"A man without a past"

sounds sinister doesn't it? 

I met a young man without a past yesterday - without a past he can remember.  Another person I know introduced him yesterday. He is trying to help this unfortunate man. 

It's both a long story and a short story. I can't share the details but the man I was introduced to has no memory. He is desperate for something, anything, anyone to tell  him who he is.  Yes, he can remember the past few years when he has been safely here in this country but his life before that is gone. He seems to have wiped it from his memory. 

Somewhere in the past he was tortured. He could not have been very old. At best he is now only about twenty or twenty-one. The family who tried to help in the refugee camp knew nothing about him. Nobody else seemed to know either.

He was brought here in urgent need of medical treatment. All sorts of questions have been asked and tests undertaken but he genuinely seems unable to remember.  He cries because he cannot remember. I spent time with him yesterday because, in one of the efforts to kick-start his memory,  I had been asked to see if a different way of communicating might help.  

I thought that was unlikely - and that proved to be so - but it did give me an idea. "Has anyone shown you some books?" I asked him, "Books for children that you might have liked when you were very young?"

He looked at me in silence and then said, "I know I was at school. I can read."

It is something he does know even if he cannot remember it. I have asked the person responsible for his welfare to find some of the most common school books from his home country. They may not help but I could think of nothing else.

"It must be like having Alzheimer's," someone else told me later. No, it  is nothing like that. It is something far worse.