The Memory Man Read Free Page B

to stand at the window like that. Waiting for him to come home from school. He would see her and then race up the stairs impatient for the cool gentle hand ruffling his hair, the scent of sweetened cocoa waiting for him on the hob. That day, there had been no racing. He was carried, instead, a small figure wracked by silent sobs and pretending they didn’t exist, though his shoulders heaved. The doctor arrived. Voices were hushed. Except for his little sister, who cried and cried. He remembered that. And Mamusia was all tension beneath the show of calm, as she dabbed at the blood that oozed from his brow.
    The attack on him must have taken place not long before his father had gone. Had been taken, in fact, by two Nazi officers while Bruno was at school. When he asked where he had been taken, no answer came. But in the adults’ whispers, he kept hearing the word ‘camp’, which seemed harmless enough, so he expected his father’s return at any moment. At first, when his mother announced that they were leaving Vienna, he protested stubbornly saying they had to wait for ‘
Vati
’ to come home. Did he feel responsible in some way? Had the forgotten attack on him propelled his fiery father into some mad attempt at retribution?
    He would join them, his mother promised.

    Bruno shifted in his bed with growing restlessness. He shouldn’t have come to this city. That was palpably clear given where he was lying only a few hours after his arrival. Yet the invitation had been so flattering. It had also come just as he was emerging from the cocoon he had inhabited since his wife’s death. Not that he had emerged a butterfly. Far from it. But something about the proposal had stirred his curiosity. Perhaps, without wanting to admit it to himself, it was precisely to revisit those now dim years of early childhood that he had come. His wife, who had anchored him to his Western life, was gone, and her death seemed to bring all those other earlier ones in its train. As if he had neural nets that encoded death for him, and Eve’s had somehow activated the whole system. Then, he was also getting old. And as the novelists always implied when desire goes, memories come. But that wasn’t altogether righteither: it was the chemicals which emotion produced that helped to bind memories in the brain.
    So much they still didn’t know, despite the genetic information. Despite the new technologies with their astonishing speed of calculation that provided those startling images of the brain.
    Maybe he had come here to act as the subject of his own memory experiment. Bruno chuckled to himself. A scientist’s ultimate challenge had always been to test his hypotheses by performing his experiments on himself. If he travelled the byways of his past now, he could assess whether new memories cropped up, and by what they were triggered; see too whether old recollections were altered, and decay had set in. Though he had probably left it all too late: the decay had taken over and he could no longer monitor himself. For instance, he hadn’t remembered that the parental home was on the same street as Professor Freud’s, but as soon as that Davies woman had mentioned it, he recalled his parents’ bringing it up, indeed had an image of his mother talking to a quaintly hatted woman on the street and saying, ‘That was Frau Freud,
Schätzchen.
A kind lady. They live above the butcher’s.’
    But he gave little scientific credence to the Freudian unconscious. It was too elaborate a concept, even in the little he knew of it. Not efficient. As far as he was concerned, to be unconscious was a state, the brain’s way of preserving the body in an emergency. The brain was a voracious consumer of oxygen and glucose. It consumed at ten times the rate of other tissues. Fall down unconscious , become horizontal, and it takes less energy to pump the blood through. Just for a few minutes, mind, otherwise the comedy is quickly over.
    Bruno lay back, altogether