Free Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch Page B

darkness. In July we scattered Anne-Marie’s ashes in the ocean off Fire Island. In late September, we held her memorial service.
    The service was held at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, in the grand rooms of its Millionaires’ Row mansion on Fifth Avenue. Friends and family spoke; then Marvin ran a slide show of photos while a trio of cellist, pianist, and violinist played Beethoven. More friends spoke, and Marvin ended the service with his own memories from the life he shared with Anne-Marie.
    Memories of Anne-Marie would be all we could have of her. We no longer had a future with her to look forward to. Sharing our recollections of time spent with Anne-Marie was part of keeping hold of her, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was there to celebrate her life that afternoon. I didn’t understand the importance of ensuring her remembrance. I only realized three years later, when reading The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, the significance of the sharing of memories. And the danger of not sharing memories at all.
    In The Book of Chameleons , main character Felix Ventura’s profession is to replace the memories of his clients with new memories. Most of his clients use their new memories to support an exalted identity. They are trying to get away from their pasts of poverty and inconsequence in order to move up in the world. Ventura has godlike gifts of re-creation. He molds around each client a new skin, unsheddable and opaque. But not all histories can be traded in and discarded. The past will rise up to be acknowledged: “The smell is still there, the sound of the child crying.”
    A book of fiction, The Book of Chameleons is based on the very real atrocities committed in Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal. Agualusa imagines what would happen if victims and perpetrators sought to forget the horrors and uses his story to underscore the impossibility of such forgetting. By the end of the book, remembrance is the only pathway, painful as it is, to a settlement with the past: “I’m at peace at last. I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing.”
    The day after reading Agualusa’s book, I picked up another book translated from the Portuguese, Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani . Couto is a writer from Mozambique, a country, like Angola, brutally governed during its years as a Portuguese colony. Under the Frangipani tells the story of a murder investigation told from the point of view of a man who is dead but who has taken up residence in the body of the investigator. The dead man cares less about his own death than he does about “killing the world of the past.” He fears that the leaders of Mozambique, having fought for independence, no longer believe in the old African ways, the culture and traditions of their ancestors. Instead, they are rushing to catch up with the West, and allowing the past to be forgotten. They are becoming “people without a history, people who live by imitation.” In contrast, the dead man is regaining memories through the body of the inspector, and he is grateful: “Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.” He remembers the good and the bad, and finds validity for his own life in both. By taking that “return journey”—looking backward—he finds peace.
    When we were growing up, our parents told us bits and pieces about living through World War II in Europe. Our mother grew up in Antwerp and remembers the Germans invading Belgium in May of 1940. Her father was mobilized to fight the Germans, and the whole family moved with him to France, staying with French families, some welcoming and some not so welcoming. My mother remembers walking along a beach in Brittany with her sister when a troop of Germans on motorcycles came roaring through, separating the