A Traitor to Memory

Ah, you say. Your voice is noncommittal and carefully, scrupulously without judgement, Dr. Rose. Your hands, however, rise, pressed together in an attitude that resembles prayer. You place them just beneath your chin. You don't avert your gaze but I avert mine.

I see what you're thinking, and I'm thinking it as well. My answers to that policeman's questions were what sent Katja Wolff to prison.

But I didn't give evidence at her trial, Dr. Rose. So if what I said was so important, why wasn't I called to give evidence? Anything less than the whole truth sworn to in a court of law was like an article appearing on the front page of a tabloid: something to be taken at face value only, something suggesting that further investigation into the matter by professionals might be required.

If I said that Katja Wolff harmed my sister, all that would have come from that is their looking into the allegation. Isn't that the case? And if corroboration existed for what I told them, they would have found it.

That has to be what happened, Dr. Rose.

15 October





I might have truly seen it. I might have been a witness to those things which I declared as having occurred between my little sister and her nanny. If so many sections of my mind are blank when it comes to the past, how illogical is it to assume that somewhere on that vast canvas reside images too painful to be remembered accurately?

Pink dungarees are fairly accurate, you tell me. They come either from memory or from embellishment, Gideon.

How could I embellish with such a detail as the colour of her overalls if she didn't wear those overalls?

She was a little girl, you say with a shrug that's not dismissive so much as inconclusive. Little girls often wear pink.

So you're saying I was a liar, Dr. Rose? Simultaneously a child prodigy and a liar?

They're not mutually exclusive, you point out.

I reel from this and you see something—anguish, horror, guilt?—on my face.

You say, I'm not labeling you a liar now, Gideon. But you might have been then. Circumstances may have required you to lie.

What sort of circumstances, Dr. Rose?

You have no answer to give me other than this: Write what you remember.

17 October





Libby found me at the top of Primrose Hill. I was standing before that metal engraving that allows one to identify the buildings and monuments that one can see from the summit, and I was forcing myself to look from the engraving to the view—working from east to west—in order to pick each one out. From the corner of my eye, I saw her coming up the path, dressed in her black leathers. She'd left her helmet elsewhere, and the wind whipped her curls round her face.

She said, “Saw your car in the square. I thought I'd find you here. No kite?”





“No kite.” I touched the metal surface of the engraving, my fingers resting on St. Paul's Cathedral. I studied the skyline.

“What's up, then? You don't look so great. Aren't you cold? What're you doing out here without a sweater?”





Looking for answers, I thought.

She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I'm, like, talking to you here.”





I said, “I needed a walk.”





She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn't you?”





I wanted to say that I see you even when I don't see you, Dr. Rose. But I thought that she would misunderstand and take the comment for a patient's obsession with his doctor, which I do not have.

She came round the engraving to face me, blocking my view. She reached across the sheet of metal and touched her palm to my chest, saying, “What's wrong, Gid? How can I help?”





Her touch reminded me of all that isn't happening between us—of all that would have been happening between a woman and a normal man—and the weight of this idea was suddenly too much to bear in conjunction with what was already plaguing me. I said, “I may have sent a woman to prison.”





“What?”





I told her the rest.

When I had finished, she said, “You were eight years old. A cop was asking questions. You did the best you could in a bad situation. And you might have seen that stuff, too. There've been studies on this, Gid, and they say that kids don't make things up when it comes to abuse. Where there's smoke, there's fire. And anyway, someone must have confirmed what you said if you didn't testify in court.”





“That's just it. I'm not so sure that I didn't testify, Libby.”





“But you said—”

“I said I'd managed to remember the policeman, the questions, the station: all of them aspects of a situation that I'd blocked from my mind. What's to say I haven't also blocked from my mind giving evidence at Katja Wolff 's trial?”





“Oh. Yeah. I see.” She looked out at the view and tried to tame her hair, sucking in on her lower lip as she thought about what I'd said. Finally, she declared, “Okay. Let's find out what really went on, then.”





“How?”

“How tough can it be to dig up what happened at a trial that was probably covered by every newspaper in the country?”





19 October