The Memory Man

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Why do you think you suddenly wanted to hear?’

  Irena laughed, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Because my future was all behind me, and I was ready for the past.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why I want to hear?’

  ‘No, no.’ Irena was mortified. ‘It’s different. Different for you. It’s a different time now too, what with Communism gone. Everything’s more open. To foreigners. And about the past. On top of that, the survivors are growing so old, they’ll be gone soon, so we want to know before it’s too late.’ She was already blushing so she felt she might as well plunge on. ‘And you’re American… It’s such a distance to…well, to travel into that time. And you all seem to have this cultural thing about finding roots, ’cause your country’s so new, so disparate. Here, we have the sense of having been rooted for so long that we don’t always want to know how tangled and warped those roots can be. We prefer blaming things on our various invaders.’

  Amelia stared at her. ‘You speak very good English.’

  ‘I spoke little else for a long time.’

  ‘There’s a love story in there, I can feel it.’

  ‘Can you?’

  She nodded, slipped her sunglasses down to the end of her nose and peered over them playfully in the guise of a wise professor. ‘I have an infallible instinct.’

  Irena managed to laugh.

  ‘So what do you think of this Aleksander Tarski?’

  ‘I’ll give you the article when I’m done. Maybe tonight. Your father can translate.’

  ‘I wasn’t really referring to his scientific acumen.’ Amelia put down her coffee cup. ‘Why don’t I come home with you and keep you company while you see to your mother? Then we can both go off to the Academy.’

  Irena stared at her.

  ‘Am I being forward? It would be fun. I haven’t been inside a Polish place yet. And I doubt anyone’s going to invite me.’

  ‘Of course, of course. You’re welcome. But it’s not going to be a barrel of laughs.’

  ‘Try me.’

  They took a tram on Amelia’s insistence from the other side of the tree-lined Planty, a ring road of gardens. On her return from London, Irena had used her store of capital to buy a small house on a leafy street, not too far from the centre. Everything had been so cheap then with sterling to hand. Here her mother could have a ground floor to herself, while Irena was still free to have something of a life. That had been the theory in any case. But with her mother’s growing infirmity, Irena was often too afraid to leave her on her own for very long. So she had set up a workspace in a tiny backroom downstairs.

  Children were playing on the street in front of the house. Her mother was sitting on the porch with another old lady whom Irena paid to stay with her on occasion, though she suspected that in this last year Pani Maria had grown almost as batty as her mum. Still, she managed to make a cup of tea and carry it to the table. And she picked up the telephone, which her mother had ceased to do, as if the object had grown utterly unfamiliar to her and she didn’t know which bit to put to her ear. When Irena had tried to show her, she grew frightened at the voices she heard at the other end.

  For the moment, the two old women looked benign enough, resting in the sunlight in their floral dresses topped with cardigans and staring out at the children. Irena, who had long wondered why old ladies wore only patterned dresses or dark colours now had a theory that it had to do with how much food flowers and dark colours could absorb before demanding a wash. Maybe if she had had children, she would have already known about these things. But then, maybe if she had had children, she wouldn’t have been here now. Anthony had never wanted any. Before had been too soon. And now it was too late.

  ‘Do you have children?’ she suddenly asked Amelia, who shook her head.

  ‘I’d like some, though. Trouble is, I’d rather have them with a man. And before you ask, I’m divorced.’

  ‘A common enough state. I’m divorced. Aleksander Tarski is divorced too.’

  ‘I suspected as much. He has the air of a man who’s been hurt by women.’

  ‘Only one official one as far as I know.’

  ‘To give him his due, unlike some of my fellow Americans, he hasn’t already told me all about it and complained vociferously about the settlement. Are you interested in him?’

  ‘Interested in him? What do you…? Oh, I see.’ Irena calmed her rising panic. For a moment she had thought that Amelia could mind-read. ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Good. ’Cause I find him intriguing. Which is a rare event these days. And he seems gentle.’

  ‘Pani Irenka.’ Plump smiling Maria was waving at them and getting her mother to raise her arm and do the same.

  ‘Is that your mother?’

  ‘The taller one. The one who isn’t calling out. Yes. Marta. Marta Kanikowa. Kanikow is the family name.’

  ‘What a handsome woman. Wonderful bones. She must have been a great beauty.’

  Irena hadn’t thought of her mother’s beauty for a long time. She tried to see her through Amelia’s perspective, which was unclouded by familial anxiety, and saw wispy grey hair neatly clasped in a bun, a jaw line that was still firm and clear blue eyes. These for the moment had a dreamy serenity about them.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she was. When I was in my teens, my friends used to say she was pretty. But she never did anything for herself. Not that in those days there was much we could do, unless you had those extra privileges that came with being part of the party machinery.’

  Irena introduced Amelia to the two old women. Both of them stared at her, which in her mother’s case, Irena reflected, meant that, despite the rudeness, at least she was paying attention, and the present-tense barrier had been scaled.

  Amelia stopped her apologies. ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t bother me.’

  Irena ushered them all into the house. Suddenly from behind her back she heard her mother say: ‘Pretty baby.’ She veered round. Her mother had spoken in English. Distinctly in English. Though her mother didn’t speak English.

  ‘Pretty baby,’ she said again with a lilt in her voice and a rolled ‘R’ as Pani Maria helped her into her customary chair beside the table. She was still staring at Amelia.

  ‘She’s singing,’ Amelia said. ‘How nice.’

  ‘She doesn’t sing. Or at least she hasn’t for years and years.’

  ‘Well, she’s singing now, honey chile. She sure is trying to sing. She’s singing Josephine Baker’s “Pretty Baby”.’ Amelia laughed, altered her voice, chameleon-like, so that it came out as a croon, high-pitched.

  ‘Beautiful…marvellous.’

  Her mother started to move her head from side to side in a swaying motion to Amelia’s rhythm. Her lips were definitely eking out some English syllables in the midst of an audible hum. The words were like a birdcall or a child’s song, at once eerie and joyous.

  ‘Pretty little baby, I love you.’

  ‘Hey Irena, your mom is a Josephine Baker fan. She’s a swinger. Would you like to hear Bessie Smith, Pani Marta? I do a mean Bessie.’

  Marta, who was still humming, had what was almost a smile on her face, though Irena had thought her facial muscles had disappeared, and she couldn’t anymore. It was so long since she’d seen a smile.

  ‘She’s happy.’ Pani Maria said to Irena. ‘She’s really happy. Look.’

  Irena translated and added: ‘Carry on with Josephine Baker, while I get some food together for her.’

  Amelia sang, sashayed round the room.

  ‘You should get her some CDs. I can send them to you if they’re not available here. Better still, I’ll order them online for you tonight. She loves it. Just look at her go. My dad once told me about this experiment they did with old people who had Alzheimer’s. In a home somewhere. The music is really good for them.’

  Irena had a sudden wave of guilt. Why hadn’t she thought of that for her m
other? It was true that she was always calm when there was some Mozart or Chopin playing, but it had never occurred to Irena to try her on music from her personal past. She would do that now. Almost too late.

  Luckily, Pani Maria didn’t have to go home to look after her grandchildren and could stay for a few hours. So Irena quickly prepared a large omelette with yesterday’s potatoes and put some cold meats on the table, together with a pitcher of blackcurrant juice, a glass and the slowing-down of Alzheimer’s tablet her mother took supposedly to inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine, a chemical which allowed neurons to talk to each other. They didn’t much, as the disease progressed.

  Maybe the pill was working a little at last, since her mother was talking to Amelia with some enthusiasm, even though the woman had no idea what she was acquiescing to with all her nods and smiles. In fact, her mother was asking Amelia whether she was from Paris and how kind of her to come and visit and wouldn’t she come again please, since she was sure her father would love to hear her sing. She held on to Amelia’s hand like a talisman.

  Irena didn’t know what pocket of time she was caught in, but since she seemed to be happy in it, it really made no difference. For a good many months now, she had stopped trying to reason her mother into the present. Or indeed to insist that she was her daughter and not any other figure in the repertoire her mother conjured up. Most recently, she had realized, her mother often addressed her as her own. They had switched roles. Sometimes she would say she wasn’t feeling very well in her throat, and could mama possibly have cook prepare some broth with noodles in it.

  It was the first time that she firmly took on board that there had been numerous servants in her mother’s early home. Now she could add to this knowledge the uncertain fact that her grandfather had enjoyed the songs of Josephine Baker. She remembered now, something that she had known as a child, known in that half-grasped way which children have since there’s no repertoire for them to fit the knowledge into: that her grandfather had indeed been to France in the thirties. In a mournful tone, when Irena was just a little girl, her mother would repeat, ‘How I would have loved to go to Paris, like your grandfather. How I would have loved to take you. What stories he told us when he returned.’ Then she stopped talking about it. There was no use in having a father who had been a diplomat, not in the depths of the Soviet days. Even a dead diplomat might prove dangerous. It was better not to know about anything foreign, in fact: particularly if one worked, as most people did one way or another, for the state. Her mother worked as a junior schoolteacher, and that made her particularly susceptible to stray words or bits of unwanted information. So she ‘forgot’ her past. Forgot it, instrumentally. Until now.

  So many ruptures. So many discontinuities. It was no wonder people didn’t want to talk. Couldn’t make sense of it all, all the layers of accommodation, of writings and rewritings, of lies that became truths, and truths that became lies with changing regimes. Narratives were supposed to make sense, personal memory somehow fit into collective memory. Instead there was repression, the state kind as well as the Freudian kind. What you couldn’t speak, or didn’t want to think, you eventually forgot. She didn’t blame Bruno Lind for refusing to allow himself to be interviewed. For not wanting to talk. Words were linear and intended for sense. And there wasn’t much sense to be found in that generation’s past, awkwardly bundled in too many ripped and tattered layers of history.

  Strangely, her mother was free to say and think anything she wished, now that she could no longer really think in any conventional sense. The doubling of that tragic irony was that Irena, who was now free to listen – would even have liked to know – could make little sense of what her mother was saying. Like today, now, with Amelia. ‘Pretty Baby.’ She wouldn’t have known that was a Josephine Baker song unless Amelia had been here. And her mother, who no longer had recourse to a set of explanations that made everyday sense, couldn’t have explained.

  ‘We can go now, if you like,’ Irena said softly.

  Amelia extricated her hand from the old knobbly one that held on to her, smiled, said how nice it had been to meet.

  ‘And she’s says that it’s been a great honour, and won’t you come again? You’ve made a big impression.’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s not every day Josephine Baker drops in,’ Amelia laughed as they slipped out of the house. ‘Nice place. Bright. Fresh. I think I had a fantasy of crumbling plaster and lots of cobwebs. And walls of yellowing books and a hideous old hag.’

  Irena nudged the omnipresent chip off her shoulder and managed to say with wryness in her voice, ‘You should have come ten years ago. Pre-Ikea. Though the old hag wasn’t one yet then. And you put her in a good mood, so she wasn’t even that today.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I liked her. She’s very sweet. You’re lucky in a way. At least she isn’t in pain.’

  ‘Your mother was?’

  ‘For too long. At the end it was ghastly. And she understood everything that was happening to her.’

  ‘Yes. I guess oblivion is a kind of blessing. I think, though, when the forgetting was beginning to take hold of my mother, she suffered it. Suffered from it. Not directly, ’cause you can’t know what you don’t know. But you can know there have been gaps. And there was confusion. That scared her. Panicked her in fact. She was horrible to me then. Always attacking me. As if everything in the world was somehow my fault. Especially the fact that she was no longer who she once was. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with her, so I assumed she was simply being critical of me, hateful in fact. Full of hate. And it was a bad time for me, in any case. So when the diagnosis came, even if it was a terrible diagnosis, I was somehow relieved. At least she had an illness. Something with a name. It wasn’t only that we hated each other. Sorry, I’m going on. I think we should take the car. It’ll be easier, despite the traffic.’

  Irena didn’t usually like to drive with visitors from the West. They always sat a little nervously in the clapped-out old Fiat that had made one too many trips to England in the old days. But she had held on to it. No one bothered to break into it and, apart from needing a push on very wet days, it was pretty reliable. And she had other expenses to consider first.

  Amelia curled her long legs into the front seat without so much as a whisper of ‘cute car’ and sat back with admirable ease as Irena pulled out.

  ‘I had all that Josephine Baker stuff in my head because one of my writers has been doing a script on her. Don’t know if it’ll ever get made. She had this terrific record of Resistance work in France. Altogether an admirable woman.’

  ‘My mother had a connection with the Resistance here. The AK. Armija Krajowa or Home Army. Which was the nationalist faction, so it wasn’t much talked about in my youth, ’cause the Russians didn’t like to know it had been there, in case they didn’t get the full credit for liberating Poland, and someone reminded Stalin of how he had gone back on earlier promises. I never got the full story from her. And it’s too late now.’

  ‘You should repeat that for my father’s benefit. Emphasize how sorry you are that you don’t know. Maybe it will nudge him. Is it far, by the way?’

  ‘On a good day ten minutes. On a bad day, you could get to Vienna sooner.’

  Rain started to fall, utterly unexpected. It grew heavier and heavier as the traffic ground to a halt in front of the high-rise student city until the Fiat’s old windscreen wipers squealed with the effort of their labour, and the car grew fuggy with steam.

  ‘So what do you know about Aleksander’s divorce?’ Amelia suddenly asked.

  ‘His wife left him for a German. Not a happy fate for a Pole.’

  ‘But a happy fate for a Polish woman, one can only imagine.’

  ‘Well she’s still there, apparently. It was some years ago. Eight or maybe ten. It happened when Aleksander was working in a lab in Munich.’

  ‘Munich. Central European Capital of Decadence,’ Amelia intoned.

  ‘Have you been t
here?’

  ‘No. Just joking. I haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘Well it must have felt pretty decadent back then, compared to Poland. I remember how shocked I was when I first came to London. The freedom. The jokes. Don’t forget, we not only had a fair helping of Soviet Puritanism; we also had the Catholic Church in the background. Anyhow, she met someone and stayed on. With their son. I can’t imagine that made Aleksander very happy.’

  ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

  Irena shook her head. ‘I’m a singleton in all ways.’

  ‘Ditto. Though there are three little step-siblings wondering around somewhere who have missed the pleasure of little ole me.’

  Irena threw her a quizzical look.

  ‘I’m adopted. Didn’t you guess?’

  ‘I didn’t think, no…’

  ‘You thought sweet-as-sugar Bruno Lind found himself a nice little Josephine Baker and made yours truly? No, sweetheart. That just wasn’t the way. And glad I am of it. ’Cause the woman he found for himself was a real honey of a mom.’

  Irena laughed. Amelia had a way with sending herself up. ‘So you were chosen. I used to think I might have been dropped. By some passing bad fairy in the shape of a stork, but that wasn’t the case.’ She veered off into a side street where the trees where so thick it was like a green tunnel. A tunnel that now dripped fat droplets of water everywhere. ‘Sorry I almost missed it. It’s just up this road here.’

  This outpost of the Academy of Sciences was an indistinguishable fairly new block that could have been a set of accountant’s offices as easily as a prestigious set of labs. The only marked difference was that the receptionist behind her wide cloakroom counter addressed them formally and treated them with consummate respect.