The Day of the Lie (29 page)

‘He’s seen everything,
you know,’ said the curate to Anselm. ‘From the Nazis to the Reds. They say he
smuggled Jewish kids out of the Ghetto, made Molotovs in the Uprising, and
then, after Yalta, went out into the Cold. But he won’t tell me anything. Sweet
whatever. He only talks about his childhood.’

They entered a parlour
facing a garden running to outbuildings and a wall. On the far side lay an
embankment sloping to the tracks. A train thundered by out of sight, tearing
towards the bridge.

Father Kaminsky was
lodged in a wheelchair, his legs painfully thin in flimsy black trousers. Bony
feet in large slippers had been lodged on the footrests like pedals on a bike.
A grey woollen cardigan with buttons missing hung upon his shrunken chest.
Around his neck was a bright yellow scarf, The room had the feel of a passenger’s
waiting room. Newspapers were heaped on a table. Anselm’s eye picked out
El
País, La Repubblica,
the
Sun.

‘Ah, my youth has come
to scold me,’ Father Kaminsky said in English, fondly noting Anselm’s habit. ‘I’ll
come back, one day’ He pointed towards a wicker chair, his voice throaty and
soft. ‘You want to speak about Róża Mojeska.’

‘In the first instance,
no,’ replied Anselm, picking up the
Sun.
‘I thought we might start with
Pavel, her husband. Or Stefan. Or maybe Otto Brack. Or perhaps we could just
cut to the chase and talk about retribution, human and divine.’

The old man started,
gently ‘You surprise me, Father.’

‘Really?’ Anselm turned
the pages, not seeing. ‘Do you know this paper’s most famous headline? It’s “Gotcha!”‘

The curate knocked open
the door with his knee and brought in a tray laden with tea, sliced
panettone,
nougat, Lady Finger biscuits and poppyseed cakes. After pouring and
stirring he loitered, hoping to join in the chat, but Father Kaminsky made a
firm nod towards the door. He was frail, like Sylvester back home. His bones
were clear beneath the soft skin on his face. White hair, in wisps, had managed
to get tangled, making him look more of a boy than a man. It was hard to
believe that collaboration could leave no identifying marks. His eyes were
wide, the blue running out of colour.

‘Tell me about SABINA,’
said Anselm, closing the paper. ‘The rest will come out in the wash:

I’m old school, he said, taking no nonsense.
I’m telling you all you need to know and not a breadcrumb more, do you understand.
You’ll be getting nothing about the Shoemaker, the Friends,
Freedom and
Independence.
Don’t ask how I met Pavel Mojeska because I won’t tell you.
Same for Stefan Binkowski. They were both shot because someone said something
they should’ve kept to themselves. Trust is all well and good, but it has a
boundary. It’s not an open field. And don’t ask about me. I won’t tell you.
Understood? Check the door will you?

He was Sylvester in
reverse. Anselm, unsteady on his feet, had a quick look: the curate had gone.
The old man was rolling on with his story even before Anselm had sat down. A
premonition told Anselm that playing smart with a headline had been a
spectacular mistake. And the old man was talking … talking fast, as if he’d
been primed to explode.

‘I approached them in
nineteen forty-eight. We needed the money ‘We?’

‘I’ve already told you:
don’t ask for breadcrumbs. Where was I?’

‘Money’

‘Ah, yes, and we needed
to keep them at a distance.’

So he’d drawn them
in
to keep them
out,
and drawn a decent wage while he was at it. A
group of prominent figures, well known to him and of interest to the
authorities, had agreed that he should inform on them. Patriots with ideas.
Nationalists who didn’t accept Soviet domination. They’d met regularly to
decide in advance what Father Nicodem was to say They’d hoped to influence
minds.

‘Whose?’

‘Theirs.’

It was a word that
seemed to point. He’d identified the opposition en masse. Back then, at the
beginning, the ideological conflict had been acute, cleaner, and simpler. Some
people’s minds were for the taking. The country had been devastated. Something
new had to be built, both psychologically and materially It was a terrible,
tragic fresh start. And it was important to get the thinking right for this new
purpose and the new future. It was, in fact, an opportunity for everyone to
start again. But it was persuasion against imposition; words against violence.
The intellectuals known to Father Kaminsky had hoped to infiltrate the system
itself and lure away its agents with ideas, with arguments … to poison the
entire edifice of oppression by injecting free-flowing words into its
bloodstream.

‘You see, we all
believed passionately that ideas
matter,’
said Father Kaminsky with an
old undying fervour. ‘That ideas, properly worked out, bring peace, prosperity,
equality of opportunity, justice … that if we could only get them into the
minds of the jailors, then they’d find it harder to turn the key that
eventually — maybe not in our lifetimes, but in generations hence — the words
would do their work.’

‘And the money?’ asked
Anselm, weakly.

‘Paper and ink. A good
education doesn’t come cheap. We thought they ought at least to pay the running
costs.’

The scale of Anselm’s
misconstruction was colossal. Father Kaminsky’s innocence completely demolished
his understanding of Brack’s scheme and a good half of Róża’s presumed
motivation. All that remained was the vindication of her child. He listened
with a kind of humility, embarrassed that he’d condemned a man who’d risked so
much for so long.

‘In those days, my
handler was a man called Strenk,’ said Father Kaminsky ‘A hardliner with a mind
dead to any feeling. Like so many of his kind, he’d separated thought and
emotion. All torturers do that. It’s how they make sense of wading in blood,
doing what ordinary folk could never stomach; it’s how they step back into
ordinary life thinking they’re heroes.’

A few years later Brack
took over. Strenk and Brack were like father and son, pupil and master and
Brack was being given a chance to show he could drive the car on his own, that
he could work the gears.

‘I was in my forties
then, and Brack, well, I’d say his mid—twenties.’ A white hand with knotted
veins rose to his mouth, touching his pale bottom lip. ‘I remember when I saw
him first … this young man, this …
apprentice.
He was being
schooled. They were forming him into their own kind. For a long time I just
looked at him … at his eyes, his mouth … wondering what else he might have
done with his life, other than
this
with
them.’
The old priest’s
gaping eyes burned with compassion. He spoke slowly nodding out the words. ‘He
was obsessed with the Shoemaker. He wasn’t trying to please. There was
something personal to his drive.’

Father Kaminsky’s
meetings were, of course, limited to the report of conversations with suspected
persons, but Brack never failed to remind him that he was to keep his ear to
the ground, that if he heard one word about the Shoemaker he was to let him
know.

‘He was sullen and
angry,’ said the old priest, abstractedly ‘My old friend Jozef Lasky used to
say “Harm the boy you harm the man and Otto Brack was a man with deep wounds.
Whoever was responsible carries a heavy burden … for who Brack became and for
what he did.’ His face became eerily still; even his eyes ceased their slow
blinking. ‘Have some
panettone,’
he resumed, quietly ‘It’s the real
thing. From Milan.’

A train rushed along the
line, shaking the window in its frame. Anselm found his arms were folded tight
as if he were cold. He’d been spellbound by the confused tussle between
judgement and mercy.

‘In fifty-one Pavel told
me he’d broken a rule.’ Father Kaminsky had stepped away from the first meeting
with Brack. His hands became lively on his lap. ‘He’d met a stranger and
brought them into the running of the operation. He wouldn’t tell me who it was
and I didn’t want to know He was innocent, you see. Impulsive. He was too …
good
for the dirty kind of fight we were in. He was drawn to the brightness of
an ordinary tomorrow I remember now, he said, “A friend is someone who was once
a stranger”. What could I do? What could I say? I said we had to find a
sleeper, and that’s when I found out he’d broken another rule: he’d got
married. I could have wept. Marriage is trust, and trust, in our game, was a
weakness. And so I met Róża. She was to be the sleeper, he said. I could
have wept again.’

He told Pavel to give
her his ring. It’s the worst thing he’d ever said, but Father Kaminsky had an
awful foreboding that something was about to go wrong. That Pavel would go out
one night and she’d never see him again; that she’d be left with nothing …
sacred. Because Pavel had opened the door to someone who hadn’t been
picked;
he’d shaken the hand of someone who wanted to meet the Shoemaker; he’d made
a Friend out of a Stranger.

He’d trusted, thought
Anselm, with feeling. He’d wanted to walk in an open field without walls and
fences; he’d longed to stroll beneath an open sky without having to look where
he was going. Róża had made an identical mistake.

‘The first I knew about
the arrests was from Brack.’ Father Kaminsky’s cheeks were nicked here and
there from clumsy shaving; a hand touched the healing cuts. ‘He was spitting
rage … Pavel had set up a dummy meeting so when Brack moved in, he only
caught Pavel and Stefan. Pavel had tried to patch up his mistakes. He’d tested
the trust of the stranger. And he paid for it.’

Willingly as did Róża,
thought Anselm. He thought of the figure in hiding for whom the sacrifice had
been made; this man of vision and determination, kept safe by the dedication of
his Friends. How did he bear the outcome?

‘He didn’t.’ Father
Kaminsky’s head was shaking slowly right and left, his voice hoarse. ‘He lost
the ability to speak. He couldn’t write a single line.
Freedom and
Independence
died with those two young men.

Father Kaminsky was
broken, too. He felt responsible because he hadn’t been put against the wall.
This is what happens with deep friendship. Everything is shared. And he wanted
to share death. But it wasn’t his task, his duty. His job was to survive. But
how could he go on? It was as though the lights had gone out in his life.
Doggedly he’d carried on working with the SB. He’d ‘informed’, diligently
passing on the ideas of a new generation of intellectuals who’d tired of the
broken promises for change. This had been his duty, and the reason for being
alive: whoever had read those files had received messages of hope. The money?
Given to the families of those imprisoned for what they believed.

‘Then, in nineteen
eighty-two, Róża came back.’ Father Kaminsky’s wide eyes and open mouth
showed the surprise had never faded. ‘I hadn’t seen her for thirty years, and
here she was, strong and sure and … forgiving. She had a message for the
Shoemaker from the widow of a Friend. The fight goes on, she insisted. Tell him
he has no choice, she said; tell him the choice has already been made:

Father Kaminsky looked
outside, turning away from remembered emotion. He stayed like that as if
waiting for his train to arrive; waiting for the guard to carry his bags and
find his seat; waiting for his big trip over the bridge.

Anselm knew the rest: it
was a matter of history repeating itself Róża had made the same momentous
blunder as Pavel. Eventually they’d both tired of deceit and caution, suspicion
and doubt. They’d decided to live as human beings. They’d chosen to live by
trust. They’d said, ‘Yes’ when they should have said, ‘No’.

‘When Brack saw me in
the cemetery, he knew I was linked to Róża,’ said Father Kaminsky with the
look of a man tired of delays.

Anselm was quizzical. It
was All Souls. He was a priest. Being there had an innocent explanation.

‘One gesture.’ Father
Kaminsky smiled, the jagged cracks in his skin turning supple. ‘After Róża
was taken away I turned round and looked … and he saw the expression on my
face. He saw how much I cared. The scales in his eyes came crashing down —
scales carefully laid one upon the other for decades until he was blind —and I
said, “Join us, won’t you? We’re going to win, eventually”, and he came right
up close —’ the old man leaned forward, aping the disbelief and confusion in
Brack’s face, his thin arms rigid on the arms of his wheelchair — ‘and he
replied, as if he were mourning, “I know you are. But don’t you see? Neither of
us will join the celebrations.”‘

Of course they wouldn’t,
thought Anselm. Brack had told Frenzel to name Father Kaminsky as his agent: to
link him to a betrayal he could never explain away contaminating all the SABINA
files in the SB archive. There and then, in the cemetery, he’d planned for
Father Kaminsky’s future condemnation. He’d seen everything with frightening
clarity and staggering speed.

They drank tea, Anselm eating
the
panettone,
the old man struggling with the nougat. There used to be
a wonderful shop in the Jewish Quarter that made poppyseed cakes bigger than
the ones on the plate. A wall had been built twenty feet high. Children were
smuggled out and hidden in homes and institutions. Father Kaminsky’s
remembrances began to scatter. He moved back and forth in time, ‘they’
variously being the Nazis, the Soviets and the City Council. Brushing crumbs
off his lap, he said, suddenly ‘Whoever betrayed Róża is trapped:

Anselm looked over the
rim of his teacup.

‘That’s how Brack works.
It’s how they made him.’

Anselm didn’t move.

‘Whoever it might be is
trapped by their past.’ The old man was nodding his words again. ‘He did it to Róża
and he did it to me. When you find them, don’t be too harsh: