The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  ‘Why did you get them passports?’ said Anselm very quietly; but the question broke the spell.

  The two dark brown holes in Brack’s head were levelled against him once more, as when he’d first entered the hall. He returned to his seat, croaking and angry. ‘Because they were both lost causes:

  But Anselm didn’t entirely believe him. He screwed up his eyes: behind the manifest wrongdoing that Polana represented he’d discerned a contradictory image … or at least he thought he had: there were lines drawn in Brack’s behaviour that he didn’t appear to know about. The decision to expel Róża and Celina had another inner logic: a kind of unconscious rebellion against himself and the voices in his head.

  Recalling Celina’s feverish account of meeting Brack in John’s apartment, Anselm heard again Brack’s first avowed explanation of his conduct: that he’d been helping John as he’d once helped Celina. From one perspective, that remained true. It also remained true that Brack’s plan to find Róża through a journal entry (written by John, read by Celina and reported to Brack) had, as its chief purpose, the need to warn Róża that she could never seek justice without harming her daughter — which is what he’d told her in Mokotów And it remained true that Brack still hoped to capture the Shoemaker. But there was more to be seen.

  Brack had tried to bring Róża and Celina together.

  He’d got them passports. He’d planned to expel them, not just because they were ‘lost causes’, but because he knew that if they didn’t get to the West pretty damn fast, long prison sentences would await them both, for they’d never stop resisting the system to which he’d given his life.

  He’d planned to expel them together.

  And not because eyes other than his own had seen John’s journal — evidence of the offences that would place John and Róża in prison. That had been a lie. Brack had come to John’s flat alone, in his capacity as the Dentist, an identity unknown to Frenzel and the other SB footmen. He’d lied to twist Celina’s arm … to make her betray John … so that he could bring Róża and Celina back to one another, an outcome that now revealed itself as the inner logic of Polana. Irina Orlosky had said it was the only case that Brack had cared about. He’d even dressed up to make the culminating arrest that would trigger Róża’s departure from Warsaw Only — for all that — Brack didn’t seem to know what he’d been doing. He hadn’t seen the parallel mechanics of his own stratagem. Anselm was now convinced of what he’d discerned behind Brack’s argument and actions: he’d tried to return a stolen daughter to her mother. There’d been a remnant of humanity in Otto Brack: he hadn’t quite managed to stamp out the fire. He’d made a confused bid for reparation.

  ‘Lost causes, I say’ snapped Brack, coiled in his chair, arms folded tight. ‘The pair of them.’

  He seemed to be retracing his steps, wanting to clear up any confusion. He looked worried, vulnerable, knowing he could only repeat himself; that away from the microphone he’d said strange things off the record. He couldn’t retract them; he’d let slip things he didn’t fully grasp himself.

  ‘Well?’ challenged Brack.

  Anselm didn’t reply He let Brack squirm in the made-to-measure suit of a killer, sensing the cloth had always chafed his skin. Anselm stared across the divide, intrigued at that lingering scrap of decency.

  It was Celina who’d fanned a heap of dust into flame, bringing sensation back to his life. With her colour and craziness and cheek. After she’d walked out on him, he’d tracked her troubled steps, protecting her from the many dangers of the brave new world, torn between the two, though not acknowledging the tear into his own universe. He’d almost been rescued from moral extinction … by garish nail varnish worn by a girl who wouldn’t stay between the lines. The chance of salvation had risen out of his crimes, but he hadn’t seen it. Then, and now, he had to keep face. He’d once been the man of a moment, the responsibility handed to him by his father. He couldn’t surrender that, not even for the sake of Celina.

  ‘Well? Speak. Now it’s your turn,’ he barked, ill-tempered and defensive, no longer quite so convincing. ‘I’ve told you about the crimes, now tell me about the mercy.’

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Anselm had made no deal. But he couldn’t walk away from the table. There’d been a partial exchange of information. Anselm had listened. It was his duty to complete the picture: to complete the trial. However, he had a few preliminary matters that required a brisk adjudication.

  ‘What happened to JULITA’s file?’

  ‘It was destroyed.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I don’t know’

  That was a lie, concluded Anselm, but it didn’t matter, for now; at least the point had been dealt with.

  ‘Did you let it be known to interested parties that John Fielding had been involved in intelligence gathering — an allegation which, by the way could only damage his reputation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Frenzel. I found out shortly afterwards:

  And that was true. Anselm nodded, intrigued again by the hint of another double image. For if Brack had known — he’d implied — he’d have stopped his subordinate from having fun. But why? John was an enemy.

  ‘I’m not making an exchange,’ said Anselm, moving on to the trial proper. ‘I’ll explain why Róża chose mercy if you insist, but this is your chance to escape. You can walk out of this hall, just like Róża and Celina could have left Warsaw, sheltered by ignorance. Or, like them, you can try and shape how you understand your life by taking account of things you never knew about. Things that were kept from you. As you kept them from Celina. It’s a big choice. Think about it. The protection you offered them is still available to you. I’m offering you a passport.’

  Anselm found it almost impossible to make contact with Brack now Behind his glasses Brack was almost absent, in a chosen darkness. Anselm was talking into an abyss. Brack said, ‘In eighty-nine I tried to find my file. It had gone. I wanted to see what others made of me. You see, I’m not scared of what others think. I’m more troubled by what they do. I don’t understand Róża’s mercy and I don’t want Róża’s mercy But if I have to live with it, I need to know why’

  Anselm wondered if irony would ever leave this man alone. The one thing he needed to fear was that file. And chance had taken it from him. But he wanted it back.

  ‘Your parents were deported to Mauthausen ,’ said Anselm. He’d decided to lay out the facts, simply and without padding, as he’d done with Celina in the Old Mill. ‘Your mother died there but, against what you have always believed, your father did not.’

  Brack made all the physical motions preparatory to speech — that sudden, light rising with the body — but then said nothing. The cracks in the linoleum round his mouth became hard again. Anselm continued.

  ‘After the liberation of the camp he was hospitalised in a part of Austria that fell under Soviet post-war administration. Agents of Stalin’s security service found him. They found him because they had a list of names, names of Communist Party members of the wrong kind. The kind Stalin no longer trusted because he was mad with suspicion and fear and dread.’

  Brack’s mouth moved. A lip twitched.

  ‘I’ve guessed that your father never told you,’ said Anselm, ‘but he’d lost faith in Stalin as early as nineteen thirty-eight, when the Party was dissolved by the Comintern, before the Terror got underway I imagine he didn’t want to disillusion you with grown-up talk about in-politics, divisions and back-stabbing. Maybe he just wanted to keep the story about the field nice and simple, because it was worth believing in; because he, himself; believed in it so much that he didn’t want the grass, for you, to be polluted with stories of blood spilled over … what? How not to build a fence? Your father saw further than Stalin, Mr Brack. He understood that the death of innocent people kills off a good idea.’

  Brack’s top teeth nipped his lip.

  ‘The Terror reached your father,’ said Anselm. ‘H
e was deported to a work camp in the Arctic Circle.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Nineteen forty-six.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Vorkuta.’

  The interrogator’s voice came and went like air from a slow puncture. Brack’s face became eerily mobile, the lines appearing at once as contortions rather than marks on a damaged floor. The loose collar somehow constricted his windpipe.

  ‘He was still alive in nineteen forty-eight when you applied to join the secret police in Warsaw’ Anselm’s flesh began to prickle, his back aggravated by sweat. He didn’t like this bargain, this bringing together of crime with mercy. But he was a part of unfolding circumstances. The Prior had said that you have to go along with them, sometimes, as an act of obedience; you had to let the head of the axe do all the work. ‘Your prospective employers were concerned about your background. They’d received a memo from the NKVD disclosing your father’s whereabouts and his resistance to current Party ideology. Major Strenk, however, spoke up in your favour.’

  ‘How?’

  Anselm swallowed hard. ‘He thought you were ideologically uncomplicated, hungry to subordinate yourself to an institution and, if offered the paternity of the service, were likely to offer back the devotion of a son. His demand that you abandon Róża was a test of loyalty … proof to his superiors that he’d been right to support your application.’

  There was a long pause. Both Anselm and Brack seemed to hear Strenk’s speech about men chosen by history for the difficult tasks of the moment: the voice that had replaced that of his father. Strenk had spoken for the institution that was dedicated to the nitty-gritty of protecting what his father had believed in. This had been the moment in Brack’s life when, in discarding Róża and everything she meant to him, he’d sacrificed his own inner life: for he’d loved her, hadn’t he? Isn’t that why he’d taken Celina? Something had stirred when he saw the child and he’d tried to grasp what he’d thrown away for the sake of tomorrow Wasn’t that the other image behind the failed indoctrination of the girl who wouldn’t listen?

  ‘Tymon Strenk knew that my father was in Vorkuta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even as I sat in the interview room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm drew a line in his mind. He wasn’t going to say any more about Strenk’s relationship with Brack. Sebastian was right: the file contained copious evidence that Strenk effectively adopted Brack, moulding him and directing him in the ways of the service, its ideals and its goals. That didn’t need saying: B rack already knew; his mind was probably burning at the recollection. Brack was grimacing again, though he’d said nothing, the discs on his eyes moving with each brief spasm. Suddenly he spoke, his voice, like a soft gust of air.

  ‘What happened to my father?’

  Anselm sighed. He wanted to ease out the disclosure, but Brack didn’t want forgiveness or compassion or understanding. He wanted the reason for Róża’s mercy Anselm said, ‘He escaped from Vorkuta. According to the NKVD he’d walked a thousand miles before they found him. He’d said he was coming home to Warsaw He wanted to see his son.

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They shot him.’

  Brack’s mouth went into a slight paroxysm; his legs started shaking like thin sticks in his trousers.

  ‘What year?’

  ‘Nineteen fifty-one.’

  The hands began to tremble, too. His head fell back slightly and the change in angle allowed Anselm a glimpse into the abyss … at the eyes behind their glass walls … they were closed and horribly creased. Brack was staring at the truth of his past: in the very year that he tortured Róża and shot her husband, his renegade father —the inspiration of his life — was executed by agents of the wider security system he’d served; the system that had knowingly taken him under its wing while dragging his father to the Gulag.

  He’d locked the cage and pulled the trigger for a system his father didn’t believe in.

  They’d given him the key and the gun.

  With confounding speed, the tremors to Brack’s limbs and face ceased. It was as though the plug to his nerves had been kicked out of its socket. A hand came up and settled the glasses more firmly on the nose. Once more his skin settled into a cracked, hard surface, the stains like weights on his head.

  ‘I must leave this place,’ he said, stumbling away his voice hoarse and dry ‘I have to get out, I can’t … think. I’m …’

  Brack couldn’t articulate his despair and confusion because it was too deep. There was too much to think about, too many events to reconsider, decisions to review A vast crack had opened at his feet and he was falling into the darkness. The new world worth killing for had come to an end: it wasn’t just a failed dream beaten flat by the old vested interests; it had never existed. But the look on Brack’s faced seemed to admit that this was something he’d always known … ever since Celina walked out of the door. She’d taken all the colour with her, leaving behind the grey.

  ‘Mr Brack,’ called Anselm, instinctively rising. ‘Stop, just a moment. ‘The murderer and torturer who’d escaped punishment was staggering down a long aisle, row upon row of empty seats on either side. The delegates were on their feet laughing at the idiot who’d done the dirty work; the fool who’d thought shooting people in a cellar was an act of significance; the clown who’d abandoned those he’d loved. He reached the Hall doors and pushed his way out, escaping the silent applause.

  Anselm hadn’t moved. He’d been rooted to the spot like one of the audience, only he hadn’t been clapping. As if the conference was over, he left his seat and chased after the principal speaker, but he’d gone.

  One of the lifts was descending, the numbers counting down.

  He ran towards the stairs, hoping to catch Brack before he left the building. He’d thought of something to say even if he wasn’t sure it was true. Rounding a corner, he saw him limping ahead. He caught up and tugged his sleeve, but Brack was the one who spoke.

  ‘I knew someone, once, and he used to say to everyone, “Harm the boy you harm the man”, but to me, he said, “Save the boy you save the man”. He meant you saved him to do something decent, worthwhile and good.’ He swayed as if he might fall, and moved on, as if to catch his balance. ‘You know, I was the one with the matches. I knew where I was going.’

  Brack reeled away quickly One shoulder had fallen lower than the other, the sleeve of his brown jacket almost covering the hand. He began to drag one foot. Anselm followed, half stammering, not able to call out, wanting to reach the person who’d once loved Róża and been grateful to Mr Lasky.

  ‘Mr Brack,’ he managed, again, as if the name was all he had to say.

  But Brack was in the foyer now, passing the reception desk, bright lights and glass everywhere, the well-heeled from the four corners of the earth looking idly on at an old man running away from a priest. Krystyna smiled and made a little wave. Abruptly Anselm stopped and gasped.

  Standing at the entrance was Irina Orlosky She was holding out a gun, Brack’s gun, as if it were a Happy Meal. Her arms were wavering under the strain.

  ‘No, Irina, don’t …’ called Anselm. But she made no response: her eyes were wide and levelled; and Brack was heading towards her as if to welcome his old assistant. Screams broke out and people stumbled for safety while Brack came to a slow halt, expectant and resigned, the centre of a fast-widening circle. All at once — for Anselm — the glittering foyer became a kind of dripping cellar. Brack had returned to the place where the big decisions are made and where big people must swallow hard and seize the moment.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, Irina,’ he said. ‘Have courage.

  Anselm tried to shout but time had seized up, and with it his reactions. His lips gradually parted, but then, suddenly came an immense bang … and Brack retreated three or four juddering steps, like a buffoon at the circus after being hit on the head with a frying pan. He paused, as if to think about it, and then fell on one knee. Seconds later — with s
triking gentleness, and slowly — he sank to the floor, rolling on to his back.

  When Anselm reached him, he instinctively removed the glasses. Clouds had gathered over green flames — they’d come to life and were burning, but they were fast turning hard, becoming cold glass, the light seeming to vanish inwards. He let Myriam’s words fall out, still undecided if they were true or not: ‘You’re always more than your past.’

  And then, all at once, Anselm noticed that he was surrounded by a hushed crowd. That Brack was dead, and that he was on his knees.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Róża was told of Brack’s death the same evening. She walked the length of her sitting room and slowly sat down, no longer quite present. Examining her face, Anselm wondered if he caught the slightest lift of that wave he’d noticed when she’d been told the contents of Brack’s file. Sadness, pity or compassion, he’d never know, but it had led to mercy And now with him dead, there was an edge to her quiet. It was almost as if she and Brack were linked by a remaining thread of understanding, that with the onslaught of terror, good and bad are swept into the one fire.

  Celina seemed the most confused, battling — Anselm suspected — against the upsurge of relief which, once spent, made one feel vaguely unclean. Death did that. It demanded a moment’s thought, requiring all those remotely affected to look with honesty at the empty chair and check if the life extinguished had left anything worthwhile behind: and Brack’s hadn’t. John was indifferent, though he drew emotions vicariously from Róża and Celina, by turns reflective and furtively jubilant. Speaking to Sebastian on the phone, Anselm found him angry He’d wanted a trial. He’d wanted to see the law at work, its hands reaching back in time to reclaim lost ground, making it holy again. But it remained out of reach, unsanctified. Brack had died on a deep pile red carpet. It didn’t seem quite right. In truth, Sebastian hadn’t understood Róża’s justice: that in eschewing naked retaliation for the past she’d looked creatively forwards, where even a murderer without a defence had an open future.