The Memory Man Read Free

vividly remembered the destruction of the Twin Towers as a real event, whereas in fact they had only witnessed it virtually. Did the brain distinguish between registering real death from real-time death, as death on television was oddly called? The answer probably lay in the level of fear – recurring fear.
    It was soon after the
Anschluss
that his father had disappeared. He had never returned. Bruno was no longer sure he had missed him at the time. Not right away in any case. There were his mother and his sister to tend to. With his father gone, he was the man of the house, self-important despite his short trousers. He revelled in the new responsibility. But later, much later, when he was already in his forties, older than his father had been at the time of his disappearance, an acute sadness had taken him over. It was when the San Diego lab had won that huge investment and he had all at once recalled – for the first time – that it was his father who had first shown him a drawing of a nerve cell, so intricately branched that it trapped the eye like a lure.
    Early spring, it had been. They had all spent the day in the country. A family picnic. At one point he and his father had lain under a tree together and looked up, marvelling at the intricate fretwork of boughs and branches, not yet in leaf, through which the sky glowed a deep clear blue. When they got home that evening, his father had pulled a thick book from his library shelves and shown him a delicate drawing that repeated the spread of branches and boughs. This, his father had told him, is a neuron, a cell in yourbrain. Bruno had gazed at the spun-sugar delicacy of the drawing: a mysterious tracery that his father told him mirrored the complexity of human thought.
    Yes, it was his father who had infected him with the excitement of science, had even way back then talked of sending him to the technically progressive
Realschul
instead of the more classical Gymnasium. Perhaps it was he who had spoken of science as a search for principles of law and order in the universe. Perhaps not. Bruno no longer knew.
    He wasn’t looking at the palace any more. He was walking, walking quickly, his summer jacket ruched, his hands balled into fists. Walking with his head down, like an angry lad or an absentminded don. He walked past chestnut-lined gardens and statuary, bronze horsemen and flower beds, past regal arches and towering spires, past a roll-call of names: Bankgasse, Lowellstrasse, Schottengasse, Warhingerstrasse… How he arrived at the particular street with its uniform stone buildings, he didn’t know. His body had taken him, and it was the sudden slope that alerted him. Memory triggered by his legs along ancient pathways to the cerebellum. He was staring up, up past decorated stonework, at a second-floor window which was home. The curtain fluttered. A woman appeared. Her soft, gold-brown hair curled slightly at the shoulders. Her summer dress was flowered and as she reached up to unlatch the window, her bare arm glimmered smooth in the sunlight.
    ‘Mami. Mamusia,’ his lips formed round the syllables.
    Warmth coursed through his veins, a happy anticipation. He waved, prepared to race into the courtyard and up the stairs.
    And then there was a kick and thud at the back of his knees. He crumbled. The building heaved and turned upside down. He started to shout, shouted louder, but the shouting didn’t reach his mouth that had gone bone-dry. The screams exploded in his head instead, one explosion with each kick and thump – in his stomach, his groin, his back, his face. Each punch came with the punctuation of vile curses he wasn’t allowed to use. All of them ending in the word ‘
Jude
’ – ‘Jew’ until the taste of blood was the taste of that word, and the world ended.
    *
    He hurt everywhere. His eyelids were too heavy to move. But he heard her voice, soft with meaning. There was a smell too, which tickled his nose. Antiseptic, a pomade for his cuts and