The Day of the Lie (18 page)

Sebastian leaned back
slowly viewing Anselm with reluctant admiration. Annoyance, too, that he’d
missed the true meaning of the surviving correspondence. For months he’d been
poring over those two letters, seeing nothing more alluring than a reference
number, and then this monk had turned up.’ this herald expected to shatter the
illusions of many and he’d seen the implications in five minutes.

‘I think I might join
you after all,’ said Anselm, signalling to the waiter.

Warmed by Sebastian’s
silent praise, he thought it right, however, to advertise his ignorance. He’d
wanted to know something long before he’d dared to question the eminence of
dumplings.

‘So, tell me.’ who was
FELIKS?’

Chapter Nineteen

IPN/RM/13129/2010

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT
MADE BY

RÓŻA MOJESKA

Timings refer
to the complete recording.

0.15

The guard behind shoved me out … but I
didn’t want to leave. I’d forgotten how to live and I didn’t know what to do
out there, on an ordinary street. For years I’d been in a cell with a tiny
window so high that I had to strain my neck to see the clouds. I turned round
and banged on the gate … but they wouldn’t let me back in. Brack just watched
me … and, when I finished beating on the gate, his eyes followed me to a
junction a few hundred yards up the road. That’s when I thought of Aniela
Kolba. We’d shared a cell. She’d told me to come and stay when they set me
free.

0.56

Aniela and I were bound by memories of
prison while Edward, her husband, became my guide and friend. He knew how to
live
na lewo,
on the left … outside official channels; he’d learned
how to
załatwić sprawy
… to wangle things. That first night
he obtained an old British Army camp bed and set it up in the sitting room.’
between a wardrobe and wall. He called it my apartment. A few days later, he
pulled some strings and got me a job sewing ribbons in a hat factory I was part
of the family No rent. No payments of any kind. I sat at their table as if I’d
always been there. I didn’t leave it until four years later, when — thanks to
Edward’s back door wangling — I got a place of my own. But by then there was no
leaving. I belonged.

5.37

Work at the factory gave a structure to my
life. I sat between two women and we just sewed from morning till night. To my
left was Barbara Nowak. Her husband had gone for a long walk and never come
back. She had a pram with a doll, bought in the hope of having a child. She had
a parrot in a cage that yelled ‘Let me out’. She was unhappy; and that made us
friends. We both sat there, lost with our own thoughts, endlessly pulling a
needle and thread. Thirty years later, never having attended a strike or
demonstration in her life.’ Barbara organised a system of distribution for
Freedom
and Independence.
She used to wear a flowery apron, even in the street. The
SB never gave her a second look. But that was all to come. At the time I met
her, we were both in a kind of troubled sleep.

8.09

The fifties were a difficult time for
everyone. And yet I didn’t really notice the hardship. I remember once seeing
blood on my thumb but I had no recollection of having felt the stab of the
needle. That sums me up, back then. From day to day I felt nothing. The greater
part of me was still in Mokotów … by a large window that looked on to a
cherry tree. Events passed me by — great, terrible events, which burned
themselves into those around me.’ and I looked on, numbed, as if I’d found
someone else’s blood on my fingers.

It was through Barbara
that I heard about the riots in 1956. She leaned towards me saying the workers from
the Stalin factory in Poznań were on the streets. They had banners. ‘We
want Freedom’, ‘We want Bread’.’

‘We are Hungry’. She
said the farmers had taken on the Soviet army Bombs were falling out of the sky
Folk were being dragged off to Siberia. I listened from afar, only stirring at
a detail that turned out to be true. Children had climbed trees to get a better
view of the tanks and the soldiers. When the army opened fire, aiming high to
warn the rioters, they hit these little sparrows. Children fell dead from the
branches.

18.23

Such was my life. Every night I’d go to
Saint Klement’s for an hour or so. The silence reminded me of a voice I once
heard on a train. This girl sang a song that took me out of myself. In my life,
which has seen so many demands for names and dates of birth, here was someone
important who’d escaped being nailed down. There was no name. I don’t know who
it was, or what she looked like but I found her again in that quiet place.

The cleaner was called
Lidia Zelk. A timid woman, we didn’t speak for three years. She’d never
married. Like Barbara, she eventually joined the Friends of the Shoemaker.

Chapter Twenty

While waiting for Róża’s statement to
be translated, Anselm sat at his desk humming Bunny Berigan’s trumpet solo from
‘I Can’t Get Started’. His eyes drifted on to the orange file. He’d left it
open. Róża’s two faces peered back from the prison photographs. All that
lay between each snap of the shutter release was a couple of years, during
which time … Anselm’s humming came to an abrupt halt: he’d noticed a tiny
scrap of blue paper sticking out towards the bottom of the pile.

Swivelling the block
round, he lowered his head to examine the fragment more closely It was held in
place by the string fastener that kept the documents together. The relevant
sheet had evidently been detached from the bundle, leaving behind the corner
section. Puzzled, he closed the cover. He’d only just tied the bow when
Sebastian entered with the translation of Róża’s statement.

‘Let me know what you
think,’ he said. ‘Our rat is in there somewhere.’

As he reached the door,
Anselm heard himself say ‘Can I just ask an idle question?’

‘Absolutely’

Sebastian turned and
leaned on the jamb, hands in his pockets.

‘Can’t understand a
thing in here, of course,’ said Anselm, tapping the orange file, ‘but why are
there two kinds of paper … white and blue.’

‘The white was used by
the interrogators, the blue by the nurses.

‘Nurses?’

‘Yes. The colour coding
was common to all prisons. In Róża’s case, having any medical notes is
laughable. I mean, what did they do? Dish out the aspirin when they’d finished
with the rack? That’s probably why it’s blank. They didn’t do anything.’

‘Blank?’

‘Apart from her name at
the top. I don’t know why it’s in there at all. I imagine they lumped all her
papers together, even when they hadn’t been used.’

Anselm’s mind made a
sort of grinding noise. Sebastian was talking as if the blue paper was still in
the file. He’d seen it. He knew it was blank. But it wasn’t there now Some
primitive caution stopped Anselm from revealing his thoughts. Instead he asked
if he could venture some more questions peripheral to their investigation.

‘Is anyone else involved
in this case?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone else read the
files?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Just wondering if you’d
got a second opinion on the
Polana
material.’ That was completely
untrue. Anselm had wanted to know who might have had access to the orange file.
His intuition had already leapt at the answer. He quickly pressed on.’ seeking
confirmation. ‘I know this is neither here nor there, but what did Róża
do when she saw the transcripts? That white and blue paper must have knocked
her flat:

‘She didn’t even open
the cover.’

‘Really?’

‘The sight of the files
winded her. Wanted to be alone. When the door opened her eyes were on the “Way
Out” sign.’

‘How did you change her
mind?’ The question was entirely superfluous. Anselm had found out what he
wanted to know.

‘I said I had a story,
too,’ replied Sebastian. ‘She stared at my shirt and shoes and then, for some
reason, she just weakened. I pushed some more and she finally gave in. The fact
is, she wanted to speak. Everyone who’s been brutalised has to speak, needs to
speak. And Róża went as far as she was able … but I very nearly lost
her.’

Anselm made a
mischievous nod. Sebastian was no different. That reference to an untold story
had come from a dropped guard. Already the lawyer was backtracking, heading
into the corridor before Anselm’s curiosity could tug at the admission.

‘Don’t ask,’ he intoned.
‘I’ll tell you after Brack’s conviction.’

Until that moment,
Anselm had thought that Sebastian was simply a dedicated lawyer born of the
generation that dealt with the sins of their fathers. There was clearly another
facet to his energy. Anselm recalled the box files and the photograph of the
elderly woman standing behind a wheelchair. Who should have been sitting there?
Were they linked to Sebastian’s investigation into Brack? Anselm turned as from
the ghost to have a quick word with Róża.

‘I said nothing to
Sebastian, because you didn’t,’ he said, confiding and quiet. ‘I’m respecting
your privacy. You removed the blue paper because you didn’t want anyone to know
you’d been in the infirmary. Fair enough. Your choice. Don’t worry, your secret’s
safe with me.’

He waited, but no reply
came to his imagination.

‘But I’m in some difficulty.
You went to John for help and, for all I know, he’d just walk straight through
the fire. But you’ve ended up with me. I’m different. I’m easily distracted.
And I can only help by stumbling around on the sidelines — it’s my way Comes
with monastic life, you know, head half in the clouds. So bear with me, because
I now want to know why you vandalised the national archives.’

With that resolution in
mind, Anselm picked up Róża’s statement.

Anselm read the document three times with
increasing attentiveness — a monastic practice vaguely similar to deep sea
diving without the benefit of lead boots, each appraisal an attempt to break
beneath the surface tension of the page. The objective: to descend into the
dark and find the strange light not always visible from the side of the boat.
He lingered here and there on individual phrases, letting his mind sink and swim
where it willed.

His first reaction on
drying himself down, so to speak, was completely irrelevant to the matter in
hand. He was hurt. And confused. At first he’d found the references to John
touching. They’d given bright glimpses on to the young man who’d left East
Berlin for Warsaw.’ the gifted journalist driven to document the struggle of an
oppressed people. But then, like a sudden power-cut, came that reference to
John’s mother. He’d told Róża what he’d never told him. Suppressing his
disappointment, Anselm focused instead on Róża’s staggering misfortune.
She’d walked out of Mokotów into the house of an informer.

Anselm’s second
reaction, then, was pity Immense pity for Róża, but also for the husband
and father who’d become FELIKS. Presumably there’d been pressure or the allure
of reward, but Edward Kolba had evidently come to an arrangement with Otto
Brack. With or without his wife’s connivance, he’d kept an eye on their guest.
For sure, Róża had been welcomed with open arms. But she’d also been placed
at the centre of an ongoing surveillance operation. If FELIKS did betray Róża
in 1982 then that would certainly explain Róża’s silence afterwards: her
loyalty to him, but perhaps more so to his wife.’ Aniela, who’d shared the
unforgettable experience of Mokotów. She too got Anselm’s pity.

His third reaction was
more clinical.

Róża had amended
and amplified the transcript, making it a carefully polished document. Each
section dealt neatly with people and places and their significance in her life.
Every word had its place. Which made Róża’s mistake all the more
illuminating.

She’d slipped up.

The tiny window in her
cell was so high she had to strain her neck ‘to see the clouds’. Eight minutes
later she confessed that the greater part of her remained in Mokotów ‘by a
large window that looking on to a cherry tree.’.

Where was that big
window? It had to be located in the prison infirmary. Róża wouldn’t have
had the run of the place. There was no gym, television room or sauna. Where
else could she have been if it wasn’t her cell? The textual inconsistency was
of no small importance. It explained Róża’s startling opening remark that
she wanted to remain incarcerated. Fine, she’d forgotten how to boil an egg,
but think again (Anselm said to himself): she was effectively saying that she
longed to remain at the scene of a double execution. Dogs do things like that,
not human beings. Not wives. But this is what Róża said she wanted to do.
And it was not credible. In an otherwise crafted testimonial where nothing had
been given away without a specific reason, Róża had made an accidental
admission. She’d kicked and screamed and beaten the prison door not because she
wanted her cell back but because she longed to be near that larger window; an
infirmary window Where else if not there? It haunted her. And all because it
looked on to a tree?

‘Well, what do you
think?’

Anselm made a start. He
hadn’t heard Sebastian enter. The lawyer pulled over a chair and straddled the
seat, his chin lodged on his folded arms as if he were looking into that eye
testing machine at the opticians. He worked too hard, that was Anselm’s
verdict. The whites were yellowed and bloodshot.

‘Something isn’t quite
right.” said Anselm.

‘In what way?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He made
a sigh of self-deprecation. ‘Can’t read a damn thing without brooding on it for
months. At Larkwood we tend to chew words slowly. swallow them even more slowly
and then wait for this sudden kick of understanding, right here —’ he pointed
at his stomach — ‘it’s a bit annoying, really I read stuff ten years ago and I’ve
still got indigestion. The only cure’s watching and waiting.’