A History of Forgetting

by Adderson, Caroline

  Then he noticed, next to the tree that was the leafy axis of the courtyard, a ragged figure swigging from a gasoline can. He dashed towards a couple sitting under the restaurant awning, lunged and let gush a flame. Watching, Malcolm could not help but recognize himself. For the last three days he had been smouldering. If he had opened his mouth, he would have had a blowtorch for a tongue.

  After accepting a gratuity from the diners he had so scorchingly entertained, the figure retreated to the tree. Still Malcolm smelled smoke. It wasn’t coming from below, but was with him there, in the room. Turning, he saw in the corner the bright tip of a cigarette bobbing, a cinder floating in the dark.

  ‘Point de feu sans fumée.’

  Malcolm tried repeating the words. He might have actually learned some French if he hadn’t suffered these pyrotechnic moods.

  Denis joined him at the window. In silence, they watched the tattered man at his startling craft. It was an act beyond language. The next day Denis would invite him upstairs and give him dinner, then trim the singe off his bangs. Now he dragged on the cigarette and passed it to Malcolm, who did not smoke but took it anyway for the chance it offered him to put his lips where Denis’ had been.

  Soon Denis left the window and went to switch on the lamp. He sat on the sofa, on Malcolm’s crumpled sheets. ‘Venez,’ he said, patting the place beside him. Malcolm came over and sat at the other end of the sofa, his heart beating audibly, at least to him. Anything might happen, he thought, though inevitably it wouldn’t. He glanced sidelong at his bemused host. Just then, something in the space between them caught Denis’ eye. He reached over to pluck it off the sheet, leaned away from Malcolm, under the lamp, squinting as he held the wiry hair close to his face.

  ‘Quel trésor,’ Denis had whispered. ‘Quel trésor.’

  ‘Every day,’ Malcolm told Denis now, ‘you asked if I was angry. Yes, I’m angry. I had nearly thirty years of memories I wouldn’t have exchanged with anyone. In one year, you’ve ruined them all. Yes, I’m angry.

  ‘I remember different things now, little things that make me angry, too. Like the time a client—Mme. Moreau, I think it was—brought in that photo. Do you remember? Her young son in the Vichy-inspired uniform of the Front National de la Jeunesse. You passed it over to me and said, “Comme il est charmant!” It made me grim. It made me sick. I realized I could no longer say Monsieur Le Pen in the Ass. I had to be careful who I made such jokes to after that. You, you didn’t care. You didn’t see anything wrong with it.’

  He sniffed at his wrist again.

  ‘We never did get that odour out of the salon.’ It had always been there, just faintly under the perm solution and the hairspray. Malcolm looked at Denis, longing both to strike him and to hold him. ‘I’m angry,’ he said, then, leaning over, smelled his hair.

  ‘Come.’

  Taking Denis’ hand, he helped him to his feet. Together they drifted out of the room, down the corridor to the lounge, where he left Denis while he went to get a towel. When Malcolm returned, Denis was rocking himself prayer-like among the dieffenbachia. Deep currents pushing and pulling, impulses, formless thoughts. To Malcolm’s prodding, he turned, very, very slowly, as underwater, as if the air were a fluid. He lifted his eyes to Malcolm.

  ‘Come. I’m going to bathe you.’

  Words coming out bubbles, bubbles floating up.

  The bath running, Malcolm peeled the singlet over Denis’ head, removed the padded pants, tugged off his socks. He ended on his knees at Denis’ feet looking up, where he had figuratively placed himself through the years.

  Underwater, Denis’ pubic hairs swayed; his penis floated, a sea cucumber above his thigh. Gradually, the room filled up with steam. It occurred to Malcolm then that Denis had reached the beginning again. Prelingual, asexual, mentally inchoate, he had crawled back into the primordial pool. Now he was innocent again, though maybe he had always been.

  And Malcolm got an idea: to bring the tape recorder, plug it in the shaving socket and toss it in the water. The shock would jump-start Denis. It would be like the original bolt that opened the story of Life. Denis would rise up from the steaming waters, reborn—his beloved. The tape would be Peggy Lee singing ‘Is That All There Is?’

  Back in the room, Denis shampooed and fresh, Malcolm told him, ‘A terrible thing happened to a man I worked with. I was approached by a young woman who knew him as well. She asked for my help, asked that I accompany her on a pilgrimage of sorts.’ He shrugged. ‘That I be her Virgil.’

  Then he kissed Denis goodbye. He did not think he would see him again. First his sweet-smelling left cheek, then his right, as was their custom, then again the left. This third kiss was impromptu, an apology. It was for what he intended to do with Denis’ dog.

  3

  The day came when he had to pack, but what? Deposited all around the apartment, like at a Salvation Army drop-off, were bags and bags of clothes. In the beginning he had been very careful about remembering which client had given him what; he liked always to be wearing something that would be familiar to each one when her appointment came, something that would make her smile and, musing, perhaps share a secret with him. In the end, he gave up trying. With no room to hang things up, no order could be made. He couldn’t keep track of it all, couldn’t even remember what he had used to wear before he came to work at Faye’s. His own clothes were hopelessly mixed with the others, and with Denis’ in the drawers.

  Early in the morning he began to sort. He was ruthless; some things—too much the wrong size, outlandish, stained—would simply never work. Then he would pull something interesting out of a bag and lay it on the bed, separate from the discard and the keeping piles, just because it struck his fancy. By the time he had finished, hours later, he turned and saw a museum spread across the bed.

  ‘Tennis anyone?’ he addressed the yellowing pair of flannel trousers pleated from the waist and its matching short-sleeved shirt, cotton-knit and trimmed with piping—all the rage on the courts around 1938, though in 1938, they would still have been white. From the same bag he had been astonished to draw the uniform out. Who had given it to him? Had she really thought Malcolm could find a use for army khakis? The insignia torn off the jacket, he couldn’t place the regiment or rank, but it was certainly of Second World War vintage. He laid it out next to the tennis outfit: how things change, and not just for Malcolm.

  A post-war exuberance of ties, hand-painted with American skyscrapers or pin-up girls in silhouette, so optimistic. Then, from a more sober continent, the black cashmere turtleneck of an existentialist. The Teddy Boy suit made him laugh, it was so like one he had worn himself in London with its narrow lapels and black velvet collar, its stovepipe trousers. He found three ruffled blouses from Mr. Fish and a malodorous goatskin jacket—très sixties. Lapels went wide in the seventies, trousers flared, stripes turned clownish: from various bags he pieced a suit together. All his donors were too old to be influenced by any trend in the eighties. By the nineties they were dead.

  What he packed was infinitely more sensible. Then he called a taxi and checked that the pills for the flight were in the pocket next to his heart. A last look around, at the clothes on the bed, the furniture wedged together, the Persian carpet rolled. It seemed more a storeroom than an apartment. Except what was essential, he had never really bothered to unpack. The Egyptian head was somewhere in a box.

  Negotiating his way over to the door, he noticed that a fine layer of hair had settled over it all, as if he had disposed of the dog by plugging in a firecracker and exploding her in the room. The thought made him shudder. He picked up his suitcase filled with the clothes of dead men he’d never known, and left without a backward glance.

  When he arrived at the airport, the girl was nowhere to be seen. He joined a long line switching back through bands and posts. Intermittently he lifted his suitcase, shuffled a few steps forward and set it down again. At last, a b
riskly cheerful agent with a jaunty red bow under her chin beckoned to him. He gave her the girl’s name so that they could sit together, and asked, ‘How long is the flight?’

  ‘Ten hours to London. You’ll have to clear customs at Heathrow and check in again with LOT.’

  Hearing this, his bag gave up completely. Handle tagged with a coded adhesive loop, it teetered and, thudding onto its side, was conveyed away.

  He found her at the gate, remarkably composed, with a guidebook in her lap. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You look really pale.’

  It was just his shroud of skin contrasting with his hair. ‘I don’t care for flying,’ he admitted, which started her rooting through her voluminous handbag for a piece of gum. She herself had never taken such a long flight, she said, hardly flown at all, but the day before Thi had given her an article about long-distance air travel. From it she had seemed to glean that chewing gum was some kind of cure-all. She held a stick out to him, but he declined and took a pill instead.

  They boarded the plane and found their appointed row. A man in a suit was sitting in the middle seat. ‘Are you together? I’ll move over. No, no. I insist. Why break up a party?’

  He stepped into the aisle and gestured chivalrously. Malcolm slid in first, thinking about the unlikely party they made, he a lachrymose and jaded chaperone, she a wide-eyed naive. Why had he agreed to come? He would have been embarrassed to admit to her that he’d been flattered. His clientele, though they endured, would not last. Despite his best efforts, he could do nothing to hold them back. When the girl approached him, he suddenly saw himself as he was to his aging clients—a guide, a confidant—but this time to the young. There was a future, then, not just a past. Buoyed along for several weeks by this conceit, he had felt the dizzy thrill of peering into bankruptcy’s abyss. He had even dared to take the towel off the bathroom mirror: she had made him feel needed.

  When the video presentation of the emergency procedures began he was already dozy from the pill. The girl was sitting up straight watching, attentive as a child. She tightened the strap of her seat belt and looked up to see from where in the ceiling the oxygen mask would drop, as if she believed in a deus ex machina. He was touched and, for that instant, still glad he came. Then the plane began to move and the pilot’s voice, staticky and omniscient, told them they were taxiing to the runway.

  He clutched her, filled with dread. Briefly, when the plane came to a stop, he let go, only to grab her hand again. Acceleration, tilt and lift, the panicked heart, then the giddy lightening that he associated with death. When next he opened his eyes they were entering the clouds.

  The lit seat-belt signs pinged and went out; a hundred buckles simultaneously unclicked. Malcolm was asleep, so Alison extricated herself from his grip. The window seat was wasted on him but, leaning over to peek down, the spectacle of unbaling cloud was all there was to see.

  From her handbag she took the guidebook. ‘Dzi-eń do-bry?’ she sounded out. Dz: ‘D’ as in ‘day’ rapidly followed by ‘Z’ as in ‘zoo’, except at the end of the word, where it becomes ‘Ts’, or if the ‘Z’ is dotted, when it becomes ‘D-sh’, or the ‘Z’ has a stroke above it, which sharpens the pronunciation, or at the end of the word when it sounds like ‘C’ with a stroke above it. She sighed. It would take all day for her to say good day.

  And here was a fearsome cluster—szcz. A cluster with teeth. Szczur. Rat.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man in the suit who had changed seats with her. ‘You’re going to Poland?’

  ‘Yes. How about you?’

  ‘I’ve got business in London.’

  She talked to him until dinner, which Malcolm slept right through. Then more drinks were served and the movie started. She watched the moving picture outside the window instead: above the Northwest Territories now the cloud had finally cleared, though it took some time for her to realize it, mistaking for cloud the thousand tiny grey lakes floating in the darker grey of land. What she was watching then, while the rest of them watched the screen, was evening becoming night, the very edge of the sky slowly turning the colour of an old bruise or the inside of a rotten plum—that peculiar yellowy black. Gradually, the colour drained completely and the stars sequining the pale sky blended with the lights of the occasional settlements far below, so she could no longer distinguish where the sky ended and the land began. Now and then the businessman ooh-ed and clucked, as if marvelling at the night’s plot.

  Malcolm woke to the horizon’s seam, visible now as a rusty streak, and the girl’s head heavy against his shoulder, her snoring light. He only seemed to blink, but must have slept again; when he opened his eyes he was as blinded as by a photographer’s flash. They were inside the clouds, the light reflecting brilliantly.

  The flight attendant was offering a Continental breakfast.

  ‘Yes, coffee,’ the girl muttered dopily. ‘Coffee, please.’

  The worst of the lines was the one at Heathrow customs where even the congenial businessman looked right through Alison when she waved goodbye. Malcolm staggered along behind her, pulling his suitcase on a leash.

  ‘What did you do with Grace?’ she asked.

  He started at the name and stabbed his eyes. ‘Grace is taken care of,’ he said and turned away.

  They boarded the bus to Terminal 2. It took them in a wide circle bounded by a wire fence topped with bales of razor wire strung with shredded litter, all set against a cement sky. Hell, Malcolm remembered from the Inferno, was a downward spiral. For the entire ride, the girl kept one hand on her heart, beatifically.

  There turned out to be no LOT counter. LOT used a desk at Air France where a woman told them to come back in four hours.

  ‘Christ,’ Malcolm muttered. And what sadist decided on bucket-style chairs, impossible to stretch out on? His watch said it was the middle of the night.

  ‘Didn’t you bring anything to read?’ the girl asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve read it all?’ she joked.

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t read Douglas Coupland yet.’

  Nearby, a huge board clicked out some kind of tally—numbers, hundreds of thousands, millions. Flight numbers. Gates and times.

  On the plane to Kraków, she took the window seat. Europe from the air looked to her like a concrete floor covered with puffs of dust. She opened the guidebook. ‘Kiedy odjeżdża pociąg do Oświęcimia ?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘When does the train leave for Auschwitz?’ she translated for Malcolm. ‘Czy muszę się przesiadać? Do I have to change?’

  He began, slowly, to thump his head against the headrest.

  They landed, stairs wheeled up to the plane, the passengers herded down into the night. Alison was surprised it was so cold. Inside the terminal building, luggage started arriving on a conveyor belt and everyone pitched in to help unload it, grabbing a suitcase, any suitcase, no matter whose. Then, going through customs, every third person was made to step aside. Foreigners turned out to be exempt from official curiosity and Malcolm and Alison were waved on through.

  To the currency exchange counter where a young man sat, blank-faced except for an extraordinary number of moles. Immediately, the girl began groping down her front which was, Malcolm realized with disappointment, where her money was and the reason she kept her hand on her heart.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the spattered man without sounding in the least apologetic. ‘We exchange only banknotes.’

  She stared at him, puzzled, as if by the connect-the-dots on his face. ‘But I only have traveller’s cheques. Aren’t they any good?’

  ‘Certainly. Traveller’s cheques you may exchange at a bank. In Poland, banks generally open at seven-thirty.’ She turned to Malcolm. ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘A credit card,’ he said.

  ‘How can we get to the bank?’ she asked.

  The man behind
the counter told her, ‘There is a taxi stand outside.’

  ‘But we don’t have any money for a taxi.’

  Naturally, she turned to Malcolm again. It panged him: they’d only just arrived and already he’d let her down. In desperation, she found her wallet in her handbag, opened the change purse and overturned it on the counter. Coins wheeled off in all directions. The young man, gazing on blandly, reminded her: ‘Banknotes.’

  ‘I say, come in our cab.’

  They turned and saw, shambling towards them, an enormous loose-jointed man with a suitcase in each hand. The girl followed him at once and Malcolm followed her, outside to where a queue of taxis waited at the curb. Cabbies and passengers yelling, arms thrown open, probably in welcome, but in Polish it sounded like umbrage and rancour.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alison to their hulking saviour.

  ‘Yoo-hoo, Clive! Clive! Over here!’ A woman flagging. ‘Oh, sharesies! What a good idea!’

  ‘They’re in a bit of a spot,’ said Clive.

  ‘Francuski! Francuski!’ the woman told the driver loading the suitcases in the trunk. She was small and plain with fine, unclean hair. Enthusiastically, she pumped Malcolm’s arm.

  ‘I’m Ronnie. Which hotel are you at?’

  ‘Pollera,’ Alison told the driver.

  ‘Pollera! Pollera!’ Ronnie echoed.

  Malcolm got in the back, drawing the girl in after him to buffer him from Ronnie, Clive in front, knees tucked up. From behind, his hair looked like the matted brown plush of a stuffed bear.

  As soon as the doors were closed and the taxi had pulled away, Ronnie turned to Alison. ‘So what brings you and your father to Poland?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not my father.’

  A hand clapped over her mouth, Ronnie leaned forward to peek at Malcolm.