno fully expected another cell. Instead, the men were treated like naughty schoolboys, told to wait their turn, which would now come at the very end of the queue. For the time being, since they didn’t seem to be dying, the sickbay needed its floor swabbed. Mops and pails were in the cupboard.

  When Bruno’s turn with the Canadian doctor finally came, he had the dawning sense he was speaking to someone for the first time in years. Really speaking, which was an act in which another heard you. Intelligence, perspicacity, good will emanated from the man like beams of sunlight after a bitter grey winter. Or so it felt to Bruno when the Canadian doctor gently prodded his chest and with equal gentleness asked him questions about his past, his war experience, his activities in the camp. He asked not in the way of the camp interrogators, but as if he really wanted to listen, as if he fully believed he was speaking to another human being who had an equal grasp on experience. Who wasn’t demented or lying. When Gilbert saw that Bruno was following much of what he said without having to wait for the interpreter, he sent the latter away.

  A few more minutes of prodding and tapping, a bit more history, and a reconfirmation of Bruno’s agility in German and Polish, his smattering of English, and Gilbert asked Bruno whether he had any regular occupation in the camp. He then explained that one of his assistants had received a visa and recently left, so he was now looking for a replacement. He needed someone who could be trusted not to steal drugs and resell them on the black market, who could follow instructions rigorously, who could translate when necessary and who would be willing to help out daily and sometimes at night. Was Bruno willing?

  In return for his stunned ‘yes’ he was told instantly to sign up for the camp’s English classes. He was also presented with a military first aid manual, a German-English dictionary and told to read and come back the following week.

  Gradually, as he began to work with Dr Gilbert in the infirmary, Bruno received the education the war years had robbed him of. Somehow, amongst the population of the camp Gilbert found people who could tutor him in maths, chemistry and biology. For English, he had a ragbag of teachers, some English, some American, so that his pronunciation always remained a mixed matter.

  In the clinic, Dr Gilbert taught as he worked, even at his busiest, even during an outbreak of diphtheria when quarantine units had to be set up.

  Bruno worshipped him, gobbled up whatever knowledge came his way like a starving man. He followed Gilbert’s instructions with great precision, worked hard in order to earn a rare smile from his mentor. What he couldn’t admit to Gilbert, barely dared admit to himself, was that he didn’t really like the contact with the sick. But for some reason, he loved assisting in the operating theatre. Watching the cut into flesh, the violence of an incision that was nonetheless benignly administered, calmed him in the way nothing else did. At those times, the images of war that plagued him, still fresh with their horror, receded into a distance where they could somehow be kept at bay: be controlled. One form of physical invasiveness seemed to stem another. The incision made into the body, the tamping of blood, the sewing gave him a kind of low thrum of hope, as if death could be turned back, as if he were penetrating the mystery of life and that dark edge where it faded into something else or nothing at all.

  He spent almost two years at the camp. He watched the floating population come and go, a stream of desperate haunted people, who wanted only to find a place that wasn’t a place of transit. Bruno had begun to feel that he might have found just that at Dr Gilbert’s side.

  He did everything the doctor asked of him and more. He would gladly have spent the rest of his days with him, but with his unflinching generosity, Gilbert had managed to get him papers for Canada. On top of that, he had magically organized a place for him on a pre-med course in Montreal. Bruno knew that he couldn’t not go, and before the winter of ’48 closed in, he was on his way, first to Paris then to Le Havre and then across a wave-tossed Atlantic, so savage it felt as if it wanted to wash the war away.

  The ship docked at the port of Halifax in Nova Scotia. Once past the immigration controls, Canada felt innocent. As he walked the quiet streets of Montreal, in search of a rooming house someone had recommended, he looked around him in a daze. He realized he was looking for those men in uniform, any kind of uniform, who had so dramatically punctuated his existence until now. They were few and far between. He had to adjust his behaviour. It didn’t fit. It wouldn’t do to lurch up and around whenever there
was the sound of footsteps behind him. It wouldn’t do to finish everything on his plate in record time, so that his neighbours at the student cafeteria stared. Nor would it do to pretend an arrogant disdain and barge through every obstacle, as he had so effectively learned to do in imitation of the SS officers who had so long been a part of his life. And finally, he had somehow to learn how to put this incommodious past behind him: no one here wanted to know, not really, not after the first moments of bland politeness.

  From his lodgings in a sprawling stone house on the lower end of Crescent Street, he could walk to the university buildings sheltered beneath a slope that, for a brief few days after his arrival, was ablaze with red and russet leaves. These gave way to gusting winds. Snows followed in their wake, and the city took on a coat of white. He loved the white and the stillness that came with it. The American bomber jacket he had acquired with pride in the streets of Munich might barely be enough to keep out the biting cold, but on Sundays, when he could, he hitched rides into the countryside. The rolling hills outside the city had a quiet that seemed to soothe the tumult inside him, and the blinding whiteness obliterated the images he no longer wanted to see.

  He was intent on his courses. His first experience of a laboratory came with what he would later call a thrill of recognition. The business of making up a slide – the thin delicate glass, the fine slice of whatever matter, paper-thin, the drop of chemical from the pipette, the second sandwiching glass precisely placed, the microscope adjusted, the moving, crawling, swimming enlarged world within, so remote from anything he had seen, yet intricately related – filled him with a delight he couldn’t name. It was a little like the snow. It swallowed everything outside and made it invisible.