The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  There was a sliver of irony or sarcasm in those strong, hazel eyes, but the surrounding light carried a heavier regret.

  ‘We fell out, once, over a play by Mickiewicz,’ resumed Bernard. ‘And we nearly fell out again over Róża’s arrest. But he was a very careful man. And he had to be careful for Róża. So he followed her sometimes, even when she thought she was alone, just in case of trouble. So when I accused him of collaboration, like you accused me — though I failed to choose my words as finely as you did — he had a reply He brought me here:

  Once more Bernard pointed towards a grave. The headstone was a fraction too tall, making Anselm think the incumbent had been given a straitjacket for eternity. He stepped closer to read the inscription. There was only a name and some dates: the barest elements of identification. No loving words had come to the husband’s mind. It read:

  Klara Fielding

  8th March 1925 — 1st July 1953

  Anselm read the inscription several times as if more information might suddenly appear on the stone. This was John’s secret. He’d only told Róża. It was why he’d come to Warsaw.

  ‘A BBC journalist wanted to interview the Shoemaker,’ said Bernard. ‘Róża told Mateusz to arrange a meeting. When the guy arrived, Róża tailed him … and Mateusz tailed Róża. In turn, they came here, before convening at the agreed location as if nothing had happened. Mateusz thought nothing of it until much later, when Róża walked into a trap.’

  Bernard had tracked down Klara’s family Not the English one, by marriage — they’d left the country — but the Communist Party members who’d come to Warsaw from Poznań after the war: her parents .

  ‘They were still fiercely proud of her memory,’ said Bernard, stepping to one side, moving his shadow off the grave. ‘Even though they knew nothing of her work for the state, they clung on to the fact that it was significant. That’s what the man in the dark suit had said at the funeral. He’d come round a week later with her medals, recognition from Warsaw and Moscow of her service to the people … difficult service.’

  Anselm did the maths. ‘She was only twenty-eight.’

  ‘Yes:

  ‘What happened? She had a husband; she was a young mother.’

  John, the child, had only just been born.

  ‘Suicide.’

  Anselm breathed back the word.

  ‘She hung herself. But not in the garage or her bedroom. She chose an unguarded section of railings around the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Her parents didn’t know that, of course — it would have shattered the myth. And myths, even false ones, can heal if you believe in them.’

  Mateusz had also tracked down her friends. She’d been carefree and funny Talented, too, a musician who’d won prizes at home and abroad. She’d been naive, thinking she could marry an English diplomat without attracting the attention of the security service.

  ‘Not one of these old friends knew she’d been recruited,’ said Bernard, buffing the felt with the back of his hand. ‘All they noticed was that she’d lost her sense of fun. They’d thought it was because of the Englishman, you know, that stiff upper lip and the stiff embassy parties. But then she made a confession of what she’d done, to these people that mattered. She planned to tell her husband, too. A couple of days later she vanished.’

  One of those shattered friends, a former love — kindly rejected — hadn’t accepted the police explanation of a road accident. So he’d gone to the undertaker’s with a bottle of vodka and a Molotov cocktail and given him a choice. They’d got smashed making vows of secrecy about the tell-tale bruising to Klara’s neck and the laugh of the ubek who’d unhooked the body from outside his place of work.

  ‘But how does all this relate to John?’ asked Anselm, moved and sad, his mind drained of curiosity. ‘Did Mateusz ask himself that question? Did you?’

  ‘Yes, we did.’ Bernard scratched the back of his head again, not especially enjoying the moment he’d waited for since 1982. ‘Your friend told Róża that he’d come to Warsaw to make up for a mistake … that’s what Róża told Mateusz. She’d been overwhelmed by his honesty; she’d wanted to help him; she’d brought him into the struggle. But things looked very different once Róża was back in Mokotów and Mateusz had unearthed the nature of Klara’s mistake. There were only four people who’d known about that planned meeting with the Shoemaker: Father Kaminsky Mateusz, me and …’

  Bernard left a sort of gap for Anselm to fill but, not wanting to name his friend, he made a kind of last-ditch loyal defence. He thought of his father sighting the Indians at Little Big Horn. He sensed an impending death and grief.

  ‘But John has no motive. He’d mapped the failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest and everywhere in between. He told me once of a betrayal — he meant her abandonment of him. He’d never forgiven her …’

  Bernard listened, nodding with agreement, following the steps in Anselm’s thinking, not accepting — with immense regret — where they were leading. He stepped back, as if to get some distance from Klara, not wanting her to hear what he was going to say.

  ‘I’d imagine that for a child, the suicide of a parent could be a sort of betrayal. They weren’t important enough. Something was bigger. But that doesn’t mean they cease to love them, deeply and all they stood for.’

  Anselm didn’t respond because he knew it was true.

  ‘You know, a child can grow to spend their life trying to find what they’ve lost. To reach the person taken away. They can seek out the streets on which that vanished parent walked … to see what they saw, to smell the air they breathed, to feel the same breeze on their skin. And they can do something even more desperate, a gruesome act of necrophilia: they can dig deep into the grave to salvage what their mother or father cared about. To bring those ideas and feelings back to life. To live them out, in the flesh, in mystical union with the person who turned their back upon them. Everything’s forgiven. They’re together again. It’s another kind of suicide. This time the child is dead. Everything they might have thought and felt has been buried in an unmarked grave. They’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, dying so that someone else might live.’

  Again Anselm couldn’t speak. He was looking at Klara’s inscription, her life reduced to two dates. No wonder Mr Fielding had been lost for words.

  ‘We think he came clean to Róża because it gave him the best kind of cover, continued Bernard, in a changed voice; less compassionate, more logical. ‘The remorse of a child salvaging the mistake of his mother — it’s a good story and credible. The mapped failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest? Part of a long and detailed preparation. I think it’s called a legend. When your friend came to Warsaw, it was a homecoming. He’d arrived to finish off what his mother had started:

  Sebastian didn’t argue as much as Anselm had expected. Perhaps it was Anselm’s crisp retorts, the impatient authority of a judge in control of his court. Holding the phone some distance from his ear and mouth, he spoke to the Warsaw skyline. No, it wasn’t Father Kaminsky who’d led Brack to Róża and it wasn’t Bernard Kolba. Their innocence had sparkled. Anselm cut short the remonstrations, asking him to check the SB archive for material on Klara Fielding and her son, John. Perhaps they might discuss the outcome the following evening. It had been a long day he’d said, and tomorrow he fancied a spot of aimless sight-seeing.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Cooking when you’re blind isn’t as difficult as one might think, but it takes years of practice — at least when it comes to the more demanding recipes, and those heartbreakers, like Yorkshire pudding, which rise, or don’t rise according to a caprice of their own. John had been down the roast dinner road many times and, after almost thirty years, it held no terrors for him. Except for that pudding. It wouldn’t fall into line.

  John’s hands were shaking, too, and that didn’t help. The risk of accident hovered in his darkness. Róża had said she’d come round. You’re a fool, thought John. You should have left well alone. Only all
was not well.

  John felt his way across the kitchen, tapping the edge of the worktop. His hands wandered towards the knife stand and he picked out the second from the left. Mechanically he chopped some garlic, moving fast towards his thumb and finger.

  Róża wanted justice.

  He’d nearly fallen over when he’d answered the phone and heard that voice. He’d gripped the door frame, leaning his head against the wall. He’d listened, trying to hear the traces of accusation in her rushed explanation — the blind are good at that; they can hear things above the frequency of ordinary sighted folk; but Róża was too good; she was too smart; she was wasn’t giving anything away She just stayed within the conventional waveband, leaving him to pick up the signal. She wanted to know who’d betrayed her. She’d said whoever betrayed her in eighty-two could help her bring Otto Brack to court by facing their past. All they had to do was agree to meet her.

  Dear God, what had the Dentist said to her? How much did she know?

  John had listened with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to locate the slightest crackle of accusation. He couldn’t hear it. She just sounded resolved, her need for help almost tearing at his clothes. It was as though Róża were on her knees, forehead touching his shoes, her hands knotted into the hem of his trousers. It had been awful.

  And — out of genuine affection, but a colossal lack of prudence, in the face of everything the Dentist had ever taught him — he’d said, ‘Róża, come round, will you? I’ll give you the taste of an English heaven.’

  When he’d finished off the clove, he trussed up the meat with string.

  For the first time since the bandages were taken off his eyes, John wished, with a suppressed screaming desperation, that he could see. Róża was there, four steps in front of him, seated at the end of the dining table. She smelled of 4711 cologne. Her hand had been cool and soft, the wrinkles like the striations in some living stone. Her cheek had been warm, those fine hairs touching his skin when he kissed her.

  ‘Do you remember the grave of Prus?’ she said, her knife clinking. She’d put it down. Which meant she was watching.

  ‘How could I forget?’ John kept his hand against the table to control the shake. For the moment, he’d have to leave the wine. He didn’t want any spilling. ‘I never asked, why did you pick that spot?’

  ‘The caretaker at Saint Justyn’s once brought us … he was a wonderful man, always dressed in patched overalls. Mr Lasky His eyebrows were huge, like woollen hats for his eyes. He played the banjo.’

  He’d told them stories when she was a child. His job was fixing doors and windows and pipes but he found an excuse whenever he could to drop his tools and be with the children. He’d loved children. That’s why he’d taken the job in the first place. They’d shot him in the ruins of the Ghetto while the stones were still hot.

  ‘Hot?’ John’s breathing scraped out the word; his chest was tightening.

  ‘There was an Uprising before ours. After they’d crushed the remaining Jewish community, they blew the Ghetto to pieces. I’m told the Shoemaker was in there.’

  Her knife clinked. She’d picked it up … but she wasn’t eating … she was looking away John snatched at his glass and gulped some wine.

  ‘The grave of Prus,’ he said, playing dangerous, going back to the place of Róża’s arrest. ‘I loved the carving of that child.’

  ‘Me, too.’ Her knife clinked; so did the fork. ‘Do you remember that article you did on me for that series on lives lived in secret for the truth?’

  ‘I do-o-o-o.’ John drew out the last word as if he’d just been brought to something fondly packed away in the attic.

  ‘The title embarrassed me hugely:

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. It made me sound like a hero.’ Her gruff voice showed smiling and affection. ‘That was the beginning, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Our friendship.’

  ‘God, of course, sorry, yes.

  ‘Don’t worry.

  ‘No really I’m half out of it. Getting the old Yorkshire to rise did me in.

  ‘It meant a lot, what you told me, John … about your mother:

  ‘It was just … natural.’

  ‘I could tell.’ She picked up her cutlery. ‘I followed you, you know’

  ‘What?’ John coughed and dabbed his mouth. ‘Sorry, it’s the string on the beef, ha. Don’t know why we do that. The thing’s dead. Why tie it up?’

  ‘I said I followed you.

  ‘That’s right. Sorry again. Where to? The ends of the BBC?’

  ‘No.’ Her tone was smiling and warm again. ‘To her grave. If you hadn’t gone there, you know, I might never have met you. I ,might have changed my mind at the last minute:

  ‘Really’

  ‘Oh yes, agreeing to see you was the breaking of a golden rule.’

  ‘Rule?’

  ‘Mmmmm. Never meet a stranger. But having seen her stone, I thought you had roots. Deep roots in my soil.’

  ‘I’m glad, because I have; because …’John coughed again. ‘Blasted stuff. It’s part of an Englishman’s understanding of paradise. You can’t get in without a ball of string and penknife. Dear God —’ he banged his chest, thinking what to say — ‘roots. You never leave them behind.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  They ate in silence, John composing himself, trying to classify the signals from the other end of the table. There was no doubting the use of code — the lives lived in secret, that tilt towards the Shoemaker, and the tailing to a grave and the beginning of it all — the problem was cracking it; being sure. What had the Dentist said to her? If only John knew, he could play out this meal and make it to the shore. And with that thought, he hated himself deeply and angrily Róża wanted justice. She’d waited the length of the Cold War and more. The Big Game was over, and John was still ducking and weaving over a Yorkshire pudding. It was ignoble.

  ‘Do you remember the film-maker?’ asked Róża.

  ‘Blimey I haven’t thought of her in thirty years.’

  ‘You would ask about the Shoemaker so I would ask about her. It was the only way to shut you up.

  ‘Ha, yes, that’s right. Dear oh dear, I was pushy in those days.’

  ‘I think you’d have given your back teeth for that interview I’m sorry it wasn’t possible:

  ‘No matter. I got you instead.’

  ‘Yes, John, you did.’

  Back teeth? Was that a reference to the Dentist? Was she slowly eating him up? Was she getting ready to spit out the gristle of what she knew? John made a kind of dash for the door.

  ‘She came to London, too, you know?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes:

  ‘Brought a film with her. She’d lined up a string of clips … the forces of order at work, from fifty-six to eighty-one. Not that subtle, I have to say but hard-hitting. It was shown on BBC2. Unfortunately —’ one finger strayed near his dark glasses — ‘I never got to see it.’

  She was drinking some wine. There was no soft thud: the glass didn’t return to the table … she was watching again, cautiously She was thinking, appraising, making a decision. Oh God, what was she going to say now? Or was that last, pointed reference to his blindness going to save him? Had he silenced her with a bid for pity?

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, very quietly.

  ‘I went off the rails … well, off the road actually Hit a tree.’

  ‘I’m sorry.

  ‘Don’t be. As a kid I always tried to see in the dark. That’s why I’d eaten the carrots.’

  The smell of bread and butter pudding was almost loud, the promised tang of raisins taking the top note.

  ‘I’d better be going.’

  John didn’t argue. He’d won match point with a blow below the belt. Or had he? He just didn’t know But he wasn’t going to stay in the ring to find out. He said how pleased he’d been to hear her voice and natter about the old days. And she was silent, feeding her arm
s into her coat, settling her hat, working her fingers into the gloves. At the door a cold blast of air swept off Hampstead Heath, bringing back the recollection of snow in Warsaw, and tanks and soldiers. Suddenly her hands grabbed his arms and squeezed them hard. Her fingers were on him, as his had once been upon her in that dreary flat, when he’d seen the bullet beneath the mirror; when he realised how close to suicide she’d sailed. He could feel the desolation breathing mist in the darkness.

  ‘Goodbye, John,’ she said, ‘and thank you.

  Thank you? What for? Throughout a seemingly endless night John gnawed at his thumb bone to keep his teeth from tearing off his nails. He curled up, writhing with anxiety. What for? A Yorkshire pudding that rose to the occasion? Or that punch to the kidneys? The wind moved listlessly across the common. A car crawled to a halt and then pulled away rapidly … it had to be a taxi. Feet stumbled on the pavement. Another gust of wind, stronger this time, rattled the bay window downstairs. At times, he didn’t like the wind. It carried too many sounds, too many signals. It made him feel confused.

  When morning came John made a pot of strong coffee, chilled by a certainty that had grown as the heath fell silent. She hadn’t taken back her request for help. Surprised by his blindness, Róża hadn’t mumbled, ‘Forget what I said on the phone.’ She still wanted justice. She was still looking to him with that bullet in the background, despair misting her eyes.

  After four large cups of Fair Trade Arabica from Peru, John picked up the phone and dialled one of the few numbers he knew by heart. All his life he couldn’t commit them to memory. Finally the Old Duffer put him through.

  ‘Anselm?’

  ‘Yep.’ The goat had managed it. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I need a lawyer.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  A special kind of quiet reigned over the empty corridors of the IPN. Most of the staff had gone home. The outcome of Sebastian’s research lay on a long mahogany table in a large conference room. There were two sections of material, but each had their own piles with individual sheets laid out for ease of reference. The matching chairs on one side had been pulled back to the wall, allowing Sebastian and Anselm to move freely as if they were choosing what to eat at a self—service counter. Heavy gold curtains had been drawn. Ornate wall lights cast a pleasant, soft light. Sebastian had made coffee and the woman in white had found some Austrian biscuits. There was an unmistakable atmosphere of finality, embarrassment and secrecy which was odd because the substance of everything on the table would soon be on the TV and plastered over the front pages of the national press.