Free After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Page B

forgetfulness,” the doctor says, “brighten up your synapses. It can’t hurt you.” I see Hannah nodding.
    â€œAll right,” I say, “I’ll try it.” The last thing I want is to seem unreasonable.
    The doctor has pretty hands. I can imagine them stroking my face, soothing me the way you would a crying child. I read a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald once about a man, Benjamin Button was his name, who instead of growing older grows younger until he becomes a baby and floats helplessly away on a river to die. Someone made a movie of it starring Brad Pitt. Maybe I could do an Italian version some day.
    Is this what is happening to me? My wish to be surrounded by children might have been a sort of foreknowing.A wish to become a child again, like the luscious
putti
on the church ceilings with their unashamed penises and gossamer wings—fresh souls. My brief flare-up of sexual energy when I thought about Leila wasn’t a sinking into prurience. It was the life force holding on before it flickers out.
    The doctor isn’t going to stroke my face. Instead she asks me questions. The year, the date, the place where we are now. Then she makes me touch my shoulder with my left hand while moving my right hand towards the window. I have trouble getting it. Clearly the pressure to perform is confusing me.
    â€œI’m going to give you an address,” she says finally, “and I want you to remember it while we do some other things. All right?”
    I nod.
    â€œAndrea Monte, Via Governo Vecchio, 85,” the doctor says. I look at Hannah to see if this is a trick of some sort. Hannah gives me a sad little smile because that was one of the streets that she used to get lost on.
    I check my mind to see if I still have the address she gave me and I do. I think of how I’m going to rattle it back at her with gentle reproof for her suspicion that I couldn’t remember a simple name and address. Meanwhile she gives me some other tests, asking me to touch places on my body. To count backwards, spell backwards. “Do I have to? Do that?” I asked her. “I’ve always had trouble with directional things. Are all these tricks really necessary?”
    â€œYou’ve done very well,” she says. “We’re almost at the end.”
    Then she asked me for the name and address she had given me. It seemed to be on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t capture it even when she gave me hints or multiple choices. She says it’s too early to give a firm diagnosis. The only thing that really seems to bother her is my forgetting the name and address she gave me. I try to recall it now that she’s reminded me what it was and all I remember is that it was theplace where my Hannah got lost. On the way home we stop at the
farmacìa
and order my new medicine.
    I was looking for something on my bookshelf but forgot what I was looking for. Instead a novel falls into my hands. The title is in crimson, the letters drip blood. How odd. I don’t like murder mysteries except Agatha Christie’s, and this author has an unknown name: Ella Erickson. Sounds Swedish. Ah, I see it’s a translation and, looking at the inside flap, I see the book described as the spine-chilling story of a woman and an old man.
    I begin to remember now. They’d been lovers and he’d let a gasoline lamp fall and it killed her baby. I remember thinking it was just an accident: he didn’t mean to do it. But she was determined to avenge her child’s death. When he became infirm and advertised for a home nurse, she took the job and set about to torture him. Ah, yes, he was becoming demented. But still able to understand how much she hates him. One day he tries to escape, tells his visiting daughter that he is being persecuted, that the “nurse” she hired isn’t really a nurse but a woman who wants to destroy him.
    The “nurse” pretends concern that his dementia is