The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  Róża folded up the paper and laid it with the others on the table.

  All eyes in the court were upon her. She was the only person standing, now Madam Czerny and Mr Fischer had resumed their seats, superfluous to the drama in which they’d played a part. Brack glared from the dock, paralysed and unnaturally dark — from rage or confusion or from the choking realisation that the trial was coming to an end. Róża addressed her final words to him.

  ‘I was going to return your bullet, Otto,’ she explained, conversationally ‘But I’m glad the court took it from me. I’d be worried that when you left here a free man you might use it, and I’d only blame myself.’

  Without any further acknowledgement to the court, or even the dismantling of her own — she left the table covered with editions of Freedom and Independence, for anyone who might want a copy —Róża began walking from the hushed room, plastic bag in hand, as if she could, at last, get to the market and catch those two-for-one bargains that weren’t really bargains.

  ‘I had hopes, too,’ shouted a strangled voice. Brack was upright and wavering; a fist punching at the air. But Róża wasn’t listening; she just kept strolling towards the courtroom entrance, frowning to herself as if she’d forgotten to bring a shopping list. Brack stumbled forward, pushing Mr Fischer aside. ‘I have a story, too, about birds shot from a tree, Yes, tell that to the Shoemaker … come back … I have a right to be heard … I demand it. Come back …’

  But Róża had gone: the door had swung shut behind her with a soft thud. The trial was over. Or rather, the two trials had ended. Only Róża had spoken. She’d achieved the inconceivable: she’d condemned a man with mercy.

  There was no doubting Róża’s victory — at least in the minds of those who understood her — but no celebration took place; and not because Brack’s technical acquittal was a matter of regret in several quarters. There was no party because Róża did, in fact, go to the market — the biggest in Eastern Europe, on the Praga side of the river. It was just another day it seemed. Sebastian, subdued and defeated, went back to work, leaving Anselm, John and Celina in a crowded bar near the court sipping Żubrówka.

  ‘Who was that bizarre woman?’ asked Celina. ‘The one that wouldn’t leave?’

  ‘Some crackpot,’ offered John, who’d only heard the rumpus.

  ‘Eventually the ushers called the police … it took three of them …’

  Anselm had watched uneasily from on high. As the court had emptied Irina had simply stood there, like someone in the cheap seats who hadn’t understood the play The allusions had gone over her head. People had to push past her while she stared at the empty stage and the vacant chair that Brack had occupied; from which he’d walked a free man. She’d been forcibly escorted from the building.

  ‘She was a victim,’ said Anselm with a snap.

  The memory of Irina’s ejection haunted him: she was the only person left behind in Breughel’s hell. She’d fallen outside of Mad Meg’s raid on the underworld. Anselm had tried to talk to her in the street, but her disappointment had imploded; she’d drifted away unseeing, just like that young woman outside Mokotów He was still thinking of her, dishevelled and disorientated, when the phone rang in his bedroom later that evening. He’d been wondering whether to call round, unannounced, bringing more flowers and a pizza, with something fizzy and sweet for the son.

  ‘Father, there’s someone here,’ began Krystyna, tentatively For once she wasn’t cheery. ‘They want to know if you’ll hear their confession.’

  Chapter Fifty

  There were no appropriate quiet corners. There were no small rooms available. Every conference facility was booked, even the Warsaw Hall, a 15,000-square-foot auditorium large enough for two thousand delegates. But the place wasn’t occupied for the moment. The management had authorised its use, for an hour or so, with apologies for the lack of intimacy Amused and perplexed at the same time, Anselm followed a suited porter to the lift, up to the second floor of the hotel and through a half open door.

  On stepping inside, Anselm froze.

  Light fittings like coronets cast a phosphorous glow upon a red carpet patterned on loops like rows of tabletops without their legs. Rank upon rank of seats faced a small wooden podium with a microphone. Just beyond, to one side, sat Otto Brack, waiting to address the plenum. Unmoved and unmoving he watched Anselm’s slow approach to the front row.

  ‘You were responsible for that fiasco, weren’t you?’ His German was low and hoarse as if he’d been shouting. The glasses, dark in reaction to the light, made his eyes look like deep brown holes in his head. ‘I’m told there’s been a meddling priest who wanted to understand why I shot men and tortured women.

  He pointed to a facing seat and Anselm sat down. They were six feet apart, sitting on either side of a circle in the carpet.

  ‘I never had Frenzel’s loathing for you lot,’ continued Brack. A thin arm moved woodenly in the loose brown suit, shoving aside his colleague’s aversions. ‘I just thought you were too concerned about the next life and interfered too much with this one. There was work to be done. Great work.’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Anselm. To his own surprise, he wasn’t afraid. People who link their fate to greatness always appear small.

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘You’ve had it.’

  ‘No, I haven’t; and neither has Róża. She thinks I had some scheme to escape laws written by the victors. There was no scheme. ‘He appraised Anselm through those strange openings in his head.

  ‘You and I hold two parts of one story. Together they make the truth that the court didn’t hear. Because of your interfering, they didn’t come together. This is what I propose: I’ll explain the crime, if you explain the mercy The result will be the trial I never had. Is it a deal?’

  Anselm didn’t have the opportunity to walk away from the negotiating table, because Brack opened up — his pitch low and grating, the phrases cold and prepared — implementing his side of the bargain. Frenzel had evidently said nothing of the file. He’d given his boss a tip-off, a taster, knowing it would send him to the priest; knowing it would flush out an old mistake.

  ‘Have you ever seen a city reduced to a heap of stones? Have you seen the dead bodies of children floating in a sewer? Have you seen the world you know stamped on and beaten flat?’ Brack rasped his authority. He knew about desolation. He’d seen things that set him apart. When he saw that Damascus wasn’t there any more, he’d heard an unearthly voice. ‘Of course you haven’t. Few have. But I did. I’ve seen it and I’ve felt the ash in my hands afterwards.’ The indignation and self-aggrandisement poured out like the complaint of a servant who’d never been properly thanked. ‘That’s what I faced in forty-five,’ he said, stabbing his leg with a bony finger. ‘I looked around and all I could see was a bare horizon.’

  Brack came to his feet, head held high, as if waiting for the absent applause to stop. When he heard the hushed silence, he moved instinctively to the podium, as if drawn by a magnet. On arriving, he listened surprised but attentive as his breathing grated through the loudspeakers … by some awful act of forgetfulness the microphone had been left on.

  ‘What’s private property?’ His voice, amplified, soared over the empty seats of the auditorium. He was getting back to basics. ‘I’ll tell you what my father told me. It’s a fence that someone’s put round a field and everyone else is simple enough to think that the grass on the other side was never theirs. What’s history? It’s the misery of the majority brought in afterwards to do the ploughing for a pittance. Well my father didn’t live to see the day but all the fences had gone. It was time to think again, from scratch. The reconstruction? It wasn’t about where the fences used to be; it was about how we shared the fields. Those of us who survived the war … we had a chance to build something new Something different. Something noble and good. Except, good things are never that simple.’

  He scanned the room as if Anselm wasn’t there, drinking in the absent nods and shared
indignation. The crowd knew where the speaker was going.

  ‘Because those old landowners, the old szlachta, would never accept change. They just want to turn up with their maps and title deeds and start rebuilding their interests, putting up the old boundaries —Brack leaned forward, urgent and raucous, stabbing the air, now —’well someone has to stop them.’

  He leaned back, listening to the echo of his realpolitik, nodding significantly.

  ‘Someone has to have the courage to do difficult things.’

  He paused again, his voice resounding.

  ‘Someone must step forward to meet the demands of the moment.’

  Brack turned towards Anselm as if appraising a snake in the grass. He seemed to be wondering if a man concerned about the next world had the slightest idea about how to handle this one, especially when it was in the throes of regeneration. Tentative and guttural, he tried to explain.

  ‘There’s a time in a child’s life when it’s most vulnerable. Those responsible for its growth must protect it at all costs. They act according to high instinct. Moralities are written afterwards.’ A shaking hand briefly tugged at a lapel, implying a kind of modesty. ‘It is no different with the renewal of society. There is a moment in its growth, just after its birth, when it is weak and defenceless. When those vested interests can creep into the nursery and suffocate the child, the child that will grow to overthrow their kingdom.’

  Anselm tried to peer inside the two brown discs that seemed to hover over Brack’s face. His repugnance at the imagery of child protection was slightly overtaken by an almost technical observation: he’d heard two voices, that of Brack’s father talking to a boy about the field and fences; and someone else’s, making a speech about men born for the moment. Anselm thought it was Strenk’s.

  ‘There are men called to act in defence of tomorrow They must forget themselves.’ Brack’s teeth chafed his bottom lip. ‘They must do what others dare not do, for their sake. They must shoulder the burden. And they do it by terror. A brief wave of terror, to frighten off the agitators and hooligans.’ He looked aside, as if he’d heard a noise offstage — some whispering from the wings. Replying, huskily he became petulant, his voice barely sounding in the loudspeakers:

  ‘Do you think I wanted to shoot Pavel Mojeska? Do you think I wanted to harm his wife? Do you think I congratulate myself for having accepted those responsibilities?’ Turning back to Anselm and the microphone, he growled his complaint, sneering at the shallow minds of his carping detractors. ‘I say “No, no, no.” But was it necessary? I say “Yes, and again yes, and once more, yes.” I did what had to be done.’ He struggled in his loose brown suit, raising his head to give his shouting some leverage. ‘Because I believed and still believe that what we were trying to bring into the world was better than what was here before. I tried to save the child before they could wring it by the neck. They were the murderers. Yes, they were the criminals. They killed an idea that would have transformed the future … and for what great and noble purpose?’ He dropped his voice, nodding at Anselm as if he were simple like the majority, as if even he, a monk, might yet understand that the grass of the here and now was just as important as the heavens above; that it belonged to him. ‘For what end? To fence off the fields again. To raise another dung heap out of the ashes.’

  Anselm wished the table had legs: that the red circle in the deep pile would rise up and put something of substance between him and Otto Brack. He was glad he’d never worked at the Hague, instructed to defend the executioners — the ordinary people who’d let something slip in their consciences, who now baffled the courts with the consequences of whatever it was they’d dropped. How do we comprehend? How then do we judge? Anselm had wanted to understand Brack, the roots of his relationship with evil, and now he was appalled. He’d expected a complex, twisted political philosophy something that just might begin to explain the killing and the torture. But all Brack had rattled off was a bedtime story: a fable about a garden and a quibble about fences, a handy catechesis cribbed from Voltaire, to hold on to while he pulled the trigger, simple propositions of faith that answered all the questions if you thought about it long enough, only there wasn’t time, because an urgent moment in history had called upon men to be great first and think afterwards. He had none of Frenzel’s wily intelligence, who’d learned his doctrine without caring whether it was true or not. Not Brack. He’d believed and cared. He’d never buy a slum in Prada. He’d disapprove. It would disgust him. He had a morality. And this was the man who’d argued with Pavel Mojeska. No wonder he’d said nothing. No wonder Róża had sat beneath a torrent of water. There was nothing anyone could say to challenge Brack’s credo. According to Father Nicodem, this was the man made by Strenk. This is what the Major had constructed with the ruins of a boy who’d lost his family someone ordinary, the apprentice who’d once felt love and gratitude. How to judge him?

  ‘You spoke about a new-born child,’ said Anselm, thinking it was time to put some uncomfortable questions.

  ‘Yes, an innocent life.’

  ‘That needed protecting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm would have leaned on the table if he could, so instead, he stared at the carpet. ‘You’ve told me why people had to be shot, I was wondering if you might like to explain why Celina had to be—’

  ‘Don’t be clever with me.’

  ‘I’m not,’ replied Anselm, mildly ‘It’s just that I follow the steps you took to assuming heavy responsibilities of historic dimensions, but I don’t grasp the scheme to keep Róża quiet afterwards.’

  The timbre of the negotiations shifted dramatically.

  Brack didn’t change, as such. But it was as though he lifted the tracing paper over a colour print. There was a certain tinting to his voice: it became warmer. The lines around his argument became clearer. The picture, however, remained something out of Breughel’s unearthly imagination.

  ‘There was no scheme,’ he said, turning again towards the wings. ‘I thought I could make something of her. Here was a new life, unspoiled —’ a foreign wistfulness came over him; the coarse sentimentality of those without the normal palette of feeling — ‘I thought I could raise her to understand what her parents had tried to destroy to bring something worthwhile out of the father’s death and the mother’s refusal to co—operate … her obstinate …’ The face that swung back to Anselm was a mask of worn out linoleum, the voice hard and dry. ‘But I failed. Celina wouldn’t listen. She turned everything upside down. At school, she wouldn’t even colour in between the lines. She was a lost cause:

  There were too many shades of night in Otto Brack. Anselm couldn’t fully distinguish one atrocity from another. The executioner didn’t see the perversion of the adoption. He’d turned it into a salvific act: he’d brought something out of Pavel and Róża’s tragedy; he’d brought the child out of Egypt into the promise of another land. He was resentful, even now, for the monstrous ingratitude of the child taken from the nursery — only the attack on Celina itself didn’t sound entirely convincing. It was too brisk and short; trite, like a snap rejoinder planned for an unfinished argument.

  ‘I did everything I could,’ he murmured, gruffly ‘I tried my best.’

  Anselm had tried his best, too, and he’d heard enough. Otto Brack had no comprehension whatsoever of the scale and nature of his wrongdoing. He stood on his own dung heap claiming a kind of purity. He’d killed because someone had to do it; and, it being done, like any decent man, he’d pulled out the stops to make up for the consequences. Thank God Róża had managed to silence him. Anselm was about to rise and go when Brack himself stepped back from the microphone. He walked away diffidently one hand rubbing an aching hip; but when he reached the chair he came to a halt, as though recognising that he hadn’t quite finished. Trapped between the chair and the rostrum he started limping to and fro, his head bent. Anselm slowly sank back down, listening to the lowered, murmuring voice.

  ‘They almost met.’

 
; ‘Who?’ asked Anselm, this time strangely afraid.

  ‘Celina … and her mother.’ Brack, thin and angular, seemed lost. All he’d said till now had been for the court, prepared and crafted, but now he was wandering. He didn’t know what he was saying, or how to say it.

  ‘What did you do?’ Anselm was almost whispering.

  ‘I found a journalist … first, 1 linked him up with Róża … then I linked him up with Celina —’ he’d paused, standing still, his wavering hands moving objects slowly in the air from one place to another — ‘through him, they would have come together. I’d got them passports … all I had to do was throw them out … but Róża wouldn’t go … she thought I was trying to escape the law … that I’d adopted Celina to protect myself … there was no scheme … she couldn’t see that it was better if Celina never knew what had happened.’