The Day of the Lie (47 page)

‘Which ones?’

‘The birds:

‘Why?’

‘As you said, they’re
the result of an unusually peaceful activity, something that you shared
together.’

‘Often.’

‘Well, have a fresh
look.’ Anselm shifted uneasily reminded again of Myriam’s confidence in human
nature. ‘Maybe they’ve got nothing to do with OLEK. Maybe they were drawn by
the Aleksander known to you and your mother.’

Chapter Fifty-Five

Spring had come to Larkwood, bringing
colour to the fields. The orchards were pink with blossom, flimsy petals
detached by the faintest breeze — making Anselm (an occasional and reluctant
empiricist) wonder what was the point of blooming at all. He was struck
because he found no tragedy in the swift coming and going, the sudden outburst
of fragility before the fruit began to grow There was no point, as such, he
concluded. It was simply beautiful. Here today gone tomorrow.

The observation, it
transpired, had the character of a prophetic warning (though Anselm didn’t
quite hear the message). Six weeks after his return to Larkwood, he received a
call from a man who’d thumped out Colonel Bogey while marching through the
bush.

‘You know, the trombone
player,’ said Sylvester, frustrated, holding out the phone.

It took Anselm a few
seconds to enter the Watchman’s lost world but then he understood. John’s voice
was anything but musical.

‘Celina asked me to call
you.’

Anselm listened, hardly
speaking, overwhelmed by an incoming tide of sadness — something predictable
and curiously inevitable. Róża had asked Celina if she might come to
London for a short spell, explained John; they’d said goodbye only the previous
week in Warsaw, but that was no matter. Both of them had wept, not wanting
another leave-taking, not knowing how to handle letters or phone calls,
hesitant about any more time spent apart and what with cheap flights these days
and the spare room overlooking the metro line … She’d arrived at Heathrow
thin, uncertain of herself; wanting the arm of a flight attendant even before
she’d reached baggage control. She’d brought presents, cheap things from the
market in Praga, desperate gestures it seemed towards the backlog of gifts
never given because of their long separation. Celina had taken her home, to her
flat in West Kilburn. On returning to the sitting room after a quiet evening
meal — a comfortable time spent talking about an office bore, career hopes and
a crack in the ceiling — Celina had found Róża apparently asleep in an
armchair. For a long moment she’d stood looking down upon the peaceful face of
mauve shadows, struck by a certain majesty, the frail hands open in her lap,
the feet in blue woollen stockings, crossed at the ankle … and then she’d
noticed that Róża wasn’t breathing. She’d gone. It was as though she’d
left her coat behind, laid neatly on the chair. Amongst her few possessions
Celina had found a one way ticket: Róża had come to London with that
peculiar knowledge of the old.

‘Celina wonders if you’d
conduct the ceremony ‘Of course.

‘She’s moved on already
Anselm.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’d only just got her
daughter back.’

The greater part of Brack’s legacy was now
complete.

All the world came to Róża,
it seemed. A small crowd gathered at the graveside in Kensal Green: Celina, of
course, with John, and their different circles — people who’d never met Róża
but who now felt involved in her life and death through an attachment to her
daughter; Magda Samovitz with the memory of an orphanage and its caretaker, Mr
Lasky; the Kolbas from Warsaw, along with Mateusz Robak and a number of elderly
women brought by Sebastian, the pillagers of hell, all mentioned by name in Róża’s
testimonial. The Friends formed a line, strangely together, strangely apart,
like those two protesters at Brack’s trial holding on to a banner about
justice. Even Father Nicodem took extreme measures to be there, dying two days
beforehand, setting his spirit free to join the gathering. In the late
afternoon, to the rhythm of a psalm of hope, they walked in turn past the mound
of moist earth, dropping a flower into the deep shadow by their feet.

As the mourners drifted
away Anselm approached Edward Kolba, a stooped figure wearing a charcoal grey
trilby This was the wangler; the one who’d learned to live ‘on the left’.
Anselm gripped his hand and wouldn’t let go. The old man tugged but Anselm
wouldn’t release him. Eventually he lifted his face. Anselm had expected
tortured remorse but he found a challenge, glared back with a quivering lip. ‘C’mon
finish it,’ he seemed to say It was FELIKS. Anselm let the soft hand drop, seeing
resentment in the old man’s eyes — not to him, but Róża, who’d brought the
scourge of compromise into his life. ‘You cannot understand,’ his stare
implied. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a child at home and a wife in
prison. Our married life had just begun. Judge me all you like …’

Anselm didn’t, but he
couldn’t say so because they were trapped without a common tongue and Aniela
was watching, smiling gratefully at the monk’s attentiveness, assuming neither
of them understood the other. It was time to go.

The rest had mourned.
And Anselm, left alone by the grave with a fugitive conscience, asked himself
if anyone apart from himself had dared to grieve for Otto Brack — not for who
he was, but for who he might have been, knowing that there’d only been one
person present in the State-run crematorium: a stranger who didn’t speak the
language, a troubled monk who’d seen a flicker of green light in a man’s dying
eyes.

Anselm returned to his monastery ill at
ease. The violent storm that had begun during the Terror had finally blown
itself out. And in that particular serenity that follows a cataclysm, Anselm
tried to make sense of the devastation, wanting to find the meaningful ending
when all those affected could finally applaud the victory of good over evil. In
a sense, he’d found it — or at least he
thought
he had … he couldn’t
be certain — but the finding (if that is what it was) had made him feel dirty
again, all the more so because he’d glimpsed it in a place he’d least expected
to find anything worthwhile. Anselm roamed around the cloister, head down,
shuffling his feet. In choir he lost his place, pulling at the wrong ribbon in
the wrong book. Taking his thoughts to his bees one morning, he passed beneath
the branches of the surrounding aspens to see the Prior sitting on Anselm’s
throne, an old pew in the circle of hives.

‘Aren’t you scared of
getting stung?’ asked the Prior as Anselm hitched his habit and sat down.

‘Permanently. It comes
with the territory’

‘You have other
concerns? If it would help, go to the end of them.’ He paused and then added. ‘Why
not start with John?’

Anselm couldn’t help but
smile. At last the invitation had come to enter the grey area between himself
and the Prior. Its shadow had followed him from Larkwood to Warsaw and back
again. It lay between them here, among the hives. It fell upon the wild,
trampled flowers .

‘I suppose I feel let
down,’ conceded Anselm, shifting a little on the bench. ‘Pushed aside when I
turned up to help; pulled back once I’d gone away Pushed and pulled when it
suited. He might have shared more earlier, willingly rather than leave me to
find out later by chance.’

The Prior thought for so
long that Anselm thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he spoke, seeming to aim
across the clearing, his head angled to one side.

‘You’re disappointed
because he never told you about his mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nor about his shame and
his longing to change her story and his own?’

‘Yes.’

‘His gamble with a man
who called himself the Dentist?’

‘Yes:

This was part of the
ground covered by the Prior and John all the years ago, trekking through the
woods to Our Lady’s Lake. The Prior wouldn’t say so, of course, but leaving
aside Exodus 22, previous knowledge of John’s past was the one explanation for
why he’d sent Anselm to Warsaw without a moment’s hesitation. He’d made his
mind up (in principle) thirty years earlier, when the chance to call on Anselm
had seemed impossible to imagine. But then an archive had turned up in Dresden
and Róża had flown to London.

‘Did you ever explain to
John why you came to Larkwood?’ asked the Prior from a seeming tangent. ‘Did
you tell him why you were leaving behind a way of life he’d shared and
understood?’

‘No.’

He’d tried, but his
friend’s mind hadn’t engaged with the mesh of Anselm’s words. This, too — he
was sure — had been ground covered long ago in the woods. The Prior wasn’t
surprised, and he had something to say:

‘Sometimes, Anselm — and
especially with the most important parts of our lives — we cannot share who we
are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we
want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh
and spirit … and at certain times we can’t do it. Because, ultimately we
cannot give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want
to do so that we realise how
immense
we are … more vast and mysterious
than the night sky; and alone.’

Anselm nodded, thrown
off balance.

‘John didn’t give you
plain facts because you were his friend. He wanted to give you so much more and
couldn’t. But when the time came — and he waited patiently in the darkness — he
sent you into his troubled past to find him. And now you know more than anyone
else; more than you could reduce to words, if asked. This is friendship,
Anselm. Knowledge beyond the reach of language. It’s what bound Róża to
Father Kaminsky.’

The Prior had lanced a
hidden abscess, instantaneously healing Anselm of a resentment that he hadn’t
even wanted to acknowledge. He felt peculiarly light in his body and
clear-headed with a sharper appreciation of the matters that had lowered his
head in the cloister. His head fell now and the Prior, seeming to understand,
spoke with a familiar tone of command:

‘Your concerns; go to
the end of them.’

There was so much on
Anselm’s mind: not just Róża’s mysterious victory over Otto Brack, but the
tragedy of half-redeemed lives that peppered the surrounding landscape; Irina
in Mokotów, Sebastian exiled, and Aniela smiling for no good purpose, while men
like Frenzel lived as though the premiums would never stop coming in (an
arrangement, admittedly that was now under close review). But the question that
most troubled Anselm was how to understand Otto Brack. What was his
relationship with evil?

‘Róża gave me a bit
of a slap in the face when the Shoemaker was dying,’ he said, scratching the
back of his head. ‘My entire outlook on Brack had been fixed by this
inclination — and I can’t get rid of it, even now — that but for certain
experiences, Brack would have been just like you and me. He might even be here
in Larkwood, causing bite—size trouble. So I started building up this defence,
before God and Man, about a damaged childhood, a limping boy who ended up in
the hands of Strenk who’d only made things worse by forcing on the wrong sized boots.
You know what I mean, it’s the stuff about screws, loose and tight. Damaged
will, and all that. Father Nicodem was on board, too, but Róża wouldn’t
have it, not completely’

‘What did she say?’

‘That he’d made a free
choice. That damaged people can make undamaged choices, and I thought, blast
it, you’re right, there’s a freedom in this, a total liberty, and thank God I’m
not tied down to the effects of a cat jumping in my pram or someone’s messing
around with a flat-head screwdriver. Róża says Brack did what he did
because he wanted to. He was a vengeful man who didn’t want to leave his
injuries behind. In Strenk he’d found himself another father who told a
different kind of bedtime story, a grown-up one, and he wanted to listen so he
could learn the words. Like John —like me, put in similar circumstances — he
fancied his place in history.’

The Prior made a light
cough, as he did when he wasn’t sure about a proposed change in the work rota.
He unhooked his wire glasses and began fiddling with the paperclip repair and
said, ‘Do you remember, once, you wondered if Brack was simply an evil man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, when you sat with
him in the Warsaw Hall, what did you see?’

This was the nub of the
problem for Anselm. It was why he’d been lifting up volume two in choir rather
than volume three, pulling the red ribbon rather than the blue.

‘He spoke to me,’ began
Anselm, scuffing his feet. ‘It was a sort of confession. He wanted to tell the
whole world about his crimes, that he was proud of them, in a way for having
grasped the nettle. And as I listened, I thought there’s room here for the cat
and the screwdriver, sure … and I still do, despite Róża’s point that he’d
made a lot of choices … but either way the picture of the man was uniformly
dim.’

The Prior waited.

‘But as he was speaking
I thought I saw someone else behind his words and actions … it was as though
someone decent was trying to break out, to crack the hard surface of who he
was. Whether the hardness was due to circumstance or choice didn’t really
matter, there was some good in him. Even as he did something wrong he was
trying to do something right. And I wondered if events had layers, and people
had layers, and that evil might be the obliterating painting on top, but that
in time, with the right kind of chemicals — something strong but not so strong
to bleach the prosecutor’s hair — we might be able to get it off and find out
whatever it is that still lies behind the original canvas with its unimaginable
depth of colour.’

This refusal to believe
that one layer saturated or transformed the other, his wondering if they could
remain distinct was based not on an outbreak of pity, or a desire to reinstate
the damaged childhood defence. Rather it was because as Brack had stumbled away
he’d been like a man blinded by light. The truth, revealed, had had a
coruscating effect on him. Out of his confusion he’d recalled another story,
told by Mr Lasky recognising that his life should have been something noble and
good.