A Traitor to Memory

“I can't answer that question. I don't know the answer. I don't care to know. And—” Here he took up the sheet music that I'd left on the stand when I'd thought to play, and he closed it slowly, seeming to put an end to something that neither one of us wanted to name. “I can't understand why you're dwelling on this at all. Hasn't Katja Wolff damaged our lives enough?”





“It's not Katja Wolff,” I said. “It's what happened.”





“You know what happened.”





“I don't know everything.”





“You know enough.”





“I know that when I look over my life, when I write about it or talk about it, all I can remember with accuracy is the music: how I came to it, how I proceeded, the exercises that Raphael had me engage in, concerts I gave, orchestras I performed with, conductors, concertmasters, journalists who interviewed me, recordings I made.”





“That's been your life. That's who you are.”





But not according to Libby. I could hear her shouting at me once again. I could feel her frustration. I could drown in the wretchedness that flooded her heart.

And I am adrift, Dr. Rose. I am a man without a country any longer. I once existed in a world I recognised and was comfortable with, a world with definite borders, peopled by citizens all speaking a language I understood. All that is foreign territory to me now, but it is no less foreign than the land I wander in, without a guide or a map, at your instructions.

11





YASMIN EDWARDS HAD a busy morning, for which she was grateful. She'd received half a dozen referrals from a women's shelter in Lambeth, and the six women in question all turned up at the shop at once. None of them were needing wigs—these usually went to women undergoing chemo or afflicted with alopecia—but all of them wanted make-overs, and Yasmin was happy to accommodate them. She knew what it felt like to be down and out because of a man, and she wasn't surprised when the women first hung back and spoke in hushed tones about their personal appearance and the changes they hoped Yasmin Edwards could make for them. So Yasmin started out gently, letting them decide for themselves over magazines, coffee, and biscuits.

“You make me look like this one?” was the question that broke the ice among them. One of the women—who wouldn't see sixty again and who must have tipped the scales at nearly twenty stone—had chosen a picture of a nubile black model with sumptuous breasts and pouting lips.

“You look like that when we done, girl, I'm taking up residence in this damn shop,” one of the others said. Soft giggles among them turned to hearty laughter, and everything was easy after that.

Oddly, it was the scent of the cleaning fluid that Yasmin was using on the work tops after the women left that took her back abruptly to the morning. For a moment, she wondered why, until she recalled that she'd been cleaning the bathtub of the few wig hairs that Daniel hadn't managed to remove after his washing chore on the previous night when Katja came into the bathroom to clean her teeth.

“You going in to work today?” Yasmin asked her companion. Daniel had already left for school, so they were free to talk openly for the first time. Or at least they were free to make the attempt.

“Of course,” Katja said. “Why would I not?”

She still made her W's into V's. Sometimes it seemed to Yasmin that twenty years away from her native language would have been enough to alter Katja's most deeply rooted habits, but that final one still remained. There had been a time when Yasmin had found her companion's way of speaking English appealing, but she did not find it so now. She couldn't determine when the charm had diminished for her. Recently, she thought. But she couldn't afford to put an exact date to the change in her feelings.

“He said that you'd missed. Four times in twelve weeks is what he said.”