A Traitor to Memory

Do you already know this story, Dr. Rose? Perhaps not. You would have been less than ten years old at that time, I expect, and living … where? In America at that point?

Living here in England so much closer to where it all happened, I don't remember it myself. But it was, as Dad told me, quite a story then because Katja and her boyfriend didn't attempt their crossing from somewhere in the countryside, where it would have been at least marginally safer to go from east into west, but instead they sailed from East Berlin itself. The boy didn't make it all the way. The border guards got him. But Katja did make it. She earned her fifteen minutes that way and became a standard-bearer for freedom. Television news, front-page headlines, magazine stories, radio interviews. She ended up being invited to England.

I listened carefully as Dad told me all this, and I watched him closely. I looked for signs and for inner meanings, and I tried to make inferences, leaps, and deductions. Because even now in the situation in which I find myself—sitting here in the music room in Chalcot Square with the Guarneri fifteen feet away, taken from its case at least and surely that's progress God tell me that's progress, Dr. Rose, although I can't bring myself to lift the violin to the height of my shoulder—there are questions I'm afraid to ask my father.

What sorts of questions? you want to know.

Questions like these, questions that rise to my mind without effort: Who took that picture of Sonia and Katja? Why did my mother leave only that single picture behind? Did she even know about it? Did she actually take the other pictures or did he destroy them? And why, above all, did my father never speak of them before now: never speak to me of Sonia, of Katja, of my mother?

Obviously, he hadn't forgotten they existed. After all, once I brought Sonia up, he produced her picture and from its condition I'd swear before God that it was something he's held and contemplated hundreds of times. So why the silence?

People sometimes avoid, you tell me. They dodge subjects too painful for them to face.

Like Sonia herself? Her death? My mother? Her leaving? The pictures?

Katja Wolff perhaps?

But why would Katja Wolff be a painful subject to Dad? Except for the most obvious reason.

Which is?

You want me to say it, don't you, Dr. Rose? You want me to write it. You want me to stare at it sitting on this page, and thus to weigh its truth or its falsehood. But where the hell is that going to get me? She's holding my sister, she's cradling her just beneath her breast, her eyes look kind and her face is serene. One of her shoulders is bare because she's wearing a dress or a top with straps too loose and it's brightly coloured, bizarrely coloured, that dress or top, so much yellow and orange and green and blue. And that bare shoulder is smooth and round and yes all right it's an invitation and I'd have to be blind not to see it so if a man is taking that picture of Katja and if that man is my father—but it could be Raphael it could be James the Lodger it could be Granddad or the gardener or the postman or any man because she is splendid beautiful seductive and even I a cocked-up mess of a paltry excuse of a healthy laughable male can see who she is and what she is and how she's offering what she's offering—then that man has an alliance with her and I've a fairly good idea what sort it is.

So write about her, you instruct me. Write about Katja. Fill a page with her name alone if that's what it takes and see where filling that page takes you, Gideon. Ask your father if there are other pictures he can show you: family pictures, casual pictures, snapshots of holidays, fêtes, parties, gatherings, dinners, anything at all. Look at them closely. See who's in them. Read their expressions.

Look for Katja? I ask.

Look for what's there.

21 September





Dad says I was nearly six when Sonia was born. I was just short of eight when she died. I phoned and asked him those two questions outright. Aren't you pleased, Dr. Rose? The horns were there and I actually grabbed them.

When I asked him how Sonia died, Dad said, “She drowned, son.” The answer seemed to cost him much, and his voice seemed to come from a place that was distant. I felt a tightness inside me, having asked him anything at all, but that did not stop me going on. I asked him her age when she died: two years. And the strain in his voice told me that she had been quite old enough not only to have established a permanent place in his heart but also to have made an indelible mark on his spirit.