A Traitor to Memory

And there it was between my legs, Dr. Rose, what I hadn't been able to manage in … how many years? … since Beth. Throbbing, engorged, and ready for action, all because of a dream in which I was nothing but a voyeur of my father's pleasure.

I lay there in the darkness, despising myself, despising my body and my mind and what both of them were telling me through the means of a dream. And as I lay there, a memory came to me.

It is Katja, and she has come into the dining room where we're having dinner. She's carrying my sister, who is dressed for bed, and it's very clear that she's excited about something, because when Katja Wolff is excited, her English becomes more broken. She says, “See! See you must what she has done!”





Granddad says irritably, “What is it now?” and there's a moment that I recognise as tension while all the adults look at each other: Mother at Granddad, Dad at Gran, Sarah-Jane at James the Lodger. He—James—is looking at Katja. And Katja is looking at Sonia.

She says, “Show them, little one,” and she sets my sister on the floor. She puts her on her bum but she doesn't prop her up as she's had to do in the past. Instead, she balances her carefully and removes her hands, and Sonia remains upright.

“She sits alone!” Katja announces proudly. “Is this not a dream?”





Mother gets to her feet, saying, “Wonderful, darling!” and goes to cuddle her. She says, “Thank you, Katja,” and when she smiles, her face is radiant with delight.

Granddad makes no comment at all because he doesn't look to see what Sonia has managed to do. Gran murmurs, “Lovely, my dear,” and watches Granddad.

Sarah-Jane Beckett makes a polite comment and attempts to draw James the Lodger into conversation. But it's an attempt that is all in vain: James is fixated on Katja the way a starving dog might fixate on a rare piece of beef.

And Katja herself is fixated on my father. “See how lovely is she!” Katja crows. “See what learns she and how quickly! What a good big girl is Sonia, yes. Every baby can thrive with Katja.”





Every baby. How had I forgotten those words and that look? How had it escaped me till now: what those words and that look really meant? What they had to have meant, because everyone freezes the way people freeze when a motion picture is reduced to a single frame. And a moment later—in the breath of a second—Mother picks up Sonia and says, “We're all quite sure that's the case, my dear.”





I saw it then, and I see it now. But I didn't understand because what was I, seven years old? What child that young can comprehend the full reality of the situation in which he's living? What child that young can infer from a single simple statement graciously said a woman's sudden understanding of a betrayal that has occurred and is continuing to occur within her own home?

9 November





He kept that picture, Dr. Rose. Everything I know goes back to the fact that my father kept that single picture, a photograph that he himself must have taken and hidden away because how else could it possibly have come to be in his possession?

So I see them, on a sunny afternoon in the summer, and he asks Katja to step into the garden so that he can take a photo of her with my sister. Sonia's presence, cradled in Katja's arms, legitimises the moment. Sonia serves as an excuse for the picture-taking despite the fact that she is cradled in such a way that her face isn't visible to the camera. And that's an important detail as well, because Sonia isn't perfect. Sonia is a freak, and a picture of Sonia whose face bears the manifestations of the congenital syndrome that afflicts her—oblique palpebral fissures, I have learned they are called, epicanthal folds, and a mouth that is disproportionately small—will serve as a constant reminder to Dad that he created for the second time in his life a child with physical and mental imperfections. So he doesn't want to capture her face on film, but he needs her there as an excuse.

Are he and Katja lovers at the time? Or do they both just think about it then, each of them waiting for some sign from the other that will express an interest that cannot yet be spoken? And when it happens between them for the first time, who makes the move and what is the move that signals the direction they will soon be taking?

She goes out for a breath of air on a stifling night, the kind of August night in London when a heat wave hits and there's no escaping the oppressive atmosphere created by bad air hanging too long over the city, which is daily heated by the scorching sun and further poisoned by the diesel lorries that belch exhaust fumes along the streets. Sonia is asleep at long last, and Katja has ten precious minutes to herself. The darkness outside makes a false promise of deliverance from the heat trapped inside the house, so she walks out into it, out into the garden behind the house, which is where he finds her.

“Terrible day,” he says. “I'm burning up.”





“I, too,” she replies, and she watches him steadily. “I too burn, Richard.”