A Traitor to Memory

He's talking about Katja. I've heard her leave. I've seen her in the company of the nun, so perhaps she's returned to the convent. Her name isn't mentioned within our little world. Neither is Sonia's. Unless the policeman brings one of them up.

I say, “He said someone hurt Sosy.”





Dad says, “Think of the music, Gideon. Listen to the music and master it, son. That's all you have to do just now.”





But that turns out not to be the case, because the policeman instructs my father to bring me to the station on the Earl's Court Road, where we sit in a small, brightly lit room, in the company of a woman who wears a suit like a man and listens watchfully to the questions I'm asked, like a guardian who's there to protect me from something. Asking the questions is Ginger Hair himself.

What he wants to know is something simple, he tells me. “You know who Katja Wolff is, don't you, lad?” I look from my father to the woman. She wears spectacles and when the light hits them, the lenses reflect it and hide her eyes.

Dad says, “Of course he knows who Katja Wolff is. He isn't an idiot. Get to the point.”





The policeman won't be hurried. He talks to me as if Dad were not there. He takes me from Sosy's birth, through Katja's coming to live with us, to the care that Sosy received at her hands. Dad protests at this. “How is an eight-year-old boy supposed to answer these sorts of questions?”





The policeman says that children are observant, that I will be able to tell them more than Dad imagines possible.

I've been given a can of Coke and a biscuit studded with nuts and sultanas, and they sit before me on the table like a three-dimensional exclamation mark. I watch the moisture form its beadwork on the can, and I run my finger through it to shape a treble clef on the curving side. I'm missing my three-hour morning practice to be here in the police station. This makes me restless, anxious, and difficult. I am already quite afraid.

Of what? you ask me.

Of the questions themselves, of giving the wrong answers, of the tension that I sense in my father which, now that I consider it, seems so at odds with my mother's grief. Shouldn't he have been prostrate with sorrow, Dr. Rose? Or at least desperate to get to the bottom of what happened to Sonia? But he isn't sorrowful, and if he's desperate, it seems like a feeling born of an urgency that he hasn't explained to anyone.

Do you answer the questions despite your fear? you ask.

I answer them as well as I can. They lead me through the two years that Katja Wolff has lived in our home. For some reason, they seem to focus primarily on her relationship with James the Lodger and Sarah-Jane Beckett. But at long last they veer to her care of Sosy and to one particular point in that care.

“Did you ever hear Katja shout at your little sister?” the policeman asked.

No, I had not.

“Did you ever see her discipline Sonia if she misbehaved?”





No, I had not.

“Did you ever see her do anything a little bit rough with Sonia? Shake her a bit when she wouldn't stop crying? Smack her bottom when she didn't obey? Pull on her arm to get her attention? Grab her leg to move her about when she changed her nappies?”





Sosy cried a lot, I tell him. Katja got out of bed in the night to take care of Sosy. She talked German to her—





“In an angry voice?”





—and sometimes she cried as well. I could hear her from my room, and once I got up and looked into the corridor and saw her walking up and down, holding Sosy on her shoulder. Sosy wouldn't stop crying, so Katja put her back in her cot. She took a set of plastic baby keys and jangled them over Sosy's head and I heard her say, “Bitte, bitte, bitte” which is German for please. And when the keys didn't make Sosy stop crying, she grabbed the side of the cot and gave it a shake.

“You saw this?” The policeman leans towards me across the table. “You saw Katja do this? Are you certain, lad?”





And something in his voice tells me I've given an answer that's pleasing. I say I'm certain: Sosy cried and Katja shook the side of the cot.

“I think we're getting somewhere now,” the policeman says.

12 October





How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his memory, Dr. Rose? How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his dreams? How much of what I say to the detective in those hours in the police station comes from what I actually witnessed? How much grows from sources as diverse as the tension I feel between my father and the policeman and my desire to please them both?

It isn't much of a leap from shaking the side of a cot to shaking a child. And from there, it is the work of a moment to fancy having seen a small arm twisted, a small body jerked upright to put a coat on, a small round face squeezed and pinched when someone spits her food on the floor, a tangle of hair yanked through a comb, and legs wrenched into a pair of pink dungarees.