Free The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi Page B

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    Yes, they had become horribly similar. Behind the folds and furrows the years had brought, she and her mother, with those eerie clear blue eyes turned inward, were just two girls – watchful, fearful, yet somehow innocent – still hoping the world would bring them no harm, perhaps even an occasional kindness.
    A sombre cloud had settled over the city with no warning. Moments later a deluge fell on the streets, thick, warm drops like pellets, leaping up where they hit the cobbles. Irena took refuge inside a church, a pretty church with a small baroque dome aflutter with angels and puffball clouds. There was a lingering smell of incense in the air. She kneeled and crossed herself as she had an intense memory of doing in the small country church of her childhood. She offered an unspoken prayer and then lit a candle for her mother

    Two days later, without knowing quite how it had happened, Irena found herself sitting on a train bound for Krakow. It was not the sitting that was bizarre, or the train that was as shabby-genteel as the last one with soft, slightly sagging seats, though the windows had been scrubbed, and at least they could see out. The surprise was who was sitting with her in the compartment. For one therewas Professor Aleksander Tarski. Next to him sat Amelia, gorgeous in jeans and a casual jacket with bits of glass beads on it that caught the light. And opposite them by the window, looking out gravely, as if he might conjure up bits of landscape and bring them in for microscopic examination, was Professor Bruno Lind.
    For once, Irena thought, coming home held out just a little excitement.

5
    Bruno Lind leaned into his seat. The even repetitive rhythm of the rails produced a dream-like somnolence. Greens and browns and blues of varying hues rose and fell before him A herd of spotted cows came into focus only to disappear just as quickly, followed by a regal house with a vaulted dome, small hillside vineyards, and in the mysterious distance, the purple folds of mist-covered mountains, their shapes as inconstant as their constancy. The train might be moving forward, ploughing towards some destination, but the sensation was that of being held in a capsule, one that lulled, produced a hole in time.
    It had been an age since he had spent more than a necessary hour on a train. And those weren’t real journeys. The one before him was.
    He still had no idea why he had succumbed to Amelia’s insistence, coupled with Aleksander Tarski’s charming invitation and Irena Davies’s more diffident persuasion. It felt to him a little as if they were all in cahoots. Certainly, the man and his daughter were keeping up some kind of patter now, which he couldn’t quite bother to tune into. But he could see that Amelia was relaxed. That was good. As for this Tarski, if she had any idea of the thoughts he aroused in Bruno, she would probably have dragged her father back to LA in the flash of a credit card. But there was no need for her to know.
    If he thought about it, the last time he had been on a train journey of any length in Europe must have been in the autumn of 1946. He could barely remember himself then, imagine himself from the inside. His past was inhabited by a stranger bereft of feeling. Though he must have felt something. Must have feltsome hope now that the ghastly war was over. That was what the books said. Liberation. New hope. New beginnings. But if he could conjure up a glimpse of himself, all he could see was a tanned face, an arrogant slit of a mouth and cold blue eyes, eyes that expressed nothing. Except sometimes rage. He had met those eyes in a cracked mirror once or twice. They weren’t his. Had nothing to do with him. There was even something a little mad about them.
    He was eighteen, a lean, hardened and filthy youth who hadn’t changed his clothes in months. A wild youth, who knew about guns and knives and explosives and hatred. Who acted, who sometimes even planned his actions, because, yes, he