The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi

attacked him. They were lashing back at him these flashbacks, lashing out. They didn’t want to be kept back. People running. Crowds. Children staring. Processions. Whips. Marching. Marching. He speeded them up, sent them on their way. Go away.

    ‘You don’t see eye-to-eye with Penfield, then?’ Aleksander brought him back.
    ‘Was I suggesting that? No, no. He was brilliant. He and Milner, after all, led us to discover the strategic role of the hippocampus in laying down long-term memories. Intuitively, I think he was on the right track. No, I was thinking of something else.’ He shook himself into the present. ‘As you know, there’s so much that still remains unexplained. Biochemically, above all. It’s a question of mapping plus much more. Penfield was a great surgeon, by the way. I’m not. I ended up working on the eighth floor. Research. I don’t know if my mentor, Dr Gilbert, would have been pleased. He died just before I made the decision.’
    Bruno faltered again, still in the grip of his own memories. He saw Gilbert as he had seen him that last time in Toronto, shrunken to child-size, already gone really, but he had made an effort to squeeze Bruno’s hand, and Bruno had cried his thanks, cried for perhaps the first time since he was a boy. Gilbert had been a good man. A giant.
    ‘Did Penfield lecture?’ Aleksander asked
    ‘I think I first heard him at a meeting. The first meeting of the Canadian Neurological Society, which took place in 1949. I slipped in under some pretext… I think I was acting as an usher. And I heard Penfield make one of his rousing claims. Heard him say that the splitting of the atom was child’s play when compared to the task of charting the mechanisms of the central nervous system on which thought and behaviour depend. Guess he was right, there. We’re still at it.’
    ‘And so you will be. For a long time to come.’ Amelia intervened. ‘The last thing we want is your lot pretending you understand everything. You’ll just feed us more and more pills, pills for everything until the pills go wrong, and we have to take new ones to get over the damage.’
    ‘But Amelia, if there had been something for your mother to take, you would have been happy.’
    ‘That’s different, Pops. That was cancer. Not her mind.’
    ‘Amelia is a pharmaceutical Calvinist,’ Bruno explained.
    ‘That must make me into a hedonist for once. I would be very happy if there was a pill for my mother’s mind.’
    ‘Oh.’
    They all stared at Irena.
    She squirmed. ‘Yes, yes. She has Alzheimer’s.’ She said it softly, quickly, as if she didn’t want anyone really to hear. As if a kind of infectious shame came with it.
    ‘That’s hard,’ Bruno offered. ‘Hard on her. And everyone around her.’
    ‘The trouble is,’ Irena burst out, ‘we want mental processes to have a physical base. And at the same time we don’t. We want to be free, not to think of ourselves as utterly controlled by proteins, hormones, chemicals, even genes. But if something goes wrong with our minds, we don’t want that wrong to be attributed to us, to the way we lead our lives. We want the simple chemical diagnosis, the instant pill. Well, I do.’ She met Amelia’s stare.
    ‘Lucky for the pharmacologists amongst us.’ Aleksander turned his hangdog look on Irena. Its irony was uncertain.
    Impetuously, she squeezed his hand across the table and then exclaimed. ‘Look, look, we’ve reached the Tatras.’

6
    1938
    ‘The Tatras, Bruno, look. They’re beautiful.’
    Bruno refused to look up. His gaze was stubbornly fixed on his knees. They were knobbly. There was a smudge on them. It looked like ink. Why hadn’t they let him put on his long trousers? Grandpa and Grandma, when they came to meet them at the station, would think he was still a baby, like Anna. There she was lying in Mamusia’s arms, not even bothering to stir and look up at the mountains, no matter how beautiful. He could make her look up,