The Memory Man Read online

  He spent far more than the requisite hours on his stool. As difficult as he initially found it to make contact with students who were mostly younger, certainly less experienced than he was, he had no difficulty in talking to his fellows about the world they shared on the other side of the microscope. He loved its infinite mysteries and the paradox of its containment, its rigorous exactitudes. The business of mixing and observing and measuring felt like a newly acquired and better nature than any he had known.

  The problem was he had to earn his keep. Dr Gilbert with whom he corresponded regularly and who kept sending him addresses of new people to visit – which Bruno rarely did – had seen to it during the latter part of his stay at the DP camp that he was paid. But his savings were small and soon run through. It was then that he heard orderlies were needed at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

  He knew nothing yet of its famous director, Wilder Penfield. Nor did he have any idea of the work the Institute was engaged on. The inscription above the heavy doors of the imposing eight-storey building on the slopes of Mount Royal, gave him pause: ‘Dedicated to the relief of sickness and pain and the study of neurology.’

  ‘Professor… Professor Lind.’

  ‘Pops, are you okay?’

  Bruno opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized they had been closed.

  ‘We were thinking of going to have some lunch. Will you join us?’

  Bruno blinked over Irena Davies’s words.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He found his voice and a smile he hoped wasn’t a grimace. ‘I think I was awake. I was remembering my early days in Montreal.’

  ‘Montreal?’ Aleksander Tarski queried. ‘Of course. At Wilder Penfield’s Institute. You must have known him.’

  ‘You’ve heard of him? I thought he was utterly out of fashion now.’

  Tarski grinned. It gave his long, rather pallid face, a raffish air. ‘Under Communism we sometimes learned peculiar things. Not that Penfield is peculiar…only that a distant Canadian should have made it onto our syllabus. He had good early relations with the Soviets, you know. They saw him as someone who was furthering the work of their own great Pavlov and indeed confirming his findings on conditioning.’

  ‘I see.’ Bruno stood up slowly, testing his legs and his bearings.

  ‘We were recommended his book on epilepsy and the functional anatomy of the brain.’

  ‘But you never visited the Institute in Montreal.’

  ‘No, no, our possibilities of travel were not great. Moscow: yes, when I was a student in the late seventies and eighties. Montreal: no.’

  Bruno waited to speak until they had reached the dining car and been shown a table. He found a neutral topic. ‘For some reason I was wondering whether, if Penfield were alive and working now and had the new brain imaging technologies to play with, would these have changed his insights, perhaps even his pursuits?’

  ‘Inevitably, since tools are never simply that.’ Aleksander’s voice grew warm as he rushed on. ‘Once they’re there, they begin to shape our questions, don’t they? Alzheimer himself would never have made it as a name into the diagnostic manuals if it hadn’t been for the new distortion-free microscopes that magnified tissue by several hundred times. Not to mention Nissel’s new method for tissue staining. These were what allowed him to see the tangled bundles of fibrils and clusters of plaques that bear his name. See them only after the patient was dead, of course…’

  Amelia interrupted, teasing. ‘This calls out for note-taking, Professor Tarski!’

  Tarski stopped, as still as a startled creature. He turned his face to the window with a gesture of apology.

  Bruno rushed in. ‘No, no. You’re right. Penfield would probably now be busy identifying mutated genes in inherited epilepsy syndromes and certainly in imaging sites of seizure origin, or maybe even moving into gene-chip technology, pioneering implants. You know, Professor Tarski,’ he paused on the discomfort saying the name induced in him, ‘I was half dreaming before about my first visit to the Institute. There’s this frieze…no, no, I’m confusing it with the frieze in the reception hall which shows all the great neurologists, and then at the centre of the back wall there’s a woman pulling back a veil and underneath her, a caption: “La nature se devoile devant la science.” “Nature unveils herself before science.”’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare do that to women now,’ Amelia challenged.

  ‘Or perhaps to nature,’ Irena offered and quickly added when there was no response: ‘Our environmentalists would be insulted, no?’

  ‘I think you’re right.’ Bruno smiled. ‘We were all much more cavalier in our ambitions then.’

  ‘So your time at the Montreal Neurological proved interesting?’ It was Aleksander’s turn to prompt.

  Bruno tried to answer him without hedging. ‘Yes, in a way it made me. It pointed a direction. And Penfield himself… Well, I can only say he was charismatic. A tyrant, of course, but a benevolent and brilliant one. I watched some of his operations – you know the ones in which the patient helped to map brain areas in response to the doctor’s probe. It was most peculiar, humbling too. These people conjuring up forgotten episodes, seeing relatives in the room, finding acute smells, and then everything would disappear when the probe moved. Penfield talked of a storehouse of memories: a film superimposed on a part of the brain in either or both hemispheres that comes to life when triggered. And pursuing the film language, he talked of flashbacks…’

  Bruno stopped abruptly as if the word itself had attacked him. They were lashing back at him these flashbacks, lashing out. They didn’t want to be kept back. People running. Crowds. Children staring. Processions. Whips. Marching. Marching. He speeded them up, sent them on their way. Go away.

  ‘You don’t see eye-to-eye with Penfield, then?’ Aleksander brought him back.

  ‘Was I suggesting that? No, no. He was brilliant. He and Milner, after all, led us to discover the strategic role of the hippocampus in laying down long-term memories. Intuitively, I think he was on the right track. No, I was thinking of something else.’ He shook himself into the present. ‘As you know, there’s so much that still remains unexplained. Biochemically, above all. It’s a question of mapping plus much more. Penfield was a great surgeon, by the way. I’m not. I ended up working on the eighth floor. Research. I don’t know if my mentor, Dr Gilbert, would have been pleased. He died just before I made the decision.’

  Bruno faltered again, still in the grip of his own memories. He saw Gilbert as he had seen him that last time in Toronto, shrunken to child-size, already gone really, but he had made an effort to squeeze Bruno’s hand, and Bruno had cried his thanks, cried for perhaps the first time since he was a boy. Gilbert had been a good man. A giant.

  ‘Did Penfield lecture?’ Aleksander asked

  ‘I think I first heard him at a meeting. The first meeting of the Canadian Neurological Society, which took place in 1949. I slipped in under some pretext… I think I was acting as an usher. And I heard Penfield make one of his rousing claims. Heard him say that the splitting of the atom was child’s play when compared to the task of charting the mechanisms of the central nervous system on which thought and behaviour depend. Guess he was right, there. We’re still at it.’

  ‘And so you will be. For a long time to come.’ Amelia intervened. ‘The last thing we want is your lot pretending you understand everything. You’ll just feed us more and more pills, pills for everything until the pills go wrong, and we have to take new ones to get over the damage.’

  ‘But Amelia, if there had been something for your mother to take, you would have been happy.’

  ‘That’s different, Pops. That was cancer. Not her mind.’

  ‘Amelia is a pharmaceutical Calvinist,’ Bruno explained.

  ‘That must make me into a hedonist for once. I would be very happy if there was a pill for my mother’s mind.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They all stared at Irena.

  She squir
med. ‘Yes, yes. She has Alzheimer’s.’ She said it softly, quickly, as if she didn’t want anyone really to hear. As if a kind of infectious shame came with it.

  ‘That’s hard,’ Bruno offered. ‘Hard on her. And everyone around her.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Irena burst out, ‘we want mental processes to have a physical base. And at the same time we don’t. We want to be free, not to think of ourselves as utterly controlled by proteins, hormones, chemicals, even genes. But if something goes wrong with our minds, we don’t want that wrong to be attributed to us, to the way we lead our lives. We want the simple chemical diagnosis, the instant pill. Well, I do.’ She met Amelia’s stare.

  ‘Lucky for the pharmacologists amongst us.’ Aleksander turned his hangdog look on Irena. Its irony was uncertain.

  Impetuously, she squeezed his hand across the table and then exclaimed. ‘Look, look, we’ve reached the Tatras.’

  Past Present

  6

  1938

  ‘The Tatras, Bruno, look. They’re beautiful.’

  Bruno refused to look up. His gaze was stubbornly fixed on his knees. They were knobbly. There was a smudge on them. It looked like ink. Why hadn’t they let him put on his long trousers? Grandpa and Grandma, when they came to meet them at the station, would think he was still a baby, like Anna. There she was lying in Mamusia’s arms, not even bothering to stir and look up at the mountains, no matter how beautiful. He could make her look up, though. All it would take was a little prod. Even a big prod. She didn’t cry when she knew it was him. He had been her first word. ‘Bru’, though it sounded like ‘Boo’.

  He didn’t want to look up. Didn’t want to see anything. He hadn’t wanted to leave Vienna. Mamusia was wrong. Stefcia was wrong too. It was wrong to go before Papa came back, even if the grandparents were waiting. And the border guards had been horrible, scoffing at them when they came to check their papers, and Mamusia had prompted him again just before to remember to say that he was Polish and going home. As if he could forget after all the times she had told him. Again and again. As if he didn’t already know all his times tables and some Latin and the capitals of most of the countries of the world and kings and emperors and some English alongside German and Polish. As if he would trip up, because they were always on at him not to tell lies and suddenly they were telling him the opposite.

  ‘Horses, Bruno. Do look. They’re galloping.’ This time it was Stefcia urging.

  He looked up inadvertently. The horses were galloping very fast. Two of them. Running away from the noise of the train to the opposite end of a long field. Their muscles strained. They were moving towards a house with a steep bright-red roof. It glistened like jewels. Behind the house the pines were very tall. Almost as tall as the sky.

  Stefcia ruffled his hair and then smoothed it down again. ‘Good horses, aren’t they? Told you so.’

  ‘I suppose Grandpa will let you ride the stallion this year. When he sees how tall you’ve grown.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  His mother smiled.

  She was so lovely when she smiled that he wanted to stroke the place where her smile made a little crease in her cheek. She hadn’t been smiling much recently. Not really since those boys with the swastika shirts had beat him up. It was horrible. He hadn’t been able to fight back. Only a kick or two and then they had held his legs. There were too many of them, and they were too big. They were everywhere too. Gangs of them. Marching. Looking so proud of themselves. They had beaten him up because he was a Jew.

  He had never thought much about being a Jew until some of the boys in school had made it an issue. He had had to ask Papa what it really meant and what was wrong with it, and all Papa had been able to tell him was that mostly everyone had been a Jew until Christ came along. He had muttered that and something else and then told him that Hitler and his Nazi Party with all their police forces were blaming the Jews for Germany’s and now Austria’s problems. All the problems since the last war, including the loss of the last war. It was convenient to have a group to blame things on. But that kind of lazy thinking had to be fought, and his father’s party was fighting it.

  Bruno thought that those scary men with their shiny uniforms had come to take his father away because he had gone to fight the boys who had beat Bruno up. Probably their parents, as well. Arthur, his best friend, had said that was silly. His father wouldn’t do anything so stupid. Arthur and his family had left Vienna now. Papa had lent them money and arranged for their papers, for special letters of invitation to come for them from England. Bruno had overheard his mother talking to him about it. Father had done the same for other people too. There was a drawer in the house he wasn’t allowed to open. High up in the back of the pantry. You had to get a chair. A secret drawer, but his father had told him a few months before that should anything happen to him, he was to open it. There might be money there he could use. Other things. But when he had gone to the place just two days ago, it was empty and his mother had scolded him. She must have been there first.

  Mamusia was passing Anna to Stefcia to hold and wrapping her arm round him, urging him to look at the hills, blue and purple in the distance. He didn’t know whether he ought to squirm away and sit up straight. What if the conductor came and saw him all curled up against Mamusia? But he couldn’t resist.

  She had tried to make him understand again last night. That Papa wanted them to go, just like Arthur and his other friends. She had cried a little then quickly wiped the tears away. He couldn’t bear to see her crying. It made him angry too. Angry at her. But more angry at everyone else. He mustn’t let her cry again. He would take care of her. And Stefcia. After all, he was in double figures now. And he had Papa’s binoculars. They hung black and solid against his chest. He flicked open the snap on the leather case and adjusted them to his eyes, first the little knob in the middle, then the two separate lenses, just like Papa had shown him. Now he could see the trees from up close, could almost make out the details of leaves and yes, a fat brown clump of cones, clinging to the needles of a pine behind. But it was hard to keep it all steady with the chugging of the train.

  The Krakow station was noisy with the rattle of porters’ trolleys and voices blaring Polish over loudspeakers. It was hard to understand what they said. It was two years, no three, since they had come here, because his grandparents had been to stay with them instead, up in the hills above Vienna so that Papa could come and visit on weekends. But here was his grandfather now, trying to lift him up in his arms and then with a laugh giving up and hugging him instead, his little man. His big moustache was a soft scrubbing brush tickling Bruno’s face. Grandpa had round smiling eyes, and his hair was cut like a porcupine, all bristly, and he was grinning and grinning, kissing Mamusia, even kissing Stefcia and holding Anna high up in the air and bringing her down again, up, down, so that her curls tumbled round her plump cheeks and she chortled and then laughed that joyous laugh of hers, like some wild bird.

  A porter put them and all their things into a beautiful black car. They hadn’t really brought very much, though his mother had allowed his beetle collection, because he wanted to add to it over the summer, and some of his favourite books. The car took them round the big square with its covered central market, the Sukiennice, his grandfather said, asking him to repeat it so he did and then passed a church which looked even bigger than the Stephansdom and had a tower topped with lots of spires. He could just see them if he bent forward.

  Home, as his mother loudly announced was only a few minutes away, round one corner into a narrow street, then another, and they were there in a big pale yellow house, with curly windows and grandma was inside and the hugging started again. Grandma didn’t look the same. She had grown smaller, and her hair was streaked grey and white and black, but he remembered the softness of her voice, which had a kind of lilting music. He was going to have his own room she told him, but not here. Here he would share with Stefcia, which he didn’t mind at all, since they chatted like old mates w
ay into the night. First though, there was dinner at the huge linen-covered table that sparkled with silver and crystal. He watched his grandmother light candles and mutter some strange incantation as she wafted the smoke of the candles towards her. He noticed his mother and Grandpa exchanging looks and then a shrug and then they were all eating, and Grandma explained to him that she had been praying, welcoming in the Sabbath and thanking God for the good things they were about to eat. His grandfather seemed a little impatient with God and made a joke, saying that women always turned to him and to ritual when their men failed them. His grandfather was always making jokes Bruno wasn’t too sure he understood. But Grandpa gave him wine to drink, which made him feel very grown up.

  Later while he was laying out a game of solitaire his grandfather had shown him how to play, he overheard him talking to his mother. Talking about his uncle Pawel whom he had met once but when he was so little he didn’t remember. ‘She holds it against me,’ his grandfather said. ‘Pawel doesn’t want to leave France, even though there are problems with papers, and his law studies are at an end, and there’s little money. He’s taken up with a French woman on top of all that. So she wants me to go and fetch him, bring him home at once, but you know your brother. If he’s set his mind on something, I’m not going to convince him. Maybe Otto would have some effect.’

  At which his mother burst into tears. ‘Do you know where those pigs have taken my Otto?’

  Bruno rushed over to comfort her. She held him so tightly he couldn’t breathe.

  That night, when Stefcia wanted him to say his prayers along with her, he held back. He hadn’t done so before. There had seemed little harm in making Stefcia happy by saying the occasional ‘Hail Mary’ with her when she popped into a church on a whim. Or offering the evening prayer she recommended. But somehow, the proximity of his grandmother and those other prayers, the whole stormy matter of how he was a Jew, now made these prayers, which he knew were Catholic, seem wrong.