The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  “Professor, join us.” Golkov’s phrase hung between an invitation and an instruction.

  Without replying, Wolski sat at the opposite end of the table from Golkov, who began what sounded like a carefully prepared speech. Out of sight, below the table, Wolski gripped the sides of the chair in an attempt to counter the spinning sensation inside his head.

  The main points of Golkov’s oration registered with Wolski through a haze of detail. “Honour … speciality … report to Wolski … groundbreaking research … security … speak to each other only about work … Russian … co-ordinate … USA … importance … cellular … build from components … timescale … targets.”

  As Wolski began to build a mental picture of the project, he was all but overwhelmed by his own place at the centre of it. The meeting drew to a close but none of the participants spoke to him. Somehow, they seemed to regard his presence as a tiresome necessity. This did not trouble him; he had grown to be emotionally self-sufficient and was not disturbed by being treated as an outsider. Golkov was the last of them to leave and Wolski remained at the table.

  “You will find the papers in your office,” Golkov said as he closed the door.

  The office assigned to Wolski was furnished in a bizarre combination of fine 19th-century craftsmanship and shoddily made junk from the Soviet era. But he noticed none of it and sat on a bent metal chair behind a grand baroque mahogany desk that was covered with blue hardback-bound computer printouts.

  It was the kind of prospect he had always relished and now there was the added incentive of isolating his mind from what was going on around him. He locked the door, drew the shutters, turned off the room lights and switched on the small spot lamp on his desk, and began to work.

  In the days that followed, his submersion in the task became complete. Day after day, he studied the files and interrogated the computers. The long hours at his desk provided another advantage – a genuine justification for withdrawal from the Night Watch.

  A vast amount of advanced theoretical work had been done but there was no obvious source material and each line of exploration terminated before a conclusion. It was the strangest collection of research material he had ever encountered.

  *

  Everyone involved with the project gradually came to live an island existence. The canteen was well supplied with German and American delicacies. They got used to the teams of watchers, the security checks and the permanent guard on the photocopier room.

  On the streets outside, there was a transition from lines of people with wads of money trying to buy goods from empty shops, to shops packed with goods and people with no money to buy them.

  But Wolski noticed none of these things. The intensity of the work, and the retreat from the outside world, began to have an unanticipated effect. He became intoxicated by the task. Fear and moral reservations seemed to float away on a sea of data. Even his hatred of Golkov faded to a dull acceptance. It was like recognising time, space and gravity as facts of life.

  Then, without warning, the adrenaline that fuelled his flight from reality ran out. The black despair was paralysing and he fell to earth with terrible speed. He could not rid his mind of Golkov; he became an obsession, all-powerful, dominating every avenue of thought, blocking all attempts at escape. For some time, he struggled with thoughts of self-destruction. Then for no apparent reason, it was as if he awoke. Like a dream, the terror was gone and he found himself laughing out loud. Only slowly did he understand why. Somewhere beneath conscious thought he had discovered a flaw in Golkov’s judgement. With a sense of liberating shame, he realised that Golkov’s threat to The Night Watch was a blunder.

  This awareness transformed Golkov from a giant with impenetrable armour, to an adversary diminished to human proportions. Wolski treasured this realisation of Golkov’s fallibility, like a convict finding a file in his prison cell and concealing it against an opportunity to escape.

  *

  “You see, we have powerful friends abroad.”

  It was no more than a chance remark by one of the Russian technicians when the second consignment of computers arrived, but it set Wolski on a path of action. It was in that instant that he realised that unless he too had ‘powerful friends abroad’ he would be crushed and with him any hope of influencing whatever it was that Golkov’s masters wanted him to produce. He needed a plan, but had no notion of what to do or where to begin. Taking shelter in his tiny room high up in the East Wing he sat wakefully, deep into the night. He opened the window and stared down the long grey avenue that seemed to be awaiting a triumphant procession that somehow never arrived. In the feeble pools of streetlight between the apartment blocks, a pair of hungry cats hunted for mice.

  Chapter 9 - Jakob

  Wolski was fasting; food was an intrusion, and he savoured the sharpness that hunger brought as he searched the crevices of his mind for some way out of his dilemma. Just before first light, an answer came. It was triggered by the recollection of a half-remembered conversation, some years earlier, with Jakob, the only Jewish member of the Night Watch. He wondered whether he had subconsciously suppressed the memory of their brief exchange because Jakob had seemed to be moving towards confiding a secret, and secrets were dangerous. The two of them had first met shortly after Jakob returned from a conference in Germany. At the time, Wolski wondered if Jakob had been recruited by the West Germans, as they were then called. It was safer not to know the answer. They had met several times after that, at the Night Watch or in the company of mutual friends, but as if by some unspoken agreement, Jakob’s visit to Germany was never mentioned again. But now it was time to take risks.

  The next evening, Wolski boarded a tram to the Amama district and called Jakob’s flat from a public phone. He tried to sound drunk and spoke in German with an attempt at a Silesian accent. There was a chance that any listeners might not understand.

  “I was passing your door and I have a bottle of Scotch whisky. Do you have any glasses?” His attempts at subterfuge sounded inept and he hoped Jakob recognised his voice.

  Thankfully, Jakob was in good humour. “How much do you have left, old friend? If you can still manage the stairs, come up.”

  The climb to the fourth floor was further than Wolski had remembered and he collapsed, breathless, into a large old-fashioned armchair upholstered in threadbare William Morris fabric. It was one of Jakob’s treasures.

  “Glasses, you said.” Jakob put two Czech crystal tumblers on the table.

  Wolski pulled an unopened bottle of Glen Fiddich from his overcoat and broke the seal. Jakob was impressed.

  “The best; you must have generous friends. A celebration?”

  “I hope so.” Wolski took a pen from his pocket. Feeling self-conscious, he wrote in the margin of the newspaper on the table: ‘I need to talk to you’.

  Despite his caution, he was alarmed when Jakob took the gesture seriously. He wrote: ‘Unwise here. Sunday 10.30 – Café Mozart?’

  Wolski nodded.

  “Well, it’s good to see you a happy man, Josef Wolski. Tell me about your life.”

  They talked boisterously, and swapped jokes and sad stories for several hours. Jakob was an easy man to talk to.

  *

  Jakob was waiting. Café Mozart was in a leafy park beside the river – an attempt to import the Danube to the Vistula. It was not an idea that appealed to Jakob.

  “Why Café Mozart? Why not Café Chopin — a good Pole? That’s the sadness of this country – everything worth having we have to import.” Jakob spoke with loud mock-anger as Wolski sat down.

  The waiter arrived and they ordered coffee and Viennese pastries. The interruption gave Wolski a chance to think of a reply.

  “But Chopin escaped and lived in the Mediterranean sunshine,” Wolski said with as much irony as he could manage.

  Jakob stared at him thoughtfully. “And what is on your mind?” he said. “Imports or escape?”

  The moment had come quickly; there could be no avoiding it.
He had to trust this shambling friendly bear of a man.

  “Both,” Wolski said.

  Jakob again lapsed into one of his thoughtful silences. It was as if he had not heard Wolski.

  “What a strange time this is. You wish to speak to me in confidence. In my home I cannot be sure that this is possible, yet here in public we have a good chance of speaking in private. A very special kind of madness, I think.” He burst into a ready peal of laughter of the kind that is a refuge for people with little to laugh about. “When you were in Germany, I gained the impression that you formed, shall we say, an alliance. You began to speak about it once and I stopped you. Why should you wish to speak of such a possibility now?” Jakob asked guardedly.

  Wolski ignored the question, pressing his original point. “Did you? Did you make friends in the West, reliable friends?”

  Jakob replied sharply. “No! I do not believe in, as you put it, ‘alliances’.” He used the word contemptuously.

  The conversation was halted as the waiter brought their coffee and cream-filled Windbeutel It was clear that Jakob wanted to make his own pace.

  “Here we sit by the river, not any river but the Vistula, drinking good coffee and eating imitation Viennese cakes…”

  Jakob lapsed into silence; his mind seemed to drift away and his gaze became fixed on the middle distance. Wolski waited patiently. When Jakob spoke, his mind was in another time.

  “The very worst of them were Austrians. Did you know that? I wasn’t here then of course, not then… I was a child at the time – my father sent me to Turkey, my uncle ran part of the family business in Istanbul.” As any Pole would, Wolski knew exactly what Jakob was talking about. “Even now, more than sixty years later, I feel guilty for being absent. I survived not by having courage, nor skill or resistance, but simply by being somewhere else. In the Ghetto rising, when more than three hundred thousand died, I lived comfortably abroad. Can you imagine how it must have been on the streets near here? Three hundred thousand people killed.” He repeated the fact. “Three hundred thousand, here in a tiny part of this city. Can you possibly imagine it?”

  Wolski knew the facts well but had never appreciated the depth to which they touched Jakob, who always seemed to live in a haze of goodwill and joviality.

  “And while this slaughter was going on, here beside this very river our ‘allies’, the Red Army, on Stalin’s orders, sat and watched, waiting for the Germans to exterminate us so that they would be saved the trouble. A couple of Russian generals protested but they were liquidated. And how did it all begin? With our other ‘allies’, the British. Though they had the decency to declare war when Hitler invaded us, they were totally powerless to help. They watched while our cavalry charged the Panzers, and the Luftwaffe destroyed Warsaw and machine-gunned refugees.”

  Wolski was overwhelmed by the torrent of emotion his question had unleashed. But Jakob was not finished yet.

  “And when Auschwitz, Birkenau and Treblinka were making their contribution to six million Jewish dead, our ‘allies’ in London and Washington simply chose not to believe it. And you talk to me of ‘alliances’.”

  Jakob stopped suddenly and Wolski did not know how to respond.

  He began clumsily. “I’m sorry–”

  Jakob cut him short. “Don’t be, there has been too much sorrow beside this river.” He emptied his cold coffee cup. Without taking his eyes off the grounds that remained in the bottom, he said, “Yes, I will answer your question. They did approach me. Not the Germans, the British. I said no.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  “Your coffee is getting cold,” Jakob replied.

  Wolski drank and attacked the giant cream cake.

  Jakob did the same, and then spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “Confession, they say, is good for the soul, but in this city, even today, it can be very bad for the health.”

  “I am not a priest, I’m someone looking for a guide,” Wolski replied. “I’m trapped in something that I’m being forced to create; some fearful game being played by the Americans and the Russians, or to be more exact, some Americans and some Russians. They want a test-bed for their fantasies and they have chosen to set it up here–”

  Jakob interrupted. “I think it best that you tell me no more. I will confide just this. There is a man, his name is Thornhill.”

  Wolski nearly wrote down the name but instantly realised the folly of doing so. “I met him in Hamburg. It was when I delivered my last lecture at the Academy of Arts. They put on a concert for the speakers – Bach Viola Sonatas. I remember it clearly; music to move the soul. He had a passion for Bach, this man Thornhill. There was a reception after the concert; that’s how we began talking.”

  “You spoke to him more than once?” Wolski was beginning to betray his eagerness.

  “Yes. I met him again just before I left. I was invited to a cocktail party arranged by the British Council. We talked for a long time. He made it plain that he wanted to make me an offer. They were looking for ‘honest eyes and ears’, he said.”

  “How did you reply?” Wolski asked.

  “I told him that ‘honest eyes and ears’ working for him would be a contradiction in terms. He laughed and told me to contact him if ever I should come to another view. I refused to take an address or phone number but I recall that, though he was based in London, he had responsibilities in Germany and used an office behind the Kunsthalle in Hamburg.”

  It was an anti-climax. Wolski was disappointed. He had confided much and in return had got nothing usable.

  “Shall we walk?” he said as he waved at the waiter to bring the bill.

  “What will you do?” Jakob asked.

  “I don’t know what I can do. I only know what I need to do.”

  “Go on.”

  “I need to establish credibility, to find somebody of influence on the outside so that, if and when the time comes, I can act quickly. But it’s essential that I do this without strings. I’m already the servant of one puppet master and will not become tangled up with another.”

  “Difficult,” Jakob said.

  Silently they walked beside the Vistula. In the dappled spring shadows, the new green of the trees stood vividly against the sky and windowpanes across the river glinted with reflected sunlight. But the river remained untouched by the uncertain spring warmth. Its source was too far into the cold interior to yield to so transient an influence.

  “Can I help?” Jakob asked.

  It was an offer Wolski had not expected and he was unsure how to reply. “Perhaps.”

  “Marriage is a wonderful institution, one which you have never entered. I, on the other hand, have passed through its portals twice.”

  For a moment, Wolski resented Jakob wandering off into a story that he was sure would be full of self-pity, but instinct told him that this was Jakob’s way of explaining something important. Wolski had never thought of Jakob as married and was puzzled as to why he brought up the subject now.

  They walked with the sun at their back and it cast long shadows across their path.

  “Hannah, my first wife, left me. It was me or Israel,” Jakob said. He made a gesture in the direction of his portly shadow on the gravel path. “How could I win?” It was some time before he spoke again. “She has an apartment in Tel Aviv and teaches history. Very happy, I hear.” He stopped for another long moment and then spoke more quickly, as if not wanting to let his mind dwell on the details. “Not long afterwards, I met Natasha. She is, she was, Lithuanian, lectured in musicology here in Warsaw. That’s where we met. Her husband…” He paused. “He was a psychopath, or at least he behaved like one; a failed violinist, I believe. He frequently beat her senseless and eventually they were divorced. But he couldn’t come to terms with it and still appeared at her flat from time to time, full of rage and hate. Once he nearly killed her. So there we were; I was lonely, she was afraid, not just of him, but of life. That’s how we came together.” He halted, leaned on the parapet overlooking the ri
ver and lapsed into silence. “Cold and grey,” he said when he eventually spoke.

  Wolski had learned not to interrupt.

  “That was the end of her; the end of us,” Jakob said, staring into the water. It was a riddle that Wolski did not understand. Erratically the story came out. “She was drowned, swimming in the sea … we were on holiday … the Baltic that she loved. Endless sand dunes and ceaseless wind, but it was home to her. It was the water, the cold water, it gave her cramp. I saw it happen but I could do nothing. I never learnt to swim. All I could do was scream for help. Scream, scream, scream.”

  He repeated the word, pounding it with his fist into the unyielding granite of the river wall. It was an expression of such helplessness that Wolski was left without words. Jakob turned away from the river and looked directly at him with an ironic smile.

  “So you see, I know what it is to call for help.”

  Wolski was touched that Jakob should reveal so painful a secret but disturbed by the comparison with his own position, and it was a relief when Jakob’s solemn mood slowly changed to one of deliberate cheerfulness.

  “Why do I tell you all this?” He strode on without waiting for an answer and Wolski had to walk quickly to catch up with him. “Because what is left is Anya, Natasha’s daughter. You must meet her.” He spoke emphatically and Wolski was unsure how to reply.

  Wolski couldn’t see how meeting this woman would help and was cautious about being drawn into the tangle of Jakob’s emotions, but he was given no opportunity to express his doubts.

  “Come here again, Café Mozart, lunchtime next Sunday,” Jakob said, and hurried away without further explanation.

  As the low sun began to lose its grip on the afternoon, Wolski wandered alone among the departing crowds. Without conscious thought, he found himself again overlooking the broad river where Jakob had stood. The light began to fade and as an icy east wind arose, his mood congealed into cold sadness. Jakob, though loveable, was unstable. His help was impossible to accept. He had chosen the wrong man.