The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  The disclosure to Celina of her background had obviously been a shattering experience. She was being helped to cope with the implications by a skilled counsellor called Myriam, said John — he didn’t know the surname and Anselm wondered if counsellors even had them — and one of her remarks (‘you are always more than your past’) had worked its way into Anselm’s mouth as if it was a gem from his life of silence. When the time was right he planned to let it drop, lightly But there was, if anything, a sharp irony to the failure of Brack’s plan. Coping with the knowledge that one’s parent had been murdered was dramatically offset by the relief of learning that the ideologue who’d ranted at you from infancy was not your father; that the woman who’d chosen puzzles over the enigma of life was not, in fact, your mother; that Celina’s relatives were, in truth, the dissident activists of her imagination. She had the whole package, from torture to martyrdom. She was exactly who John had thought her to be. There was a hint, too, that she had found a deep bond with him — something more prized than any collection of reinstated memories: in very different ways and for very different reasons, they’d both been abandoned; they each had to grapple with the consequences of failure — their own and other people’s; Anselm sensed the unique and warming softness of people who no longer judge that easily.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Brack’s arrest caused a sensation in Warsaw and beyond. Sebastian had been right in saying the case had a unique quality. The revelation of crimes by the secret police during the Terror linked to secret police operations under martial law evoked the entire period of communist rule, presenting it as a seamless garment, dirtier in some places than others, but one thing. A straitjacket stitched and darned by the dedicated service of certain individuals. Memory and moment came together in the media. Róża’s vindication, for so long a personal concern, had become a matter of national remembrance.

  Anselm followed events at a distance, thanks to faxes or calls from Sebastian and John (Larkwood had yet to obtain a computer. The idea of explaining an email to Sylvester had left the Prior speechless). He’d seen copies of press coverage, and mused over the smudged photograph of the accused, barely able to discern his features. Flinching, he’d read a transcript of Róża’s evidence. But, curiously nothing came from Brack himself There’d been no transcripts of interviews conducted in the presence of his legal representative. And then one morning in April, the Watchman beckoned Anselm as he floated through reception on his way to the hives. The old fellow was cross.

  ‘It never works.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘That.’ He hit the console with his stick. ‘Why can’t we just have one phone? Why the wires like springs? Why the buttons and lights, blasted thing? You know, other calls come in while you’re trying to— ‘Who rang?’

  ‘A chap from a place with memories or something. Flags, too, I think. He was nice enough, I suppose. Said he’d been here once.

  Anselm immediately rang Sebastian from an extension near the cloister.

  ‘I’m worried about this trial,’ came the voice without preamble. It was as though Anselm was in the room on the other side of his desk. He pictured Sebastian, feet up, clothing acceptably disarrayed, his bloodshot eyes on the wall of box files surrounding the photograph of an old woman standing behind the wheelchair.

  ‘He refuses to answer a single question. Won’t say “Yes”, won’t say “No”. Affirms nothing, denies nothing. But he’s not playing the system. He’s pleased. He wants the trial:

  ‘Wants?’

  ‘He wants Róża to take the stand and say out loud what he did. He’s impatient for the prosecutor’s opening speech. Doesn’t even want a lawyer. Says someone can be appointed for any legal stuff. It’s as though this were his day and not hers. He wants Róża to say whatever she likes. He is supremely unconcerned.’

  Slowly, Anselm sank to a stone seat built into an arch. What had Brack done? What further step had Brack prepared? This was not a man who entered a brawl. He was a cold planner. A man who worked out his preferences. And he was obviously confident. What was the final trick? Róża wouldn’t find out until she stood up in public … and then it would be too late. Anselm’s mind careered into a manner of darkness: who else was left for Brack to use? Had he trapped someone else vital to Róża’s life and story?

  ‘I’ve lost the first round already’ said Sebastian. He was rapidly clicking and unclicking a biro.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The murderer of Stefan Binkowski won’t be on the indictment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Róża insists. Have you any idea who he might be?’

  ‘None.’

  Which was untrue. Because Anselm had thought of the empty wheelchair. And he’d recalled that Sebastian, too, had a personal story linked to the struggle. He’d promised to tell Anselm after Brack’s conviction.

  ‘He’s the brother of Aniela Kolba.’

  Anselm, caught by surprise, thought for a moment. His mind whirred back to the grovelling reports of FELIKS.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Sebastian. ‘It sheds a different light on Edward.’

  It certainly did. It took time for the picture to develop in Anselm’s mind, but when the print was done, he stared at it with a mixture of revulsion and pity. Stefan had been one of the Friends. They’d arrested his sister, presumably to exert pressure on him. Maybe, unknown to Róża, Aniela had been a Friend, too. It didn’t matter. The point is they had her brother and they’d been beating him for months. Getting nowhere. Same with Pavel and Róża. To break Róża’s will — and possibly Aniela’s — they’d shot Pavel and Stefan. But it hadn’t worked. That left the two women in the cell, either of whom could still lead them to the Shoemaker.

  ‘I don’t think Edward went to them,’ said Sebastian. ‘I reckon they came to him.’

  ‘Saying if you don’t watch your wife and Róża, we shoot them both.’ Anselm felt the strange sick feeling that comes with recognising something deep and wicked. ‘So Edward agreed — hell, what’s so bad about watching someone? Just give Brack some peanuts every once in a while.’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Sebastian. ‘They let Aniela go first, but not before she’d urged Róża to come and stay. The invite must have been Edward’s. Róża took the bait: she moved in.

  And Edward, who’d saved the lives of two women, who’d banked on feeding the monkeys, found himself in the cage. He’d told them what he’d seen and heard. In time, he’d secured his son’s education with information on Magda the troublesome Jew He’d become the real thing — a Comrade who played the system for what it was worth.

  ‘Does Róża know that Edward informed on her?’ asked Anselm.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell her, but once we started talking about Stefan and Aniela he became the elephant in the room.

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘Silence. But not your kind of silence. Or mine. It was something dark and awesome. She’s meant to fall down with shock — that’s what ordinary people do — but she didn’t even waver. She just took the blow You know, going over the case, it’s always silence, every time anything leaks out of her past. A sort of agonised soaking up. She even looked heavier afterwards.’ A reflective pause came down the line. ‘She’s ageing before my eyes, Anselm. She’s not the woman I chased round Warsaw’

  ‘So it’s a variation on the same old story’ said Anselm, peremptorily ‘If the trial goes ahead for the murder of Aniela’s brother, then Brack will reveal Edward’s history of collaboration.’

  ‘He hasn’t made the threat, it’s just built into the facts. He doesn’t have to say anything. He’s planned his way forward. And there’s an added feature.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Aniela doesn’t know her brother is dead. Or that they had him in Mokotów at the same time as herself. For her, he’s missing. For ever missing. So, getting back to Róża, she can only move forward on Stefan by telling Aniela that her brother was shot and that her husband was an
informer. To say nothing of Bernard, his wife, their son …

  Such were the implications of disturbing the past. Was it really a good idea? Wasn’t there a lot to be said for drawing a thick long line and living as best as possible on the other side? Even if people like Brack were the winners? Isn’t it part of their crime that the suffering they’ve caused others, collectively outweighs the impact of any punishment? He blurted out his thoughts, surprised to hear his own quarrel with conventional justice.

  ‘That’s why Róża’s trial is so important,’ replied Sebastian, clicking his pen. ‘It’s not just hers. She represents all the people who never got a chance to tell their story, all the cases that can never be brought. She’s the epoch: its victim: its accuser.

  At the conclusion of that phrase, Anselm seemed to glimpse some of the scrawl upon Brack’s mind, for he, too, was the epoch, though his role was so utterly different. And he would defend it.

  ‘I know how he intends to stop Róża,’ said Anselm, in a hushed voice. The door to the cloister had been left open. He looked at the Garth, just visible between two pillars — a rich, moist and violent green, bathed in spring sunshine. ‘Everything returns to the same principle of destruction. He uses families. He sets father against son, mother against daughter.’

  Sebastian followed Anselm’s lead. ‘He’s got something on Aniela. I never thought of her. She cracked in fifty-one, she …’

  Anselm didn’t listen. He was thinking the matter through.

  … so if Róża pursues Brack —’ concluded Sebastian — ‘there’ll be no more warnings. This time it’s mutual, public destruction. If he goes down, Aniela—’

  ‘It’s not her,’ said Anselm evenly cold and certain. ‘Brack saved his best trick till last.’

  Spring is a special interlude for a beekeeper. New colonies begin and the old ones come back to life. There’s a lot to do. And Anselm normally found himself oddly fulfilled pottering about the hives with his list of jobs. But not this time. He was still haunted by the reunion of Róża with Celina, haunted by Brack’s intentions, haunted by the long shadow of Klara’s handlers. The Terror wasn’t over.

  By late September the harvest was over and then, as if there was some kind of connection between the bitter and the sweet, a letter came, written in a wavering hand he did not recognise. It was from Róża. A trial date had been fixed for the spring. Father Nicodem was too old and, frankly not altogether well. Would Anselm take his place, even if he understood nothing? The Prior didn’t hesitate to grant his permission. He, like Anselm, understood only too clearly that Róża’s suffering was by no means over; that it was about to reach its conclusion.

  Part Seven

  The Wind that Strips the Trees

  Chapter Forty-Five

  On a cold morning at the beginning of March, the Warsaw District Court was ready to hear the case against Otto Brack, a former colonel in the communist Służba Bezpieczeństwa. The sun had risen to poke holes in a grey blanket of cloud. Faint rain spat upon the streets and the crowd of onlookers and restive journalists. On the other side of the road stood an elderly couple, a man and woman. They seemed to be making a separate, private protest. Between them they held a banner made from a torn bed sheet.

  ‘Czekamy na sprwiedliwośća,’ murmured Róża, reading the black lettering, as the limousine swung to a halt at the main entrance. She turned to Anselm with a quiet translation: ‘We are waiting for justice.’

  Guided by hulking policemen in baseball caps and black body armour, Anselm followed Róża, John and Celina out of the car towards the court, mouthing the phrase as if it were sacred, ducking past the nest of microphones, the flash of cameras and the volley of questions.

  ‘We are waiting for justice,’ he mumbled, in reply.

  Róża’s expectation that Anselm would understand nothing had been defeated by the simple expedient of simultaneous translation delivered through a discreet earpiece. Upon arrival he was brought by a court usher to a tiny room with a window and an elevated view on to the court. The cabin was sufficiently high that no one would notice it unless they raised their heads to examine the plaster mouldings or the flamboyant capitals crowning the sequence of pillars that stood like guards around the auditorium. Anselm had a bird’s eye view, with the implied detachment that comes with distance. Once he was seated at a narrow table, the translator’s voice sounded in his ear, greeting him with flawless English.

  ‘Let me introduce the lawyers down below’

  The courtroom was wood-panelled from floor to ceiling. Three robed judges sat beneath the emblem of a white eagle. Documents lay in bundles between the computer screens. The IPN prosecutors were crouched to one side, their black gowns trimmed with red:

  Sebastian a kind of map-reader to the driver, Madam Czerny a woman with bleached straggling hair and a pair of gold bifocals held permanently in one hand. Fastened just below their left shoulders was a plume of crimson cloth the size of a handkerchief. Anselm couldn’t help but think of blood. Facing them sat Mr Fischer, counsel appointed for Brack, the sober green border to his gown completely displaced by the pink and blue striped cuffs of his shirt. One could almost pass over the client at his side. He’d been upstaged by the few centimetres of peeping colour.

  Anselm examined Brack. First with a lawyer’s eye: aged eighty— four, he faced what the indictment called Communist crimes — a misnomer because murder and torture had a prevalence and character without boundary of any kind — and then, briefly with a monk’s:

  Do you realise what you’re doing?

  He wore a light brown jacket and a dark brown shirt. His tie was another brown. Against those combinations, even his skin seemed brown. Dark pigmentations like the spots on a Dalmatian covered his head. Large glasses with brownish lenses hid his face. He was thin, like a wooden clothes stand. All the emotion centred on the mouth. It worked as if he were chewing a piece of old leather, the top teeth occasionally pulling at the bottom lip. He ignored every whispered remark from his counsel. In front of him was a smart-looking black leather document case.

  Is this truly your choice?

  The witness stand was directly in front of the judicial bench. It resembled a lectern, inherently serious. Róża would stand there and tell her story. Then Brack would do the same thing. A year earlier, at the other end of the phone, Sebastian had listened to Anselm, clicking his biro open and shut.

  ‘He’ll tell the court how Pavel Mojeska betrayed his wife, his friends and his country. If he wants, he can make it up as he goes along, because no one else was there. He’s going to spring a defence out of the files. He’ll produce evidence that Pavel collaborated with the Nazis — a crime the IPN would prosecute now, if he was living. He’ll make those executions into rough justice — unpleasant, brutal, and lacking ceremony … but legitimate actions of the State nonetheless. Brack’s not going down, Sebastian, he doesn’t play to lose; he never has done.’

  Sebastian’s pen had clattered against a wall.

  ‘What have I done?’ he’d said, faintly ‘I’ve brought her to this.’

  ‘What have we all done?’ Anselm had replied.

  Drawing that thick long line between ‘then’ and ‘now’ had never seemed more prudent. Shortly after that telephone conversation Sebastian had carefully explained to Róża what was likely to happen when Brack opened his mouth, and she’d listened with that disconcerting quietness that absorbed any and all disappointment. When he’d finished, she’d simply said, ‘At least I didn’t remain quiet.’

  She was now sitting with John and Celina in a room set aside for prosecution witnesses. She was wearing a sober dress from Jaeger with a silvery Paisley design. The lime cardigan — an old friend, worn at the elbows — appeared, by association, both refined and expensive. Sebastian was right, though: she’d aged. She’d taken in too much. Her movements were slow and heavy, her spine rounded. But she had a most haunting allure, a curious effect of soft skin and eyes that Anselm couldn’t meet for long without turning away Ine
xplicably they’d remained vulnerable.

  Looking down through the window, Anselm scanned the court as if there might be any familiar faces, not expecting to find any But he did. He found one. And it wasn’t Bernard Kolba’s. They’d already met in the corridor (he was there representing the family; his parents couldn’t face the strain). Anselm’s eyes had alighted upon a fine bone structure, frizzy greying hair and round glasses. Irina Orlosky was in the public gallery, her dark, shapeless coat held tight by folded arms. Her eyes were on Brack, the man whose life she’d saved.

  Once the jury were installed Madam Czerny came to her feet. Her voice had alarming, deep cadences, the translation in Anselm’s ear skilfully matching tone with content, keeping a sort of distance from the primary speaker. Somehow, the prosecutor was addressing Anselm without intermediary. Throughout, her right hand held the bifocals, elegantly as if it were a glass of Muscat.

  ‘This case concerns the Terror,’ she said, deadly gentle. ‘The time of denunciation and disappearing, of imprisonment upon a whim, of routine violence, pathological suspicion, false accusations and forced recantations. The epoch of complicity. The age of exile and executions, co-ordinated to secure the imposition of Soviet socialist realism.’ Madam Czerny’s gaze moved around, indomitable. ‘Róża Mojeska is one ordinary woman who, despite the overwhelming presence of fear and the crushing pressure to conform, said, “No”. As a consequence she was brutally tortured. Pavel Mojeska, her husband, also said, “No”. He was brutally murdered. They’d said the one word that millions dared not speak. They’d brought a free word to Warsaw’ She seemed to have finished but then, confiding and soft spoken, she made a reluctant declaration. ‘The accused, Otto Brack, said, “Yes”. He got up every morning, looked in the mirror and said “Yes”. No one twisted his arm. He made his own free choice. And it is this profound affirmation of terror — its implementation and consequences — that now falls to be judged.’