The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  Anselm had been a monk for about eighteen months and hadn’t heard from John at all. For his part, Anselm had sent tape recordings in place of letters, describing the rough and tumble of life around a cloister. He’d told funny stories about the older duffers. He’d passed on some of the wisecracks from the Prior. But nothing came in return. With the passage of time Anselm had grown anxious because he couldn’t expunge his last memory of John: unshaven, the buttons out of order on his shirt, the coloured socks that didn’t match. And so, with the Prior’s permission, Anselm had taken an early train from Cambridge and turned up unannounced at John’s flat.

  ‘I thought we might have breakfast,’ said Anselm, as the door opened.

  ‘Have they kicked you out?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Are you wearing sandals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘O God.’

  Anselm followed John down the dark corridor, weaving between unopened mail and slumped rubbish sacks loose at the neck, horrified at what he’d just seen: the bloodless face behind dark glasses; the creased, slept-in clothing; the saffron stains on the open shirt. Cautiously he entered the kitchen, smelling a nauseating blend of cigarettes, stale beer and spices. The work surface and sink overflowed with filthy crockery, half empty aluminium take-away trays, empty bottles and crushed cans. On a table, by a tape recorder, lay a saucer heaped with ash and stubs. One of Anselm’s cassettes was in the deck. The others, salvaged from the corridor but still in their envelopes, were piled to one side.

  ‘I take it you’ve made a significant effort to continue your engagement with the local community?’ queried Anselm.

  ‘I feed my neighbour’s cat.’

  ‘You’ve sought help from professionals trained to help a talented young man come to terms with restricted vision?’

  ‘Don’t be shy. The word’s “blind”.’

  ‘You take frequent and regular exercise?’

  ‘Without fail. I go upstairs … and then I come down again.’

  John was opening cupboards, patting his hands inside, trying to find a jar of instant coffee.

  ‘You’re relatively happy, grappling with the exciting question of what comes next in your life?’

  ‘I’m raring to go.

  ‘I assume you have a suitcase?’

  John turned around, letting his arms drop.

  ‘A suitcase,’ repeated Anselm. ‘Let me pack it. You’re expected at Larkwood. I realise you’ll be leaving behind a vast, carefully constructed support network, but you’ll find another community, different help, lots of exercise and as much time as you need to grapple. Sandals, too, if you want.’

  ‘And a whip?’

  ‘No. And leave yours behind. The point of coming is to learn to do without.’

  John was not the first person overwhelmed by depression to stay at Larkwood. Many tortured men and women had taken a room in the guesthouse while learning to grope through various kinds of darkness. John was allocated a room on the ground floor. In lieu of a white stick, Anselm cut down a sapling with twists and turns produced by a struggle with a winding creeper. John was given a job picking apples, alternating with bottle washing and waxing floors. He was given a structure. Early rising, quiet, work, more quiet, more work, recreation (sometimes raucous), a Great Silence, early to bed. Between times: mysteriously bad meals.

  ‘This is good, Anselm,’ he said after three weeks. ‘I’m beginning to find my way.’

  It was a warm, grateful but cryptic comment. Anselm had anticipated that John would eventually start shaving, pick fruit and — when the moment was ripe — open up about the terror of finding himself blind, haunted by the memory of colour. However, only a portion of those expectations came to pass. He did shave. He went one step further: despite strong warnings to the contrary, he asked Larkwood’s unskilled barber for a haircut. He wandered through the orchard, arms reaching up into the lower branches feeling for apples that were ready to fall, removing them with that gentle twist required by Brother Aiden. But he didn’t open up. At least not to Anselm. In the evenings, in that quiet hour before Compline, Anselm often saw John walking with the Prior, the man whose pungent remarks had made it on to the cassette left in the tape deck. Heads bowed, they ambled along the Bluebell Walk; they sat on the railway sleeper overlooking Our Lady’s Lake; they paused in the woods, suddenly alert, as though wondering if someone had tailed them. Moving once more, the Prior listened intently his arm hooked into John’s, nudging or pulling as the turns of the lane required.

  ‘You’re back to your old self, John,’ remarked Anselm six months later as they rinsed bottles in the scullery. ‘And I’m glad, real glad.’

  ‘I’m not quite there,’ he replied, plunging his hands into the hot water. ‘But I’m learning … slowly learning … to bide my time and wait.’

  Wait for what? Anselm wanted to know but he couldn’t ask. There was something confessional about John’s talks with the Prior which, by their nature, excluded repetition, even to a close friend. Anselm understood this, but it didn’t erase the jealousy: his wanting to be an important — if not decisive — part of John’s recovery. The sense of exclusion was all the more difficult to manage because John became increasingly relaxed with Anselm. He joked again, as they’d done at school. He sought him out to talk about everything but the past: he confided to Anselm not the path travelled, but his plans for the future.

  ‘I can still contribute,’ he said cautiously almost lapsing into the Prior’s strange Glasgow-Suffolk dialect. ‘I can write. I can teach. I can see certain things without my eyes … things I might not have seen unless I’d been forced to look in a different way Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Anselm did. It applied to his life of faith.

  John left Larkwood after seven months. By his own account he wasn’t ready to handle life alone in Hampstead but the time was right — like one of those apples that need a little twist to leave the tree. Anselm drove him home, a restored but still broken man — that contradictory state of the injured who have come to accept their injury and the limitations it brings.

  ‘Thanks for the tapes, Anselm,’ said John after they’d tidied up the kitchen.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Thanks for coming to get me.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks for bringing me back. I can take care of myself, now.’

  A pause fell between them. Anselm’s failure to reply contained the unspoken hurt: that he’d planned his own wisecracks and counsel only to find himself employed as the chauffeur.

  ‘Anselm?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If ever I needed help — real help … with something far more difficult than what to do when you can’t see the end of your nose … I’d only come to you.

  At those words Anselm woke up as if someone had snapped a thumb and forefinger.

  He showered and threw on his habit, glancing afresh at the milestones to John’s professional rehabilitation. After leaving Larkwood he’d found a place at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and completed a PhD, a meisterwerk on the contribution of dissident thinking to political theory in East-Central Europe. Honoured with a copy Anselm had confined himself to the first and last pages, thus missing those abundant references to the Shoemaker. Fortunately, more discriminating readers had considered its merits and John had been offered a tiny room in Birkbeck College, London. There, speaking from a cloud, Sobranies to hand, he’d entranced successive generations with tales of the movers and shakers behind a peaceful revolution; of how he’d once rubbed shoulders with greatness.

  But the dream had left another imprint on Anselm’s mind: the recollection of something altogether personal. The bell for Lauds came like a herald: John’s request for help had been planned long ago, even as he’d stumbled through the woods at Larkwood.

  Chapter Ten

  The jubilant opening antiphon did not command Anselm’s undivided attention. He kept thinking of Melanie Fielding propped up in a facing stall, pool c
ue in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the other. Beside her stood another phantom, this one empty handed: John’s real mother, the woman he’d never named. They seemed to watch Anselm with different kinds of appeal, wanting by turns to be understood and forgiven. They were at his shoulder when, after Lauds, he tugged at the Prior’s scapular. Standing in the cloister, he spoke in a hushed voice from one cowled shadow to another, the shamble of feet around them growing still. Given the hour and the place he restricted himself to the sparest details.

  ‘John Fielding has asked for my help,’ whispered Anselm.

  Nod.

  ‘He wants me to walk through fire.’

  A reasonable-request nod.

  ‘If I make it to the other side a killer from the Stalinist Terror will be brought to justice.’

  An as-you’d-expect nod.

  ‘Will you tell him it’s just not possible? Monastery walls, and all that?’

  The Prior nudged his glasses and the two round discs glinted suddenly in the darkness. His reply was barely audible. ‘This afternoon, two-thirty’

  The meeting was convened in the parlour, a bright and draughty room opposite the reception desk where Sylvester endured his long face-off with the telephone. Anselm strongly suspected that the Watchman had quit the front line trench and had scouted silently to the door where he could listen to John’s explanation.

  The Prior listened, too, but in that intimidating way for which he was renowned. He didn’t move, sitting on the edge of his seat, his dark eyes alive with an intense concentration that threatened to consume whoever was speaking. His cheap wire glasses, round and slightly out of shape, seemed to have been damaged by the force behind them.

  ‘Where is Róża now?’ he said, the accent more Glasgow than Suffolk.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘She’d gone before I could ask where she was going.’

  The Prior made a humph. ‘She waited fifty-nine years,’ he calculated, drawing out the words. ‘And then, when she finally decided to use the power given to her by this man Brack, she turned to you. Not one of the many Friends who’d served the cause of the Shoemaker, but you, a man she’d only known for a matter of months … it’s as though she could trust no other. It’s as though you were part of her lost opportunity’

  The Prior humphed again, and Anselm winced, waiting for his spiritual father to express pained regret: that the monastic enclosure represented an environment of inner freedom born of stability and that Anselm, without duress, had chosen to live within it; that he was no longer free to be anyone’s eyes and hands. Instead the Prior sat back and said, ‘What can be done?’

  Like Róża said, explained John, there are files.

  During the eighties, the Warsaw SB and Stasi personnel from East Germany formed a unit to tackle underground printing in the city They kept a joint archive in German. No one knew of its existence until six months ago when a plumber found two crates in the basement of a condemned office block in Dresden. The contents were now lodged with the Instytut Pamięci Nardowej in Warsaw, the Institute of National Remembrance, commonly known as the IPN. After Róża’s disappearance John had lunged for the phone, wondering if she’d been there and hoping to track down a contact number. He’d failed on both scores for reasons of confidentiality but mention of the Shoemaker and his own arrest elicited a reference to the newly found documents. As a victim of the former communist regime and someone directly linked to the fortunes of Freedom and Independence, he was entitled to inspect them.

  ‘The operation that led to my arrest was called Polana,’ he explained. ‘Obviously, the target was Róża, not me. The point, however, is that the file generated by the operation was stored in one of those crates. As I say, all the paperwork is in German.’

  The last observation came with an angling of the head towards Anselm, neatly making reference to his passable competence at the language. As an adolescent Anselm had been enthralled by all those dark words for dread and anxiety along with heavyweight mindbenders like vergangenheitsbewältigung: the assumption of one’s past. He’d relished that one, even before he’d had a past to assume. With the same hunger he’d scoured a dictionary for like terms in a fearless endeavour to acquire intellectual depth. He’d drop them carelessly into ordinary discourse as if to say English had unfortunate conceptual limitations. It was only much later, after the war criminal Eduard Schwermann had claimed sanctuary at Larkwood, that Anselm returned to the language with the sober application that comes with middle age. He’d been taught by the community’s gardener, Brother Eckhart, a former bookseller with unsubstantiated connections to the Austrian aristocracy His tuition had been unconventional, grounding Anselm’s vocabulary in horticultural matters, thirteenth century mystical theology and the requirements of polite table conversation.

  ‘The file ought to contain everything compiled by this unit to catch Róża,’ said John, fidgeting with a button on the cuff of his jacket. ‘And that would include the name of the informer.’

  ‘Whom Róża has, in effect, protected from Otto Brack,’ mumbled the Prior, recapitulating.

  ‘Yes,’ said John.

  ‘Because if she accuses Brack he, in turn, will accuse his own informer.’

  ‘Exactly’

  ‘Who would then be exposed for what they were and are.’

  ‘Which Róża, until now, has refused to contemplate.’

  ‘For fear they’d take desperate measures to avoid the shame.’

  This was Róża’s dilemma, neatly summarised. For a long while, the two monks and their guest meditated on Otto Brack’s scheme to avoid justice, their heavy silence almost certainly shared by Sylvester who, ear to the door, was straining to catch the Prior’s considered response. Finally, Larkwood’s reluctant superior made a kind of speech. If Anselm hadn’t sought the conference that morning he’d have thought the Prior had prepared his words the night before. He spoke deliberately with measured phrasing:

  ‘Such is the ingenious plan of Otto Brack. But Róża’s is all the braver, all the more daring and all the more laden with risk. Her aim is nothing less than to turn Brack’s world-view upside down. She’s placing all her hopes in the hands of the one person who has everything to lose. Brack, it seems, has no faith in the human condition, in humanity. He has never contemplated that his informer might be prepared, if asked, to face their past. Róża, on the other hand, holds firm to a belief that I sometimes fear is waning … that a longing for truth lingers in every man. This, I suspect, is why she dares — at last — to seek their co-operation. She thinks they’ll agree to a manner of dying. For their own sake if not for hers.’ The Prior adjusted his glasses and a trace of Glasgow pragmatism entered his voice. ‘As with any great endeavour the risk of failure far exceeds the chances of success. Someone has to reach out and tip the balance. Someone with the right kind of experience.’

  ‘My sentiments precisely’ endorsed John.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No:

  ‘We’re all agreed then.’

  Anselm frowned, not quite following the drift of accord that had left him behind. Puzzled, he watched the Prior worm a hand into his chest habit pocket and take out a diary and the chewed stub of a pencil. Flicking the pages, he said, ‘Anselm, I take it you’ve persuaded more than one criminal to enter a guilty plea?’

  ‘Indeed I have.’

  It was an art. They had to come out of the discussion believing abject surrender was a smart move. He coughed modestly.

  ‘Well, you better go to Warsaw and read that file. The sooner you find this informer and get to work the better. It seems Róża needs your kind of help.’

  Anselm’s mouth dropped open. What had happened to ‘monastery walls’? It was the Prior’s phrase, used to emphasise the importance of the enclosure, and not just when restless monks fancied a jaunt up the road for some ostensibly worthwhile purpose. The remark enshrined the withdrawn nature of Larkwood’s communal life, its witness of recollection and stability to people forever on th
e move. And yet here he was, trading dates and times with John, resolving incidental details.

  ‘I’ll meet all the expenses,’ insisted John. ‘There’s a reasonable hotel right by the IPN:

  ‘We’ll contribute.’

  ‘No, really’

  ‘Three days?’

  ‘A week, he might as well visit the place.’

  ‘Call it ten. We’ll pay the difference.’

  ‘I think not.’

  At the close of the meeting, the two negotiators shook hands and, with a curiously solemn nod to Anselm, the Prior disappeared through the arched door that led to the cloister. It was as though his companions had just finished one of their old walks, when John had been overrun by despair and Anselm had kept watch from a distance. His presence had finally been acknowledged.

  Quite apart from the ‘monastic walls’ aspect, the Prior’s decision had been unprecedentedly swift. Ordinarily he didn’t sleep on a proposal; he hibernated with it, emerging after some private winter of reflection. But now, without the slightest equivocation, he’d agreed to Anselm acting on John’s behalf. Leaving his old friend in the parlour, Anselm hurried over to Sylvester who was back behind his desk, eyeing the telephone as if it were a child that might talk back.

  ‘Were you listening?’ whispered Anselm, leaning down.

  ‘How dare you.’ Sylvester lurched for his walking stick as if it were a Lee Enfield with fixed bayonet.

  ‘Why did he let me go without a fight?’ pursued Anselm, fearlessly ‘Can’t you guess? Or are you just plain stupid?’

  ‘There are two schools of thought on that one. But seriously why?’

  ‘Exodus Twenty-two.’

  ‘Yer wot?’

  ‘Defend the widow and the orphan:

  Anselm gave a knowing sigh, but before he could pull away Sylvester gestured him closer, nodding towards John. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

  ‘You have.’