The Day of the Lie (37 page)

The fire crackled and spat.

‘Do you see what he was
doing? What he did?’ Celina’s voice rose slightly ‘He’d already been to you. He’d
already sent you towards Róża. You’d already found her, and so he came to
me. I didn’t know, I suspected nothing.’

Róża made the
slightest moan, so low and so unobtrusive that in other circumstances it wouldn’t
have been noticed. But here, in this vast yet cramped room, it was as though a
flagstone had cracked. Something immense was disintegrating within Róża.
But there was no collapse. Her eyes were on John, bleeding with emotion.

‘I read your journal.’
Celina’s admission came like a tearing at the mouth. ‘I knew where you’d been
and where you were going.’

She’d read it every day
worried that time was ebbing away; that her father would come back to arrest
them both. She finally learned of a planned meeting by the grave of Prus.
Celina was whispering now She’d dialled Brack’s number as if she were lodging a
complaint at the passport office. It had been a quick, cold call.

They were silent.

The truth, at last, was
out. The informer used by Brack had been his own daughter … but Anselm was
running now, following the fizz of the burning fuse, head down, not seeing
where he was going. Brack had told Róża the name of the informer and what
they’d been doing for years. And that had silenced her … but why? She’d never
met Celina. Brack’s delinquent child couldn’t be that significant.

‘You came home beaten by
them,’ said Celina, carefully unfolding the tissue. ‘The next day I didn’t go
to the censor. I rang my father. We met in the cemetery.’

Celina had sent him back
to Prus, to where he’d betrayed her. She’d hit him hard across the face. His
head had flown back with the force of the blow, but, on righting himself, he’d
hardly seemed present. One calm hand had gone into his drab overcoat and he’d
taken out a passport.

‘I threw it on the
floor.’ Celina dabbed the corners of her eyes. ‘I wanted my freedom but not
thanks to him. Then, when I came home, the phone rang. They’d given you two days.
You asked me to come. You made a call for a passport.’ She clutched the tissue
as if it were a shred of hope. ‘Was it the embassy?’

‘No.’

‘Five—five—eight—seven-six?’

‘Yes.’

Everything was ready
thought Anselm, awed. Everyone had been put into position. Everyone had been moved.
Polana
was a game of wit and patience for three or more players.
Waddington’s couldn’t have dreamed up the goal, the rules or the cost. Brack
had won. But only because Celina’s importance was …

‘I couldn’t speak at the
trial, John, because it was me who’d got you thrown out of Warsaw’ Celina was
looking at her daisy again. ‘I left because I knew I couldn’t remain and keep
the lie going, year on year. I’m sorry.

We’d both lost out, she
seemed to say Something simple and beautiful had died, without even withering.
Celina turned to Róża, her face anguished. Her hands came together. ‘I’m
sorry I brought him to you. To this day I don’t know what my father was doing,
or why’

Anselm wasn’t entirely
sure that Róża was breathing. Her thumb had stopped moving. Her face
remained drawn and shadowed; her eyes were open; the stare fixed. John seemed
to look back, yet neither was really looking at the other. Why was Róża
looking at John?

‘He was saving himself,’
replied Róża from her inner refuge.

‘But from what?’ asked
Celina. ‘Why use me to get to John, and John to get to you?’

‘He was frightened.’

‘What of?’

‘The claims of the law
My claims, those of my husband … and those of …’

My child.
The
fuse went phut just as the word burst inside Anselm’s mouth.

He sat, lips apart, as
if watching torn clods fall in slow motion to the ground: he recalled what Róża
had said in the bright light of what she had not said. There and then an
elemental fusion took place in Anselm’s mind between the deeper depth of Róża’s
statement and its surface meaning: Róża’s child lay beneath the page on
blank blue paper, its name the one name she’d refused to disclose on the
surface of the page.

‘I’ve understood, Róża,’
he said. ‘I know what happened in nineteen fifty-three.’

Disclosing certain
tragedies can’t be done slowly There can be no cushioning. But Anselm was going
to try He reached over and took one of Róża’s hands in his. Watching the
tears spill free, he said, deliberately and slowly ‘Celina, Otto Brack is not
your father.’

Anselm could feel the
impact of his words. They’d crashed into Celina and a stunned hush had bounced
back. As if he needed any confirmation, Anselm felt the slightest pressure from
Róża’s fingers.

‘He’s not your father,’
repeated Anselm, even more slowly. ‘And your mother never sat in the corner
lost in a puzzle, not minding what the day might bring. She minded more than
she’ll ever be able to say.

Anselm couldn’t speak
any more. The fire snapped and murmured, sending sparks upwards in a spray of
light.

Chapter Forty-Three

There were many images and sounds, all
seared into Anselm’s memory, which kept him awake that night. His mind became a
screen showing nothing but the moments any censor of discretion would have cut
and hid away — the parts where the actors broke down while the camera was
running; the elements of tragedy best left to inference, for fear they unsettle
any respectful observer. Sophocles knew his stuff: Oedipus tore his eyes out
off stage; all the audience got was a man with blood streaming down his face.
There are certain things you’re just not meant to see.

What was the more harrowing:
the moment when Róża, trembling with fear, timidity and courage, took
Celina’s hand from his? Or was it the slow, seeping words when Róża — her
eyes closed, her head bent in an attitude of veneration and penitence — said,
over and over again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’? ‘For what?’ mumbled
Celina, confused and overcome. ‘For having failed you, for having let you go,
for not being there as you grew and changed, changed so much.’ Anselm had been
rigid, choking. Róża had nothing but a frayed string of lost years, and now
this, this moment of regret and misery and jubilation with her daughter. So
much to explain; so much to understand — with so much more time behind than was
left in front. She’d looked so terribly alone, like a passenger who’d been left
behind on the platform.

Or was it immediately
afterwards when Celina, disorientated, asked about her father — when Róża
had to explain in simple, direct words that he was dead, that he’d been shot?
By the man who’d taken his place in her life.

‘I tried to find you,’
said Róża. ‘But I’d let you go without a name, to set you free. I didn’t
know where you were until Brack told me what he’d done. But in telling me, he
knew I couldn’t come to you. I couldn’t bring you the truth, because I knew it
would be shattering. It’s taken me all these years to understand that it was
your right to know, even if it destroyed who you’d become. You had a right to
know who you really are. To know what had been done to you, to me and to your
father.’

Or was it the sound of
Celina’s breathing, catching like a broken zip, the unsteady movement jamming
when she tried to reply? She’d taken Róża’s other hand, tears jolting from
her eyes. They’d stood like that, motionless, speechless, their arms a kind of
low swing bridge between them. Somehow, they had to cross the immeasurable
distance, finding their own balance, all the while terrified of a fall, of some
weak plank breaking underfoot.

If Anselm was forced to
choose it would have been a quiet moment late next morning, seen by accident
from the kitchen window It was the sight of Celina leading Róża through
the crisp snow to her car parked beneath Larkwood’s plum trees. They moved
cautiously fearing a sudden slip on hidden ice. Celina had one arm around Róża’s
shoulder, the other holding her elbow, their heads leaning close together.
Anselm had lingered, thinking that Róża had suddenly and dramatically
aged. It wasn’t necessarily a dark thought, but he knew she was ready to die.

After Celina’s car had turned out of the
gate, its occupants beginning the longest journey of their lives, Anselm, John
and Sebastian — boots and coats borrowed where necessary — went for a long walk
in the woods. They were white, silent and deep, every branch collared and tied
with icicles and snow Feet crunched along hidden paths known only to Anselm;
voices rose, gathering in the facts, an occasional outburst of anger echoing
through the forest.

They spoke of the
criminal Otto Brack.

In 1951, protected by
the State, he’d shot two men. Threatened by a widow with future justice, he’d
tricked her into letting go of her child as if it were an act of sacrifice. But
he’d secretly taken the new life as his own, knowing that in the years to come
the widow could never touch him without harming her own child: for who could
tell their child that the man they hold as their father is, in fact, his
killer?

Then, in 1982, when the
possibility of overthrow first reared its head, Brack had organised Operation
Polana,
its goal to catch the Shoemaker; its secondary purpose to find Róża
and tell her what he’d done: to warn her of the cost of justice. To give her a
passport. To push her beyond arm’s length.

They spoke of Celina,
the child abandoned by the woman who wasn’t her mother.

By using her Brack had
secured her eventual silence, in the event that she ever learned of her past. A
snide remark from the likes of Frenzel, if he’d ever uncovered the adoption,
might have sent her on a quest. At its term she’d have learned that the woman
in John’s journal was her mother: a woman she had betrayed. Brack had silenced
mother and daughter with reciprocal shame. Even Sophocles, the specialist in
unusual parent—child issues, hadn’t thought of that one.

And they spoke of the
victim Róża Mojeska.

For thirty years she’d
believed that Celina was proximate, if not close, to Brack. That she believed
him to be her father. How had she grown? Who had she become? Róża had been
paralysed by two conflicting imperatives, each with a moral character: to speak
or not to speak; the claims of the truth as against the benefits of ignorance.
Ultimately she’d recognised Celina’s rights.

But there was more to it
than that.

Brack’s scheme exploited
the natural bond between a mother and her child. He knew that Róża would
choose silence rather than damage her daughter with information she need not
know She’d been trapped by love. But Sebastian had urged her to do the last
thing Brack would expect: to give her another reason for living. The challenge
had led Róża to realise that shielding her daughter from the truth was
many things — pity, compassion, mercy self-sacrifice — but it wasn’t love. So
she’d set her hand to the unthinkable task of wounding her own child. But it
had to be done with enormous care. As a preliminary, she needed the smallest
indication from her daughter that she was prepared to talk about her past and
the shadow of her presumed father. For that, Róża needed the gentle touch
of an intermediary Which brought them on to her statement — that implement
crafted to help her representative.

Frankly as an
identification tool, it hadn’t worked. But as an example of moral technology it
had the qualities often ascribed to Audi engineering. It ran smoothly to its
destination; and so quietly you might not know it had arrived.
Vorsprung
durch Technik.
Róża had placed Celina’s collaboration in its complete
context: against the backdrop of the Shoemaker operation, fully described,
showing, in effect, that she had done nothing to compromise its aims. Crucially
she had not used her name. She’d asked about the film-maker as often as John
had asked about the Shoemaker. This had been the one, decisive clue.

They came back to
Larkwood chattering with cold, enchanted by the magic of the woods. John and
Sebastian left for Cambridge railway station like old friends, a certain
complicity between them as Sebastian explained the next steps to be taken upon
his return to Warsaw: the obtaining of a witness statement from Róża to be
followed by the arrest, charge and prosecution of Otto Brack.

‘You’ll keep me
informed?’ asked John.

‘As matters develop:

It was as though John
worked at the IPN. The only question was who had the senior position.

As Anselm drove slowly
back from the station to Larkwood, minding snow drifts, distracted now and then
by the magnificence of blank fields at evening, his thoughts turned to
something that hadn’t been explored during that walk in the woods: the mind of
Otto Brack.

On the plane out to Warsaw, Anselm had
thought about the mystery of the man’s character: how he’d ever come to use
good for evil ends. He’d been curious as a man might leaf through a textbook,
seeking a simple explanation for why the moral cells broke down. But that was
then, on the plane. He now knew what lay in Brack’s dangerous world. He couldn’t
contain his meditation or understand its direction. He sought out the Prior,
ostensibly to report back on the outcome of the Round Table talks, finding him
once more in the woodshed. This time there was no work. Anselm sat on the piano
stool, the Prior on the chopping block. He spoke the inimitable phrase:

‘Go to the end of your
concerns.

As ever the Prior was
inscrutable, not reacting when told of John’s innocence, nor seeking any tribute
for being right about John’s intentions in coming to Anselm (he knew about
Lebanon Cedars, why they fell and the direction of their grain). His only
response was a sharp contraction of the eyebrows when Anselm explained the
mechanism and consequences of Brack’s plan. As if they were both seated in its
shadow, Anselm moved directly on to the matter that troubled him. It was a kind
of fear.