The Day of the Lie (5 page)

Róża turned right.

Another man had been
shot, too. Róża didn’t even know his name. She’d just seen him being
dragged along the floor of the cellar, his two bare feet, angled in, broken or
limp. Who was he? Who mourned him? What had happened to his body? Did he lie
with Pavel in the foundations of an office block?

Awful questions.
Questions that trailed you with a low whine.

Róża turned left.

Time was not a healer.
Year after year Róża’s attention would fasten on to the back of someone’s
head — the curls at the nape of the neck — and she’d wonder, insanely if it
might be Pavel, expecting some magic to have occurred, even though she’d seen
his broken face and heard the kick of the gun. Then, as if waking, she’d grasp
that he was dead, and off she’d go to that imagined door in the Ministry, full
of hell or timidity. It was an endless cycle, rolling across the sand.

Don’t leave us with
his story.

Sebastian had brought
the law close to Róża and she hadn’t seen it coming. Yes, he’d said he was
a lawyer, and he’d pleaded with her about forgotten crimes, but to have him in
her flat, to deflect his questions and divert his hopes, had gradually made the
law come to life. It was there, dressed in a blue linen jacket with silver
buttons. He’d made her feel afresh the pain of justice denied. Year on year Róża
had read of men convicted of monstrous crimes against women and children. She’d
seen photographs of judges and barristers in their robes, knowing that they
would never sit to consider the case against Otto Brack. And now here was a
lawyer who wanted to put Brack in a courtroom.

Don’t leave us with
his story.

Róża turned right
again and came, finally, to a large granite monument. It was the grave of Bolesław
Prus, the writer. This was where she’d been arrested. The light was fading, so
she couldn’t quite make out the girl, carved in relief, reaching up to the
inscription. But she knew the figure well enough: the thin legs, the pretty
dress and the smart shoes. She’d always loved the little buckles by the ankles.
Though she was the grey of stone, Róża had seen different colours,
materials and textures, changing them every time she came.

You owe it to the
children you might have had.

What a devastating
phrase.

Speak to the
informer.

How could she?

You might as well,
because one day someone else will do just that
…
someone cleverer than
me.

Sebastian’s throwaway
remark had nearly knocked Róża off her feet. He was right. The informer’s
days of quiet obscurity were coming to an end. It was only a matter of time.
Others would come to pore over the archives. And that changed everything for Róża.
Why wait until the informer was shattered by exposure? She could get there
beforehand and …

Give them another
reason for living.

Róża clung to
herself, feeling cold and lonely All around stray lights flickered like scared
moths trapped in a jar. A breeze unsettled the trees. Throughout, Sebastian’s
voice repeated that final beguiling command. After a while Róża ceased to
follow the words. She held her breath. She was staring at a troubled ghost. He
was there, clothed in shadows before her eyes, offering to help while pleading
his innocence.

Róża could barely sleep. An
overwhelming sense of urgency came crashing into the night hours, sweeping
aside the decades of submission, the patient acceptance of defeat. With each
passing minute her imagination grew bolder, her resolve all the more firm. By
the time dawn light filtered through the worn bedroom curtains she’d devised a
simple plan to bring Otto Brack to court. Ironically, it involved handing over
all the names she’d refused to disclose when in Mokotów But that time had come.
They were all safe, now The epoch of fear and secrets was almost over.

For three days she paced
round Warsaw, waiting for the transcript of her narrative to arrive from the
IPN. When the post came, on the fourth day, she set to work. First, she
carefully checked that the text presented a balanced picture of her life
between 1951 and 1982. Second, with a red pen, she inserted all the names she’d
left out while making the recording. Third, with a black pen, she deleted
convoluted expressions, repetitions and digressions. The result was a crafted
manuscript that suited her newfound purpose — something the Shoemaker would
have been proud of. Every word had its place. They presented a kind of
landscape ordered by signposts, only the most important indicator was missing,
its absence serving to point without pointing, identifying the informer without
a trace of condemnation. When she’d finished she went straight to the IPN and
gave it to Sebastian.

‘I’ve changed my
testimony,’ she said quickly standing in the entrance hall. ‘Could you type it
up, please?’

‘Sure.’

‘Now, while I’m waiting.’

‘Consider it done.’

Róża stepped
outside to pace some more, refusing the offer of coffee, tea or Bison Grass.
After what seemed an age, Sebastian returned with a clean copy in a brown
envelope.

‘Changed your mind, as
well?’ he quipped, seriously.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to
do?’

A phrase of the
Shoemaker’s came to mind. ‘Raise the dead and shatter the illusions of many’

‘Okay sounds reasonably
apocalyptic. That’s fine. And in the meantime, what do you expect from me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Not fine. Tell me what
you’re up to.’

She shook her head with
approbation. ‘You’d never have survived the fifties. You ask far too many
questions.’

With that judgement, she
left him bewildered by the leaning tree. On returning home she rang her old
friend Magda Samovitz in England, a woman who’d survived the Nazi holocaust
only to be hounded out of Warsaw by a Communist pogrom in 1969. Magda had
bought a ticket to a new life. For years she’d been sending Róża postcards
of Trafalgar Square which bore one simple message: ‘Come and feed the pigeons’.
That time, too, had finally arrived.

By the evening of the
next day Róża had bought her flight and packed her bags. There was no need
for a phrase book. She’d been learning English since 1989. It had been a hobby
of sorts. Twenty-four hours later Róża was in the upstairs box bedroom of
Magda’s Georgian house in Stockwell, south London, lamenting the absence of a
phrase book that would have helped an elderly dissident cope with a different
kind of Underground. Once again she couldn’t sleep. Her mind whirred like the
air vent back in Warsaw.

Sebastian had been right
about something else. He’d seen something obvious to which Róża had been
blind; blind because, as a matter of principle, she’d excluded the possibility
from the outset. The last thing that Brack expected was that Róża would
arrange to meet the informer. That she’d sit down at their table. That the
betrayer and the betrayed would somehow find the courage to talk together,
deeply of all that lay hidden. That Róża would open up the possibility —
for the informer — of another, more authentic existence, a public and private
identity based on the truth. This was the landscape that lay beyond Brack’s
imagination: that his informer would stomach disclosure of the past and face
the dread of an uncharted future. And that defined Róża’s task: to
persuade the informer that even now after all these years, the pain of a life
in the open was preferable to a numbed existence in the dark.

There was, however, one
remaining catch. A relatively large one, too.

There could be no forced
entry. The door had to be left unlocked from the inside. Róża would have
it no other way. She needed an invitation to enter and sit down, her host
knowing full well that the unexpected guest intended to talk about their mutual
relationship with Otto Brack. It was a great gamble with great risks … but if
this, Róża’s stratagem, worked, Brack would be left defenceless. Once the
informer accepted exposure, Róża would be free to accuse her husband’s
killer.

Róża switched off
her bedroom light, her thoughts and prayers resting with a man she’d first met
in 1982. He’d found her through the distribution chain of
Freedom and
Independence.
She’d thought of him looking at the monument to Prus — they’d
met there countless times. He’d been a romantic. An outsider. An Englishman of
ancient courtesies. He’d been kicked out of the country for getting too close
to the fire. His name was John Fielding, a British journalist who’d longed to
find the Shoemaker.

Part Two

Lives Lived in Secret

Chapter Six

Anselm cut the engine dead. The wipers
swung home with a soft thud. Outside autumn rain fell quietly in the darkness,
the drizzle lit a strange yellow by the distant street lamps. A mist had
drifted east off the river Cam smudging the clean-lined portico of Cambridge station.
It was the same back at Larkwood: an afternoon of intense sunshine had brought
a fog off the Lark to hide the fields and smooth the tangled roofs and walls of
the monastery. An apple wood fire blazed in the calefactory and Anselm was keen
to get back to the hearth and warm his hands.

‘I need a
lawyer,’
quoted
Anselm, pensively tapping the steering wheel.

Those had been John’s
exact words. Not, it seemed, a
monk.

‘I’d better explain in
person. You know I don’t like the phone.’

‘When do you want to come?’

‘Tonight.’

Anselm had put down the
receiver and shuffled off to the woodshed. There, musing and recollected, he’d
split some green logs and sized them for a decent fire.

John Fielding was Anselm’s oldest friend.
They’d been to the same boarding school where, following a walk around the
cricket square, they’d become allies in mutual understanding, a hallowed state
that was later sealed over a bottle of purloined altar wine. While at
university — John at Exeter, Anselm at Durham — they’d skilfully negotiated the
transition from boyhood to manhood, that time of awkward flowering when, in
making momentous decisions, many who were once close find themselves subtly
apart. John, a linguist, had chosen journalism. Anselm, drawn by the thrilling
mix of courtesy high theatre and linguistic violence, had opted for the Bar.
Both noted, with satisfaction, that the distance between Fleet Street and Gray’s
Inn was negligible.

While Anselm had forged
a career defending the washed and unwashed alike, John had secured a position
as foreign correspondent, serving first in East Berlin with Reuters and then
landing a prized BBC posting to Warsaw in early 1982. He’d arrived just after
the Communist Junta put its troops on the streets in their doomed fight against
Solidarity. He’d covered the scrap meticulously until, much to the surprise of
his employer, he’d been shown the door. More accurately he’d been tossed on to
a plane bound for Heathrow Following which he’d told Anselm that he needed a
lawyer.

Only there’d been a
short interlude; a brief time when John was something of a reluctant hero in
the pubs scattered around Gray’s Inn and the watering holes favoured by writing
hacks at the bottom end of Chancery Lane. John had clout. He’d been a friend of
Lech. And everyone wanted to know what had happened out there in the cold. John
parried questions from all quarters, only disclosing — with reluctance — the
barest of details. He’d gone to a graveyard for a clandestine meeting with an
underground activist (a remark that pulled a few laughs) but no sooner had he
arrived at the chosen spot when agents of the security service appeared,
arresting both John and his contact. Three days later his accreditation had
been withdrawn. No amount of coaxing or flattery from the audience would persuade
John to add anything further, either about the activist, or the candidates for
betrayal — the person close to home who’d sold him down the river. The troubled
disinclination to elaborate simply buffed up John’s unwanted glamour and
increased the aura of mystery surrounding his narrative.

Alone with Anselm,
however, he’d been a fraction more informative, not so much about the events
that had led to his arrest as to the nature of his work, its risks and
obligations. But Anselm had sensed a link between the two, as if John were
examining the chain of causation that had led to his expulsion.

Investigative journalism
(he’d said, without preamble, while they were playing chess) involves talking
to anyone with insight and authority, regardless of their standing or the
provenance of their information. It’s about the search for truth, and sometimes
you had to put your hand into the sewer. One of his sources had been a
disaffected official with access to the darker corners of the government’s
mind. He’d phoned John cold. He’d called himself ‘The Dentist’ .

‘As in teeth and
fillings?’

‘Is there another kind?’

‘I suppose not.’ Anselm
was distracted, considering a dramatic sacrifice late in the game. His queen
for a pawn. Something unheard of in the annals of their many confrontations. ‘What
about him?’

‘Well, he was just a
voice at the end of the line, feeding me inside stories … he remained hidden
… until, one day I met him.’

‘Really? He dropped his
guard?’ All sacrifice involves a gamble, thought Anselm coldly He made his
move.

‘Yes,’ replied John, his
voice light with surprise. ‘He came to see me just before I left Warsaw’

Anselm looked up.

‘You know —’ John
hesitated, his brown eyes alight with subdued anxiety — ‘I think I might have
reached too far.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Into the sewer.