The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  Anselm came to his feet and tiptoed out of the cell. Once in the cool, vaulted corridor he breathed deeply and made for a rounded door that had been left ajar. It opened on to a gravel path between a hedge and a rock garden of strange, mountain flowers, flowers he’d never seen before, again randomly planted. Listening to the crunch of gravel underfoot, Anselm thought of the Shoemaker’s craft and the price paid for the abstract raw materials. Words had always come cheaply at home; how could they cost so much abroad?

  Anselm also felt slightly miffed. He’d been to law school and practised at the Bar for years, but he could never have conceived of a trial as fair as Róża’s private prosecution of Otto Brack. She’d taken everything into account, gauging the true weight of Brack’s responsibility And the Nazis had stopped her schooling when she was twelve. How had she done it? Reaching a slight elevation he turned towards the bell tower. The circling kestrel had gone.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Anselm and Sebastian hadn’t met to drown their sorrows because Sebastian hadn’t called, as agreed. The plan to meet the Shoemaker seemed to have blanked out his evening agenda. Somehow a kind of lull fell between them — of miseries not shared. They’d gone to and from the Shoemaker — three hours each way — saying little, except for those odd surges of energetic discussion that usually evince the avoidance of a particular subject. A similar mood installed itself on the way to the airport. Anselm was leaning with his head on the window, meditating on Madam Czerny’s coiffure — whether she actually paid someone to do it, or whether she improvised at home with a concoction of toilet cleaner and rose water.

  ‘Do you like opera?’

  ‘Yes, but jazz has the edge, except for sixties Bebop … when something went wrong in the state of Denmark.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you seen Prodany a Prodaná, The Bartered and the Bought? It’s Czech nationalism set to music. Melodic resistance, if you like:

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, it turned out the guy who wrote the words was an informer. Did it for money so he could write. He denied it. But no one believed him. He couldn’t walk down the street for fear of being attacked. Lived in hiding. Died an outcast. He was called Sabina.’

  SABINA.

  Anselm flicked his wrist — a French gesture meaning lots of things, but in this case ‘that was a close one’. He thought of Father Nicodem meeting Strenk. They’d have talked about this and that — the weight of history and men of moment — and when it came to choosing a code-name the mocking priest had made a reference his duped handler would never have understood. Behind every philosopher is a jester, laughing with or laughing at … it depends on the integrity of the person on the other side of the table: someone has to come away a fool. And Father Nicodem was effectively saying, yes, Tymon, I do appreciate the scale of the risk I’m taking, but …

  Anselm flicked his wrist again: Father Nicodem’s name remained on paper as an informer, but without any disambiguation. This wasn’t a close call: this was a major accident. The SABINA joke was about to crash into the public domain.

  ‘What are you going to do with the files?’ asked Anselm.

  Once they were back in the archive, Father Nicodem would be drowned in controversy There’d be detractors and protagonists, Frenzel choking with glee on his oysters, Róża swearing by his integrity.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ repeated Anselm.

  ‘Burn the lot. Brack’s included.’

  ‘I appreciate the sentiment, but … how much did the IPN spend?’

  ‘Nothing, I did.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yep. So they’re my property.’ He was gripping the wheel firmly as if the car might go in a different direction. ‘It’s better the archive is left as we found it in eighty-nine — incomplete and dangerous. I’m not going to try and tidy it up or fill in any blanks. It stays as is.

  ‘You paid for them?’ repeated Anselm.

  ‘Yeah.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Pity to get rid of it all. It’s like burning Bonhoeffer’s prison papers or Havel’s letters. The material Father Nicodem and his friends sent to the SB … it’s a unique outpouring of dissident thought — all of it beautifully written. But, there you go. We can’t stick a label on the front of every cover saying, “These essays were deliberately crafted for the eyes of the security apparatus and were disclosed with the consent of the various authors.” How many people my age swallow that? The priest-collaborator is a far better story. Actually it would serve a useful purpose.’ He’d turned mocking, now ‘The files in the archive have become a lot more than a record of informing. They’re our primary documentary access to the past; and we’re a nation in search of villains. We need them. You can’t bring Communism crashing down without having a few executions afterwards. We have to find the traitor to make sense of the hero. Where else to look if not the files? Forget the fact that half the time they represent words twisted on to paper. With Father Nicodem, of course — and this is funny I suppose — it’s the other way around: his words were straight, trying to bend his twisted readers back into shape — but he remains, like many others, an easy useful target. They can all take the rap … relying on what? The files? Half the story? I don’t think so.’

  Anselm tried to read Sebastian’s features, distracted and surprised to learn that he’d used his own money to meet Frenzel’s premiums. He offered no comment on the ethics of handling the SB’s paper legacy though he observed with gratification the parallel between Sebastian and Róża: they’d both pillaged the national archives to protect someone they cared about.

  ‘Does the name Olek mean anything to you?’ asked Sebastian, in a lighter voice, changing subject.

  Anselm couldn’t place it. Why use your own money? He played along. ‘Composer or writer?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Informer.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Yeah, only I knew Olek.’

  He used to take Sebastian bird-watching. It was an incredibly peaceful activity … tiptoeing in the woods, looking and listening. Sometimes they’d just stand still, barely breathing. Olek knew a lot about birds — their colouring and habitats, what they ate, where they went, migration patterns and all that.

  ‘He used to draw them,’ said Sebastian. ‘Spent ages with his pencils and crayons.

  Anselm was no longer smiling. At first he’d been taken in, but now he was thinking of the elderly woman standing behind an empty wheelchair; the hint of a couple surrounded by pending investigations .

  ‘I didn’t find out about his forgotten life until I came to the IPN,’ said Sebastian. ‘He’d been in a strange mood ever since I got the job. Argued with my grandmother — and they’d been a quiet couple … and what do you expect? They’d been together donkey’s years. They’d made the allowances old people come to make.’

  OLEK.

  Anselm placed the name. It was capitalised in the memo attached to Róża’s photographs in the orange file from 1951. He didn’t immediately appreciate the significance of his recollection, because OLEK hadn’t informed on Róża — she’d been arrested simply because of the link to her husband. Then Anselm took the next, obvious step:

  OLEK had been Brack’s man in his first attempt to find the Shoemaker. He was one of the strangers whom Pavel had trusted.

  ‘He was more than an informer, actually’ said Sebastian, as if hearing Anselm’s thoughts. ‘He wormed his way into the Freedom and Independence set-up and then let Brack know when Pavel Mojeska was planning to meet the Shoemaker. So, you see, my grandfather was the one who put Róża and her husband in Mokotów. Aleksander Voight is the man who made friends with Pavel and Stefan and then sent them both to the cellar.’

  And you’re the man who chased Róża round Warsaw and wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer, thought Anselm. You tried to make up for what Aleksander had done.

  Sebastian had confronted Grandpa in private, thinking of cont
ainment, not sure what he was going to do; wanting, at least, the truth. But that was enough. That little chink of light — shone in the living room while Grandma was out — did all the damage. Sebastian’s grandfather said nothing in reply No explanation, no defence. He simply wheeled himself away as if the rare bird he’d been watching for years had finally flown off. When his wife came back, her hair nicely cut, he told her everything, stripping down their shared past as though it were an old engine that didn’t work properly At eighty-two she’d thrown him out. He’d left his wheelchair behind and died in an old folk’s home three weeks later.

  ‘Which is why I understood Róża when she didn’t want to pursue Brack for the murder of Stefan Binkowski,’ sighed Sebastian. ‘She let Edward keep his secret. That way Aniela kept her husband and Bernard kept his father: they didn’t lose what they’d known and loved. Moving on, head down? It works, sometimes. The family stayed together.’

  Whereas Sebastian’s fell apart. His parents blamed him. They didn’t want to look backwards. They kept their eyes straight in front. ‘Can’t we just draw a line?’ bellowed his father, hands on hips. ‘Why do people like you have to keep pushing it further and further back to find out … what? Bits of information. You’re just another kind of informer. Damn it, we’ll never know the whole picture anyway so what’s the point of having a close-up from some corner near the frame? You studied law, at home and abroad. Well, good on you. You’re the man to teach us all about right and wrong. But a man willed himself to death and his wife is trying to make sense of what he did before you were born. Is that justice? Tell me, Sebastian, what’s wrong with just turning the page? Just leaving the bad time bad?’

  Because in the long run it didn’t work, he’d shouted back … knowing full well that FELIKS had a family too. That Edward must have burned in private while the rest of them were free, ignorant of blood stains, torture and murder, consoled, if anything, by their own engagement in the history of resistance. The difficulty for Sebastian, however, was that the Kolbas weren’t the only people standing by the fire. Bad times left bad had not worked for Róża. A line could only be drawn in her case as a final step and not as a means of escape — either for Brack or the Voight family There had to be a public reckoning, regardless of the fall out.

  ‘I pursued Brack because he’d committed crimes that couldn’t be ignored, crimes which revealed the nature of an epoch, crimes where the free choice of an individual embodied the character of a system and its institutions. But then—’

  ‘Róża, of all people, saw things differently’ said Anselm.

  ‘Yes.’

  And you were left with a family that might as well have stayed together — that could have met the Kolbas one afternoon at a bowling alley the adults sharing a beer while the kids knocked down the skittles. Everyone could have whooped — even if Edward and Aleksander were out of it, mooning over vodka at the bar.

  ‘I think we all see things differently now,’ said Sebastian, with flick to the indicator.

  They said goodbye at the departure gate, Anselm promising to offer his services gratis if; on the off-chance, Sebastian netted a case of grave international importance. Justice, he quipped, it’s a slippery fish. How so? (Sebastian smiled warily looking so much older, at ease for once in his dark suit.) You catch some, you lose some, and then there are strange people who throw them back into the river. After shaking hands, Anselm said, ‘If you have any keep the pictures.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The birds:

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As you said, they’re the result of an unusually peaceful activity, something that you shared together.’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘Well, have a fresh look.’ Anselm shifted uneasily reminded again of Myriam’s confidence in human nature. ‘Maybe they’ve got nothing to do with OLEK. Maybe they were drawn by the Aleksander known to you and your mother.’

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Spring had come to Larkwood, bringing colour to the fields. The orchards were pink with blossom, flimsy petals detached by the faintest breeze — making Anselm (an occasional and reluctant empiricist) wonder what was the point of blooming at all. He was struck because he found no tragedy in the swift coming and going, the sudden outburst of fragility before the fruit began to grow There was no point, as such, he concluded. It was simply beautiful. Here today gone tomorrow.

  The observation, it transpired, had the character of a prophetic warning (though Anselm didn’t quite hear the message). Six weeks after his return to Larkwood, he received a call from a man who’d thumped out Colonel Bogey while marching through the bush.

  ‘You know, the trombone player,’ said Sylvester, frustrated, holding out the phone.

  It took Anselm a few seconds to enter the Watchman’s lost world but then he understood. John’s voice was anything but musical.

  ‘Celina asked me to call you.’

  Anselm listened, hardly speaking, overwhelmed by an incoming tide of sadness — something predictable and curiously inevitable. Róża had asked Celina if she might come to London for a short spell, explained John; they’d said goodbye only the previous week in Warsaw, but that was no matter. Both of them had wept, not wanting another leave-taking, not knowing how to handle letters or phone calls, hesitant about any more time spent apart and what with cheap flights these days and the spare room overlooking the metro line … She’d arrived at Heathrow thin, uncertain of herself; wanting the arm of a flight attendant even before she’d reached baggage control. She’d brought presents, cheap things from the market in Praga, desperate gestures it seemed towards the backlog of gifts never given because of their long separation. Celina had taken her home, to her flat in West Kilburn. On returning to the sitting room after a quiet evening meal — a comfortable time spent talking about an office bore, career hopes and a crack in the ceiling — Celina had found Róża apparently asleep in an armchair. For a long moment she’d stood looking down upon the peaceful face of mauve shadows, struck by a certain majesty, the frail hands open in her lap, the feet in blue woollen stockings, crossed at the ankle … and then she’d noticed that Róża wasn’t breathing. She’d gone. It was as though she’d left her coat behind, laid neatly on the chair. Amongst her few possessions Celina had found a one way ticket: Róża had come to London with that peculiar knowledge of the old.

  ‘Celina wonders if you’d conduct the ceremony ‘Of course.

  ‘She’s moved on already Anselm.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’d only just got her daughter back.’

  The greater part of Brack’s legacy was now complete.

  All the world came to Róża, it seemed. A small crowd gathered at the graveside in Kensal Green: Celina, of course, with John, and their different circles — people who’d never met Róża but who now felt involved in her life and death through an attachment to her daughter; Magda Samovitz with the memory of an orphanage and its caretaker, Mr Lasky; the Kolbas from Warsaw, along with Mateusz Robak and a number of elderly women brought by Sebastian, the pillagers of hell, all mentioned by name in Róża’s testimonial. The Friends formed a line, strangely together, strangely apart, like those two protesters at Brack’s trial holding on to a banner about justice. Even Father Nicodem took extreme measures to be there, dying two days beforehand, setting his spirit free to join the gathering. In the late afternoon, to the rhythm of a psalm of hope, they walked in turn past the mound of moist earth, dropping a flower into the deep shadow by their feet.

  As the mourners drifted away Anselm approached Edward Kolba, a stooped figure wearing a charcoal grey trilby This was the wangler; the one who’d learned to live ‘on the left’. Anselm gripped his hand and wouldn’t let go. The old man tugged but Anselm wouldn’t release him. Eventually he lifted his face. Anselm had expected tortured remorse but he found a challenge, glared back with a quivering lip. ‘C’mon finish it,’ he seemed to say It was FELIKS. Anselm let the soft hand drop, seeing resentment in the old man’s eyes —
not to him, but Róża, who’d brought the scourge of compromise into his life. ‘You cannot understand,’ his stare implied. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a child at home and a wife in prison. Our married life had just begun. Judge me all you like …’

  Anselm didn’t, but he couldn’t say so because they were trapped without a common tongue and Aniela was watching, smiling gratefully at the monk’s attentiveness, assuming neither of them understood the other. It was time to go.

  The rest had mourned. And Anselm, left alone by the grave with a fugitive conscience, asked himself if anyone apart from himself had dared to grieve for Otto Brack — not for who he was, but for who he might have been, knowing that there’d only been one person present in the State-run crematorium: a stranger who didn’t speak the language, a troubled monk who’d seen a flicker of green light in a man’s dying eyes.

  Anselm returned to his monastery ill at ease. The violent storm that had begun during the Terror had finally blown itself out. And in that particular serenity that follows a cataclysm, Anselm tried to make sense of the devastation, wanting to find the meaningful ending when all those affected could finally applaud the victory of good over evil. In a sense, he’d found it — or at least he thought he had … he couldn’t be certain — but the finding (if that is what it was) had made him feel dirty again, all the more so because he’d glimpsed it in a place he’d least expected to find anything worthwhile. Anselm roamed around the cloister, head down, shuffling his feet. In choir he lost his place, pulling at the wrong ribbon in the wrong book. Taking his thoughts to his bees one morning, he passed beneath the branches of the surrounding aspens to see the Prior sitting on Anselm’s throne, an old pew in the circle of hives.

  ‘Aren’t you scared of getting stung?’ asked the Prior as Anselm hitched his habit and sat down.

  ‘Permanently. It comes with the territory’