The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

always sensitive to the slights Amelia might suffer, acknowledging her difference, but not wanting to make too much of it. Colour, race needn’t be an ultimately defining characteristic, she would argue with a rebellious teenage Amelia, who had abandoned all her white friends for black,though she didn’t feel at home with them either. Colour wasn’t the whole of her identity. She was also a woman, the child of middle-class professionals, a lover of books, a champion swimmer, a layabout with the world’s untidiest room. And when Pops shouted at her, she knew full well it had nothing to do with her being black and everything to do with lip; just as when she shouted at him, he didn’t label her anti-Semitic – it might not be the Jewish bit of him, whatever that was, that she was railing at. As for feeling at home, home was what you turned it into. And so it went on, until adolescence and Amelia’s marriage were over, and they reached the age of jokes.
    Then, too quickly, Eve was gone: Eve who had been his cherished companion for all those years, first in Boston, then San Diego, then New York, then back to Cambridge, where the end had come. Too soon. The cancer had eaten her up, until she said to him at last: ‘That’s it. I’m about to lose my most precious sense. Please, please get them to up the morphine. I want to go smiling.’ He didn’t know if she had somehow managed to convince one of her colleagues, but she went soon after that, faded into her pain and out. Leaving him and Amelia clutching at each other, utterly bereft.
    ‘A penny for those black thoughts that always make you so pale.’
    ‘The furniture. It got to me.’
    ‘It wasn’t where you left it?’
    ‘That too.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’
    ‘I know. I can’t talk about it yet.’
    ‘Okay. But I’m not leaving you. Not leaving you until I’ve heard a little more about this Polish mother. A lot more, in fact. I need to know, Pops. Really, I do. I never talked to Eve enough about her family, and then she upped and vanished on me. Parents are altogether unreliable, that way.’ She gave him a smile, half rueful, half persuasive.
    ‘Maybe we should go to Poland too, while we’re so close. You owe me a story, Pops. A big one, I imagine. A history. To think you’ve kept it from me even after I became a half-orphan.’ Sheshook her head in mock mournfulness, which did nothing to hide the real feeling beneath. ‘Even after I took on the faith. Well, a bit of it.’
    It was true. Some years back – for reasons he didn’t really understand, except that people did these things in the mysterious country that America continued to be to him whenever he paused to consider it – Amelia had decided to join a temple. She had decided to become Jewish, she told him with a lazy smile, because the Jews knew deep down about the workings of prejudice.
    There, Bruno had to acknowledge, she had a distinct point. And if he, himself, knew little of belief or faith, he had an intimate acquaintance with the harsher end of prejudice. Beatings, killings, terror, the inner tremblings of disguise, these were not subjects he had ever before taken up with her. Now it looked as if he was going to have to, though he still didn’t feel they were matters that he knew how to broach – even with himself.
    He had spent so long dealing with memory as chemistry that having to confront his own past as narrative, whatever the ruptures and blanks, presented itself as a daunting task.

4
    Irena Davies tiptoed quietly to the back of the conference room and slipped out. She’d had enough for one day. Probably enough altogether. Certainly more than enough notes to write an article from. She now knew that the cerebellum and the basal ganglia – which was affected in Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s Chorea – were responsible for controlling tacit or automatic memory, habits and skills, but not memory of facts and events, which was a function of the cortex and that