The Day of the Lie (19 page)

‘Well, you’ve got till
nine-thirty tomorrow morning.’ Sebastian reached into his inside jacket pocket
and took out a scrap of paper. He held it up to Anselm so he could read the
address scrawled across the middle. ‘You have an appointment with Marek
Frenzel.’

Locating the former
secret policeman had been no more difficult than tracing Irina Orlosky
According to the tax people, Brack’s assistant, now aged sixty-two, had left
the SB to join the peace of mind industry and was now a branch manager in
central Warsaw He’d shown a flare for insurance. He was still looking after the
People: house and contents; the whole caboodle.

‘Does he know what we
want?’ asked Anselm, taking the paper. ‘I told his secretary that an old policy
had finally matured.’

So the stage was set. If Anselm’s hunch was
correct, he’d shortly buy back the missing contents of the
Polana
file.
And that would confirm if Edward Kolba had gone the distance. But in truth
Anselm’s curiosity, lambent with expectation, lay just as much elsewhere: on
the sidelines.’ far from the fire.

Chapter Twenty-One

IPN/RM/13129/2010

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT
MADE BY

RÓŻA
MOJESKA

33.41

If it wasn’t for Bernard, I might never
have gone back to the Shoemaker. When he was a child, I told him the story of
the dragon and I like to think that his first steps towards resistance came
from hearing that tale of intellect against brute force. Later, without
prompting, he began to ask the ‘wrong’ sorts of question, like, ‘Why do we have
a special relationship with the Soviet Union?’. Edward used to pull his hair
out, begging him to stick to algebra. Clean problems that could be solved
cleanly He just wanted his boy to do well at school.

36.22

At university Bernard started talking about
all kinds of freedom … freedom to read books banned by the censor; freedom to
watch any film he wanted; to say what he liked; to meet whom he liked; freedom
from the restraint that kept everyone in line, an ideological line drawn more
for Moscow’s approval than theirs; freedom to pick his own leaders; freedom of
information; freedom protected by the law Freedom, pure and simple. Edward
would shake his head, stabbing one finger upwards, warning Bernard that they
might be bugged, while Aniela would dust the flour from her hands, round on him
and shout back, ‘What are you on about? You’re getting a free education!’

38.54

Bernard belonged to that group of
intellectuals whose strong belief in socialism — its vision of fairness and
equality — had turned restive. Their problem was that, in practice, it wasn’t
working properly. They demanded
reform
not revolution — a reform that
had been promised year on year by the Party leadership. All they wanted was for
the apparatchiks to stand back so that he and his educated pals could lift the
bonnet on the government’s engine. With a bit of major tinkering they were sure
they could fix those grinding noises that everyone was complaining about. But
eventually he lost his faith. One of his professors was expelled from the Party
for condemning the lack of political, social and economic development. That was
when he — and many others — realised that without a revolution of ideas there
was little hope for change. He wrote a letter saying so to both the rector and
the Party leadership — actions for which he could have been kicked out of the
university Happily he only received a disciplinary warning. Bernard got his
degree later that year and I still remember Edward when the results came out.
He sat with his mouth open, tears of joy pouring on to his thick moustache.
There was a scholar in the family.

41.52

They got Bernard after he’d started
post-graduate studies. One domino hit another: in 1968 the censor banned
Forefather’s
Eve
after the audience had a field day jeering the czarist agent as if he
were a latter—day soviet stooge. The students took to the streets in protest so
the rector shut down a string of Departments. Thousands of young people —
Bernard, among them — had their schooling cut short. They all got ‘wolf tickets’,
blacklisting them when it came to finding a job. Edward’s face set into a mask.
This was one affair he couldn’t resolve by wangling. He had to watch his boy
scratch around for bit work.

42.58

Bernard didn’t only lose his future; he
lost a childhood friend, Mateusz Robak. They’d gone in different directions,
Bernard to books on philosophy and Mateusz to an electrician’s manual. When the
demonstration had erupted Bernard the Student had wanted Mateusz the Worker by
his side. But Mateusz had laughed him down: ‘I’m not risking my job so you can
watch a play written two hundred years ago.’ They never spoke again, not until
1982. By then Mateusz was in charge of my security.

53.21

I lost a friend, too. Magda Samovitz. We’d
met in Saint Justyn’s, where she’d been hidden during the war. The German
secret police had taken her away with Mr Lasky in 1944 but she’d survived
Treblinka and come back. Well, the government now blamed the student unrest on
Zionists, and Magda lost her job simply because she was Jewish. I couldn’t
believe that those who’d survived and returned, like her, would one day leave
again with the little they could carry in their bags. Thousands lost their jobs
and left the country. Magda went to England.

54.39

Bernard became heavily involved in
unofficial union activity which was how he met his wife, Helena. A close friend
of theirs was shot dead in 1970 at Gdynia, one of a crowd chanting ‘We want
bread! We want truth!’ at the machine guns. They carried his body on planks
behind a banner saying ‘The Blood of Children’. Others were killed in the Radom
riots of 1976 when food prices doubled. Demonstrators unfurled the white eagle
and set the Party building on fire. I listened to the news, still not feeling
the stab of a needle. According to the presenter, ‘drunken hooligans and
hysterical women led the crowds’.

1h.02

Bernard always said that Solidarity grew
from that banner and those martyrs, because afterwards the students and workers
came together. But I would add something else, a remark I heard on the bus last
week: no Church, no Solidarity, no revolution. And it’s true. Behind this
coalition of minds and hands was the presence of those strong arches, arches
that had refused to bend or break despite the weight of Soviet Occupation. Even
if there were men of God who’d become men of Brack, that changes nothing, and
it never can: the story has been told; the arches didn’t sway I, and millions
like me, stood beneath them.

Anyway the students and
workers, united to this spirit of resistance.’ overwhelmed the Party. Our
special friends had to swallow it. Solidarity became official.

What followed, however,
was chaos. Strike after strike. I ended up brushing my teeth with imported
Bulgarian toothpaste. Frankly though.’ I was more interested in Helena’s
pregnancy. I watched her slowly grow large. I didn’t quite notice the hunger
marches or the trucks jamming the central roundabout or the rumours that the
Russians were mobilising. I just saw Helena’s radiant face. Aniela watched her,
scared there’d be a knock on the door; that they might come back in their
leather jackets and jeans.

1h.08

They came on the night martial law was
declared, barging in, guns everywhere, masked men dressed like warriors from
the Middle Ages, with helmets and big sticks and whatnot. And shouting,
terrible shouting. Aniela screaming, Edward pulling at his son. This time they’d
really got him.

That’s when it happened.
Moments later, sometime after midnight. Just as they dragged Bernard away.
Helena fell to her knees. Aniela dropped beside her. I was frozen to the spot,
overwhelmed with … fear … no, awe, I suppose. The child was born there, in
the flat, before my eyes, with Aniela stroking the mother’s hair.

1h.15

I went on to the street next morning.
Soldiers were warming themselves by makeshift fires. Tanks rolled over the snow
By a lamppost I found a sheet of paper. There were others, lying around like
litter. On it was a list of names … the names of people who’d been picked up
the night before. The ink was running in the melt water. I think it had been
made from tea or carrot skins, I don’t know, but someone had printed off this
bulletin before morning, even before the soldiers had gone home to bed.

That’s when I decided to
go back to the Shoemaker — not because of martial law or Solidarity or because
I was worried about the cost of meat or the Russians. I went back because a
little boy had been born. His father had been taken to prison before the child
had even got his name.

1h.19

I packed some clothes into a shopping bag,
knowing I’d have to vanish, for as soon as
Freedom and Independence
appeared
again, Brack would come for me. Half an hour later I knocked on the door of
Father Nicodem Kaminsky He was the Threshold to the Shoemaker. I’d last seen
him with my husband in November 1951.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The beaming secretary in the tight skirt
opened the door for Anselm on to a cramped office with half-closed blinds. The furnishings
were modern and shiny: wood veneers and chrome; stripped pine flooring,
convincing to look at, but manufactured by the sheet, soft underfoot where the
fitters had skimped on glue. Sound-proof panelling seemed to soak up the dry
rasp of Anselm’s breathing. He was instantly scared.

Marek Frenzel sat with
his paunch pressed against his glass-top desk, squashed from behind by his red
filing cabinet. A computer screen threw an unkind bluish light on to his
features. Mouse grey hair, parted and creamed back, topped a surprisingly
smooth forehead. Heavy, dark—framed glasses, a throwback to the seventies,
momentarily distracted Anselm from the small eyes that appraised his habit with
disgust. His cheeks sagged off the bone. His lips were delicate, almost
feminine. He reminded Anselm of a strip club singer who’d fallen on good times.
He went straight to the point, speaking so quickly that Frenzel’s jolt at
hearing German was overcome by the substance of the words.

‘I represent someone who
wants to make a claim on a policy opened in nineteen eighty-two. The papers are
lost. The name is
Polana.’

Frenzel became
remarkably still, like a man on a rope finding his balance. Only he wasn’t
afraid of the fall; he was just weighing which way to tilt his stick. He clicked
his mouse and the light dropped a shade darker.

‘Can’t say the name
rings a bell.’ He smirked, leaning back a fraction till his head touched the
wall. To one side, a print of Monet’s water lilies made a desperate bid for
recognisable culture and homeliness. He was the man who could protect your
house and garden. ‘I can do a search if the payout reaches a neat grand.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A thousand Euros. Used
notes.’

Anselm was still
standing. There’d been no invitation to sit. He wavered in confusion, not knowing
what to say He’d been right about the catalogue but he’d given no thought to
the prices.

‘Tell you what,’ said
Frenzel.’ using his helpful voice, his face sunny with reassurance and
competence. ‘I’ll see what I can find out. First, I’ll need a copy of your
passport.’

He called out and the
secretary nipped in and nipped out, her legs moving quickly her stride reduced.

‘That’ll be three
hundred.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Euros. Three hundred.
To do the search. There’s a cash point round the corner. Where are you staying?’

Anselm told him and
Frenzel’s lips paled with a snigger. ‘The
Hilton.’
He leaned back again.
‘Well, well, Father. Give me three days in the tomb and maybe we can have lunch
together.’

Anselm returned to the Hilton unnerved by
Frenzel’s swagger; the sneering confidence that he could still take someone’s
background to pieces. He was a fearless man. He knew how to protect himself.
And his representatives were even now picking over Anselm’s past, his
associates, his movements. The activity alarmed him all the more because
Anselm, seated at the large table in his bedroom, was about to do something
very similar to Róża’s narrative. Both he and Frenzel were aiming to flush
out a private figure and strip it down. Uneasy but holding on to the sheer
difference in their motivations, Anselm turned once more to Róża’s
statement.

The document had been
crafted to raise the dead and shatter the illusions of many.

It also had depth — that
much had been demonstrated by his first three readings.

But there was another
aspect that might be called a deeper depth: a second level that Róża
herself had not intended to disclose — its existence evinced by that slip about
the cherry tree and the strange craving to remain at the site of an execution.
The text, like Róża herself, was not as simple as it appeared.

How then to expose what
she would hide or had not seen?

There was a way.

At the Bar, when faced
with a knotty witness statement, Anselm had often turned (furtively) to the
techniques of German Biblical criticism:
Formgeschichte
and
Redaktionsgeschichte.
They were tools of deconstruction; in Anselm’s hands, secret weapons during
many a difficult trial. Secret because most of his colleagues would have
laughed him out of court; weapons because they’d enabled Anselm to penetrate
the most innocuous deposition, the results furnishing him with an unusual and
frequently devastating cross-examination. Thinking of Frenzel scratching around
his past, he now set to work on Róża’s amended transcript.