The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

though. All it would take was a little prod. Even a big prod. She didn’t cry when she knew it was him. He had been her first word. ‘Bru’, though it sounded like ‘Boo’.
    He didn’t want to look up. Didn’t want to see anything. He hadn’t wanted to leave Vienna. Mamusia was wrong. Stefcia was wrong too. It was wrong to go before Papa came back, even if the grandparents were waiting. And the border guards had been horrible, scoffing at them when they came to check their papers, and Mamusia had prompted him again just before to remember to say that he was Polish and going home. As if he could forget after all the times she had told him. Again and again. As if he didn’t already know all his times tables and some Latin and the capitals of most of the countries of the world and kings and emperors and some English alongside German and Polish. As if he would trip up, because they were always on at him not to tell lies and suddenly they were telling him the opposite.
    ‘Horses, Bruno. Do look. They’re galloping.’ This time it was Stefcia urging.
    He looked up inadvertently. The horses were galloping very fast. Two of them. Running away from the noise of the train to theopposite end of a long field. Their muscles strained. They were moving towards a house with a steep bright-red roof. It glistened like jewels. Behind the house the pines were very tall. Almost as tall as the sky.
    Stefcia ruffled his hair and then smoothed it down again. ‘Good horses, aren’t they? Told you so.’
    ‘I suppose Grandpa will let you ride the stallion this year. When he sees how tall you’ve grown.’
    ‘Do you think so?’
    His mother smiled.
    She was so lovely when she smiled that he wanted to stroke the place where her smile made a little crease in her cheek. She hadn’t been smiling much recently. Not really since those boys with the swastika shirts had beat him up. It was horrible. He hadn’t been able to fight back. Only a kick or two and then they had held his legs. There were too many of them, and they were too big. They were everywhere too. Gangs of them. Marching. Looking so proud of themselves. They had beaten him up because he was a Jew.
    He had never thought much about being a Jew until some of the boys in school had made it an issue. He had had to ask Papa what it really meant and what was wrong with it, and all Papa had been able to tell him was that mostly everyone had been a Jew until Christ came along. He had muttered that and something else and then told him that Hitler and his Nazi Party with all their police forces were blaming the Jews for Germany’s and now Austria’s problems. All the problems since the last war, including the loss of the last war. It was convenient to have a group to blame things on. But that kind of lazy thinking had to be fought, and his father’s party was fighting it.
    Bruno thought that those scary men with their shiny uniforms had come to take his father away because he had gone to fight the boys who had beat Bruno up. Probably their parents, as well. Arthur, his best friend, had said that was silly. His father wouldn’t do anything so stupid. Arthur and his family had left Vienna now. Papa had lent them money and arranged for their papers, for special letters of invitation to come for them from England. Brunohad overheard his mother talking to him about it. Father had done the same for other people too. There was a drawer in the house he wasn’t allowed to open. High up in the back of the pantry. You had to get a chair. A secret drawer, but his father had told him a few months before that should anything happen to him, he was to open it. There might be money there he could use. Other things. But when he had gone to the place just two days ago, it was empty and his mother had scolded him. She must have been there first.
    Mamusia was passing Anna to Stefcia to hold and wrapping her arm round him, urging him to look at the hills, blue and purple in the distance. He didn’t know