The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi

bringing with them great floods of adrenalin and steroids, picked up by the amygdala and the hippocampus , imprinted. Here, inside. In his brain. As if he had lived it himself.
    History wasn’t bunk. It was a long trail of flashbulb memories. Countless details coalescing into received images, tableaux, icons, simply because it was these our synapses registered over and overagain, learned, until the emotion which had made them memorable in the first instance became trite, third-hand, voided. And then entire sequences disappeared into oblivion until they were discovered afresh.
    He forced the racing thoughts away and concentrated on the physical reality of the present.
    His childhood home had been airy, uncluttered, modern. Nothing like this.
    Frau Berndt opened a door into a child’s room and then another and another, a concatenation of doors, and suddenly Bruno had the impression he was running wildly, racing, ducking, pushing one door open and then another, into his sister’s room and then out again and round through another door into his own. Round and round, chased by Stefcia, when Anna was just tiny, a package on a bed. Out of breath, he would nip down behind a chair. Hide and seek. Until Stefcia found him and, laughing, picked him up, called him her little man, he must have been five or six – no, more, more because Anna was there – eight or nine probably. Stefcia tickled him, tickled him until he roared and pleaded with her to stop, and the tears poured from his eyes.
    Now that could only be his own memory.
    ‘You okay, Pops?’
    ‘Yes, yes. Fine. This was my room, I think.’ He looked up, and there, above where his bed had been, tucked into the corner of the high ceiling, was a single figure from what had been a stencilled frieze: a boy drummer, dressed in blue, beating out a marching rhythm all along the walls of his room. What was the song his mother had sung? Sung in Polish? Yes. Something to do with freedom. A horse and freedom. No, no, a little soldier who went off to war with bravery and seven horses and came back with one. Only one… But the words wouldn’t coalesce any more.
    ‘Did I ever tell you my mother used to talk to me in Polish when we were alone? Sing too.’
    ‘In Polish? No. No, you didn’t. How come?’ Amelia was gazing at him intently, as if he had suddenly grown a pair of wings or sprouted fins. ‘Maybe we’ve had enough of this for one day, Pops.
    Let’s go and grab a cup of coffee. Or something stronger. You look as if you could use it.’

    At first they mistook
Philosophie im Boudoir
for a café. But it was a furnishings shop. Salacious sheets and cushion covers were draped over a couch, just a joke’s throw from the Freud house. The only neurologist in history to spawn his own kitsch, Bruno thought, unsure whether he reckoned that was a good or a bad thing.
    They had to turn a corner before they found a place, a sizeable establishment with
Jugendstil
flowers etched into its windows. An old ceiling fan had been pressed into service and gave their conversation a slow, sultry, timeless feel.
    ‘So your mother was Polish?’
    ‘Galician. It’s what the Austrian-ruled regions of Poland were called. Galicia.’
    ‘Like Spain.’
    ‘Like Spain and unlike Spain. Cold and wintry, really, but southern by Polish standards. The lazy south. Anyhow, my mother’s family was from Krakow. And they had a country place as well… Further east, towards what’s now the Ukraine. Borders shifted a lot in that part of the world.’
    ‘You’re telling me. One minute I have an Austrian father, the next he’s turned into a Pole.’
    ‘Does it make any difference?’
    ‘Maybe it does. I don’t know. I’m just beginning to find out.’ She assessed him with her frank gaze. ‘Good coffee. And you should eat something. You’re looking too white. Can’t be right. Gotta get some colour into you’
    Bruno laughed. He loved the banter they had developed about colour. Eve had started them off,