Free The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi

have this on the square and so close to the Shoah monument, don’t you think?’
    Amelia shrugged. ‘What does it say?’
    ‘My Latin’s a bit rusty. Something about Baptism in the Jordan ridding one of sin, disease, evil. Ritual cleansing.’
    ‘Oh, I read about that.’ Bob Wells joined them. ‘The relief describes a pogrom, another great instance of the state using the Jews as scapegoats for various ills. In 1421. Albrecht V, I think it was. He had Vienna’s poorer Jews stripped of the little they possessed and forced them down the Danube on rafts, while the richerones were tortured until they revealed where they’d hidden their wealth. Then they were burned alive. Many chose suicide instead of torture. It’s one of the great historical instances of ethnic cleansing. According to my book.’
    ‘I think I’ve had enough history for one day,’ Bruno said quietly.
    So had Irena. Pyres had leaped up around the square while the man talked. She could almost smell the charred flesh, hear the screaming children.
    She excused herself. ‘I’d forgotten. I’d arranged to meet someone . And to buy a present. I’ve got to get back.’ She looked at her watch, made hasty goodbyes.
    ‘One always forgets things at conferences about memory.’ Andrew Wood threw her a smile that wasn’t altogether reassuring.

    Irena had lied. No one was waiting for her. But she had wanted to get away. Away from these Brits and Americans with their certainties about right and wrong, about Jews and Gentiles, blacks and whites. Had she imagined it or were they all staring directly at her when that Bob Wells was going on about that pogrom almost six hundred years ago?
    The trouble was they didn’t seem to realize every bit of ground here had been the site of some battle or siege or horror. Some plague of rats or locusts. You never walked except to step over bodies. Turks against Poles, against Austrians, Russians against Poles against Turks against Prussians, Hungarians against Romanians against Bulgarians, Lats and Liths and Ruthenians and Moravians and Bohemians and Slovaks and Lemks and Czechs and Croats and Serbs.
    And that wasn’t even to get into the French or Italians or Germans , let alone the Brits and their ships, ships everywhere, unheard of bits of the world. In her school days, they were given names of battles to memorize, whole lists of heroic resistances against invading Turks and Russians and Germans and Austrians and French. And because the Brits had never been occupied, well not since the Normans, they somehow felt superior. As for the Americans, they promptly forgot all those Indians they’d doneaway with and behaved as if they had a monopoly on virtue. That Amelia must know better.
    She was tired. Overreacting. She shouldn’t have left them. But all this effort of concentration after being cooped up with her mother was too much. Her mind had gone to seed, had lost its resilience, its agility.
    She sometimes really thought her mother’s condition was contagious. That she, too, was growing demented. Several days alone in her mother’s presence and the sharp outlines of the real faded, blurred, metamorphosed under the charge of the old woman’s insistent emotion. For several months her mother had been certain that a neighbour was breaking into the house, that he was climbing up onto the roof and lowering himself down a chimney in order to invade her bedroom and her lounge and steal her most precious possessions. She would grip Irena’s arm with the force of panic and breathlessly recount the experience as if a massed raid had taken place. She insisted that the police be called.
    Indeed, one day when Irena was out, the poor woman had called them and Irena had found a bemused policeman comforting her mother when she returned. Irena had, first patiently, and then with growing impatience explained that it was hardly likely that the neighbour would break in, that there was nothing to steal, that he was too fat and drunk to