Free The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

get down the chimney, that reason dictated otherwise. But her mother’s nocturnal fear spread through the house and gathered in dark corners.
    One sleepless night it leaped out at her, creaked across floorboards, produced ominous shadows that fluttered wildly past curtains and pounced on her, so that she thought she would suffocate. She was certain that a burglary was in progress. Unable to get up or reach the phone, she just managed to burrow under bedclothes. She tried not to breathe. When first light finally came, she tiptoed out of bed to see what had been taken, what mess had been left. Nothing had been touched. She had grown as demented as her mother.
    Yes, contagion.
    On another occasion, her mother had talked of a Jana, who was coming to visit on the weekend. The best china had to be broughtout, something special prepared, because she was a dear, dear old friend. Her mother, who rarely anticipated anything but disaster seemed so happy at the prospect that Irena put extra effort into preparations, bought special food, a good bottle of wine. She wanted to make her mother happy. On the appointed evening, no one came. Irena realized that she had been completely taken in by a fantasy, or a memory, or a hallucination, whereas her mother, when it came to the evening in question, had forgotten all about Jana’s supposed visit.
    Yes, Irena told herself, she now inhabited a world of shifting shapes, where the real and the imaginary blended with disquieting effect. It was likely that the story her mother had told her all those years ago when she hadn’t suspected Alzheimer’s or senility or anything at all was as demented as all the rest. Why else, having kept it secret for some forty years, should the woman suddenly decide to orphan her, to tell her that her father wasn’t her father at all, to tell her when all the relevant parties except her mother were probably dead and buried? It was an act of maternal aggression that could be considered certifiable.
    Lock her up. Lock her up, a voice in Irena now raged. Yet Irena had accepted it all, at first. She had added a romantic veil and a knight on horseback to her mother’s pedestrian image; had readjusted her sense of herself too, had even made some cursory inquiries about a man called Tarski, and then gone back with a new tale to tell Anthony in England. In the light of her life then, filled with future potential, what did all those stories of long ago matter? She wasn’t really interested in distant, dusty fathers buried in Polish soil.
    And then since her return to Poland, it had all begun to niggle at her. Now that she could no longer trust any of her mother’s words, it was as if the dementia reached backwards and arched over the years. Every bearing she had grew wobbly, uncertain. Why hadn’t she grilled her mother sooner? She had left everything too late. Why hadn’t she paid better attention to all those stories of her mother’s early life? And whose daughter was she, anyway? Her assumed father’s: Witek Kanikow, the only father she had known, a kind enough man, solid, reliable, a railway engineer whoshied away from rows or even debates, left those to his fierier wife and daughter and seemed happy enough simply to get by?
    Or was there really someone else?
    She sometimes felt, as she heard her demented mother shuffling along the floorboards of the small house they shared some twenty minutes from the centre of Krakow, that they were two of a kind. While her mother wandered through the cobwebs – or was it plaques and tangles? – of her disintegrating brain, she, Irena, dreamed gossamer dreams, created fantasies of rescue involving rich and interesting fathers and brothers, even sisters, who would whisk her into a new life – or at the very least, help with her mother and provide an anchor against loneliness.
    Now that it was clear there would be no children of her own, in her most secret core she wished herself a new family in which she could feel at