The Memory Man Read Free Page A

bumps. She was talking to someone. Talking about Nazi thugs and a beating endured. Talking to his father. His father was back. A lump came into his throat. He forced tears away and eyes to open.
    Bruno focussed through harsh glare. Focussed with difficulty as the kaleidoscope twisted and turned through time. He was in a cubicle of a room. Various medical appliances crowded around him. Strangers stood at the foot of his bed. A man in a white coat. A doctor. Not his father. And a woman, a woman with clear blue hooded eyes. She met his.
    ‘He’s awake, Doctor. Awake.’ She was speaking in English. Careful but colloquial English, with only the hint of an accent. ‘What a relief.’
    The doctor was taking his pulse and murmuring something about possible concussion.
    ‘I saw it all,’ the woman said. ‘I was on my way to visit the Freud Museum and I saw it.’
    Bruno made a croaking sound.
    ‘Yes. Yes. A youth on a skateboard. Wearing one of those peaked caps they all turn backwards and a baggy sweatshirt with a skull and bones on it. He crashed into you. Just up the street. Didn’t mean to, I don’t think. You stepped backwards, and he couldn’t stop. Nasty. He got scared when you toppled, and he whizzed away. Then this woman rushed out of the building. She’d seen it too. From her window. She called an ambulance. We were so worried. And I recognized you. From the hotel. Someone pointed you out. Someone who admires you. Professor Lind, isn’t it?’
    He signalled agreement and raised himself in the bed. His body creaked but moved. Nothing broken. That was good. Just this fog in his head to get rid of. And too many ghosts. Too many dreams in this city of dreams. He concentrated on the woman. Yes, he recognized her now. She was the one who had called out the name. But she couldn’t know how it had affected him. Like a trigger aimed at an unused part of his brain.
    ‘I’m Irena Davies, by the way.’
    ‘And you’re a neuroscientist?’
    There was perhaps too much gruffness or scepticism in his unused voice, since she laughed with a lilt that turned into nervousness.
    ‘It’s that obvious, is it? No, no. I’m a…’
    ‘Not obvious, no. It was just that you’d mentioned…’
    ‘I see. Freud. Not your kind of neuroscience.’
    He demurred, would have added something, but the doctor intervened.
    ‘You should be still. Very quiet. Nothing is broken, but we must check…’ He tapped his own head. ‘You rest now.’
    ‘Yes, you took quite a fall. Bumped your head. I’ll go back and alert the organizers. They’ll be devastated. We’ll all be… Are there any messages you’d like me to convey?’
    When he didn’t answer, she hurried on, ‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow, if you like. Hope you feel better quickly, Professor Lind.’
    She slipped away, and he closed his eyes again, happy to be alone. Happier still, perhaps, to be relieved of the burden of speech giving. He had made far too many in his time. They would find someone perfectly adequate to stand in for him.
    Funny how he had altogether forgotten that attack in front of the childhood apartment until this afternoon with its painful near repetition. Forgotten because so many worse events had come in its wake, displacing it in a sequence of horrors. It must have been the physical act of falling which had awoken the young Nazi thugs who had leaped on him in 1938. No, no…that wasn’t quite right. It was the whole associative sequence, this city, the street, the woman bending towards the window, one thing after another, a whole series of cues activating the neural networks to give him the memory again.
    The city acted on him like Penfield’s electric probe, all those years ago in Montreal, when he had watched the great doctor operating on his epileptic patients, their skulls unwrapped to his prodding. As the probe moved across different areas of the brain, they re-enacted their forgotten pasts for him, smelling it, speaking it.
    Yes, his mother used