The Day of the Lie (14 page)

The drawer slammed shut.

Pavel had said none of
the Friends knew each other. The only link between them all was Pavel. Only
Pavel had a link to the priest, and only the priest knew how to get to the Shoemaker.
By the same token, the Shoemaker only knew of the priest. All the other Friends
were unknown to him. Róża, then, was a figure completely outside the
organisation, a kind of wild card in the brutal game against the secret police:
unknown to everyone, she’d been entrusted with the key to any future operation.
Pavel and the priest had fixed the one flaw in the security system: they’d
prepared for betrayal. In that event the Shoemaker could still speak and Róża
would spread his words, fronting a new organisation of Friends.

They’d moved just in
time. Two months after Róża’s initiation, Pavel had lingered at the door.
Unusually preoccupied, he’d given Róża his wedding ring. ‘Father Nicodem’s
idea,’ he’d said. It had been a first slip of the tongue: he’d used a name.
Three hours later the front door had splintered under a sledge hammer and Otto
had stepped over the debris followed by four men in coats the colour of mud.

The drawer opened,
snapping her reverie.

‘Tell me what you know, Róża.’
It was the first time that Brack had used her name. ‘We’re not going to let you
out until you tell us.’ He was staring at her swollen stomach and the hidden
life. A hint of the attic came across his face. ‘You don’t understand, Róża.
You don’t know what harm the Shoemaker has done.’

‘Harm?’

‘Harm.’ The bark had
gone; he still seemed trapped. He was still in a tunnel of filth trying to find
his way out. Róża pitied him. Major Strenk had trusted him to break the
girl while he dealt with the men.

‘There’s nothing you can
do to me,’ she declared, obliquely.

Brack twitched and slid
the drawer shut.

Thirty-two days later the cell door opened.

Two guards helped Róża
to her feet and brought her slowly down the stairs to the cellar. Ahead, to the
left, was the entrance to the room with the cage. The grey iron door was open.
But Róża was pushed on to a chair standing incongruously by the corridor
wall. Moments later came the sounds of scuffling and dragged feet. A man whom Róża
had never seen before was pulled down the stairs. He was disfigured and cut,
his chest gurgling like a blocked pipe. His feet were bare, bouncing along the
concrete as if he were a marionette without strings. The guards hoisted him
into the room with the cage. Moments later a heavy shot crashed into the corridor.
The echo was still ringing in Róża’s ears when she heard more noise from
the staircase, more groaning and dragging.

Another man was hauled
along the passageway This time the guards stopped at the grey door. The
prisoner lifted his battered face towards Róża. She hadn’t recognised him
because of the quantity of blood … but it was Pavel. His body was limp in the
arms of the green thugs, his shoulders horribly high, as if he were meat
hanging on two hooks. He gaped at Róża, and sobbed, seeing for the first
time the great swelling of life in her stomach. He tried to raise a crushed
hand but all his energy went into a shake at the neck. As they dragged him into
the room he coughed a sort of ‘No’.

Brack stepped out, a
revolver in his hand. He stood, hangdog and determined, grimacing at Róża,
waiting for her to make another choice. She pressed her thumb against the two
rings on her finger and made a confused shake of the head. Her ears were
ringing. A black hole was quietly expanding, rising from her depths. Brack’s
mouth sagged open and he stepped slowly into the room.

The silence seeped into Róża’s
mind.

She waited for the
sound, her knees shaking uncontrollably Then, a compressed bang seemed to tear
open her side.

They took Róża back to her cell as if
nothing had happened. As the lock turned, she sank to her knees and the mental
thread between her mind and her mouth snapped. She started gibbering. Her words
became jumbled, losing shape and sense. Sounds poured out from her stomach like
vomit. An arm came around her shoulder. The woman with cropped blonde hair was
stroking her brow, saying ‘Shush’. Lights flickered and popped behind her eyes.
The agony of childbirth was under way and she could feel nothing. Standing over
her was the grey, distressed woman, wagging her finger, screeching nonsense.

Chapter Fifteen

Róża was transferred to the prison
infirmary, a ward of evenly spaced iron beds, just like the dormitory at Saint
Justyn’s. There, in a state of delirium, she moaned, looking up at some figment
of Major Strenk. Cradled in his arms was a big fish, gasping for air, its tail
flapping as if it were a kind of wild applause. A door slammed in a draught.

The following weeks were
lost to Róża. She couldn’t scratch them on a wall to mark their passing.
Exhaustion gradually shut down the hallucinations. A dark cloud settled on her
consciousness, its density drawn from the pain it absorbed. She recovered the
basic functions of living without quite being alive. When she could hear and
respond to simple questions, they took her to a nursery on the same corridor.

‘It’s yours,’ said a
nurse with a square jaw.

‘Mine?’ Róża cried,
wanting wonder, feeling only a terrifying weight.

‘Have you thought of a
name?’

Róża sank to a
chair, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t look down. She’d already
glimpsed the vast ocean-blue eyes, the gangling limbs. She could hear a soft
sucking sound. She’d seen the lips, the little tongue working, the nails on
small fingers hooked on to the blanket.

‘Name. Have you got one?’
The jaw was pushed forward as if she were holding a pin between her teeth. She
tapped a pencil on a pad. ‘There are forms to be filled in.’

In abject misery, Róża
turned her head aside, away from the bulky nurse with the muscular fingers,
away from her pad, the notes, and the endless requests for names and dates of
birth. Opening her eyes, Róża saw a window The frame was large, with bars
fixed on the inside. Beyond lay the sky, puffs of cloud and, most agonising of
all, a tree. Róża could see the pink cherry blossoms. A light breeze came
in short gusts, plucking them free. They floated away by the handful, like
scared butterflies.

‘I have a form.’ The
pencil tapped impatience.

Róża looked at the
large pad of blue paper with its columns and boxes, the gaps and dotted lines. ‘There
will be no name.

‘Just a surname?’

‘Nothing.’ Róża
couldn’t do it. She couldn’t reduce this mystery of life to just another fact
in prison. ‘No name at all.’

‘I’ll leave it blank,
then.’

Róża had a consuming dread that her
milk would dry up from grief and the devastating guilt that came from bringing
life into a prison. But as she fed the murmuring infant she looked out of the
window and received something that made her strong and able to cope with the
shock of hearing that first murder and the sound of Pavel’s execution, all set
against the grotesque monotony of prison existence. She’d seen pink blossoms.
She’d seen the wind that strips the trees.

‘One day we will win,’
said Róża, crouched on the footstool, when next summoned for an
interrogation.

She’d never said ‘we’
before; she’d never spoken of a struggle for victory But now she was more than
herself. She spoke for someone who didn’t yet have a voice; and she joined
herself to all those beyond the prison walls who couldn’t speak, either from
ignorance, complacency or fear, and she spoke for them. She pledged herself to
a victory that they would all claim as their own, one day, with or without
merit, a victory that she knew was utterly certain, a day of freedom that could
only be delayed and never denied.

‘I can wait,’ she said. ‘Today,
tomorrow, either in here or out there, it makes no real difference. It’s all
about patience and waiting, and I can do both. Do you know why?’

Like the prisoners,
Brack was barely distinguishable from the greenish walls. Even his brown hair
seemed to have changed. The green in his eyes had grown stronger. He said
nothing. Róża felt herself grow beyond her surroundings: even as she
crouched, she filled the room.

‘Do you know why?’ she
repeated, looking up, arms folded on her knees. ‘Because you can’t stop the
Shoemaker. You can’t lock up his words. You can’t kill his ideas. They’re
beyond reach. They have a life of their own. They’re for ever on the wind. And
whether you like it or not, they
are
the future, yours and mine,
because, fundamentally your ideas and your words aren’t as compelling as ours.
They aren’t as
good.
They require force … bloodshed … suffering;
whereas ours … ours
demand
nothing. First they
persuade
…
only then do they
ask
for commitment and sacrifice.’

Brack’s top teeth
scraped his bottom lip. He’d darkened at the assault on his beliefs, but then
mastered himself, strangely unsettled — it seemed — by Róża’s assurance and
indifference to his authority.

‘Today is your day’
admitted Róża. ‘This is your winter. But we’ll have the spring. Tomorrow
is coming and when it dawns —’ she nodded severity at him, and confidence — ‘there’ll
be new laws, fairly framed; there’ll be honest, dedicated lawyers. There’ll be
judges who don’t pass sentence in a damp cellar with a pistol. You’ll be spared
what was done to me, but rest assured, you will be prosecuted for what you have
done. I will give evidence against you. I will tell them about the cage and the
merciless killing of two innocent men … whose only crime was to think
differently from you and the barren system you serve.

Once more Róża
expected Brack to ignite at her attack but again he said nothing. There was no
outburst about choosing sides and warnings in the sewers. He looked at Róża
over his desk and the heap of Major Strenk’s papers, his teeth gouging at the
lip. And then Róża understood why he’d been silent throughout her credo.
Like all lackeys he was scared of what might happen if the teacher went away:
where he would be if, when tomorrow came, Róża was right and he was wrong.
The recognition made Róża fire a shot at the present.

‘You can’t keep me here
for ever,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I’m already outside. I’ve seen the wind in a
cherry tree.’

Chapter Sixteen

Róża was allowed to see her child for
two hours a day Then she had to leave the metal cot watched over by the nurse
with thick fingers. Back in her cell she thought endlessly of the pink little
mouth and the branches against the sky. For the first time since her
imprisonment, she opened her eyes to those who were around her. She made
friends with the woman with cropped blonde hair; the imprisoned nurse who’d
held her hand during the birth.

Aniela Kolba was
twenty-six, the mother of a five-year-old boy called Bernard who she hadn’t
seen for eighteen months. She’d been arrested because her brother had been an
officer in the Home Army, at first a hero of the Uprising, a patriot, but then
a deemed enemy of the new order. Aniela’s offence was association by blood.
There was no one else to go for. Her parents were dead, shot and burned like
Pavel’s family in the Ochota massacres.

‘My boy hates fish,’ she
said, a hand pulling at knotted strands, her face fulsome, her arms chubby
Eyebrows, dark and fine, were twisted with pain. ‘He once threw the keys to the
house in the river.’

Róża told Aniela of
Saint Justyn’s and day trips with Mr Lasky to Chopin’s birthplace or the grave
of Prus, while Aniela recounted holidays in the Carpathians to see the timber
churches of the Lemks and Boyks. They took turns unfolding the story of
Quo
Vadis.
Neither of them was called for interrogation, though Brack’s sunken
face occasionally appeared at the Judas Window in the cell door. He’d watch,
brooding for a moment and then vanish.

One morning the guards
came for Aniela. She returned at midday, dressed in clothes from home — a light
green dress with small orange flowers, a deep red cardigan with dark blue
buttons. The colours were blinding, harsh against the scratched walls. Her hair
was neat and tidy shining like brushed silk. She wore new brown shoes.

‘They’re letting me go,’
she admitted. Her loyalty bound her to Róża and the prison.

‘Why?’

‘They didn’t say I
suppose I’m no longer a threat to the Party Maybe they’ve found my brother …
I don’t know’

It was like her arrest:
there’d been no reason to lock her up; there was no reason to let her go. She
smoothed her dress, ashamed to be wearing glad rags. Her eyebrows twisted. ‘They’ve
let me say goodbye.’

Róża thrust her
face into Aniela’s neck and the wonderful smell of soap burned her nostrils.
She pressed herself deep into those soft, open arms, from affection and to
stifle the sound of gibbering from the other women — the frenzied requests to
get a message out to their men and children.

‘When it’s your turn,
come to me,’ Aniela managed, against the choking. ‘I’ll always have a room for
you.’

Then she was gone,
taking with her the aroma of clean cotton, fresh skin, and the mysterious,
healing power of colours, the ointment of green, orange, red and brown. Her
going was like an amputation.

Róża’s turn did not
arrive. The months dragged on, leaving Róża with a glimpse of the changing
seasons for two hours a day All the depth of her being was concentrated into
that time with her growing child. She stopped sleeping, living only for that
moment of awe, veneration and pride.

On a cold night in
winter Róża heard a scraping noise in the distance. She sat up, intrigued.
All the other women were sleeping, shifting uneasily on their boards, one
moaning, another calling out. The sound outside was familiar … back and
forth, back and forth; then a sort of rest; then back and forth, back and
forth. But she couldn’t place it. The steady rhythm was comforting, oddly
warming in the memory. Back and forth, back and forth. It sent Róża into a
deep restoring sleep.