The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  What should have been one of those rare experiences of uncomplicated joy for Anselm — knowing he’d won before he’d opened his mouth — turned out to be a remarkably unpleasant tutorial in humiliation. He was pitted against the most renowned performers from London’s specialised libel chambers who viewed him, not altogether unfairly as a mole on their lawn. Every offer of settlement refused by Anselm was met with soaring contempt.

  ‘Now you’re being greedy’ said one, with a slow, patrician sneer.

  ‘I’d thought your client was being better advised,’ mused another, a short man who seemed to look down while looking up.

  They eventually caved in. And John won a retraction, a public apology, and what is always called, enticingly ‘undisclosed substantial damages’. That outcome ought to have been the signal for celebration: he’d recovered his reputation with compound interest. But within two weeks neither meant anything to him. He’d lost far more than his standing or its abstract value. Tragedies are like that. They redefine what is important.

  Anselm tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. The train from London rumbled out of the darkness, its brakes screeching, the carriages shuddering. The tannoy crackled and a low Suffolk voice announced the arrival from London and a few pending departures. Anselm got out of his car, opened his umbrella and shambled pensively towards the station entrance.

  The first tragedy to strike John took place the day following his victory. He’d not been alone in quitting Warsaw A dissident and colourful intellectual had taken the same plane to London. Celina Something-or-other had irked the censors for years through her ambiguous documentary films but she’d finally had enough of the intimidation and restrictions placed upon her work. She’d chosen exile. John had adored her, from the tangled dyed hair, past the plastic belt, and down to the green canvas shoes. Anselm had imagined that before long they’d marry and that tiny feet with garish, painted nails would patter round Hampstead — a happy vision that was only blurred by his inclination to anticipate all manner of crises best expressed in German.

  Though unfounded, his angstlichkeit turned prophetic. John’s association with Celina came to an abrupt conclusion on the very day that the agreed apologies were printed in the various newspapers. John never spoke of the matter save to say, in clinical terms, that things hadn’t worked out.

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The accident occurred within a month of that conversation, though John refused at any point afterwards to call it a tragedy He’d been screaming up the Al when he went off the road after skidding in slurry. It turned out the farmer was on his way back to clean up the mess, but John had got there first, blown through a fence and hit a couple of trees. After a few weeks in intensive care, surgeons in Leeds and London achieved quite astonishing results in facial reconstruction.

  ‘You wouldn’t know the difference,’ Anselm said, polishing his glasses on the lining of his jacket.

  ‘I’d banked on improvement,’ observed John, his voice flat and dry.

  A year or so later Anselm left the Bar to join the community at Larkwood. The sound of monastic bells had been ringing in his memory ever since he’d stumbled on the Suffolk retreat in his youth. He’d been stung by simple words on a leaflet … something about tasting a peace this world cannot give. Like water dripping on a stone, some moisture in the phrase had finally got through to his heart. Surreptitiously, he’d gone back to the quiet valley He’d mooched around the enclosure, knowing, even before he knew why that this remote place was home. When John had said he was off to Warsaw, Anselm had lured him up the bell tower, intending to reveal the strange longing that had seized hold of him: but they’d ended up talking cross purposes. Looking down upon the fiery green of the cloister Garth, they’d spoken of love and reasons — that the twain would never meet — and John had thought Anselm meant an ample Jazz singer who reigned over a basement club near Finsbury Park. When, following the accident, Anselm finally disclosed his intention to leave the Bar, John had been hurt and stunned.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘A monk? Sandals? Sackcloth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Covert flagellation?’

  ‘No, communal.’

  ‘You kept that to yourself.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Why didn’t you tell me when we were up the bell tower?’

  And yet, in a curious way Anselm’s departure proved decisive for John’s long-term rehabilitation: a deeper healing beyond the visible injuries. Unsure of where his future might lie now that his career as a journalist was over, he came to Larkwood. For months he shared the simple rhythm of Anselm’s life, the experience communicating with depth what his friend could never have expressed in words. He returned to Hampstead understanding not only Anselm but his own future, bent on academia with a resolution only comparable to his first day at Reuters.

  Over the following years John frequently made the trek to Larkwood. He told Anselm everything, from the contents of his dissertation to the underground politics that shaped the common room rebellions. They chewed over the past, as old friends do. But 1982 remained the year they never spoke about. Which, of course, made it for ever present. Because that was the time John had been in Warsaw Whatever had happened over there he’d come home to lose everything that had once mattered. And a little bit more.

  Passengers appeared in the mist. They moved quickly and purposefully shoulders hunched, hands buried in pockets. John was the last to leave the station. He stepped outside, tapping his stick in a wide arc before his feet. Anselm had cut it down shortly after John had moved into the guesthouse. The bottom half had been painted white in deference to city life and the conventions that announce disability.

  ‘I need more than a lawyer,’ he said, knowing that Anselm was out there, reaching for his arm. ‘I need you to be my eyes and hands.’

  Chapter Seven

  The fire hissed and spat. Anselm had chopped young wood, not old. The apple timbers hadn’t had enough time to dry out so the resin boiled and ran. Heat efficiency was reduced, but you got that unusual smell, the warming aroma of smoky cider, hot pies and an imagined cinnamon. Anselm threw on a couple more logs and shambled to a small oak cupboard built into the wall of the calefactory Situated as it was within the monastery, the room was not accessible to any of the guests. But Larkwood always made exceptions. To quote the Prior, it’s what the rules were for. And Anselm wanted complete privacy and the surrounding silence that promoted absolute candour.

  ‘Whisky?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Nope.’

  A couple of burgundy armchairs, the leather shabby and worn, faced the stone hearth, their feather cushions plumped and yielding. Between each stood a small round table with a faded military insignia dated 1916. They’d been picked up way back for a few quid by Father William at a Salvation Army second-hand furniture store in Manchester. Like all Larkwood’s cobbled furnishings, they carried the secret histories of many unknown lives. They linked the community to the world they served. Anselm handed John his drink and then sank into his chair.

  ‘You asked about the person I met in the graveyard?’ said John, as if they were still in Anselm’s chambers at Gray’s Inn.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I need to wind back first, to December of nineteen eighty-one, just after midnight. That’s when it all began.’

  John sat hunched forward, nursing his glass with both hands. Reflected flames danced on his dark glasses. He angled his head slightly attuned, as always, to the breathing of anyone nearby.

  ‘Tanks rolled on to the streets and within days ten thousand people had been thrown into detention camps. The army were in charge. Helped, of course, by the secret police … the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the SB, the ubeks … to use their more polite names. This was martial law People called it stan wojenny: a state of war.’

  Mo
st of the Solidarity leadership had been captured. The free trade union that had pressed for reform and change — wielding industrial chaos to speed up things — had been decapitated. Remaining activists had gone underground and settled into a long war. For their part, a war of words. They didn’t take up the gun, they took up the typewriter. Illegal publications burst out from hidden places. By the time John arrived there were hundreds in Warsaw alone. In March 1982 one of them caught his attention: Wolność i Niezależność … Freedom and Independence. Running along the bottom of the page in tiny letters was this mysterious declaration:

  PRINTED BY THE SHOEMAKER FOR THE FRIENDS OF THE SHOEMAKER

  ‘The Shoemaker?’ echoed Anselm.

  ‘His selected essays are available in translation. You’ll find a lengthy appraisal of his work (with citations) in my doctoral dissertation, a copy of which — furnished with a warm dedication — was presented to you in the manner of a gift.’

  ‘I still recall the lucid opening and the magisterial conclusions. Remind me about the cobbler.’

  ‘Every child in Warsaw knows the story. A dragon ravages the kingdom. All the knights are slain. Eventually a poor shoemaker turns up with a scheme to blow it to pieces, a sheepskin filled with sulphur … think takeaway kebab stuffed with Czech Semtex. The dragon has a night on the town, fancies a quick bite after closing time, and bang. Peace returns to the land.’

  The meaning was stark (‘and concludes Chapter Two’) — the Shoemaker was back to save the kingdom, this time with another kind of foreign explosive: words and ideas. John’s interest in the publication, however, wasn’t only limited to an enticing by-line. A few probing questions revealed that the Shoemaker’s paper had first appeared before the Second World War. It had continued in print right through the transition to Communist rule, abruptly disappearing off the streets in 1951 during the Stalinist Terror. For those old enough to remember — ‘Ring any bells? Chapter Three?’ — the reappearance of Freedom and Independence in 1982 was a wake-up call. The title was heavy with the meaning of struggle. It situated martial law squarely alongside the Occupation and the subsequent burden of totalitarian rule.

  ‘In retrospect, it was extraordinary,’ said John. ‘The response of ordinary people to the tanks and guns was spontaneously democratic. They set up “the other circuit”, drugi obieg. They devised their own secret institutions, run by and for themselves. Freedom and Independence was a perfect example … it was produced by friends. Someone printed it, obviously but the operation didn’t end there. A whole distribution network was set up, right under the noses of the army and the ubeks. Teams of volunteers, kolporters, people who believed in the Shoemaker’s ideas, spread the paper all over the city. They called themselves the Friends and, to this day, nobody has the faintest idea who any of the key players might have been. I first came across a copy in a café near my apartment. The owner had a pedal bin that functioned as a kind of secret magazine rack. Those in the know would turn up, buy a coffee and wait for the nod to go and fish out their morning paper.

  A nod given in John’s presence, telling him that he was trusted. A nod that told him the owner had some link to the Friends of the Shoemaker. John saw his opportunity to get to the voice behind the paper: he left a message asking for an interview.

  ‘Instead I met Róża Mojeska,’ said John. ‘The most remarkable woman I have ever met in my life. And she doesn’t even feature as a footnote.’

  She had two wedding rings on one finger, he said, running ahead of himself. He’d never had the courage to ask why It had been a priest’s idea, that’s all she’d said, seeing John’s gaze. But it was the single most potent ‘message’ that accompanied every movement of her hand, every gesture and action. She was not alone; she was two people. She was part of an alliance. Anyway returning to that request for a meeting, a week after leaving his message with the owner, he’d been stirring his coffee when a huge bearded guy in a checked jacket loomed over the table and told him to wear his overcoat like a cloak and wait at the grave of Bolesław Prus in the Powązki cemetery, a writer famed for his love of children.

  ‘Where you were arrested six months later?’ asked Anselm.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened in between?’

  John had become a friend of Róża, as much personally as professionally He’d been her link to the western media and she’d been his entry to the underground, but something else had grown: the sort of confidence and affection you can’t choose or nurture; it’s already there, waiting to catch light. But there’d been no meeting with the Shoemaker.

  ‘I asked every time I saw her and she always said no, which frustrated me no end because whoever did the writing wasn’t only a Václav Havel, he was a pimpernel known by his shoe rather than his glove. The paper just turned up out of nowhere. Every page kept alive the dream of an independent culture and society. There was poetry in the simplest lines.’

  And Róża was the only link to this central figure of resistance: no one else knew who he was or where he was hiding. Then on the morning of the first of November, while walking to work, John felt a big hand grab his elbow Turning to his side, he saw the towering figure who’d loomed over the café table. ‘The Shoemaker wants to meet you. Tonight. Six p.m. At the grave of Prus.’ Then he crossed the road and was gone, leaving John stunned in the middle of the pavement.

  ‘It was All Souls’ Day’ John was still leaning towards the fire. He sipped his whisky ‘The place was alight with thousands of candles. People were gathered everywhere, but Róża was nowhere to be seen. And then I saw her walking over to one of them … a hard-looking bastard with a dead man’s face.’

  John leaned on the huge stone lintel and looked down, unseeing, towards the complaining fire. His jacket was a neat fit, a slate grey herringbone, on top of a black roll neck sweater. He was tall and slim, the black trousers well pressed and shoes highly polished.

  ‘I was arrested, too,’ he said, stroking his jaw ‘For some reason, taking photographs of the secret police in action was considered bad taste. I got a good kicking and then they threw me on to the street.’

  But not before learning that Róża had been taken to Mokotów prison.

  ‘I found her home address through a contact in the jail. I had to tell her it wasn’t me, that I’d been careful, that no one had followed me, but she wasn’t listening, she wasn’t present. That’s when I realised she’d told others, and they’d been waiting like me, the Shoemaker among them … but she’d seen one of the ubeks. She’d handed herself in. It had been a spontaneous, desperate signal to whoever was watching to make a run for it. So she’d won. They got no one else and they had nothing on her … and yet she was a broken woman. She was completely shattered.’

  Straightening up, he tapped his jacket pockets. ‘May I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d always smoked Sobranie Black Russians, ever since his student days when he’d first got hooked. Like the Zeha East German trainers he’d picked up in Carnaby Street, they’d given him a sort of nonconformist allure. He still had the sheen as he fumbled for the crumpled packet, bent his head and struck a match.

  ‘I told her I’d find out who it was,’ stressed John, gesticulating with a sweeping arm towards Anselm. ‘I said I had connections, friends on both side of the fence, that it was my job to investigate, that I’d walk through fire … and she just cut me dead. She stared ahead, face stricken, and told me to do and say nothing … to forget what had happened in the cemetery, to forget the Shoemaker and the Friends — to forget her.’ He pushed smoke out of the side of his mouth, shaking his head in a kind of sickened wonder. ‘I don’t know what they did to her in prison, or what they’d said, but make no mistake. She’d lost. This was a defeated woman:

  ‘Shortly afterwards you were thrown out,’ recalled Anselm.

  ‘Yep.’ John blew hard and took another deep drag.

  ‘You kept your promise.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Which was why you couldn�
��t tell me anything during the libel proceedings.’

  John nodded.

  ‘What’s changed John?’ Anselm removed his glasses, and held them up to the light of the fire. Cleaning them on his scapular, he said, ‘You’ve kept that promise for twenty-eight years. Why break it now? I’d have thought …’ He paused, suddenly understanding.

  John counted the steps back to his seat and carefully lowered himself into the armchair. Taking his drink, he nursed it again and said, ‘Róża knocked on my door last night. She wants my help after all.’

  Anselm listened with the helpless compassion that he often felt in the confessional. He identified with other people’s lives and dilemmas; he railed against the random sequence of events whose ordering caused as much grief as any want of goodness. John evidently blamed himself for Róża’s collapse. He was the one who’d badgered her for that interview And someone had used the circumstances to engineer her spiritual obliteration.

  ‘She rang first,’ explained John. ‘There was no “How are you?” or “Long time no see”. She just said she was in London and went straight to the point. “John, I wear two wedding rings. You’ve seen them. The second belonged to my husband. He was shot in nineteen fifty-one. Pavel, and another man … they were killed like beaten dogs. I was there, in the cellar of Mokotów After my release, I could do nothing for him, for both of them, except wear the rings. I feel them every day; I’ve never forgotten the sight and the sound of that gun, or the face of the man who pulled the trigger.” She was whispering hard and I told her to slow down but she sort of pushed past me, her English breaking up as she ploughed on.

  Róża had switched to her mother tongue, speaking with deadly emphasis.

  ‘She said, “You, too, have seen his face. It belongs to Otto Brack. He arrested me at the grave of Prus in nineteen eighty-two. Do you remember?” I said I did, and then her voice dropped even lower. “When we got to Mokotów, he warned me that if I ever chose justice for Pavel consequences would follow, that he’d expose the informer he’d used to catch me … he’d spill their past all over the floor. Then he let me go. Do you understand what he did? He gave me power over their future, a power that could end their life or save it.” Her voice cracked again and seemed to vanish down a hole and I just waited and waited … and all 1 could hear was her breath dragging at the other end of the line. Then she said, cold and quiet, “That power … I’m going to use it.”‘