A History of Forgetting

by Adderson, Caroline

  ‘We’re going to Auschwitz,’ Alison said.

  The hand came down. ‘Did you hear that, Clive? Auschwitz-Birkenau.’

  ‘Ghastly,’ said Clive. ‘Birkenau means “a grove of birches”.’

  ‘Do you have some connection there?’

  ‘A friend of ours was killed.’

  ‘There?’ asked Ronnie.

  ‘No. Where we’re from. Canada.’

  Ronnie looked puzzled.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Alison.

  ‘Tell them what you’re up to, Clive.’

  ‘Dendrology.’

  Alison said, ‘What?’

  ‘Trees,’ said Malcolm.

  Ronnie giggled. ‘He’s a clever one. Tell them about the conference, Clive.’

  Where the road intersected with the lit highway, the taxi turned. Clive said, ‘International conference in Kraków next year.’

  ‘Clive’s the principal organizer. They’re all dying, you see.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Alison.

  ‘The trees.’

  ‘Are you a dendrologist, too?’

  ‘Me? No! I simply tag along. I love Poland. I love the Poles. They’ve been through so much. Haven’t they, Clive?’

  ‘Yes, they have,’ Clive agreed and when Alison glanced up, she saw the silhouette of his hunched form against the spreading lights of Kraków.

  Fifteen minutes later the taxi was shuttling through the narrow streets, the stone buildings silvery where there was a lamp. They stopped first at the Pollera with its pretty mustard-coloured façade. Across was an empty parking lot and beyond, darkness.

  When the cabbie got out to take their bags from the trunk, Clive got out, too, flexing at the knees. He shook their hands.

  ‘Much appreciated,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘We’ll pay you back tomorrow,’ said Alison.

  Ronnie shrilled, ‘Don’t you dare!’ from the car.

  Taking both their suitcases, Malcolm let the girl say goodbye to Ronnie.

  ‘The Francuski, right?’ Alison waved to her.

  The cabbie was still standing on the curb, Malcolm saw as he waited in the hotel doorway. He was wearing a tweed cap and a leather jacket, his eyes on the girl, yet deadened and unexpressive. The whole long drive he had uttered not a word, so Malcolm had assumed he couldn’t understand them. Absurdly, he had even forgotten he was there, an actual living specimen of the long-suffering Pole. But as the girl was about to walk away, the cabbie stopped her. He touched her arm and held her back.

  ‘Miss, I can bring you.’

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘To Auschwitz. Four hundred thousand złoty. I can bring you.’

  4

  Thi had honeymooned in Paris so knew to warn Alison about jet lag, how she was likely to wake or be overcome by sleep at weird hours. She switched on the lamp and saw by her watch on the night table that it was 4:00a.m. There was no toilet in the room and, too weary to dress, too nervous to walk in her T-shirt and panties down the corridor, she got up and dragged the wooden chair over to the sink instead. She balanced precariously, backward, over the basin, peed, then fell back on the lumpy mattress to sleep.

  Hours later, she woke again. Filtering through the gold curtains—dull light and a soft rhythmic whimpering like the denouement of someone’s weeping. She reached for the corner of the curtain, tugged. It opened to an explosion of dark wings on the sill outside. Lying there, she thought of Billy and wondered if this feeling was missing him. No, it was something worse. It was the sickening hollowness of waking in a country where the Holocaust had happened.

  She forced herself to get out of bed, stood a long moment shivering at the window, looking down into the courtyard where, in the rain, little box-like cars were parked around a dying tree.

  To leave the room she had to unlock the door from the inside with the key. It was one of those old-fashioned keys that delighted her when they put it in her hand last night, though was less romantic now that she knew how awkward it was to work. She finally got herself out, only to have to struggle with the lock again, and more self-consciously because, at the end of the hall, in the doorway of a windowless storeroom, two maids stood smoking. Their uniforms were possibly the ugliest Alison had ever seen—purple knit dresses with black stripes that on the older, plumper woman fit like a sock, on the younger a sack. Silently, they watched Alison’s every clumsy move through eyes narrowed to slits.

  The staircase, with its intricate wrought-iron banister, split parenthetically on this floor, the two sides meeting again on the landing below before descending to the lobby as a single broad flight—a cascade of faded threadbare leaf-print.

  The desk clerk sullenly pointed the way to the restaurant, which turned out to be a pretty, high-ceilinged room with ten little tables covered in white linen and a fireplace tiled green. Malcolm was already in the corner by the window, his breakfast barely touched. ‘Dzień dobry,’ she told him.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘That means “good day”.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pressing his eyes, he looked away.

  A waitress with peroxided hair and a cross expression came through the French doors. When Alison tried ‘dzień dobry’ on her, she fared no better. The waitress froze, eyes darting around the room, looking everywhere but at Alison. She opened the menu and stabbed a finger at the first page. ‘Polski.’ Turned the page to the menu in English. ‘English.’ The facing page: ‘Deutsch.’ Then: ‘Français.’

  Those were Alison’s choices.

  She nodded. ‘Polski! Dzień dobry.’

  Muttering, the waitress hurried off with Malcolm’s plate. Malcolm was staring out of the window, his face rubbery in the grey light, like a mask, unalive except for the nick near his ear stuck with tissue fibres.

  ‘Did you sleep all right?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘They left me a bottle of water. Is that what I’m supposed to drink?’

  He didn’t answer, so she turned to see what he was looking at. ‘Ugh. It’s like winter in Vancouver.’ Except in Vancouver the streets were not cobbled, or narrow and picturesque.

  Two women about her own age entered and took the other window table. The room was small enough for Alison to hear their twangy English and guess they were American. ‘They’re going, too,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The women behind me. I just heard them say they’re going. Do you want to go today?’

  To her relief, he shook his head and told her, ‘Tomorrow.’ She felt reprieved. ‘Tomorrow then,’ she agreed.

  The waitress returned with Alison’s coffee. Alison pointed to what she wanted on the menu, eggs, and motioned for her to wait while she dug in her handbag for the guidebook.

  ‘Dziękuję.’

  From the ferocity of the waitress’ glare, Alison guessed that in mangling the pronunciation she had said something off colour. Quickly, she pointed to the word in the book.

  ‘Ah! Dziękuję! Yes. You are welcome!’ the waitress sneered in perfect English.

  Alison’s face prickled. She couldn’t think what she had said to cause such offence. She took a sip of coffee, lukewarm, syrupy with condensed milk, and looked at Malcolm. ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ she asked, suddenly annoyed at him instead.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pressing your eyes like that?’

  ‘I’m staunching my tears, you silly girl.’

  She set down the cup and stared across the table at him. Look how she suffers over every tongue slip, he thought. Then, telling him that she was sorry, she took her hand from around the cup and laid it in the middle of the table for him to pick up if he wanted.

  ‘Grace is dead,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Alison, surprised. The dog had seemed yo
ung the time she saw her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s better this way. It would have been crueller to keep her around.’

  The waitress set down Alison’s plate, two runny eggs, a bun, a blob of red jam like a clot of blood. Malcolm got unsteadily to his feet. ‘I need to go to the bank.’

  ‘Me too. Can’t you wait?’

  He seemed to balk, then told her, ‘I’ll meet you out front in half an hour.’

  Climbing up the stairs, he wished he hadn’t told her about Grace. Now she would keep sending him achy, blue, sympathetic glances that he did not deserve. It would torment him and he wouldn’t be able to spend the day with her after coming all this way.

  He wished he’d taken a pill last night. After installing himself in his closet—it had been a grand hotel once, with expansive suites, but they’d thrown up walls everywhere and put him where the linen used to be—he had wanted to take one, but worried he would not be able to get up if he drugged himself again. So he lay there thinking about the dog. She was haunting him. In every creak, he heard her yelp.

  What he’d done was wrong and now, in his regret, he realized he had been wrong about her, too. He’d had nothing but contempt for her fawning when, in truth, there was no greater fawner than he. He’d considered her brainless and pitied her. All animals he tended to pity—because they cannot read. But can’t they? Thinking back on their many hours in the park, he recalled how, let off the lead, she would fly off on a course of delirious sniffing. It reminded him of how he liked to race home to a book. Was it not a form of reading then, this picking up a scent trail, akin, say, to Braille? Braille for the nose. Splashed up on the tree trunks, put down in trickles in the grass, there were epics and sonnets, novellas and pornographic tales. Grace had been voracious for it all; she had really been a perfect little companion.

  On her last night, Malcolm had allowed her the pleasure of sucking on a sock. Then, in the morning, before leaving, he had tied a new bow on her and wiped her eyes with a cloth. Her pink tongue washed his hands; no end to her forgiveness.

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ he had told her kindly. ‘It’s too late for that.’

  They walked down the tracks. There were dangers everywhere, of course: coyotes, racoons, cars. When they had gone far enough that finding her way back seemed unlikely, he took a biscuit from his pocket and showed it to her. Joy! Grace jigged around his feet. He bent to unfasten her collar, flung the treat. Off she bounded.

  He left a pile of biscuits on the tracks, enough to keep her busy while he hastened away.

  And now he kept seeing her little stumpy of a tail as she dashed along the ties. When he looked at the clock, it was three in the morning, too late to take a pill.

  Rain came straight down, as from a bucket overturned. Alison, under the umbrella, looked left and right, then at the open guidebook. Half a block down was some kind of palace. ‘It’s the opera house. Which makes this street Szpit—Szpitalna.’ It sounded like how the waitress had spoken to her at breakfast.

  They stepped out of the shelter of the hotel doorway, Alison telling Malcolm, ‘You carry the umbrella.’ Down the cobbled street, all the ornamented buildings looked newly painted, warm brown or gold or terracotta. Behind walls almost flush with the street were secret places: through an arched portal she glimpsed another portal, then a puddled courtyard and a door. It was all so pretty, yet eerily deserted.

  Turning a corner, they suddenly emerged upon a square. After the narrowness of the streets, it felt vast, a flagstone expanse. Empty of people too, it seemed larger still. Only one man had not rushed for cover. He stood in the rain on a pillar wearing a long bronze cloak.

  She stopped to flip through the guidebook and found the page about the square: the long arcaded building in the centre was the Sukiennice, a medieval cloth hall, and the statue was of a poet with an unpronounceable name, though not the original, which was toppled by the Nazis during the war. She read that phrase again—toppled by the Nazis—and only then did she really grasp where she was.

  She knew the bank before they were even across the square because the shorter word on the sign was ‘Bank’. Inside, the people standing against the wall or crowding the wooden benches reminded Alison of the Mission. Perhaps it was their furious restlessness, or that everyone was wearing a drenched raincoat. A man opened his wide—only to wrap it tighter around himself—but for a brief second she expected to see that underneath he was wound up with coloured lights.

  They joined the line at the currency exchange. ‘Passport,’ said the clerk and Alison wondered how he knew she spoke English. They received a metal token with a number, then went and stood with everyone else along the wall.

  Seeing Alison yawn, the woman on the bench next to her said, ‘Go on. Get some shut-eye. I’ll wake you when they call you—in about eight years.’

  Alison looked down on the woman and could tell that she wore foam rollers to bed. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Chicago. You? Is this your first time?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alison.

  ‘We came once before, in the seventies, but it was just awful. The lines were even worse and you couldn’t get any meat.’ Her husband, she said, was Polish and a bastard when he didn’t get his meat.

  Just then a number was called. The woman from Chicago rose to her feet.

  ‘Hallelujah! There is a God!’ she cried, flashing her token all around.

  Close to an hour later, they finally left the bank, Malcolm, holding the door for Alison.

  ‘You look terribly sincere.’ He meant her hand pressed over her heart, where all her millions were concealed.

  They headed back across the square, Alison carrying the umbrella now. The rain had diminished to a solemn drizzle and somewhere close by a bell started to toll. ‘I can’t believe,’ she said, ‘how cold it is.’ People were milling under the shelter of the Sukiennice’s arches. Across the square was the Mariacki Church with its unmatched towers, the gold crown shining on its steeple. ‘It must be eleven,’ she said. The bell was still tolling. ‘I’d like to drop the money off for Clive and Ronnie.’

  Malcolm stopped and took out his wallet. ‘I’m very tired,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to the hotel. Do you mind dropping off my share?’

  The bell stopped and a long mournful note sounded. It came from on high, from one of the church towers. They both looked up and saw the trumpeter tiny in silhouette. While waiting in the bank, Alison had peeled apart the wet pages of the guidebook and read about the watchman who, spying an invasion, had raised his trumpet and played this eerie song as an alarm. That was back in the thirteenth century. He got an arrow in the throat.

  Abruptly, the tune ended.

  ‘Okay,’ Alison told him, trying not to sound abandoned.

  ‘I’ll see you later then.’

  The address of the Francuski was in the guidebook. Clive and Ronnie were not in, so she left the money in an envelope. Sleep was stalking her by then.

  As she entered the Pollera’s lobby, Alison saw one of the maids pressing her purple uniform against the front desk as she and the clerk conversed. They didn’t acknowledge Alison in any way so, to Alison standing there ignored and waiting, their Polish sounded like the drawing of phlegm. At last the maid broke off, laughing—a cold, sardonic laugh—and slapped a big chapped hand down on the desk.

  Alison took the opportunity to interject politely. ‘Could I get my key, please?’

  They fell silent so abruptly that, even though no word was uttered, Alison could truly say that they were curt. All the way up the stairs, she felt their hostile gaze against her back. What she had done wrong this time, she couldn’t guess.

  The lock was another taunt, then over to the tucked-in bed she tripped. The room had been made up, but the chair was where she had left it in front of the sink. Was that it? Just that? That she’d peed in the sink? She pressed her face into the thin pillow. No matt
er how absurd the reason, it felt awful to be hated.

  In the bank, the wretched purposelessness of everyone, their blank suspended stares, the one domineering voice, American, nurse-like and over-loud, had reminded Malcolm of the ward. He would go back to his room and sleep off his misery. He did not think it would be necessary to take a pill.

  On his way back he found a store, simply rounded a corner and saw through an open door sausages stacked like firewood in an ancient refrigerated display case. All at once he remembered he was rich, a veritable millionaire in złoty. He was even in costume with someone else’s monogrammed silk aviator’s scarf hanging loose around his neck. Flinging the matted tassels over his shoulder, he stepped inside.

  ‘Is vodka consumption still the national pastime?’ he asked the shopkeeper as he handed over the bottle of Polonez. He didn’t expect a response, but the shopkeeper, wrapping the bottle in brown paper, told him, ‘Tak.’

  He stopped to fuss with the scarf again. When he looked up, he saw he was being watched. Across the street, a man in jeans and boots and a drab-coloured bomber jacket was leaning against a wall, smoking under the shelter of the eaves. The second they made eye contact, the man waved and threw down the cigarette. In hurried, deliberate strides, almost running, he crossed the cobbled street and, closer now, Malcolm saw he was not much more than a boy, eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, and very blond. Breathing hard when he reached Malcolm, cheeks aglow, he looked a veritable Polish prince, except for the shabby clothes and greying teeth.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘May I speak with you a moment?’ and Malcolm marvelled at how they always seemed to know who spoke English.

  He began to tell a long story in formal, heavily accented English, evidently learned at school. All the while he kept his eyes coyly lowered, but betrayed himself with a pair of dimples that kept appearing and disappearing, as if he were trying not to laugh. The gist of it was that he had just arrived by train from a place called Katowice; in the station, someone had stolen his bag with everything he owned in it. He was just a poor student from Kraków University. He looked up at Malcolm and, dimples vanishing, put on an expression that reminded Malcolm of Grace.