The Day of the Lie (45 page)

‘They’ll keep me in
prison, but I don’t care. I’m free now, if you can imagine that.’

No, you’re not,
thought
Anselm, sadly
Because in time you will come to regret this swift, personal
justice. You will gouge at your eyes in self-hatred for having crossed this
terrible line. Because you will gradually perceive that now you stand among the
executioners; and you will long for the day when you’d simply been compromised
by how you’d used a skill in languages.

‘I know about living in
a cell,’ replied Anselm. ‘You have to face yourself like never before. Frankly
it’s disagreeable … but persevere, Irina. The darker it gets, and no matter
what you feel, just plough on: face the silent commotion. There’s a peace at
the end, and it’s greater than the distress paid to get there.’ Anselm frowned
with melancholy: she, too, deserved the Shoemaker’s strange mercy but it couldn’t
stretch that far. It had reached Brack, but it couldn’t quite make those extra
few inches to his typist. ‘Irina, promise me something.’

‘Yes.’

She’d stood up because
their short time together had come to an end. The female guard had opened the
door with a key attached to a heavy chain hanging from her belt. She’d given
that c’mon-get-moving tilt with the head that all prison staff learn.

‘When you get out, don’t
go back to Mr Frenzel.’

‘He’s given me notice.

Already? Would a strange
retribution ever fall upon that man? A slate from a roof would do. But no, it
wouldn’t happen. The only finger justice would ever place upon his sleeve was a
parking ticket.

‘Thank you,’ Irina
blurted out at the door, pulling back from the guard.

‘What for?’ He turned,
seized by the throat.

‘The flowers. I just
loved the flowers.’

The following morning,
assisted by Sebastian, two police officers formally interviewed Anselm in a
central Warsaw police station. They were compiling eye witness testimony to the
shooting, of course, but they wanted to know about the conversation that had
taken place with Otto Brack moments before the shooting and Anselm’s previous
dealings with the killer, Irina Orlosky It took a while for him to realise that
the absence of smiles meant they were investigating — if only to exclude it —
the possibility of conspiracy: that Anselm had some shared responsibility for
Irina’s actions. The matter was dealt with courteously but not before Anselm
had suggested the two gentlemen might want to raid any and all premises
belonging to one Marek Frenzel. A portion of the national archives would be
recovered, furnishing them with enough evidence to instigate any number of
prosecutions, not to mention one against Mr Frenzel himself.

‘I used to be a lawyer
myself;’ said Anselm, after shaking hands with the senior officer. He used a
forced, jocular tone to hide his festering aggression. ‘Trust me: Mr Frenzel’s
worth a very close look indeed. Turn all the drawers out. Take up the carpet.
Full body search with gardening gloves. Same with his business dealings. Check
his VAT returns and his annual accounts. Call in the forensic people and pull
him apart column by column. You’ll find a string of stolen pearls.’ And then
the anger burst out. ‘Lock him up and give the key to Irina Orlosky’

Sebastian had translated
every phrase, he and Anselm drinking in the slow nods of the two investigators.
Afterwards, glad to have consigned Marek Frenzel to a great deal of personal
and professional inconvenience, Anselm made a discreet afternoon visit to what
would for ever remain — should an inventory be made of his actions — an
undisclosed location. On returning to his bedroom, still melancholy and
resigned, he waited for Sebastian’s call. They’d agreed to drown their mutual
but different sorrows. When the phone rang Anselm picked up the receiver and
said, with inscrutable calm:

“‘If a lion could talk,
we could not understand him”.’

He was quoting
Wittgenstein, hoping to establish a light hearted mood for the evening. But it
wasn’t Sebastian. It was Róża.

‘It’s not a lion that
wants to talk,’ she replied, as if mystical declarations were an ordinary form
of discourse. ‘It’s the Shoemaker. He wants to meet his Friends.’

Chapter Fifty-Three

The silver Fiat and the blue Citroën moved
gingerly along the narrow, pot-holed track. To the left a forest tinged sea
green rose gently to a cloudy cobalt sky The empty fields to the right sloped
smoothly to a winding silver stream at the base of the valley On the far bank
another wood climbed to a ragged May horizon. It was late afternoon.

After a mile or so the
track turned a sharp bend. Ahead, clinging to the pitch of the land, stood a
walled cluster of ancient buildings, the bell tower rising high as if to reach
the kestrel hovering above the enclosure. A row of small windows faced the vast
natural silence of the trees. Róża had been given the address. She was
with John in the lead car that had been borrowed from Edward, Celina taking
instructions at the wheel. Behind trundled Sebastian, with Anselm. These were
the Friends, a symbolic group, it seemed, comprising Brack’s victims, his
confessor and his prosecutor. As both vehicles passed slowly through the
entrance, Anselm had a fleeting premonition.

A premonition that took
immediate depth when Anselm saw the Gilbertine monk shambling from beneath an
arch. The pectoral cross identified him as the Prior, though — oddly, given the
Order’s penchant for rule-breaking — not an especially talkative one. He led
the guests in silence down a low-vaulted corridor to a cell backing on to a
small garden without borders, an enthusiastic if contradictory blend of
indiscriminate planting and fondness for the remnant of an uncut lawn. The room
was empty save for five chairs arranged around a bed.

‘He’s dead, I know, and
I am dying,’ said Father Nicodem, propped by pillows on either side, his thin
arms flat upon the crisp white sheets. ‘Someone has to say something for him,
if only to illuminate his responsibility … and my own.

Anselm thought of the
kestrel. It was out there, floating and watchful, its wings outstretched above
a crazy garden. He listened to the husky voice of the monk who’d returned home
to die, keeping his eyes firmly on the pallid, hollow features of the
Shoemaker.

Father Nicodem went back
to nineteen thirty-nine. It was the only way to situate everything that was to
unfold. There were some wishful—thinkers who felt that Hitler wouldn’t dare
cross the border and that Stalin’s interest went no further west than the
Ukraine. But that was not the lesson of history. The Nazis had already taken
Czechoslovakia and the West had done nothing. War was coming and that always
meant a carving up of the homeland. With his Prior’s permission the young
Father Nicodem, just ordained, left the monastery for Warsaw His garrulousness,
his trenchant ideas, his gift for language — increasingly irreconcilable with a
life devoted to silence — were to be put to the service of an underground
printing operation of Father Nicodem’s invention: for, anticipating defeat, he
believed ideas were the one thing that couldn’t be conquered; that words were
the sole means to keep alive an autonomous culture.

Single-handedly and by
stealth, he obtained all the requisite materials, the most imposing of which
was a treadle-operated printing machine. It was hidden behind a false wall in
the cellar of a presbytery occupied exclusively by Father Nicodem, a knowing
Cardinal (and his successor) ensuring that the young man remained alone in his
management of the parish. Old friends stored paper. Others spare parts. Others
ink. None were aware of their confreres. One night, out for a walk, he heard by
an open window a mother telling her children the story of the shoemaker who
destroyed a dragon. He came home and prepared the first edition of
Freedom
and Independence.
This was May 1939, just four months before the Germans
and Russians invaded.

‘I had contacts,’ he
said, testily sensing the atmosphere of admiration and not wanting it. ‘And
one of them — a disaffected Communist — gave me the names of prominent thinkers
and activists based in Warsaw In those early days they were very secretive, the
membership not widely known … and I decided to print their names, to unmask
them, to warn the people that these individuals had a vision and programme that
was harmful to our national identity, that they’d bow to Stalin’s will given
half the chance. And why shouldn’t I? I believed in free speech, openness,
transparency accountability. I still do. Nonetheless, I didn’t know that many
of the names on that list had broken with Stalin. I’ve often wondered if that
first edition was one of the greater mistakes of my life.’

Father Nicodem didn’t
find out why until four years later in 1943. He was sitting in the
confessional, dozing. Sinning was on a half-day week during the Occupation. A
voice woke him at the grille.

‘My name is Leon Brack.’

Father Kaminsky had
never heard of him and, stifling a yawn, he said so — adding, with a wink in
his voice, that his concern lay with actions not names.

‘Good:

‘Why?’

‘Because you printed
mine. Now I’m a hunted man. A man with a wife and child.’

The German secret police
had obtained a copy of
Freedom and Independence
and had been using it to
track down their political enemies. Leon had found refuge with someone who was
now part of the paper’s distribution chain; they’d made enquiries and eventually
directed him to Father Nicodem.

‘This was the last thing
I’d anticipated,’ murmured the old monk. ‘And yet, with hindsight, the risk had
always been there. I’d seen the Nazis coming in nineteen thirty-eight. I knew
what Hitler thought of the Communists.’

Speaking hastily
resolved to nip past a colossal part of his life, Father Nicodem said he’d had
other contacts, folk involved in smuggling operations … not of guns or food,
but people … children. His hand waved away the details — it wasn’t necessary
to say any more because it wasn’t relevant, suffice it to say he was able to
organise the hiding of Leon’s son. He’d gone to the house where Leon and his
family were hiding to collect the boy.

‘The moment is burned
into me,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘The promises, the tears, the whispers. Otto was
distraught so he barely noticed me. That night I brought him to my old friend,
Jozef Lasky —’ he settled his hollow eyes upon Róża — ‘which brought him
to you.

The family who’d given
refuge to the Bracks was Pavel Mojeska’s. For a short while they’d known each
other. Looking ahead, Anselm saw the full dimensions of Strenk’s test of
loyalty: it hadn’t ended with the abandonment of Róża, he’d required Brack
to execute the son of the family who’d saved his life. But that lay in the
future. Father Nicodem was still recalling the early slightly simpler days.

‘Having met me, Pavel
insisted on joining the operation,’ he explained, still speaking to Róża. ‘He
wanted to work on
Freedom and Independence.
He wanted to meet the
Shoemaker. That’s when I realised that Leon had found me too easily that the
Shoemaker had to become somebody other than myself; a symbol, an emblem, a
figure from a story, a writer that no one could ever find … for these were
hard times. I told him the Shoemaker was out of reach … but that he could
help me keep him even further away’

Pavel became the sole
link between Father Nicodem and a new group of Friends. The myth of the
Shoemaker was born. Father Nicodem dropped out of the picture. But on Pavel’s
side of the equation, he was always breaking the rules, always trusting
someone. Trust was the marrow in his bones. He trusted Stefan Binkowski. He
trusted others. And one of those others betrayed him.

Not long after Pavel’s execution the
handling of Father Nicodem moved to Brack.

When they first met,
nothing registered behind Brack’s eyes. There was no hint of recognition. The
distraught boy had gone: the memories of that time had been covered up, painted
over. He seemed to look directly at no one; to never quite look at anything in
focus. By then he’d been in Strenk’s shoes for several years; he’d grown into
them.

‘I tried to win him
back,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘I tried to talk to him with what I wrote, but he
couldn’t listen. There he was, at the heart of the fight against our ideas, and
he couldn’t understand them. The debate we tried to raise wasn’t just with the
intellectuals; it was with ordinary people, anyone who cared about the kind of
society we were going to reconstruct after the war, whether they accepted
Soviet Occupation or not. In a way we faced a great opportunity. Everyone had
come together to pick up the pieces, our ways of thinking included. So we were
arguing with anyone who could read … from the vendor on a street corner to a
minister in a government office … but Otto Brack was beneath all that …
They’d placed him underground, out of sight, in a prison to do the kind of
thing no reasonable man would ever do. That’s why they put him there. Pavel
wasn’t handed over to a man with a mind. They gave him to someone who couldn’t
think.’

Isn’t it always that
way?
thought Anselm. When extremists of any kind want to push for that
apocalyptic finishing line, they always call on the people who can’t understand
anything more complicated than a fable. And they in turn, protect the citadel
mumbling their mantras, convinced that they’ve grasped something the clever
ones will never understand. They’re the chosen ones. And they don’t seem to realise
that what they do sets them against the noble ideal that gave birth to the
story. Brack, proud and blind, defended authoritarian communism at the cost of
democratic socialism. The man who would guard the nursery had done his best to
kill off the newborn.