The Day of the Lie (39 page)

Part Seven

The Wind that Strips the Trees

Chapter Forty-Five

On a cold morning at the beginning of
March, the Warsaw District Court was ready to hear the case against Otto Brack,
a former colonel in the communist
Służba Bezpieczeństwa.
The
sun had risen to poke holes in a grey blanket of cloud. Faint rain spat upon
the streets and the crowd of onlookers and restive journalists. On the other
side of the road stood an elderly couple, a man and woman. They seemed to be
making a separate, private protest. Between them they held a banner made from a
torn bed sheet.

‘Czekamy na
sprwiedliwośća,’
murmured Róża, reading the black lettering,
as the limousine swung to a halt at the main entrance. She turned to Anselm
with a quiet translation: ‘We are waiting for justice.’

Guided by hulking
policemen in baseball caps and black body armour, Anselm followed Róża, John
and Celina out of the car towards the court, mouthing the phrase as if it were
sacred, ducking past the nest of microphones, the flash of cameras and the
volley of questions.

‘We are waiting for
justice,’ he mumbled, in reply.

Róża’s expectation
that Anselm would understand nothing had been defeated by the simple expedient
of simultaneous translation delivered through a discreet earpiece. Upon arrival
he was brought by a court usher to a tiny room with a window and an elevated
view on to the court. The cabin was sufficiently high that no one would notice
it unless they raised their heads to examine the plaster mouldings or the
flamboyant capitals crowning the sequence of pillars that stood like guards
around the auditorium. Anselm had a bird’s eye view, with the implied
detachment that comes with distance. Once he was seated at a narrow table, the
translator’s voice sounded in his ear, greeting him with flawless English.

‘Let me introduce the
lawyers down below’

The courtroom was
wood-panelled from floor to ceiling. Three robed judges sat beneath the emblem
of a white eagle. Documents lay in bundles between the computer screens. The
IPN prosecutors were crouched to one side, their black gowns trimmed with red:

Sebastian a kind of
map-reader to the driver, Madam Czerny a woman with bleached straggling hair
and a pair of gold bifocals held permanently in one hand. Fastened just below
their left shoulders was a plume of crimson cloth the size of a handkerchief.
Anselm couldn’t help but think of blood. Facing them sat Mr Fischer, counsel
appointed for Brack, the sober green border to his gown completely displaced by
the pink and blue striped cuffs of his shirt. One could almost pass over the
client at his side. He’d been upstaged by the few centimetres of peeping
colour.

Anselm examined Brack.
First with a lawyer’s eye: aged eighty— four, he faced what the indictment
called Communist crimes — a misnomer because murder and torture had a
prevalence and character without boundary of any kind — and then, briefly with
a monk’s:

Do you realise what
you’re doing?

He wore a light brown
jacket and a dark brown shirt. His tie was another brown. Against those
combinations, even his skin seemed brown. Dark pigmentations like the spots on
a Dalmatian covered his head. Large glasses with brownish lenses hid his face.
He was thin, like a wooden clothes stand. All the emotion centred on the mouth.
It worked as if he were chewing a piece of old leather, the top teeth
occasionally pulling at the bottom lip. He ignored every whispered remark from
his counsel. In front of him was a smart-looking black leather document case.

Is this truly your
choice?

The witness stand was
directly in front of the judicial bench. It resembled a lectern, inherently
serious. Róża would stand there and tell her story. Then Brack would do
the same thing. A year earlier, at the other end of the phone, Sebastian had
listened to Anselm, clicking his biro open and shut.

‘He’ll tell the court
how Pavel Mojeska betrayed his wife, his friends and his country. If he wants,
he can make it up as he goes along, because no one else was there. He’s going
to spring a defence out of the files. He’ll produce evidence that Pavel
collaborated with the Nazis — a crime the IPN would prosecute now, if he was
living. He’ll make those executions into rough justice — unpleasant, brutal,
and lacking ceremony … but legitimate actions of the State nonetheless.
Brack’s not going down, Sebastian, he doesn’t play to lose; he never has done.’

Sebastian’s pen had
clattered against a wall.

‘What have I done?’ he’d
said, faintly ‘I’ve brought her to this.’

‘What have we all done?’
Anselm had replied.

Drawing that thick long
line between ‘then’ and ‘now’ had never seemed more prudent. Shortly after that
telephone conversation Sebastian had carefully explained to Róża what was
likely to happen when Brack opened his mouth, and she’d listened with that
disconcerting quietness that absorbed any and all disappointment. When he’d
finished, she’d simply said, ‘At least I didn’t remain quiet.’

She was now sitting with
John and Celina in a room set aside for prosecution witnesses. She was wearing
a sober dress from
Jaeger
with a silvery Paisley design. The lime
cardigan — an old friend, worn at the elbows — appeared, by association, both
refined and expensive. Sebastian was right, though: she’d aged. She’d taken in
too much. Her movements were slow and heavy, her spine rounded. But she had a
most haunting allure, a curious effect of soft skin and eyes that Anselm couldn’t
meet for long without turning away Inexplicably they’d remained vulnerable.

Looking down through the
window, Anselm scanned the court as if there might be any familiar faces, not
expecting to find any But he did. He found one. And it wasn’t Bernard Kolba’s.
They’d already met in the corridor (he was there representing the family; his
parents couldn’t face the strain). Anselm’s eyes had alighted upon a fine bone
structure, frizzy greying hair and round glasses. Irina Orlosky was in the
public gallery, her dark, shapeless coat held tight by folded arms. Her eyes
were on Brack, the man whose life she’d saved.

Once the jury were installed Madam Czerny
came to her feet. Her voice had alarming, deep cadences, the translation in
Anselm’s ear skilfully matching tone with content, keeping a sort of distance
from the primary speaker. Somehow, the prosecutor was addressing Anselm without
intermediary. Throughout, her right hand held the bifocals, elegantly as if it
were a glass of Muscat.

‘This case concerns the
Terror,’ she said, deadly gentle. ‘The time of denunciation and disappearing,
of imprisonment upon a whim, of routine violence, pathological suspicion, false
accusations and forced recantations. The epoch of complicity. The age of exile
and executions, co-ordinated to secure the imposition of Soviet socialist realism.’
Madam Czerny’s gaze moved around, indomitable. ‘Róża Mojeska is one
ordinary woman who, despite the overwhelming presence of fear and the crushing
pressure to conform, said, “No”. As a consequence she was brutally tortured.
Pavel Mojeska, her husband, also said, “No”. He was brutally murdered. They’d
said the one word that millions dared not speak. They’d brought a free word to
Warsaw’ She seemed to have finished but then, confiding and soft spoken, she
made a reluctant declaration. ‘The accused, Otto Brack, said, “Yes”. He got up
every morning, looked in the mirror and said “Yes”. No one twisted his arm. He
made his own free choice. And it is this profound affirmation of terror — its
implementation and consequences — that now falls to be judged.’

To that end the
prosecution would call evidence from experts to present the context within
which the alleged crimes took place. An historian would describe the
architecture of Stalinism in general and the Terror in particular; another
would explain the organisation, powers and objectives of the secret police; yet
another would outline the crucial importance of underground printing as a means
of preserving an independent culture. The line of attack was clear:

Madam Czerny would lead
the court down to the foundations of a forgotten time, that it might better
understand Brack’s place in the cellar.

Then it would be Róża’s
turn.

‘She will be on her own,
as she was, once, long ago,’ said Madam Czerny ‘There is no other living
witness to what took place in that prison. She will tell you what she saw’

After lunch on the second
day of evidence, Anselm sent a message to the translator: owing to a previous
engagement, he wouldn’t be attending the hearing that afternoon — apologies for
having forgotten to mention it sooner. In fact it was a spontaneous decision.
He’d been listening, hour after hour, tormented by the sight of Brack’s leather
document case; he’d fidgeted constantly watching Brack make rushed notes while
a professor from Kraków mocked, with scholarly detachment, the acclamation of
Stalin as a ‘Philologist of Genius’ and the ‘Greatest Man of All Times’ (two of
300 unctuous tributes that had appeared in the national press in 1949 to mark
his seventieth birthday); he’d been troubled by the growing certainty that even
the prosecutor’s evidence formed part of Brack’s final scheme to escape the
power of a rightly constituted court.

Outside, away from the
growing tension, Anselm went to a fishmonger’s and bought a fresh oyster.

Chapter Forty-Six

‘Well … Hail, Mary,’ said Frenzel, with a
wave, full of surprise. ‘Or should that be Our Father?’

Anselm shut the door and
came to the edge of the desk. Frenzel’s eyes were alight with pleasure at the
swiftness of his jokes.

‘If I’d known you wanted
all the stuff to have a swipe at Brack, well, you could’ve paid by monthly
instalments. I felt sorry for him, mind, when I saw him on the telly Made me
think of those show trials in the fifties. You know, the hype and the conceit.
Hypocrites, the lot of you. What was it? Whited sepulchres or something? When I
saw that bitchy prosecutor—’

His gaze settled hard on
the oyster. Anselm had placed it carefully in the middle of his desk.

‘Sorry, I can’t. Last
time round I ate a dodgy one. Sick as a dog I was and I vowed never to—’

‘I want Brack’s
personnel file. Not just the first page and not just the last. I’d like the
lot.’

Frenzel’s pink lips made
a curve analogous to a smile. He didn’t speak at first, preferring to nod a
kind of dawning avuncular support for the workings of Anselm’s mind. He
approved.

‘It makes sense, I
suppose,’ he murmured, scratching his paunch. ‘You lot always want the pearl of
great price.

He picked up the phone,
dialled and waited. After a second’s thought he seemed to spew into the
receiver from a height, keeping it well away from his mouth as though it were dirty.
He was talking to Irina’s son, presumably He left a message from his mother. It
took an effort of will for Anselm not to lean over and thump that sagging jaw
Frenzel wouldn’t expect that from someone who was meant to turn the other
cheek. He clenched his fists, feeling the guilt of a bystander watching
back-street violence — the frenzied kicking of the racist and homophobe.

‘You played that one
well,’ Frenzel said with a wink, cleaning his hands on a wet-wipe pulled from a
shiny plastic packet. ‘If you’d started off asking for the earth, you’d have
paid through the nose. But you’ve shown some good footwork. Made yourself look
stupid when you weren’t. Now you’ve got Brack on his knees, you want his file.
Smart move. Well, you can have it for nothing. I’d like to contribute to his
execution. I’ll have it sent over. Where are you staying? Don’t tell me! Same
place?’ He nestled deeper into his chair. ‘Thought so. You’re all the same.
Nothing ever changes.’ He paused to lick his lips. ‘You’ll be getting a brown
box … Don’t go just yet, I thought we might talk about old times, you know,
the days of wine and roses. What did you make of the
pierogi?
If you
want my view, when all’s said and done, you can’t do much with a dumpling.’

On reaching the door,
Anselm turned around — not to say anything but just to have one last look at
the man who’d never be brought to court. By the time the European Cup kicked
off in Praga, he’d be a very rich man. There’d be a wine bar called Frenzel’s
or a boutique selling silk ties and brightly coloured cotton socks. He flicked
open a pocket knife and began prising open the oyster.

‘I’m having this one,’
he said, smirking. ‘Even if it kills me.’

The phone in Anselm’s room rang at 8.39
p.m. Krystyna said his visitor had arrived. She was waiting in the foyer.

‘I’m on my way down.’

It was a stab in the
dark, but while listening to the evidence Anselm had tuned into the voices of
other witnesses, other experts on the Terror. Irina had said Frenzel used
people’s mistakes; Father Nicodem had said Brack trapped people with their
past. And Anselm had wondered if there might just be some handle on to Róża’s
persecutor, some mistake, some element of his past that might be used to avert
what he was planning.

‘Here it is,’ said
Irina, holding out the brown cardboard box as if it were Christmas. ‘I don’t
know what’s inside. Mr Frenzel told me it was for your eyes only’

The jokes didn’t end. He
even played at spies.

‘Thank you.

She was standing
marooned on the red carpet, a short distance from the entrance, exposed, it
seemed, by the bright lights. She wasn’t comfortable with the opulence. She
didn’t belong with decent, well dressed people. Her shapeless coat was wet
again with rain. The hood was up, as at their first meeting. She’d come from
work in her green McDonald’s trousers and black sensible shoes. She spoke in a
rushed, sore voice.