The flicker of candlelight gave Irena’s small dining room, with its assortment of good prints and drawings, better gold-rimmed china and sparkling white cloth, a romantic glow. In the circumstances, it hardly seemed appropriate. There was no romance in the air. Not the teeniest little bit of it, Amelia thought, even if you got down on your hands and knees and searched under the table to where it might have sunk in fear of rearing its charm. What they had was one silent and sweetly demented woman who had not removed her weird blue eyes from Bruno’s face throughout the entire evening.
He, on the other hand, was in one of his moods, by turn abstracted and curmudgeonly. He had barely uttered a word all evening, and when he did look up from his plate – which couldn’t swallow the untouched Chinese takeaway – he seemed as absent as the woman at his side. Maybe Polish-Chinese wasn’t his thing, though she didn’t think that was it.
Had she been wrong to induce him to come here, to go through all this chasing of lost souls? Today had been too much for him: that was clear. Too much for her too, if she thought about the coldly brutal murders he had conjured up, the dead woman who might have been a grandmother to her. The poor dead child.
Now that he had started to talk, she recognized her own ambivalence. She had wanted to hear, wanted to know, but she also wanted to block her ears to the horror. It wrapped itself round you like a dirt- and lice-infested coat, at once too heavy to wear and too heavy to throw off. It made the world so sorry a place. That whole deadly history of race-hatred and race-murder. With its own quota of slavery, as Irena had underscored for her, though no one bothered to pay for the train-transported folk at the point of arrival.
It was probably because all that was in his bones that she always felt Bruno understood her so well. He knew intimately what it was like to enter a room preceded by your skin colour or the length of your nose. He knew about the murderous logic of appearances that meant that you walked into a wall of stereotyping prejudices well before you began to exist as an individual. He had learned to hide bits of himself, to use disguise, which wasn’t something she could do as effectively, though both of them knew how to disguise pain. The difference was he had lived within a terrifying regime that officially made race a killing attribute. She hadn’t had to confront that, not personally.
For that she thanked her lucky stars.
In her first day here, she had done some quick online research on Polish history and had been interested to find that of the pre-war Polish population, Jews had made up some ten per cent, just slightly less than the percentage of Blacks in the US. At various points through the centuries, Poles had also effectively instituted various principles of multicultural equality. But the war years had obliterated all that. Obliterated millions of people too.
So she probably shouldn’t have entreated Bruno to re-enter his own killing fields. It had been selfish of her to want to know. But the fear that he would disappear before she had a grasp on his prior life, had taken hold of her ever since he had left America for Britain. Though selfishness wasn’t the whole of it.
Over Christmas, which she had spent with him in London, Bruno had seemed in a bad way. She could hear him tossing and turning through the night in the room next door and occasionally calling out in panic in some incomprehensible language that had turned out to be this one. She was no Freud, but she knew when a guy was unsettled, even if that guy was her dear old dad. And she had really hoped that revisiting the damaging past would help. From the look on his face now, it had certainly not achieved that. If she thought it would do any good, she would throw her arms around him and drag him home this very minute.
Amelia’s gaze moved round the table. Irena. The woman had felt remote at first, maybe even a little contemptuous. But she liked her now. There she was doing her hard-working best to keep people’s spirits up, which meant chattering nervously or dramatically to cover up the gaps and failings in everything and everyone else. A little like some party organizer who had taken on the responsibility for everyone’s life and was adamantly going to make it cheerful. Not cheerful in an American way, of course. But at least amusing, which could entail some scathing ironies or mock theatrics.
She wondered why she always had the feeling Irena was hiding something. Maybe it was just the extent of her mother’s madness, but Amelia had also begun to think that hiding might be one way of simply being yourself around here. You never knew who might be watching and tell on you. Her father had a bit of that.
Worst of all there was Aleksander, who had somehow contrived not to meet her eyes once since they had sat down. At least she knew what that was about. It was about her announcement that she would have to go home either tomorrow or the next day. She had told him while they were driving to and fro in search of Irena’s mother. He hadn’t taken it the way she had hoped. Hadn’t protested or asked her to prolong or said he would zoom right over and visit her in LA. He had only hunched his shoulders and gone quiet, his face more hangdog than ever. As if she were already gone and he was mourning her departure. The man had a genius for melancholy.
But then he was probably right. This was no place for a long-legged black gal who looked less at home in these streets than a prowling tiger inside a Carmelite convent. The nuns were all lined up, looking too. No, that wasn’t accurate. Nuns were the only blacks she had seen around here. And that condition certainly wasn’t what drew her to this country. No, the whole situation was utterly impossible. If she hadn’t managed to make things work with a black man close to home, she could hardly make things work with a white, and a foreigner to boot.
She looked at Bruno, as if he could read her thoughts. She knew the lecture he would give her, if only he liked Aleksander. She knew it from beginning to resolute end. He would point out that skin and race and all those things one was born with didn’t matter, not ultimately, not conclusively… After all, the brain changed throughout life, was constantly evolving in response to experience and environment. Even clones would have individual configurations of neuronal connections that mirrored their personal experience.
But it was clear that Bruno hadn’t taken to Aleksander. So there would be no lecture.
Amelia took a sip of the indifferent wine and imagined herself trying to live in a tidy little house like this one, cooking dinners for Aleksander, waiting for him to come home from the lab…
The retrograde fantasies made her laugh in self-mockery. She hid the laugh in a cough. She had never, never imagined herself doing that for any man anywhere in the world. Impossible. And she’d never learn the language with all its soft slurring, all those rather flirtatious hesitations that Irena used. So she wouldn’t be able to work, even if there was a job for her to do. Which was probably a bigger daily problem than race.
No, Aleksander was right. There was no point even discussing it. A little holiday fling. Soon to be forgotten.
He raised his eyes and met hers. The longing in them. No, not soon to be forgotten. She had fallen hard. It wasn’t only the planes of his face and those soft deep-set eyes with the expression of a serious teddy bear. It wasn’t only the quality of his appreciation: the slow step-by-step nature of his approach to her, as if each moment on the path to love gave off its own sweetness that had to be savoured. It wasn’t even that everything wasn’t shadowed by a sense of performance, a kind of baseline competitiveness that engendered more and more from both of them so that life became a question of winning or losing, though you were never sure quite what and simply got exhausted in the process. Aleksander knew how to be still.
She sighed. She hadn’t realized it was so vocal until everyone lifted their eyes to her, even old Pani Marta, who murmured ‘Pretty Lady’ so that Amelia felt called upon to smile broadly. In that smile her spirits lifted just a little.
If only Bruno could be prevailed upon to do his bit and call in some favours. Then Aleksander would eventually be brought a little closer to home. She needed to see him on her own turf so that she could ground her perceptions. And those feelings that were flying up all over the place and out of control. But Bruno had decided not to like him. And it didn’t even feel like his ordinary hesitation towards any man she came up with. Maybe he thought this was all a little over-determined. A scientist. A Pole. No, Bruno didn’t think like that, just acted it.
She wished her mother were around. Eve could always cajole him and make him see what he was blind to. She missed her.
Probably Bruno thought Aleksander was only interested in her because of what Bruno could do for him. A scientific fortune-hunter. That would be like him, though there was nothing really wrong with fortunes in this case. Yet she sensed there was more. It had to do with that impenetrable tangled matter Bruno was carrying around with him and probably came down to a prejudice against Poles. She couldn’t blame him, really, but she wished it could be otherwise. She would work on him. Work on him when he was a little more present than he was now.
‘You know, Professor Tarski,’ Irena was saying, ‘quite a few letters arrived at the Tygodnik Powszechny in response to the article.’
‘Tarski,’ Pani Marta said in eerie echo. ‘Aleksander…’ But she was looking towards Bruno and getting all agitated. Her fingers worked away at her buttons.
Irena handed her a glass of water. She pushed it aside, inadvertently spilling it over her cardigan.
‘So sorry,’ Irena said. Her voice quivered a little. ‘It’s been a long day for her. I had better get her to bed.’
With low soothing murmurs of the kind mothers used to their children, she led Pani Marta away.
Bruno got up too, paced the length of the small room, pausing to examine the array of prints and drawings that hung on the walls. That left her and Aleksander looking at each other uncomfortably with nothing to say that they could say in front of her father, so she got up as well and started to pile the dishes and make desultory conversation.
‘That’s a good charcoal.’ She looked over Bruno’s shoulder at a drawing he was studying. It showed an old, rather handsome house, half-hidden by trees. It was the trees that were good. An invisible storm had made the foliage swirl and shake.
‘Yes,’ he said absently.
With a shrug she took the plates towards the kitchen.
‘I think I’ll go and give Irena a hand with her mother.’
‘You do that. She’ll appreciate it.’ Amelia called after him, wondering again whether he was developing a soft spot for the woman. Irena treated him with great consideration, a careful mixture of respect and admiration. But then she treated Aleksander like that too. Who knew? Who knew anything in this strange country?
Amelia, piling dishes into the sink, suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder. She shivered. What was it that made skin so susceptible to one touch and not another? Was it because she had known that about Aleksander from the moment they first shook hands, that she had really persuaded Bruno to make this journey. No, no. She mustn’t be that cruel to herself.
‘I wish…’ Aleksander’s voice was soft and wondered off on a note of such pure longing that she turned into his embrace despite the water dripping from her fingers. The kiss felt as illicit as his erection. The kitchen was so neat and tiny, her father a matter of a brittle wall away. As if she were an ardent teenager again. Though now she had a clearer picture of what she might want. Not that it seemed any more attainable.
‘I wish you could stay. Or that I could come to you,’ Aleksander was whispering. ‘Maybe after this run of experiments…’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. So sorry.’ Irena’s eyes were vast with embarrassment as they met her own over Aleksander’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t mean… I’ll… I was just getting a glass of… I’ll come back.’
‘No, please.’ Amelia barely held back a giggle. ‘Please, Irena. I’ll get you a glass. Shall I make some coffee too? We need it, I think.’
‘Yes, yes. Good idea.’
Irena stood there, head lowered, then looked up abruptly. ‘Your father is quite extraordinary with my mother. Better than any of the doctors. Better than I am. He’s so gentle. It’s as if…as if he knows that to get her attention you have to touch her. I’d never quite realized it. But it’s true. Yes. And she focuses on what he says. She doesn’t wander so much.’
She seemed to be trying to communicate something special. Amelia smiled at her. ‘Leave him with her and come back to us. Maybe he’ll work a miracle. I suspect he’s always had a way with the ladies.’ She winked at Irena, all the while holding on to Aleksander’s hand.
‘Yes. Yes.’ Irena was now looking up at Aleksander. ‘I need to say something to you. I need to clear the air.’
Amelia watched her walk away. A sudden suspicion filled her. Had she quite innocently walked into an already burgeoning love affair and somehow broken it up? That’s what Irena was hiding. No, no. She would have realized, wouldn’t she? Or were the cues so different here that she understood nothing at all?
She hurried to make coffee, could only find some instant then heard her phone ring while she put the kettle on the hob.
‘Let me.’
Aleksander took over. She switched off her phone and watched his gestures. They were precise, instinctively accurate. Did he already know this kitchen? Or was she watching the movements of a large man accustomed to small spaces?
‘May I invite you back to my place later?’
She met the plea on his face. They had only been together in hotels: some good, some ghastly, but always impersonal. Places for unconsidered passion. Despite the sense of slowness, it had all happened so quickly. And she hadn’t been to his apartment yet. Only his lab. Would there be unpleasant secrets hidden away in the bedclothes? No, no, she hoped not. And the invitation was a sign. She nodded.
‘Oh no. Please don’t. Here, here.’ Irena was back. She found a tray and quickly placed everything on it, then ushered them to the table. Guests really shouldn’t behave as informally as they had been. ‘Please,’ she said again.
They took their places. Irena’s strained face threw a hush over them. She turned to Amelia first. ‘I don’t mind you hearing this, Amelia. But please don’t think me mad. It’s just that I need to know. Need to clear the air, as I said.’
She stared at the flickering candelabrum then got up again, too restless to sit.
‘Aleksander…’ She paced, refused to meet his eyes.
‘Oh do sit, Irena. He’s not that frightening.’ Amelia tried to lighten the atmosphere. She wasn’t sure she had succeeded.
‘Of course. Of course. The thing is…’ Irena stopped and began again in a great rush, as if she were overcoming a barely surmountable hurdle. ‘The thing is that some years ago, before my mother was visibly ill, she told me that my father wasn’t my father. I mean the man I had always thought was my father, Witek Konikow, wasn’t really that at all. My real father was somebody quite different. Somebody called Aleksander Tarski.’
‘What?’ Amelia couldn’t hold back her surprise.
Aleksander said nothing. He was standing there, somewhat rigid.
Amelia looked from one to the other of them. Bewilderment coursed through her. Wasn’t Aleksander much too young to be Irena’s father, since she was older than Amelia? She shook herself, realized that Irena was talking about another generation.
‘So you mean…?’
‘I don’t know quite what I mean.’ Irena’s voice held a sob in suspension. ‘I left it all too late, you see. Back then, when my mother first told me, I wasn’t all that interested. I thought it was a kind of joke, really. Something to make my English friends giggle about. I was living in England, which made everything seem different in any case. But now I’d like to know. If my mother still remembered names back then, if she wasn’t yet demented, it could just be that Aleksander’s uncle was my father. Though if he died in the Warsaw Uprising, as I think you said while we were travelling, then his sperm would have had to have been frozen, and the whole thing is completely lunatic. As I suspect it is. Either that or I’m even older than I am.
‘But I have to ask because, well, because I’ve been thinking about it so much. It’s…well, it’s really why I sought you out in the first place, to be brutally frank. I’m no science journalist. Though I’ve learned a lot. I enjoyed it. Meeting you. And Professor Lind, as well.’
She had started to cry in the midst of this, and Amelia put her arm round her shoulder. ‘Don’t be so upset, Irena. I understand. I understand how one has to know. How uncomfortable it all is.’
‘I thought… Well, I thought if she saw you, Aleksander – you said you looked like your uncle – that she might just recognize you. But I don’t think she did. So I don’t know why I’m saying all this. Except that maybe you still have some relatives you could ask. Because I’d like to find out. No one’s altogether clear about who was killed during the Uprising, so maybe in fact your uncle lived on. Went back to the countryside until the war was over, as so many did. I don’t know. Maybe I’d just like some family.’
The tears were streaming now and the plea in her voice brought them to Amelia’s eyes too. She found a hankie and passed it to Irena. It reminded her. Reminded her how upset she’d been all those years back when she went to see her birth mother. The awkwardness of it. The sense of abjection. As if one wanted something one wasn’t even sure existed. The reparation of some lost unconditional love. But maybe it wasn’t love from that particular person. More like love from some idealized being one had dreamed up.
It was all so strange. The way memory was so crucial to who one was, the very foundation on which identity was built, yet that crucial bit of one’s identity – who one’s birth parents were, even if one had lived with them for some years – was something memory couldn’t deal with. You simply forgot. In those early years of a child’s life, when everything was being learned, memories of that kind weren’t laid down. Not so that you could recognize the person later. So bizarre. Maybe birth parents didn’t really count for much unless they hung on in there until speech kicked in. Genes: yes. But since as her father kept telling her we all shared some ninety-eight percent of our DNA with chimps, not to mention some forty percent with a banana, what was a little matter of a gene or two between humans?
Yet here was Irena, desperate to know. As she had been.
‘What can I say?’ Aleksander was staring at Irena, as if he were trying to place a grid over her features. ‘There are some photographs. Of my uncle, I mean. We could show them to your mother.’
‘Do I look at all like him?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m told he looked a lot like me. But that was by my grandmother, who had a vested interest.’
‘And were there ever any stories which cast doubt on the timing of his death?’
It was Aleksander’s turn to pace. ‘No, I don’t think so. The stories came in dribs and drabs, of course. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Resistance but a nationalist, which might account for that. He lived in Warsaw and rarely visited during the war years unless he was on some kind of mission. But as my grandmother would have it, he came to see her in July of 1944, just before the Uprising, and he was burning with the excitement of it. Apparently, she tried to hold him back, get him to stay with her, because she had a feeling that she would never see him again. Her intuitions were proved right. She never did. A message came from one of the members of his group in October of ’44 to say that he had died in Warsaw, died heroically. He remained her hero. She would recount his exploits over and over again, while my father’s war experiences were never spoken of. Not until we children prised them out of him. He took his mother’s view. He didn’t count for much. Anyhow, there was never any other account given of my uncle’s death during my childhood.’
Amelia took one look at Irena’s disappointed face and burst out: ‘I’m sure he’d gladly have you as a cousin, in any case, Irena. I know I would.’
Was it really truth that mattered so much in these cases? she wondered. Even if one was adamant about discovering it. She was no longer sure. She wanted to give Irena a hug, but the woman was all prickly tension now.
‘By the way, my uncle was always referred to as Pawel. That was his first name. My father and mother preferred his middle name, Aleksander, so gave me that.’
‘So that’s that.’ The tears welled up in Irena’s eyes. ‘Died too soon and wrong name.’
‘Tarski isn’t an uncommon name.’ Aleksander tried to be helpful. ‘And people took on false names during the war. Particularly the partisans. Maybe my uncle chose to be known as Aleksander.’
This last attempt at reassurance seemed to make Irena even more despondent.
Amelia intervened. ‘Is there any one else in your family one could ask?’
Aleksander thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘No, my mother died last year. Though…’ He gave Amelia a quick furtive glance. ‘Before he died, my father talked at length to my former wife. She loved all those family stories, family trees. Probably because of our son… I never really listened. You could, of course, contact her.’
‘No, no.’ Irena’s eyes were veiled in sadness. ‘It’s too silly, really. I’ve made enough of a mountain of it.’
‘No you haven’t,’ Amelia heard herself say. ‘If you’re not satisfied, girl, you go on and pursue it. Ask more questions. Get the bedding off. Air those ancient mattresses.’ She laughed. ‘You know how many children are born on the wrong side of the marital sheets? Some six out of ten of us, depending on whose statistics you decide to believe.’
‘No, no,’ Irena protested. ‘It’s not a matter of illegitimacy. At least, I don’t think it is. I don’t mind about that at all. It’s just that I’d like to know. And I don’t know why I think I’ll find a satisfactory answer. It’s not as if anything else in life is clear. Well, not the way things are clear under Aleksander’s microscopes.’
She was right, Amelia thought. At least about this place. In the Californian light, in the scripts she handled there weren’t as many shadows, as many textures, as many uncertainties. And the histories had been wiped out, left behind in places like this for others to worry over, so that America could concentrate on the future. Or just not concentrate.
She watched Aleksander, wondered about that former wife of his. He didn’t really want Irena to contact her. The woman still counted in some way. Did her ex count too? Probably, to sensitive external eyes, though she thought he didn’t count at all. She never thought about him. But he must have helped to shape her, produce those diminished expectations, that facade of not giving a damn. Which is why she should make more of an effort with Aleksander, not less. He was reading the remains of a second skin she had grown, a hard, laughing one.
‘You could always,’ Amelia said, knowing as she said it that it was altogether the wrong thing to bring up, ‘you could always both have a DNA test done. It would probably come up with a relationship.’
‘No. Certainly not.’ Irena came as close to snapping as Amelia had ever heard her.
‘Why DNA tests?’ Bruno had just come back into the room.
He looked exhausted, Amelia thought. They should get him back to the hotel. It had been a long day. A very long one for him. Too many ghosts. They had eaten the pounds off him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing.’
‘Irena thinks she may be related to Aleksander through a father her mother only revealed to her a few year’s back. But Aleksander says he doesn’t think so.’ Amelia explained quickly about the Warsaw uncle, his death, the name.
‘I see.’ Bruno gave Aleksander a bizarre look then eased himself into his chair and played with the small glass of vodka in front of him before downing it in a single gulp. ‘I owe you all an apology. You too, Aleksander. And Pani Marta.’
‘Was she all right? Shall I go in to her?’ Irena asked.
‘No, no. I don’t think it’s necessary.’ He smiled at her with a touch of sadness. ‘You must try not to worry so, Irena. I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but death is inevitable. And it has its own logic. Pani Marta is comfortable.’
A shiver crept up Amelia’s spine. She wasn’t sure what had caused it. Was it the way Bruno and Irena were looking at each other? She wanted to clutch at Aleksander’s hand, but he too seemed far away. Maybe, as she had half suspected all along, Bruno planned to inflict a stepmother on her, though she was well past the age of mothers of any degree. Eve would have wanted him to be happy. But she wouldn’t have persuaded him here as Amelia had done, back to the terrain his restless ghosts inhabited. Eve didn’t believe that if you put a narrative to things, they ceased to torment you. Or if she did, she had never told Amelia or ever felt it necessary to persuade Bruno here.
Or was it that the moment had never been right before?
Amelia wondered if Bruno’s nightmares would stop after this visit. Perhaps not. He looked more haunted than ever. And he was saying something she couldn’t quite grasp.
‘So your mother told you that you were related to Aleksander Tarski?’ His voice was so soft she had to strain. ‘It’s not altogether impossible.’ He paused. ‘Yes, yes. I owe you all some explanations.’
He got up to pace, his hand rifling his hair then clenching into a tight fist behind his back.
Amelia rushed to his side. ‘You don’t have to give us any explanations, Pops. You don’t owe us anything.’
He met her gaze with his steady blue one. ‘Come here, Amelia. Come and sit beside me on the sofa. This may take a while. I do have some debts, you know. I think I may owe Irena’s mother my life. Yes.’
He looked up at the charcoal drawing with its heavy shadows and stormy foliage. ‘Plato asked: can the same man know and also not know that which he knows? The answer is certainly yes. And you don’t need a brain lesion to make it so.’
He paused. He was still looking at the picture. ‘I’m not sure what I recognized first. That drawing. Or maybe it was her voice. Husky, yet somehow precise. Or the gestures. Those large hands with their small neat motion. You know,’ he looked at them all with an air of wonder, ‘I really think I’d all but forgotten that period. Or not remembered it. I needed the trigger. The stimulus of those hands and the murmur. The murmur of, “Little Cousin”.’