The Day of the Lie (46 page)

‘I’ve called you here
for another reason,’ resumed Father Nicodem, after a brief silence. He was
tiring. Outside, the wild garden came to light with a shift in the cloud. ‘I
want to thank you, Róża, for your fidelity. To
Freedom and Independence
and to me, though I don’t suppose you ever thought I was the Shoemaker. Now
that I’m dying we might as well name what I’ve never wanted to hear — because
it’s too painful — but now is the time. You were imprisoned for me. Pavel was
shot for me. You both accepted the consequences so that I could write, so that
the ideas we all believed in could be published. For sixty years I’ve told
myself the price was too high. But I wrote for you both, thinking of you both
and all the Friends that I’d never know and would never meet, and—’

‘I’ve known you were the
Shoemaker and the printer since nineteen fifty-one,’ said Róża, flatly ‘Your
hands were too clean. You sounded the same, out of your mouth and on paper. And
I found you still grieving when I came back in nineteen eighty-two. But I came
back because I believed in your words. You said what I wanted to say You said what
Pavel could no longer say You spoke for us both and all the people who had no voice.
You changed how people looked at the world—’

‘I brought Otto Brack to
your door, Róża,’ said Father Nicodem, faintly ‘I’m part of his story I
helped make Brack into the man that you and Pavel met in Mokotów’

‘I’m afraid you didn’t,’
corrected Róża, as if she were taking away a sticky cake, nice to look at
but bad for an old man’s teeth. Remorse, she implied, can be a bit too sweet. ‘You’re
getting carried away; you always got carried away’ She leaned forward towards
the bed, placing a hand upon Father Nicodem’s frail arm. ‘Thousands of people
were executed during the Uprising … in Ochota, in Wola. They left children
behind, Pavel among them. They didn’t all go and join the secret service
afterwards. For once, you must listen to me, because this time I’m the one with
the words you need to hear. Otto Brack made a choice, long before he met
Strenk. I was there, in a sewer, beneath Warsaw I went in one direction, and he
went in another. He knew what he was doing. No one pushed or pulled. He struck
a match and walked away from his father’s humanity … and, in the end, it’s
his father’s humanity that returned to condemn him. Not me, not a court in
Warsaw … but his father.’

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 containment, 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.’