The Day of the Lie (21 page)

We were pebbles on the
path to his door, whereas Father Nicodem … he was the Threshold. So he bore a
terrible responsibility. It was etched into his face. On those two occasions
when we met — in 1951 and 1982 — his cheeks and neck were covered in cuts from
a razor. I’m sure it was from the strain, from a shaking hand. Some of them
were quite large and I often wondered why he didn’t give up trying to keep
still and grow a beard.

1h.32

When Father Nicodem opened the door it was
as though he’d seen Brack. I had a fright of my own. He’d changed … almost
beyond recognition. His eyes were heavy, pulling his head between his shoulder
blades. He was in his late sixties by then, his hair a shocking white, as if he’d
seen unmentionable things. A small detail comes to mind, in contrast to his
face. His nails. They were beautifully clean and filed. They gave away his
delicacy and sensitivity. They told you that he’d handle your soul with care.

1h.36

I asked him if the Shoemaker was still
alive. He said, ‘Yes’. I asked why he’d said nothing since 1951. Father Nicodem
said, ‘He’d been broken.’ By what? ‘The death of two Friends.’ He didn’t have
to say any more. We understood one another. But he wasn’t ready for what
followed. I told him the Shoemaker had to speak again and that I would spread
his words. ‘Remember, I’m the sleeper. I’ve come back to wake the dead.’ He
waved his arms around as if trying to warn a train that there were children on
the line, but I told him he had no choice. He
had
to go back to the
Shoemaker. He was to tell him that I, the widow, demanded it. Not just for the
sake of those two Friends but for a child who’d just been born and left without
a name. Father Nicodem was pacing up and down the room, saying, ‘No’, and that’s
when I recognised an appalling truth about myself. I’d done what he was doing
for thirty years. My life since fifty-two had been one long walk, head down,
murmuring ‘No’. But there comes a time when you have to say, ‘Yes’. When life
becomes a ‘Yes’, whatever the cost might be. When we have to take the word back
from those who control what will and what will not happen. This was
my
choice,
my
decision. Not Pavel’s. But I needed Father Nicodem’s, and the
Shoemaker’s. We all had to stand together once more and say, ‘Stop, enough.’ We
had to say ‘Yes’ to a future of our choosing, and to put words out there to
wake the dead … to shatter the illusions that make oppression acceptable.

I told Father Nicodem
that the first edition of
Freedom and Independence
would need to be
ready within two weeks. He thought for a long, tortured time and then gave me
the key to his back yard.

1h.44

Pavel had told me how to set up the Friends
— how to keep them separate in order to keep them together. He’d told me who to
contact for paper and ink. I didn’t even know if these old Friends were still
alive or if they were still willing or in a position to help. But that’s what
happens with a ‘Yes’. You have to work everything out afterwards. It’s only
with a ‘No’ that all the problems have been lined up beforehand.

1h.52

As the hub of the wheel, my job was to hold
the spokes, keeping them apart. I went first to Barbara and Lidia, women the SB
would never notice; women who’d never thought they could fight back. I went to
Mateusz, Bernard’s friend, who’d had his chance but fluffed it. The system was
simple. We used prams. I collected the print run wrapped in parcels from a
dustbin in Father Nicodem’s back yard. Over two or three days, trip after trip,
I brought them to Barbara and Lidia who then trundled round Warsaw posting,
dropping and giving. In time, as the circulation grew, and unknown to each
other.’ they organised distribution teams. How they did it, I don’t know — any
more than I knew who printed the paper. Sometimes I’d pick up my parcels and
find an envelope with a shopping list and money. With the funds I’d go back to
those old Friends who still had their ways and means, not to mention their
children with minds of their own. The materials — paper and ink — would be
delivered to me at a playground, a hotel, a station — it varied — and I’d drop
them in Father Nicodem’s dustbin. It was magnificent. We were beating the tanks
and armoured personnel carriers with a convoy of prams.

1 h. 59

Mateusz found safe-house lodgings and I
moved every two weeks, borrowing clothes and shoes along the way Glasses, too,
and hats. I never looked the same; I was never in the same place long enough
for Brack to catch me. I paid my way by housework and cooking. I became, for
the first time since leaving Mokotów, content.

Chapter Twenty-Five

After a long, scalding shower Anselm placed
a pen and paper by the phone (as instructed) and then rang Sebastian to outline
the contours of Marek Frenzel’s monologue. He left out those remarks demonstrating
limited affection for the Church because they were broadly conventional — he’d
read far worse in the English press — but he recited the rest, summoning again
the man’s devouring presence. They agreed to meet that evening in the lobby
bar, where, given the demand for more money, they might consider their options.
With the remainder of the afternoon free, Anselm decided to make a ‘site-visit’
to the crime scene central to what had become a second, unofficial enquiry: the
reason behind a mysterious attack on the national archives .

Outside it was sunny
with a fresh breeze. The hint of a cold evening was in the air. It tugged at
Anselm’s hair and cleared his mind. And the first insight to crash home was
that the luxurious showers of the Warsaw Hilton didn’t work. There’d been lots
of levers, high pressure and free, heavily scented shampoo, but their combined
force had failed to shift the dirt beneath Anselm’s skin. The Prior had seen
this coming. He’d warned him about Brack’s world. He’d said it was a dangerous
place. Anselm was reminded of those
big
mistakes in life where all you
can do is accept what’s happened, hoping the years to come will remove the
dreadful sense of failure. Anselm’s meeting with Frenzel belonged in the same
camp, even though he’d had no choice but to sit near him and feel the cold,
lap-lapping of xenophobia.’ anti-Semitism, and racism, that hint of homophobia
showing what else he’d discover if he stayed in the mud much longer. The man
was a swamp and Anselm had only just about managed to crawl to the bank. But he’d
still failed. Before leaving he should have tipped the bucket of shells over
Frenzel’s head.

The second insight to crash
home — with the force of a motorway pile-up — was that Frenzel had confirmed an
important element in Anselm’s deconstruction of Róża’s statement. They’d
agreed about something. It was like a pact in hell. They were, in a limited
sense, companions in thought. Crossing the road as if to escape the consuming
fire, Anselm let his mind run over the remaining, untarnished conclusions.

The single most
important characteristic in Róża’s narrative — the pattern behind the
words — was the primacy of children. They determined her engagement with events
(nonexistent, save and except for the fall of ‘sparrows’ and ‘The Blood of
Children’). They established her viewpoint (exclusively focused on the growth
of Bernard from boy to man).They coloured her phraseology (‘children on the
line’). They ordered her priorities and interests, sometimes to an absurd
degree (Helena’s pregnancy over a potential Russian invasion). They determined
her moment of action (a traumatic home birth), who acted (initially the
childless) as well as the manner of their acting (the use of prams). There were
other instances, all springing from this fundamental authorial orientation. In
terms of Róża’s vocabulary ‘child’ or ‘children’ occurred 16 times, ‘boy’ 7
times, ‘girl’ twice, and ‘son’ once.

Children. They kept
turning up like boils on Job’s back. Why?

Anselm was cautious in
his judgement. The text beneath the text, the deeper depth, evidently disclosed
a primitive yearning; an obsession. For an instant, Anselm was transported to
a smoky basement near Finsbury Park.

He’d fallen silent once again, leaving John
to twiddle his thumbs. The guest singer had just finished a soul tearing
rendition of a Billie Holiday number, a lament about unrestrained murder in the
south. To hear it more than once, Anselm followed her from club to club. After
each performance he couldn’t speak. John presumed it was on account of the
singer and not the song.

‘You’re obsessed,’ he
declared.

‘I’m not.’

‘Trust me. All
obsessions stem from unfulfilled longing.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yep. Without treatment,
you turn really boring and fat and sad.’

‘Is this the voice of
experience?’

‘It is. And you, my
friend, have turned. You’ve curdled.’

Anselm woke to the sounds and sights around
him. The singer had gone, leaving behind the echo of ‘Strange Fruit’, that
Marseillaise of the oppressed. Disorientated, he looked to his left. He’d
reached a vast building, an improbable hybrid of the Empire State Building and
the Vatican. A glance at John’s guidebook told him this was the Palace of
Culture and Science, a 40-million brick monument to ‘the inventive spirit and
social progress’ donated by the one-time Soviet overlord. Statues with stern
expressions gazed down from the entrance facade. Like Billie they didn’t look
too pleased with how things had turned out.

‘Nor do you, Róża,’
muttered Anselm, pressing on.

To use John’s
expression, she’d ‘turned’. A deep sadness lay beneath her words. It had soaked
into the paper of her statement, persuading Anselm that if Róża was to be
restored,
deeply and
comprehensively,
then she’d need more than a colour
picture of Otto Brack in a prison cell. She’d need to deal with this underlying
longing linked to children: their absence, caused by the brutal murder of her
husband, Which brought Anselm face to face with his own mission, and its importance:
to find the informer and persuade them to co-operate with an abused and
abandoned widow There was nothing left for Róża to hope for. Anselm
instantly rehearsed the final part of his telephone conversation with
Sebastian. It had not gone smoothly.

‘Frenzel doesn’t think
FELIKS was the informer.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Bernard.’ his son.’

‘If the cap fits, make
him wear it.’

There’d been a note of
impatience in his voice. Sebastian hadn’t quite chimed with Anselm’s disgust at
the man who loved the taste of the sea.

‘Easier said than done,’
Anselm had replied. ‘If Bernard handed over Róża in a bid to get out of
prison, the whole truth would have to come out: that Edward had made the same
move.’ years back, to save Bernard’s education. It’s not a pretty picture. I
doubt if Bernard would look at it for long … not after he sees the blood
drain from his mother’s face.’

‘That’s not your
problem.’

‘Yes, it is. Because
Brack made it Róża’s problem.’

Sebastian’s replies had
been quick and mechanical, like the fall of a guillotine blade. He didn’t seem
to realise that Róża would have to be there for any public execution of
Bernard: she’d have to stand with the baying crowd.

It was an eventuality
that would almost certainly come to pass. This was the unhappy point at which
Anselm and Frenzel had found an uncomfortable agreement. If Róża’s
statement was meant to guide John to the door of the informer — and it was —
then the use of names would be an important feature. Numerically, Father
Nicodem Kaminsky was top of the list with 20 references, but he could be
excluded from suspicion because of his direct link to the Shoemaker. It was
Bernard who clocked in next with 14. Edward staggered home with a mere five.
All the signs suggested that the rebel student who’d once defended Professor Kołakowski
had switched sides when the struggle turned personal. He’d kept his place in
Solidarity but he’d changed irrevocably: he’d become Brack’s man, for the love
of a child born into a crisis.

Anselm shelved his
deliberations. He’d arrived at the crime scene.

Mokotów prison had all the demoralising
features that characterise any place of detention: high surrounding walls, the
dull brick curiously hard on the eye; stolid buildings set back with narrow,
dark windows; a heavy sense of compressed humanity; the embodiment of
architectural aggression. It was all fancy, of course, but Anselm had the
impression that birds didn’t fly over the leaden airspace.

As site—visits go,
Anselm wasn’t expecting to discover much. But buildings speak. They, too, have
a memory, and he wanted to listen to the echoes of Róża’s time. He began
by examining the species of trees that flanked the perimeter walls, all the
while turning to check the rows of windows sufficiently elevated to afford a
view on to any foliage. After half an hour he found himself back at the main
entrance, a large blue gate almost as high as the wall of yellow bricks. There’d
been no cherry trees. Not one.

Suddenly the low buzz of
an electric surge came from the gate’s lock mechanism. The iron clanged and scraped.
Moments later a straggling group of relatives left the premises. They were
mainly women, several pushing a pram or holding a boy or girl by the hand.
Apart from one or two joking teenagers, their facial expressions wore shades of
darkness, the tell-tale hollows of dejection. Anselm had arrived in time to
catch the end of visiting time, the departure of innocents torn apart by the
crimes of someone they loved.

He stepped off the
pavement to make some room, but a woman lunged towards him, someone whose age
and appearance fell somewhere between the laughing youngsters and the gloomier
adults. Her skin was pocked and smudged with make-up. She wore tight stonewashed
jeans and white, dirty trainers. The long, red tongue on a Rolling Stones
T-shirt seemed to stick out beyond the open, padded jacket. She grabbed Anselm’s
arms, her eyes drawn to his habit. For a moment he thought he was back at
Wormwood Scrubs, or any of the other prisons where he’d bumped into the people
who stuck by his clients. The young woman spoke quickly, shoulders hunched, one
hand jabbing at the monolith behind her, as if she hoped to punch a hole in the
State’s defences. She began to cry, tattooed fingers tidying her hair as if
improving her appearance might sway Anselm’s mind. What did she want? An
advocate? Prayers? A miracle?