A History of Forgetting

by Adderson, Caroline

  She’d only once been to church as a girl, with a neighbour, and all she remembered was the Sunday-school teacher telling them that God had counted every hair on their heads. Appalled by the thought of a stranger touching her, she had gone right home and told her mother.

  ‘Gosh,’ her mother had said, ‘you’d think he’d have better things to do.’

  How could Alison ever believe in God when not even her mother did, her mother who, of everyone Alison knew, came closest to being a saint? How to believe in God after Auschwitz?

  How to believe in anything?

  Her mother had said, ‘I just add that extra letter. I believe in Good.’ Now Alison thought: Oh, that I could even believe in Good.

  The little bug-like nun came brisking back and perfunctorily closed the altar. One by one the lights of the chapel were extinguished. All the people rose to go.

  Back through the crowd on Florianska Street, Alison wound her way. Entering the hotel lobby, she nodded quickly at the clerk. Climbed the leafy stairs. At Malcolm’s door she paused first to listen, tried the handle and opened it a crack.

  Inside a light was on and Malcolm was sitting on the bed in his coat, as he had been when she left him an hour ago. He seemed to be staring at the leaves strewn in a pattern on the carpet. ‘Can I come in?’ she asked.

  He nodded weakly and whispered for her to watch where she stepped. A dark wet stain on the carpet, flecked with white powder and broken bits of half-dissolved pills.

  ‘What have you done?’ she cried, then saw the bottle in his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  He allowed her to help him out of his coat. She took it over to the wardrobe and hung it on a hanger, pulling his bathrobe off another. In the mirror inside the door, her own reflection confronted her. Then she smelled that smell again, here in the room, and saw her face crumple. Grabbing a handful of her own hair, she sniffed it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked when she came over.

  ‘I’m smelling you. That smell from the museum, it’s in your hair.’

  He grabbed her hand. ‘So you smell it, too!’

  On the edge of the sink, she found his toilet bag, and a travel-sized bottle of shampoo. She left the tap running while she took off her coat.

  ‘Lift your arms,’ she told him.

  He did. He would do, she knew, anything she asked now. When she pulled his sweater off, he just sat there, shrunken-looking, ashen, his hair standing on his head.

  ‘Oh, Malcolm.’

  She smoothed it down. Her fingers opened the row of buttons, slid the shirt off his shoulders. ‘Here,’ she said holding out the robe for him.

  With difficulty, she got him to his feet and, dragging the chair along behind them, led him slowly across the room. She made a shawl with the towel and helped him to lean back. ‘Is that all right? Are you comfortable?’ She pushed up her layers of sleeves and touched her wrist to the running water. A glass on the ledge under the mirror. She filled it, and very carefully, shielding his eyes, poured the water over his crown, feeling the skin on his forehead grow less taut.

  He must have taken the little bottle of shampoo from some motel in another decade. The paper label had nearly worn off. Poured into her palm, it was pink and over-scented, like nectar, until she rubbed her hands together and it frothed. Looking in his face, she saw gravity’s kindness pulling the loose skin back instead of down. She lifted his head and stood cradling it.

  She had never really thought of it as washing. When she pressed her thumbs into his temples, his jaw unstuck. His head grew heavier, would become more and more difficult to hold. But she would hold it, while the other hand worked in circles, drawing the blood to the surface. His lips parted. Leaning over him, she felt his warm exhalation on her throat.

  She filled the glass again. The water went down in a foamy swirl. It went down grey. After the lather was gone, she tipped the glass and still the water was discoloured. The black dye was coming out. She was rinsing it away. When she looked in his face, she saw, by contrast, that the water pooling in his eye sockets was clear.

  ‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘Shh,’ and put her arms around him and raised him up. Clutching her, he pressed his face into her neck, but did not make a sound. Something wet trickled down between her breasts—his tears and water from his hair.

  He was being lifted up, he felt. The terrible weight taken from him.

  ‘Shh,’ said Alison.

  In the mirror, she saw herself rocking him.

  The first thing you notice is that the room is nearly empty, which is strange for a train station at this hour. Before you are rows of wooden benches, the ticket booths and, at the end, high up, a huge clock reading exactly 6:30. Yet there is almost no one here. A single soul hunches on the benches and only one of the ticket booths is occupied. Here, by the door, two young travellers stand reading together from a guidebook, their backpacks at their feet. Except for them and you, there is no one else.

  An airlessness about the place. You feel it as you walk over to the ticket booth, how everything seems so curiously static. Then, passing the benches where the single passenger is waiting, you notice how he is folded up: legs crossed, one arm clutching his middle as he bows over himself, the other arm propped on his knee and reaching around his head. His clothes, his hair, suggest dishevelment and, in this tangled posture, he is rocking, rocking and muttering to himself. Somehow you sense that he has been doing this for hours and, alarmed, you walk on, afraid to look back and see his face, afraid to recognize him from the Muzeum as another visitor, not a lunatic. Afraid his reaction is quite sane.

  At the ticket booth, fish for the guidebook in your bag. In the glossary is a list of useful phrases from which you find ‘Kiedy odjeżdża pociąg do Krakowa?’ When does the train leave for Kraków? Read it out slowly, labouring over the nonsense of each sound. ‘Kiedy odjeżdża pociąg do Krakowa?’ You look up expectantly, though the pummels of experience have long since taught you not to expect communication the first time.

  The woman in the booth stares at you through lashless, pink-rimmed eyes. With her pointed nose and combed-up bangs, she reminds you of a battery hen ruffled in her coop and about to squawk. Miracle of miracles, she has caught your meaning. Sourly, she ejaculates a reply. But now what? To save your life, you couldn’t decode her answer.

  Turn back a page in the guidebook and look for a suitably mollifying phrase. ‘I don’t understand,’ is self-evident, as is ‘I don’t speak Polish very well.’ So try this: ‘Proszę mówić trochę wolniej.’

  Please speak a bit more slowly.

  Oh, the disgust! The utter, cowing contempt! You feel yourself shrinking before her sneer, blushing with shame as she fires back a volley of sarcastic syllables. You almost want to duck. Certainly you flinch, then, in a panic, hold the guidebook to the window with your finger on the phrase for her to read.

  That did it. That was absolutely the last straw. Glaring, she slams the window down, leaving you standing there astonished. Rap on the glass.

  She turns her back!

  ‘Proszę,’ you plead, ‘Proszę. Just give me a fucking ticket!’

  And so you find yourself stuck, for all intents and purposes stranded, in the train station at Oświęcim. A garbled announcement over the loudspeakers: presumably a train is arriving or departing, but no one moves towards the door that leads out onto the platform and no one comes in. There is a news stand, you observe, at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the mezzanine, but it is unlit, the glass door shut. Nothing is newsworthy after what happened here. More recent wars and war crimes, the camps and slaughters since—all of them only hark back to those primal crimes. They are reflections in a mirror; here, at the Oświęcim train station, they do not warrant print. The young man on the bench has figured this out already and all day the poor bastard has been trying to get a ticket. And look at the moonfaced cloc
k. Surprised? It’s 6:30 exactly. Your own watch reads 5:43.

  Nevertheless, you do not completely believe this is a nightmare. You march past the benches and back over to the door where the two travellers are still studying their guidebook. It does not occur to you that they, too, might be searching for an escape. Have they got their tickets, you ask them, and, if so, are they going to Kraków and when does the train leave?

  Blank, their doubled gaze. Barely older than teenagers, they shake their heads in unison and shrug.

  Ask, ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘No,’ says the taller boy. ‘We are Germans.’

  You back away. Then, by chance, you happen to glance up and see the letter ‘I’ in the blue circle on the sign posted on the railing of the mezzanine.

  At the top of the stairs is the information desk and, sitting behind it, someone’s grandmother. She frowns as you approach and, reluctant to lay her knitting down, cranes to read the phrase you point to in the guidebook. She runs a knitting needle along one column of a yellowed schedule taped to the desk, stopping on a time. Take a pen from your bag and write the information you need on your hand. Then, to be absolutely certain, point in the guidebook to ‘What time is it?’

  She motions with the needle across the station to the paralysed, slack-handed clock.

  Downstairs, you secure your ticket with surprisingly little fuss. It is as if the woman in the booth doesn’t recognize you as the same person she treated so appallingly just moments before. Which is not to say she is in any way congenial. She simply hands the ticket over without a glance. And now you have nothing to do but kill time until the train leaves, nothing to do but to wait.

  Next to the entrance to the platform is the cafeteria. Here is where all the people are, clustered around the tables in the surreal yellowish light of the room. A few look like locals, stout men in tweed caps with doughy hands around mugs of beer. The others have just come from the Muzeum, you know because there is no other reason to be here. No one is talking. What is there to say? Though almost all are younger, there is something old about them, too, something deadened as they sit mostly staring straight ahead. It is as if this is not a train-station cafeteria at all, but a hospital ward for catatonics, or a room preserved perfectly in amber:

  The smell of onions frying rushes up to meet you at the door. It lures you over to the counter, where a menu is posted. Since seven-thirty this morning you’ve had nothing to eat; you stand, cross-referencing the menu with the glossary in the guidebook, but the moment you lift your eyes from the page, you forget the order of all the “Z’s” and “Y’s” and “K’s”. Nothing seems to correlate. Dizzying ciphers, the Polish words. You clutch the counter.

  ‘Proszę Pana?’ someone tells you. ‘Proszę Pana?’

  Look up. At first, you believe yourself to be hallucinating for before you is a genuine bouffant, a platinum backcombed miracle, the poof the waitress materialized in, a line of discoloured lace perched in the pillowy centre of it. Gummy strips hold her outrageous eyelashes in place. She shows a full mouth of grey teeth—an actual smile, here, of all places. Queasy, you close your eyes again and, after a moment, feel the guidebook being pulled from your sweaty grip. When you look up the second time, the waitress is scanning the glossary and frowning with painted lips. She ponders, making one incomprehensible suggestion after another before pronouncing, ‘Frytki!’ with a finger decisively held up. On the end of it, a long plastic nail is glued. Waving all ten of them, she shoos you off in the direction of the tables.

  An hour later; when you are on the train hurtling to God knows where, it will occur to you who she is. You will even make up a name for her, and, in the years to come, think again of her face, round, open, marbled with foundation, and her tawdry crown of lace. In the church in Kraków and in the sham icons in the market she looked different, muddy and serene. Like a chameleon, all her guises depend upon the place in which she appears. Today she is Our Lady of the Oświęcim Train Station, though others would naturally call her something else. Most might not even recognize her. This very evening, before a mirror peeling the insect legs off her eyelids, she might not even recognize herself.

  She sets a heaped plate before you. ‘French fries!’ you exclaim and grab her hand to hold her back. ‘You are the first person to be nice to me in Poland.’

  Laughing, she pulls her hand away. Eat, she seems to be telling you. Eat. And you do, greedily, using your fingers, then wiping them with a napkin. By the time you return to the counter to pay, the waitress has disappeared and in her place is a bloated cook in an apron calicoed with grease.

  Several people begin to stir. They stand, the ones with packs swinging them wordlessly onto their backs. Follow as they shuffle out onto the platform. A train is just now easing in, exceedingly slowly, as if blown by the wind. Another waits on the tracks and both have passengers on board. Turn to the person closest to you, a flame-haired woman in Gore-Tex who turns out, from her accent, to be Australian.

  ‘Are you going to Kraków?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she drawls.

  ‘Do you know which train to take?’

  ‘No.’ She turns away.

  Stung, you stare a moment at her back, though perhaps you are in the wrong to have spoken at all. In the Muzeum, except for the hushed, multilingual lectures of the tour guides, silence was the rule.

  A conductor is leaning out of the train that has just come in. Cross the tracks and call to him. ‘Kraków?’ He nods. You get on board.

  Enter the first compartment and take a window seat facing a heavy-bosomed woman with a wicker basket in her lap, a cloth tucked around its contents. Through the window, you watch the Australian woman and her friend, a blond boy, and wonder why they aren’t getting on the train. Everyone is still standing there, mute and grim. Barely perceptible, your departure. You don’t, in fact, feel it. The station simply slides away before your eyes. Then it occurs to you that you must be the only person retaining any volition. Everyone else has been left behind, possibly forever. But you, you got away.

  At the far end of the compartment, the conductor enters and with a hole punch begins making confetti down the aisle. Take out your ticket: Kraków Glówny. The bosomy woman across from you has a broad country face, raw-looking from the web of veins under her cheeks. She’s dozing. Lean forward and tap her knee. Her eyes fly open and she puts a hand over the basket. In gestures, tell her you want to see her ticket. At first she thinks you want to see inside the basket and, fearfully, she shakes her head.

  Wave your own ticket at her. Point at hers and nod and smile.

  ‘Ah!’ she says and holds it out.

  ‘Plaszów,’ it reads.

  You’re on the wrong train. Show her your ticket and ask, ‘I’m on the wrong train, aren’t I?’

  Puzzled, she cocks her head.

  The conductor is approaching. ‘Never mind,’ you say and, holding the ticket out to him, ask, ‘Do you speak English?’

  He arches a wiry eyebrow and squeezes the hole punch.

  ‘Am I on—’

  The compartment door clatters closed behind him.

  Accelerating, the train begins to jostle from side-to-side. Past sodden, unplanted fields, its clacking rises to a crescendo and, with it, your agitation. You are going to Plaszów. Where the hell is Plaszów? Why does it sound so familiar? The best you can hope for is that it is on the way to Kraków. Past woods, past empty stations without a soul on the platform, past farmhouses with duvets hung out of the windows in surrender. A monstrous factory rears in the distance, all stacks and smoke. You can smell it, acrid and sour, in the compartment of the train.

  Staring out of the window like this, swaying back and forth, the rhythmic clacking of the wheels always in the background, understandably you will drift off in your mind. Again and again, images from the Muzeum. You try to shut them out, to marvel instead at the countryside beyond the window
coming back to life. But it is impossible. Impossible to forget.

  By your watch, over an hour has gone by when you finally near a city. The woman with the basket has slept the whole trip. Tap her knee again. She starts awake, jarring the basket; under the cloth, something squirms.

  ‘Where are we?’ you ask. ‘Is this Plaszów?’

  She nods, and with one hand on the churning cloth, puts a finger to her lips.

  Plaszów looks a lot like Kraków, the blackened cladding crumbling off the walls, exposing the stone and brick. The train decelerates and you see on a brick wall a freshly painted sign that reads ZLIRT. A slow glide into the station. Everyone stands; they begin to gather up their things. The woman with the basket hurries out of the compartment first, then, one by one, the others. You, you stay where you are in your seat hoping that the train will move again. But soon the conductor reappears and, glaring, motions for you to get off.

  Show him your ticket again. ‘I don’t want Plaszów.’

  He makes a violent gesture towards the door. Rising, you stumble past him, out of the compartment and down onto the platform. A sign says ‘Plaszów,’ so this is Plaszów indeed. Helplessly, you look around, but cannot see an information desk anywhere.

  In your hands is the guidebook. You blink at it, as if it had just appeared there on its own. Plaszów is not listed in the index, but when you flip to the chapter on Kraków, you find a small subsection with ‘Plaszów’ as its title. On the emptying platform, you stand and read while more passers-by jostle past. Again, you read it, and again, starting from the beginning, so you are reading in a loop. And though your eyes remain on the page, in your peripheral vision, it seems the people have formed a crowd that is swirling around you. All of you spinning, spinning downward. And this is what you read: that Plaszów is a suburb of Kraków. That there were mass graves in Plaszów.

  That Plaszów was a concentration camp.

  Caroline Adderson is the author of four novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling, Ellen in Pieces), two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased To Meet You) as well as many books for young readers. Her work has received numerous award nominations including the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. Winner of three BC Book Prizes and three CBC Literary Awards, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She lives in Vancouver.