The Memory Police

Chapter 8

I showed R what I’d written. Since there were quite a few pages, he came to my house so I wouldn’t have to carry the bulky manuscript.

We went over the work, debating each line. We changed words and added sentences where something was missing. In one place, we cut several dozen lines altogether.

Seated on the sofa, R calmly turned the pages. He treated my manuscripts with the greatest of care. When I watched him working like this, I was always a bit nervous, wondering whether what I’d written was worthy of such consideration.

“Let’s stop here for today,” he said. The work over, he took his cigarettes and lighter from his pocket while I gathered up the marked pages and clipped them together.

“Would you like some more tea?” I asked when I had finished.

“I’d love a cup, on the strong side.”

In the kitchen, I sliced some cake, made tea, and carried everything into the living room.

“Is this your mother?” he asked, pointing to a photograph on the mantel.

“It is.”

“She was very beautiful,” he said. “And you look a great deal like her.”

“No, my father used to say that the only thing I inherited from my mother was my good teeth.”

“Teeth are important.”

“My mother always kept dried sardines wrapped in newspaper on the desk in her studio, and she would snack on them as she worked. If I got fussy in my playpen, she would slip one in my mouth to quiet me even before I had any teeth. I still remember the way they smelled, mixed with the odors of sawdust and plaster. They were awful, gritty things.”

He looked down and smiled, putting his hand to the frames of his glasses.

After that, we ate our cake in silence for a while. When the two of us had spent time discussing my novel, it often happened that we had no idea what else to say. There was nothing at all unpleasant about it, and I would relax, enveloped by his steady, peaceful breathing. And in any case, the only R I knew was the one who read my manuscripts. I knew nothing else about him, not his childhood, nor his family, how he spent his Sundays, his preference in women or his favorite baseball team. When we were together, he did nothing but read my writing.

After what seemed a long while savoring the silence, R spoke up.

“Do you still have many of your mother’s works here?”

“Just a few, the ones she gave as presents to my father and me,” I answered, looking once more at the picture of my mother. She wore a flowing summer dress and was smiling bashfully as she held me on her lap. Her hands, remarkably strong from handling chisels, hammers, stone, and other heavy objects, caressed my baby legs. “I don’t think she liked keeping her work around. But I do have the feeling that there were more sculptures scattered around the studio when I was a child. I think she must have hidden some of them just after she received the summons from the Memory Police. Perhaps she knew something would happen to her. But that was when I was still very young, so I don’t really remember.”

“Where is her studio?”

“Downstairs. I think she also worked in a small house somewhere up the river, but after I was born, she was always down in the basement.” I tapped the floor with the toe of my slipper.

“I didn’t realize there was a basement.”

“Well, we call it a basement, though it’s not exactly underground. The front of the house is along the road to the south, but in back, to the north, it faces the river. The stone foundation was set down into the water, with the house built on top, so the basement is actually below the level of the water.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?” he said.

“I think my mother must have loved the sound of water. Not crashing waves but the gentle flowing of the river—which is probably why she also bought the cottage upstream. She needed only three things in her studio to be able to get her sculpting done: the sound of water, my playpen, and dried sardines.”

“That, too, is unusual, don’t you think?” he said. He turned his lighter over in his palm and then lit a cigarette. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said, hesitating a moment, “would you mind showing me the basement?”

“I’d be happy to,” I told him.

He slowly exhaled the smoke from his lungs, as if he had at last managed to accomplish something that had long been weighing on his mind.

“It’s chilly down here.”

“I’ll light the heater. It’s old and it takes a while to warm the room. I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t worry. It’s cold from the river, so there’s something almost pleasant about it.”

We were making our way down to the basement, and he gently took my arm on the dark stairs.

“It’s bigger than I would have imagined,” he said, looking around the room.

“After my mother died, my father couldn’t bear to come here, so it’s falling apart.” I hadn’t been down since the Inui family had passed through. “Feel free to look around,” I added.

He walked through the room, examining one by one all the objects that had been left behind—odds and ends, cabinets full of my mother’s tools, the five sculptures entrusted to me by the Inuis that were lined up on the top shelf, the glass door that led to the washing platform, the wooden chairs. Though there was nothing particularly worth seeing, he spent a long time going around the room, peering into every corner, as though intent on breathing in the ancient chill that permeated the basement.

“You’re welcome to open drawers and look at her notebooks and sketches,” I told him. He did, and when he turned the pages, he did so with the same sort of care he used with my manuscripts.

As he moved through the room, he sent up clouds of stone dust. Light from a clear blue sky shone in through a window high in the wall. From time to time, we could hear the sound of a boat going by outside.

“What’s this?” he asked, coming at last to the cabinet with many small drawers under the staircase.

“It’s where my mother once kept secret things.”

“Secret things?”

“Yes… I’m not quite sure how to explain it. Lots of different things, all unfamiliar to me.” I was at a loss for words as he began opening drawers one after another. But they were all empty.

“There’s nothing left.”

“When I was little, each drawer held one item. When she was taking a break from her work, she would show me the things and tell me stories about them. Strange stories like nothing I had ever read in my picture books.”

“I wonder why they’re empty now.”

“I don’t know. But at some point I realized everything was gone. I think it must have happened in the confusion when the Memory Police took her away.”

“You think they took these things, too?”

“No, they never came down here. My mother and I were the only ones who knew about this cabinet. We never even told my father. I think she must have found a way to dispose of them between the time they sent her the summons and her surrender. I was barely ten years old, so I had no idea what these things meant, but I think she realized how important they were after she understood what was about to happen. I suspect she managed to hide them or throw them away or leave them in the care of one of her friends.”

“I see,” R murmured. He stood under the stairs, stooping to avoid hitting his head, and tugged at one of the drawer handles. I worried that he would get his hands dirty from the rusted metal.

“Can you remember what sorts of things were in here?” He peered up at me, the sunlight reflecting from his glasses.

“Sometimes I try to remember—those were precious moments with my mother—but I can’t recall the objects. My mother’s expression, the sound of her voice, the smell of the basement air—I can remember all that perfectly. But the things in the drawers are vague, as though those memories, and those alone, have dissolved.”

“Still, I’d like you to tell me what you can remember, no matter how dim the impression,” he said.

“Well…,” I murmured, staring at the cabinet. No doubt it had once been a handsome piece of furniture, but it had fallen now into a lamentable state, covered in dust, with its varnish peeling and handles rusted. Here and there, I could see the remains of stickers I had affixed to the drawers when I was young. “The object my mother told me was most precious,” I said, after a long pause, “was an heirloom from her own mother that she kept in a drawer in the second row, right about here. A little green stone, tiny and hard, like a baby tooth that had just fallen out. I think I remember it that way because my own baby teeth were falling out about then.”

“And the stone was beautiful?” he asked.

“Yes, I suppose so. It must have been, since my mother often took it out and held it up to admire in the moonlight. But nothing about it remains with me—that it was beautiful or dear or that I wanted to have it—nothing. Just the cold sensation when my mother once set it on my palm. When I stand here in front of the cabinet, my heart feels like a silkworm slumbering in its cocoon.”

“But that’s just the way it is—everyone feels that way about the things that have disappeared.” He touched his hand again to the frames of his glasses. “Could the green stone have been called an emerald?” he added.

“Em… er… ald,” I murmured over and over, and as I did I began to sense a faint stirring somewhere deep within. “Of course, that was it… em… er… ald. I’m sure that’s right. But how did you know?”

He said nothing for a moment. Instead, he began opening the drawers again one after the other. The handles gave a muffled clank. When he got to the drawer farthest to the left in the fourth row, he stopped and turned toward me.

“This one held perfume,” he said. I was about to repeat my question—how had he known?—but stopped myself. “There’s still some here,” he said, gently pressing on my back to force me closer. “Can you smell it?”

I peered into the little drawer and took a deep breath, recalling suddenly that my mother had made me smell odors this same way. But all that filled my chest was the chill, stale air. The sensation of his hand on my back was much more vivid than the memory of the perfume.

“I’m sorry,” I sighed, shaking my head.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s very hard to recall things that have disappeared.” He blinked and closed the “perfume” drawer. “But I remember,” he added. “The beauty of the emerald and the smell of perfume. I haven’t forgotten anything.”