A Traitor to Memory

I made no reply. Was he speaking of me? Of Sonia? Or the other, that longer-ago child of a distant marriage, the one called Virginia, who had never been spoken of?

He went on. “You give them life and you know you'd do anything to protect them, Gideon. That's how it is.”





I nodded, but he still wasn't looking at me so I said, “Yes.” Affirmation of what, I couldn't tell you. But I had to say something, and that was what I said.

It seemed enough. Dad said, “Sometimes you fail. You don't intend to. You don't even contemplate failure. But it happens. It comes out of nowhere and it takes you by surprise and before you have a chance to stop—even to react in some useless way—it's on you. Failure.” He met my eyes then, and the look he gave me was so filled with suffering that I wanted to retreat and to spare him whatever was causing him such pain. Hadn't it been bad enough that his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood had been filled with the sorrow of having a father whose infirmities tried his patience and depleted his reserves of devotion? Was he now supposed to be saddled with a son who appeared to be heading in the same direction? I wanted to retreat. I wanted to spare him. But I wanted my music more. I am a void without my music. So I said nothing. I let the silence lie like a gauntlet between us. And when my father could bear the unseen sight of that gauntlet no longer, he picked it up.

He stood and came towards me and for a moment I thought he intended to touch me. But instead he rolled back the top of my grandmother's desk. From his key ring, he inserted a small key in the central interior drawer. From the drawer, he took a neat stack of papers. These he carried back to his chair.

We'd arrived somewhere, and I was aware of the drama and significance of the moment, as if we'd crossed a boundary that neither of us had recognised as even existing before. I felt a churning in my gut as he fingered through the papers. I saw the sparkling crescent in the field of my vision that always heralds the pounding in my head.

He said, “I have no pictures of Sonia for the simplest of reasons. Had you thought it through—and had you been less distressed you probably would have—I'm certain you would have worked it out for yourself. Your mother took the pictures when she left us, Gideon. She took every one of them. Except for this.”





He took a single snapshot from a soiled envelope. He passed it to me. And for a moment, I found that I didn't want to take it from him, so fraught with meaning had Sonia suddenly become.

He read my hesitation. He said, “Take it, Gideon. It's all I have left of her.”





So I took it, hardly daring to wonder what I might see, but somehow fearing what I would see all the same. I swallowed and steeled myself. I looked.

What was in the picture was this: a baby cradled in the arms of a woman I did not recognise. They were seated in the back garden of the Kensington Square house, on a striped deck chair in the sun. The woman's shadow fell across Sonia's face, but her own was fully exposed to the light. She was young and blonde. She was aquiline featured. She was very pretty.

“I don't … Who is this?” I asked my father.

“That's Katja,” he said. “Gideon, that's Katja Wolff.”





GIDEON





20 September





This is what I've been wondering ever since Dad showed me that photograph: If Mother took with her every picture of Sonia that was in the house, why did she leave that one picture behind? Was it because Sonia's face was so much in shadow that she might have been any baby and consequently not memorable to my mother, not something she could cling to in her grief … if grief was indeed what took her from us? Or was it because Katja Wolff was in it? Or was it because Mother didn't know about the photo in the first place? Because, you see, the one thing I cannot tell from the picture—which I have now with me and which I will show you when next we meet—is who took it of them?

And why did Dad have this particular picture, this picture in which the focal figure is not his daughter his very own daughter who died, but a young and smiling and golden woman who is not his wife was never his wife never became his wife and was certainly not the mother of that child.

I asked Dad about Katja Wolff because asking was the natural thing to do. He told me that she was Sonia's nanny. She was a German girl, he said, with very limited English. She'd made a dramatic and foolhardy escape from East to West Berlin in a hot air balloon that she and her boyfriend had manufactured in secret, and she'd gained some notoriety from that.