The Memory Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

walking out onto the glacial ice with nothing but a few sled dogs and a piece of seal blubber in his pocket, then certainly I could withstand whatever obstacles came my way.
    At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifullyillustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed,
To Rachel, from Daddy.
The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me—both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father’s dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, “The only paradise is paradise lost.”
    As I paged through the Russian fairy tale book, a piece of paper fell out—a photocopied picture of a piano keyboard. Was this how my mother played music all these years? Did my homeless mother, once a child prodigy, play Bach inside her head, her hands fluttering over imaginary keys?
    What I found next took my breath away. “Nat,” I said. “She saved my pony.”
    I took out the old palomino horse I used to call Pony from a torn moldy box. The horse’s right foreleg was broken. My mother had tried to mend it with a piece of packing tape, then wrapped it in a red wool hat I had sent her for her birthday two years before. I put it in my bag to take back to the hotel. In the same box were all the letters I had written my mother over the last seventeen years. There were also photocopies she had made of her letters to me. Natalia glanced over to see what I was looking at. I wondered what she felt as she saw me sifting through the stack. We had barely spoken about our mother for years.
    At the bottom of the box were thirteen pairs of scissors. Right after her divorce, when I was four, my mother tried to slit her wrists with a pair of cutting shears and was rushed to the hospital. I remember sitting at the foot of the stairs, my grandfather looming over me, puffing on a cigar. He handed me a rag and told me to wipe the blood off each and every stair. At the top of the staircase was the open door to our apartment; inside, a limp frilly blouse draped over an ironing board, on the floor a pair of scissors and a pool of blood. My sister remembers the incident too but neither of us recalls the other being there. Did it even happen? Before the age of ten, children have akind of childhood amnesia. We lack developed language skills and a cognitive sense of self, especially when we are very young. It’s hard to even know if our memories are real. Even though we feel they are, they might not be. And in family narratives, what if the person you learned your early autobiography from couldn’t tell the difference from reality and a dream?
    In another box were all the museum date books I had sent my mother over the years. I found a little stuffed owl, a teddy bear, and a children’s book I once sent her called Owl Babies, about a mother owl who disappears but is reunited with her children in the end. There were nursing textbooks and lists of medical schools my mother planned to apply to. When she turned seventy-nine she wrote to tell me that although she was now legally blind she had decided to study medicine:
I am thinking of going to nursing school, maybe in a foreign country. That way, if I ever get sick or lose my sight completely, I’ll know what to do.
I found a set of her teeth stuck inside an old eyeglass case. I uncovered dozens of legal claims filed by her, accusing various moving companies, housing