9

The Wisła was high and mud-tossed brown from the recent rain. Bruno Lind, walking along the curve the river made with the old Kazimierz area of Krakow, felt an uncharacteristic spring in his step, like the tingle of limbs set for adventure. The lightness no longer belonged to him. He wondered that the thirteen-year-old Bruno had had it then, in the midst of war, as if his whole youthful existence were a boy’s own story of challenges and feats, while the war itself was merely a bit of history in the background. Was he misremembering, exaggerating his one-time sense of risk and mastery, slipping over the dire grimness because he didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to kneel again by the cow-shit they had on occasion been driven to eat? And because he was already anticipating the worse that was to come when adventure gave way to tragedy. Turning everything into the inevitable dramatic narrative of the great ‘oneself’, which is what memory that tapped autobiography did in story-fed humans.

But no, he contradicted himself. The thirteen-year-old that was then himself, seen from the inside, would have enjoyed the risks and the opportunity to prove himself. Even the edge of cruelty. He was a boy like any other boy, after all, though already hardened by the loss of his father, his nerves tempered by the brutality he had witnessed. Only if he put the boy into three dimensions plus time, saw him from the back and all around and moving, did his, yes, pleasurable sense of adventure seem incredible to the old Bruno. Like those psychological tests in which the subject is asked to remember from the inside of an action or field and then from the outside. Emotion comes with the first form of recall, and apparent coolness, distance, if not altogether objectivity with the second. Maybe that was one of the differences between history and memory – the first from the outside, the second from the inside – that made it a slippery faculty, prone to distortion and suggestion. But experience was like that. And it carried its own truths.

Young Bruno hadn’t known when he returned to Przemysl in that autumn of 1940 that in a few brief months, his boy’s-own-story sense of the war would be thrust backward to a period of the war’s innocence. He had no way of knowing that by next June, the Nazis’ pact with the Russians would be at an end and their hideous war machine would be marching east. Nor did he have any way of knowing that their murderous battle against the Jews had only just begun.

Bruno allowed himself a chuckle. Perhaps if his younger self had kept a diary of that first year in Przemysl, it would have contained more about the girl in the newspaper kiosk and his adolescent longings than anything else. War too had its dailiness, a repetition that, no matter how terrible, blurred in the memory. Humans, it seemed, created habits or went mad. The mundane was a part of war too. But those versions of himself, the boy in love or the bored youth, would have been far more unrecognisable than even what his memory chose to present him with now.

Bruno paused to lean against the balustrade. Across the river, Podgorze looked pleasant, even pretty. There was nothing to tell him from his present vantage-point that the crammed, disease-infested, wartime Ghetto had eventually been located where those innocuous houses now clustered just south of the river. Geography was an innocent.

In fact, nothing in what he had seen of the city was familiar. Even though he had recognized the building in which the Torok apartment stood and had pointed it out to Amelia, he felt less than nothing at its sight. Certainly no sense of homecoming. It was as if a giant broom had swept over his childhood topography and rendered it as indifferent and dull as a stretch of new town.

Yet even if the buildings failed to trigger it, he was nonetheless in the grip of memory. Maybe it was the sound of Polish all around him, though it seemed to have grown harsher with the years, less pleasing than the childhood intonations he thought he remembered. Maternal tones those. Not brutalized by war and years of oppression.

His own tongue stumbled and blundered over the language now, like some blinded bull. He was unable to come to terms with its sibilant riot of consonants. But its presence everywhere provoked unruly bits of recall – the bristle of his grandfather’s hair, the cool prod of the pitchfork under his chin, the scent of dill on white fish. Such sensations in turn brought scenes. The train had started it all, with its hypnotic motion.

Bruno followed the curl in the river beyond the Pilsudski Bridge then for some reason turned and retraced his steps in the opposite direction. Coming this way, everything looked different. The distant mound where the camp had been grew clearer. Pigeons swarmed over blackened roofs and settled with a menacing air. Shadows played like falling ash over sand-coloured stucco. Kazimierz itself, so recently anodyne, now filled him with a low thrumming anxiety he couldn’t identify, like the frantic beating of a bird’s wings.

The black-coated man who emerged to confront him from the shadows of a lane felt as if he had materialized from the floodtide of memory that threatened his mind. He had a long, ragged Chassidic beard, a fur-trimmed hat, and he held his hands crossed on his stomach as if it were a prosperous and capacious one that might at any moment bend and sway in prayer. His skin was paper-pale against the reddish beard. His mild washed-out eyes creased into weary canniness as he addressed Bruno in accented English.

‘Good morning, sir. Welcome to our beautiful city. You would like some help, no? Some help in interpreting the remains of what was once the centre of Jewish Krakow?’

With a click of his heels and a swivel of his hat, he broke into a dance, his long thin lips curling around a mournful Yiddish plaint.

The bad taste of it grew thick and acrid in Bruno’s mouth. He turned away, walked quickly.

The man was persistent. He matched his step to Bruno’s like a stray dog that had recognized a likely homeowner. ‘Of course you are interested, sir. I can feel it in you. See it. And I, Pan Marek of Szeroka Street, can show you. Tell you. Tell you everything. The way it was. Tales of kindly tailors who had more lore in their thimbles than all the doctors of the world, and their beautiful wives, their secrets modestly hidden beneath their lowered lashes. Such secrets, sir, buried within these dilapidated walls. Not all the scientists of the new world together could find them.’

‘What is this nonsense?’ Bruno erupted.

‘No nonsense, kind American sir, but the truth. The truth. For a few dollars more I will deliver you into ancient Kazimierz the way it was. The way it still is for some of us. Its streets dancing with ghosts and wise spirits and fearful dybbuks. I will tell you tales of boys falling in love through the peephole of a window, of fortunes lost and found and lost once more, of the wisdom of the Tzaddik in concluding contracts.’ He started up his infernal melody again, with its comic moans, its Klezmer whines.

Half hypnotized into helplessness, Bruno pulled some bills from his pocket. He had to get away, but his legs were reluctant. ‘Your name. Marek. Marek who?’

‘I see the American sir is knowledgeable. You wish to know if I am a Jew, like you. Believe me, sir, a name is not enough to distinguish us. Pan Marek to you. Come, come, let me take you into forgotten corners, the bathhouses where the pretty damsels bathed, the noble synagogues, the little rooms where study was done…’

The man had recognized him. That hoary wartime truism leaped into his mind. Poles and Jews recognized each other. Germans were less dangerous. They couldn’t detect the subtle differences. He had once masqueraded as a Pole. This Pole was masquerading as a Jew now that the Jews of Kazimierz had been exterminated. But masquerading as a Jew out of folklore, a stetl Jew wearing fancy dress. It was like watching a minstrel show where the whites blackened their faces to perform a pastiche of black life. Watching it in a slave graveyard.

Bruno stuffed bills into the man’s hand. ‘Go on. Leave me. I’m not interested in your theatre. Leave me alone.’

The man scurried away, his coat flapping, his hand on his hat that threatened to pull away from his gathering speed.

‘Scum,’ Bruno muttered after him, his voice betraying a bitter anger he hadn’t realized he felt.

Tiredness suddenly overcame him like a shroud. It made his movements clumsy.

He hated all this. History become kitsch. This turning of experience into folksiness. Like the Iroquois in Canada when he had first arrived there. Making beads on their reservations. For tourist consumption. Was this the inevitable after-effect of genocide? The unpalatable ghastliness of history transmuted into fairy tale. Dancing, fiddling Chassidim in funny hats. Winged spirits and some whining music to be fed to tourists for their pleasure along with pierogi and borscht. This was the city’s memorial to its Jews. As if six years of gruelling killing history were just a parenthesis with no links to before or after. As if Jews were to be remembered as a costume musical rather than as modernizers, motors of the country’s move into the twentieth century.

The heritage industry, that’s what he had walked into. Tableaux, living snapshots of the supposed past culled from an intricate continuum and re-presented as attractions. An unruly sea trimmed into a garden pond with a couple of goldfish for effect. This was the memory business at work. The furthest end of it from his, perhaps, but related. And since there were no Jews here, memory with all its distortions was all you got. It was easier, after all, to love the extinct.

Bruno forced his legs forward over dusty paving stones and uneven grit. That was why he couldn’t face accompanying Amelia to Auschwitz. A different order, that, from his masquerader, of course, but still a form of tourism. A spectacle. This time to be viewed with awe. Silent piety in front of the horror humans were capable of.

He couldn’t subject himself to kneeling before atrocity. In the way Catholics kneeled before a dying tortured god. His grandfather’s ironic cackle at this further turn of the screw rang in his ear like the tolling of a distant bell. Yes, he saw it now. It was as if the worst of the war could be confronted only if it were assimilated into religion. Murder, suffering made holy, transmuted into a moral touchstone, a mantra, a measure for all horror. Yes, that was why he wouldn’t go with Amelia. He couldn’t join the worshippers, pious or mute. Religion was about belief. Folklore about superstition. History, he hoped – like the science he had always championed – was about thought, analysis. He would say this to Amelia. Explain. It was different for her.

But it was all so difficult. He shouldn’t have come here with her. Wide-eyed, expectant, she kept asking for what he couldn’t give. Not yet. Maybe never. He still couldn’t allow his mind the freedom to roam in those more threatening regions he had forced into shadow for so long. He didn’t want the self he had then been to inhabit him. It was a nasty, suspicious, brutalized self, prone to find enemies everywhere – because in those days they had indeed been everywhere. But the self had lasted longer than the war and it carried its burden of guilt with it. The guilt of still being alive when so many weren’t. A guilt that tried to wash itself clean by finding more enemies anywhere, everywhere, to struggle against. To make that deformed self a necessity. To give it a justification.

Eve in the end had quietened him, wooed him out of it, shown him that he also knew how to be gentle, how to laugh, occasionally even how to trust. Not that they had talked. She had shown him by example.

It was all so long ago now. So long since he had revisited any of that dark matter, he was half afraid that by now he might even have given birth to new monsters – like those grotesque confabulations amnesiacs come up with, asserting with quiet aplomb that they’ve been married for three years and have children from that marriage who are twenty.

As a preventative, that morning, he had forced himself to check on the holders of the name which had led him here, like a hound bred blindly to follow a single trail. There were four of them in the telephone directory, two at the same address. One of these was Aleksander. He would ask him. Yes, he would. Soon. As soon as he could come up with a plausible story about why he wanted to know. That hadn’t shaped itself for him yet.

‘Pops.’ Amelia’s voice startled him from his reverie. He had stumbled without thinking into Kazimierz’s main square, and there was Amelia waiting for him. She was sitting at an outdoor table in front of a small restaurant partly hidden from view by the ranks of parked cars. The area, he noted to himself, was still somewhat shabby, no matter what people told you about how much had been restored over the last ten years, the Spielberg effect and all that.

‘Pops, you just walked straight past us. This is the Ariel…well, one of the two. They compete, as this young man has been explaining to me.’

The young man who had startling yellow hair and one of those noses that spoke of Greek statuary or English public schools looked rather furtive as Bruno approached and hastily excused himself with a great scraping of chair legs on pavement.

‘You frightened him, Pops. You’re a scary person.’

‘That’s’ cause his intentions weren’t honourable.’

‘You could see that immediately, right?’

‘What else are fathers for?’

Amelia stretched her long legs. ‘Let me get you something. Juice. Coffee. Some lunch. Of course, it’s lunchtime. They do borscht and all kinds of herrings. Look.’

Bruno studied the menu, which reminded him of West Broadway in the old days, ordered herring in onions and sour cream with tea and borscht with dumplings for Amelia from a waiter who looked like an extra on a Hitchcock set. He could feel Amelia watching him as his lips curled clumsily round the language.

‘What else fathers are for,’ she took up his banter in a more serious vein, ‘is introducing their children to the history that made them.’

‘It’s not like that, Amelia.’

‘Because the history that made them gets passed down, willy-nilly.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Even if you don’t talk about it, it’s there. It’s there in your silences, in your gestures, in the odd things that make you angry, like filling in forms. In your sudden starts. In the way that you used to hug me as if I might disappear down an Alice hole at any minute.’

He stared at her. Uncomfortable. Did he? More so than other parents?

‘I want to understand. You’re a mystery I want to understand. I want you to take me to Auschwitz.’

‘I told you, Amelia. I have no interest in going. I’m not a great visitor of public memorials. Nor do I want to read explanatory captions beside mountains of shoes or words on stone. All of this is hard enough as it is. I understand that for you it’s different. And you must go. Yes, you must.’

He had had to clear his throat over the mountains of shoes. As if the words wouldn’t come out. Why? Only a few hours ago he had paused in front of a shabby shop window and seen just that – a mountain of shoes, all displayed higgledy-piggledy on top of each other and making plenty the only aesthetic. The mass, not the individual. That had made him think of the killer camps, as if somewhere there might be a link. But he didn’t want to think about that. Enough emotional energy had gone into that kind of thinking all those years ago.

Amelia burst into his thoughts. ‘You’re not kidding it’s different. I may be one of the few Polish Jewish Blacks in unrecorded history, and my father’s too scared to take me to Auschwitz some fifty-five years after it closed for business.’

He studied her, decided that she was serious despite the mock-hyperbolic tone. They were quiet as the waiter deposited their plates, quiet for longer than usual as they ate.

At last he said: ‘It’s not quite the way you think, Amelia. I… No, no, that’s not right. I suspect you think there’s a trauma somewhere. A trauma that I won’t talk about. That I can’t confront. That will somehow get better if I do. If I put a narrative to emotion, even if the narrative isn’t quite right. But can you imagine the opposite? Can you imagine that one of the reasons I don’t want to go is that I’m afraid of feeling nothing? Nothing? Nothing at all? No emotion that can possibly meet the measure of those times?’

He gazed at her incomprehension. ‘Yes, that’s right. And the second reason may be that what I don’t want to confront, certainly don’t want to share with you, is something as simple, as ghastly, as banal, as self-hatred. Not guilt. Just self-hatred.’

‘You have no reason to hate yourself.’

‘I think I’m the only judge of that.’

She examined him. ‘Is this linked to why you don’t like Aleksander? Does he remind you of yourself?’

Something like panic rose up in him. He swallowed hard, scrambled for a voice. ‘What makes you think I don’t like him. I do. I do.’

‘The man doth protest too much. What do you think of his science?’

‘I slept with him.’

‘I see.’ He didn’t see at all, but he blundered on. ‘Does this have anything to do with his science?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s a way of telling you.’

‘Telling me you like him?’

‘I don’t understand… It’s strange.’

He could see that the words that had dropped out of him inadvertently made her unhappy, wary. She looked as if she might bite back, be rude, the way she had done as an adolescent if he said anything even slightly critical about her boyfriends. These bumped along erratically between effete East-coast preppies and druggie ghetto youths, roadside mirrors in whom she hoped to see herself, but who never reflected her adequately.

‘His science is fine.’

She looked at him for a moment without responding. ‘Does that mean as fine as your being here? Less fine? Or more? Nobel-standard fine?’

‘I’m not locking you out, Amelia.’ He made an effort, though his mind was racing with this other news. If Tarski was who his fears suggested, then he shouldn’t be with his daughter.

‘It’s just…this whole trip, it’s not what I expected, that’s all. Though I don’t know quite what I did expect. You see…my own history was very particular. It doesn’t quite fit into the most prevalent narratives. And there isn’t much I can show you except for buildings. They’re not what make a city. Not really. It’s the people. And the people aren’t here. When I was last in this particular square, as a child, it was teeming, noisy. Crowded and noisy with the babble of Yiddish, which I didn’t really understand. There were Jews like me, ordinary, western, business-suited, and Jews like I really didn’t know them. Exotic. They all argued and gestured and did business and tugged at their beards and haggled, and there were synagogues chock-a block at every corner and street hawkers, barrels of herring and pickles, bread stalls, horses and carts, women with headscarves or elegant feathered hats and almond-shaped eyes…and now, well now there’s this – a car park with a few half-restored buildings. A few shards of the past, like at some archaeological dig, even though it’s less than a lifetime away. And the ghosts have hardly begun to talk to me.’

‘I don’t think you’re telling the whole truth.’ She mimicked the childhood words she would throw at him and Eve when they simplified things for her. Kept the bad in the world at an adult distance.

‘You’re right.’ He heard himself sigh, and his voice had a sudden hoarseness. ‘You see, all this, the past, it was never part of the world I shared with your mother. She was a way of leaving it behind. She didn’t belong here. With her, I didn’t either. And you…well…I can’t make myself feel you’re part of this. You’re too good.’

Amelia made a funny face and squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay, Pops,’

‘But I will take you somewhere. Yes I will. Not Auschwitz. But somewhere. I’ve just remembered. Deaths of a more ordinary kind.’

He was mumbling, talking almost to himself, in the grip of a force that was greater than him. It led him by the hand, so that he seemed to know the way. First south, then into a lane, where he vaguely thought the ramshackle youth centre might once have been a synagogue whose name escaped him, then north along a wide street where the trams clattered and east along Miodowa and under a tunnel across into the New Cemetery. The new Jewish Cemetery that was as old as the 1800’s. His grandfather had told him that. His grandfather was holding his hand. His guide.

Amelia stopped to look at the memorial to the local Holocaust dead by the entrance gate where old tombstones lined a wall, but his grandfather didn’t pause there. He took him into the depths of the graveyard: a dense green, overgrown and shadowy with patches of falling sunlight that shimmered through the tall leafy trees and raked over slabs. They grew alive with movement. In the distance a mist rose from moist vegetation, brooding over moss-covered sandstone, marble and granite. Carved and faded Hebrew inscriptions he couldn’t read indented the tombs. Sometimes German or Polish peeked out at him.

‘It’s this way.’ He heard his grandfather’s voice, but it was his own burbling in the wrong tongue to Amelia, so that he caught himself and had to translate.

They turned and twisted along paths, sometimes dark, sometimes light, little purple and yellow wild flowers spreading to their sides amidst the dense greenery, until they came to a tall marble slab between two pillar scrolls. The name ‘Torok’ engraved in large letters sprang out at them, followed by a family line inscribed in German.

‘This is my mother’s family,’ Bruno murmured.

‘You never told me the name before.’

But she’s not here?’

‘No, she’s not here.’

‘The last person in the family to be buried here was during the First World War.’

‘That’s right. My grandparents aren’t here. No Adolf. No Sarah.’

Amelia said nothing. She picked up some pebbles from the path they had left and carefully placed them on the tomb.

‘Who told you about that?’ he asked.

‘Stones. So the dead don’t leave their tombs to haunt us. And wait peacefully for the Second Coming. I’m not as much of a stranger as you choose to think.’

‘Your great-grandmother would have been proud of you. She was full of such lore. Her husband didn’t have much patience for it.’

‘You never talk about the other side of the family. Your father’s side. The Austrian side.’

‘Moravian, in fact. Another lost country. I didn’t know them. My father, or so the story went, fell out with them. Over politics, I suspect. Or maybe it was religion. He was an adamant atheist. All before my time. So I have no idea what happened to them. They may even have died before the war. He was a good deal older than my mother, though I’ve only just thought about that now.’

They walked slowly side by side, pausing to look at the occasional tomb. She was waiting for him to say more. He didn’t quite know where to begin. He had never thought he would come here again. Not this city, nor this cemetery; and as he stole a glance at his daughter, he wondered again what had driven him. Was it the presage to his own old age, as all the memory commentators said, a move into the past because the present had become less distinct? The blood wasn’t getting through to his frontal lobes. They were shrinking. He needed some of his own as yet untested medicine. Had he come for the stimulus of recognition since pure recall no longer worked as well as it might?

Trite thoughts, he chastised himself. Another way of not talking properly to Amelia.

‘This place was vandalized by the Nazis, I read somewhere. They used the tombs as paving stones for the road to the camp at Plaszow. In November 1942.’

He nodded, pleased that she had made an effort with the history he wouldn’t speak.

‘I’m glad they left the Toroks.’

‘Left them something,’ he heard himself muttering, as if some of that old anger was still intact.

She thrust him a curious glance then stopped abruptly.

‘Look, Pops.’

She was pointing to a tall, narrow, white tombstone that looked more recent than its neighbours and as if it had been pressed out of concrete. It had something like a slate attached to its front. A list of names appeared on it. Amongst them was that of Adolf Torok.

‘What does it say?’ She gripped his hand, a small whispering girl.

He didn’t answer immediately. He read down the list over and over. ‘Disappeared in the Nazi terror’ the inscription at the top noted. None of the names seemed to stand in any relation to each other, except for that. Disappeared. A euphemism for killed in a manner unknown – in the camps, in a street raid, in a random shooting. Death was inventive in wartime. Above Adolf Torok’s name was the epitaph – ‘he helped many’. Below, the inscription noted that he had died at the age of sixty-eight. Younger than Bruno was now.

Bruno gazed at the stone and then into the distance and back again. A shroud obscured the light. The graves had lost their outlines and seemed to be moving in and out of the gloom like square-cut figures on a vast receding chessboard. Forward, back, sideways, lifted by invisible fingers and thrust down again willy-nilly, vertiginously, without rule or reason. He held on to Amelia’s shoulder for balance.

Her voice came from far away, blurring as it moved through gloom. ‘Do you think it’s him?’

He nodded. ‘Could be. It says he died, or rather disappeared, towards the end of 1942, which is probably right.’

‘But we don’t know how.’

‘They didn’t know how.’

Stumbling, Bruno explained that this tombstone had been the gift of someone who had survived and was remembering friends. His grandfather had helped him or her, it seemed, others too. Bruno knew that was true.

He wanted to sit down at the edge of the tomb and put his face in his hands and weep. Weep as he might have done as a small boy, before everything had gone wrong. Before he had grown a thick carapace that didn’t know about tears. Before those deaths.

‘There’s somewhere else I’d like to go. I’d like to take you,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll hire a car. Tomorrow. Or the next day.’

The dead were murmuring to him, talking. He hadn’t visited them for a very long time.