The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  ‘Because Róża was trapped,’ said John, slowly putting down his glass. ‘Which I couldn’t have anticipated. Sebastian rang me after she’d been to the IPN and we both accepted that we’d have to let Brack go. I never thought she’d turn to me. But after she left Hampstead, I thought of you, hoping that somehow, with Róża’s statement, and Sebastian’s help, you’d set off on the left, na lewo, and wangle your way to a point where the many lives lived in secret might be brought to the truth … mine, Róża’s and Celina’s. That you would speak for us all. And that with Celina’s exposure, sensitively handled, Brack could be brought to court.’

  Anselm had nothing else to say At such times, Gilbertines fall silent. For some odd reason the apparent hiatus compels others to carry on talking.

  ‘When you called me for that meeting, I thought I was finished,’ said John. ‘I’d hoped you’d flush out the truth without anyone having to say anything, but you forced me to speak for myself I had to tell Róża about my relationship with Brack, which could only portray me as the informer. Which is why I asked you to invite Celina. I’d no idea what would unfold. I just realised she had to speak up, too … not to get me off the hook, but for herself … because this would be her last chance to come out of her hole in the ground … wherever it was she’d gone when she left me. In the end, Anselm, you said nothing; you made us all speak for ourselves.’

  They finished off the purée and some braised matter that might have been lamb, chicken or pork. Fish was an outside chance. They argued about that one, unable to come to any friendly agreement. The debate threatened to turn violent, so Anselm rose to make coffee. Standing in the nearby kitchenette, he rummaged for biscuits, listening to John’s voice sail through the open door. The kettle began a low grumble.

  ‘You know, Anselm, there’s something that I can’t quite fathom about Brack’s behaviour.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘This is a man who hated the Shoemaker. He was into thought control, the suppression of free speech … he was up to his neck in class conflict:

  ‘Past his teeth.’

  ‘Well, part of his plan to trap me entailed the publication of the Shoemaker’s ideas throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. They’re out there now, thanks to him. Can you get more stupid than that?’

  Anselm didn’t reply He was looking for the sugar.

  ‘You’d have thought that was a price too high,’ called John, wondering if Anselm was still there. ‘Same thing with Celina. He got her films released. And he never even seized that last documentary … yet he must have known that his dog-eat-dog superiors would lay half the blame at his door, since it came from his would-be daughter.’

  ‘You’ve answered your own question,’ called Anselm. ‘He got more stupid.’

  More than John realised: Brack had destroyed JULITA’s file, too. He’d cleaned up John’s past when John would have had it exposed. Anselm flicked the switch on the kettle and the raging water gave a sigh. As he entered the dining room, a cup in each hand, John said, ‘What did you make of him?’

  Anselm eyed his friend — his quizzical expression, the head angled — wondering just how much to say He’d kept quiet about Róża’s blue piece of paper once, and now he didn’t want to speak about the layers to Brack’s skin.

  ‘A man of hidden depths,’ said Anselm, guardedly.

  That seemed reasonably fair. John mused upon it, as if waiting for the finish of the wine. Satisfied, he said, as though following on, ‘Tell you what, can we go up to the bell tower? It’s been a long time since we leaned on that ledge and talked cross-purposes, you mumbling about the cloister and me thinking of a singer in Finsbury Park.’

  There was a strong wind that couldn’t be felt on the lanes below But up here, by the arched arcade, the current was almost threatening, pulling at the hair, rousing exhilaration. Four bells, still and imposing, hung beside their giant wheels. Ahead, the woods stretched far away rising and falling like a stilled ocean. Patchwork fields and roads knitted what remained into a sort of kingdom, lost down there, but wonderfully visible from this crow’s nest high above the monastery.

  ‘Do you remember, we talked about love? And you said chasing reasons is like … and I can’t remember what came next.’

  ‘Neither can I.’

  ‘That’s a shame because there are remarks that sow and remarks that reap. But yours do both, back then and since. Róża found her daughter. Celina came home.’

  Words that sowed and reaped, coming from a man camped between the light and the dark: the Shoemaker would have approved.

  The sound of gently churning gravel rose from far below A car swung into the parking area. A door opened and closed. Birds fled from the nearby plum trees. Anselm picked out a slim figure dressed in black. She was elegant, even at this distance. But what caught the eye were the shoes … bright red shoes, like sparks from a fire.

  ‘Let’s go, John,’ said Anselm. ‘Tomorrow’s already waiting.’

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to express my appreciation to Wanda Wawro (Cornell University Library, Slavic and East European Studies Bibliographer), Romuald Lazarowicz (for his recollection of underground media during the communist epoch in Poland), Sebastian Szulkowski (for advice on legal matters and underground paper titles), Edyta Wróbleska (who sent me a copy of her engrossing documentary film Podziemny Tygodnik Mazowse (2006) which tells the story of the Mazowse Weekly through the testimony of its founders and associates), Mikołaj Książek and Katarzyna Hołopiak (staff at the IPN), and Françoise Koetschet and Sabine Guyard (attentive and astute readers). All were generous with their time and advice.

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ursula Mackenzie for her guidance and understanding; for helping me find the book I wanted to write. My warm thanks go to Daniel Mallory and Joanne Dickinson for their energy and help with the emerging text. And finally — if this is not too wide a grouping — I thank the dedicated and enthusiastic staff at Little, Brown whom I rarely meet but who are essential to the life of every book I write.

  Author’s Note

  This novel began with an interest in the three million SB files currently held by the IPN and the activity of underground printing which, during 1982 alone, compelled the security forces to confiscate (according to General Boguslaw Stachura, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs) ‘730,000 leaflets, 340,000 illegal publications and 4,000 posters’. In both cases — the files and the printing — the raw material was ‘words’. The SB gathered them in secret; the dissidents published them in secret. They’d been used to tell profound lies and momentous truths. They’d been used to build and to destroy And now those involved in transitional justice had to use the same stuff to open up the future, mindful of its power to bring ruin or redemption. This, I concluded, was an appropriately vexed moral landscape for Anselm to investigate.

  In order to enter this most difficult area I followed an invented character, Róża Mojeska. I placed her in Warsaw during the Martial Law years. She was, to my mind’s eye, a woman who understood history, a woman who saw the present in the clear light of the past. She was fifty-something. It was only at that point, when I looked onto the city through her eyes, that I recognised what should have been obvious from the outset. Such a person would have seen — to be brief — the Nazi invasion of 1939, the reduction of the Polish people to a slave status, the corralling of the Jewish community into the Nalewki district, the deportations to the death camps from the railway siding near Dzika Street, the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the Uprising of 1944, the razing of Warsaw, and then, when peace came with the overthrow of one tyranny the imposition of Stalinist totalitarian communism. Róża would have witnessed all these events without even leaving her teenage years. By the time she was involved in producing the fictional paper Freedom and Independence in 1982 she’d have muttered the litany of succeeding martyrdoms: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1981. And she, like most other Poles, would have viewed her experiences in the light of a shared cultural
memory: the hundred and fifty years of partition disrupted, here and there, by other failed uprisings. In short, having put Róża on the page after the tanks rolled onto the streets in 1981, I realised that I couldn’t look at the files and underground printing and transitional justice and the overarching battle of ideas without recognising that every act of resistance or collaboration had carried the weight of centuries. And with that recognition, Róża became someone so much larger than herself — a symbol of the ordinary person compelled to make far-reaching decisions in the darkness of their time without even a match to find their way By extension Warsaw itself became more than a city that had been reconstructed after the Second World War. It was a symbol of the human refusal to be reduced to dust and cinders.

  Of course, I was not writing a social history of communism. With Anselm as my guide, I intended to write a novel about one woman’s choice in a sewer set against those who’d taken a different route to the surface; about the whispering that followed, set against the riot of publishing; about the moral devastation of families razed to the ground by force or compromise. About ideas and why they were important. To do this, I gave the story three landmarks: the Stalinist Terror, the Martial Law years and what I’ll call the aftermath, the struggle of a society to pass judgement on what happened between 1945 and 1989. As a result, the final narrative could not reflect in any great detail the differing ideas of nation, the extent of any popular accommodation of the regime, or — most interestingly (given the themes of this book) —the viewpoint of the many party members who must have struggled to make sense of their convictions as the government responded to a succession of intellectual, political and economic crises. I hope the informed reader will understand that such questions were not germane to Róża’s dedication to the Shoemaker.

  As to the factual basis of this novel, there was no joint SB/Stasi unit dedicated to fighting underground printing in Warsaw (as far as I’m aware), although some 500 Stasi agents did operate in Poland under communism, beginning in 1978 after the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. The Shoemaker did not exist and there was no Shoemaker Organisation. That said, there were countless similar publishing operations (and they often used prams). The fate of the imagined character Pavel Mojeska was not out of the ordinary. A tablet on the wall of Mokotów prison commemorates the names of 283 political prisoners executed on the premises between 1945 and 1955. There were hundreds of others, though their identities are not known. For the purposes of the plot I have made a number of changes to the layout of the prison, the IPN, and the Warsaw District Court. Procedure and language in the courtroom accomodates the characteristics typical of an English criminal trial.