The Day of the Lie (7 page)

‘Whisky?’

‘Yep.’

‘Water?’

‘Nope.’

A couple of burgundy
armchairs, the leather shabby and worn, faced the stone hearth, their feather
cushions plumped and yielding. Between each stood a small round table with a
faded military insignia dated 1916. They’d been picked up way back for a few
quid by Father William at a Salvation Army second-hand furniture store in Manchester.
Like all Larkwood’s cobbled furnishings, they carried the secret histories of
many unknown lives. They linked the community to the world they served. Anselm
handed John his drink and then sank into his chair.

‘You asked about the
person I met in the graveyard?’ said John, as if they were still in Anselm’s
chambers at Gray’s Inn.

‘Yes.’

‘I need to wind back
first, to December of nineteen eighty-one, just after midnight. That’s when it
all began.’

John sat hunched
forward, nursing his glass with both hands. Reflected flames danced on his dark
glasses. He angled his head slightly attuned, as always, to the breathing of
anyone nearby.

‘Tanks rolled on to the
streets and within days ten thousand people had been thrown into detention
camps. The army were in charge. Helped, of course, by the secret police … the
Służba Bezpieczeństwa,
the SB, the
ubeks
… to
use their more polite names. This was martial law People called it
stan
wojenny:
a state of war.’

Most of the Solidarity
leadership had been captured. The free trade union that had pressed for reform
and change — wielding industrial chaos to speed up things — had been
decapitated. Remaining activists had gone underground and settled into a long
war. For their part, a war of words. They didn’t take up the gun, they took up
the typewriter. Illegal publications burst out from hidden places. By the time
John arrived there were hundreds in Warsaw alone. In March 1982 one of them
caught his attention:
Wolność i Niezależność
…
Freedom and Independence.
Running along the bottom of the page in tiny
letters was this mysterious declaration:

PRINTED BY THE SHOEMAKER FOR THE FRIENDS OF THE SHOEMAKER

‘The Shoemaker?’ echoed
Anselm.

‘His selected essays are
available in translation. You’ll find a lengthy appraisal of his work (with
citations) in my doctoral dissertation, a copy of which — furnished with a warm
dedication — was presented to you in the manner of a gift.’

‘I still recall the
lucid opening and the magisterial conclusions. Remind me about the cobbler.’

‘Every child in Warsaw
knows the story. A dragon ravages the kingdom. All the knights are slain.
Eventually a poor shoemaker turns up with a scheme to blow it to pieces, a
sheepskin filled with sulphur … think takeaway kebab stuffed with Czech
Semtex. The dragon has a night on the town, fancies a quick bite after closing
time, and bang. Peace returns to the land.’

The meaning was stark (‘and
concludes Chapter Two’) — the Shoemaker was back to save the kingdom, this time
with another kind of foreign explosive: words and ideas. John’s interest in the
publication, however, wasn’t only limited to an enticing by-line. A few probing
questions revealed that the Shoemaker’s paper had first appeared before the
Second World War. It had continued in print right through the transition to
Communist rule, abruptly disappearing off the streets in 1951 during the
Stalinist Terror. For those old enough to remember — ‘Ring any bells? Chapter
Three?’ — the reappearance of
Freedom and Independence
in 1982 was a
wake-up call. The title was heavy with the meaning of struggle. It situated
martial law squarely alongside the Occupation and the subsequent burden of
totalitarian rule.

‘In retrospect, it was
extraordinary,’ said John. ‘The response of ordinary people to the tanks and
guns was spontaneously democratic. They set up “the other circuit”,
drugi
obieg.
They devised their own secret institutions, run by and for
themselves.
Freedom and Independence
was a perfect example … it was
produced by friends. Someone printed it, obviously but the operation didn’t end
there. A whole distribution network was set up, right under the noses of the
army and the
ubeks.
Teams of volunteers,
kolporters,
people who
believed in the Shoemaker’s ideas, spread the paper all over the city. They
called themselves the Friends and, to this day, nobody has the faintest idea
who any of the key players might have been. I first came across a copy in a
café near my apartment. The owner had a pedal bin that functioned as a kind of
secret magazine rack. Those in the know would turn up, buy a coffee and wait
for the nod to go and fish out their morning paper.

A nod given in John’s
presence, telling him that he was trusted. A nod that told him the owner had
some link to the Friends of the Shoemaker. John saw his opportunity to get to
the voice behind the paper: he left a message asking for an interview.

‘Instead I met Róża
Mojeska,’ said John. ‘The most remarkable woman I have ever met in my life. And
she doesn’t even feature as a footnote.’

She had two wedding
rings on one finger, he said, running ahead of himself. He’d never had the
courage to ask why It had been a priest’s idea, that’s all she’d said, seeing
John’s gaze. But it was the single most potent ‘message’ that accompanied every
movement of her hand, every gesture and action. She was not alone; she was two
people. She was part of an alliance. Anyway returning to that request for a
meeting, a week after leaving his message with the owner, he’d been stirring his
coffee when a huge bearded guy in a checked jacket loomed over the table and
told him to wear his overcoat like a cloak and wait at the grave of Bolesław
Prus in the Powązki cemetery, a writer famed for his love of children.

‘Where you were arrested
six months later?’ asked Anselm.

‘Yes.’

‘What happened in
between?’

John had become a friend
of Róża, as much personally as professionally He’d been her link to the
western media and she’d been his entry to the underground, but something else
had grown: the sort of confidence and affection you can’t choose or nurture; it’s
already there, waiting to catch light. But there’d been no meeting with the
Shoemaker.

‘I asked every time I
saw her and she always said no, which frustrated me no end because whoever did
the writing wasn’t only a Václav Havel, he was a pimpernel known by his shoe
rather than his glove. The paper just turned up out of nowhere. Every page kept
alive the dream of an independent culture and society. There was poetry in the
simplest lines.’

And Róża was the
only link to this central figure of resistance: no one else knew who he was or
where he was hiding. Then on the morning of the first of November, while
walking to work, John felt a big hand grab his elbow Turning to his side, he
saw the towering figure who’d loomed over the café table. ‘The Shoemaker wants
to meet you. Tonight. Six p.m. At the grave of Prus.’ Then he crossed the road
and was gone, leaving John stunned in the middle of the pavement.

‘It was All Souls’ Day’
John was still leaning towards the fire. He sipped his whisky ‘The place was
alight with thousands of candles. People were gathered everywhere, but Róża
was nowhere to be seen. And then I saw her walking over to one of them … a
hard-looking bastard with a dead man’s face.’

John leaned on the huge stone lintel and
looked down, unseeing, towards the complaining fire. His jacket was a neat fit,
a slate grey herringbone, on top of a black roll neck sweater. He was tall and
slim, the black trousers well pressed and shoes highly polished.

‘I was arrested, too,’
he said, stroking his jaw ‘For some reason, taking photographs of the secret
police in action was considered bad taste. I got a good kicking and then they
threw me on to the street.’

But not before learning
that Róża had been taken to Mokotów prison.

‘I found her home
address through a contact in the jail. I had to tell her it wasn’t me, that I’d
been careful, that no one had followed me, but she wasn’t listening, she wasn’t
present.
That’s when I realised she’d told others, and they’d been
waiting like me, the Shoemaker among them … but she’d seen one of the
ubeks.
She’d handed herself in. It had been a spontaneous, desperate signal to
whoever was watching to make a run for it. So she’d won. They got no one else
and they had nothing on her … and yet she was a broken woman. She was
completely shattered.’

Straightening up, he
tapped his jacket pockets. ‘May I?’

‘Yes.’

He’d always smoked
Sobranie Black Russians, ever since his student days when he’d first got hooked.
Like the Zeha East German trainers he’d picked up in Carnaby Street, they’d
given him a sort of nonconformist allure. He still had the sheen as he fumbled
for the crumpled packet, bent his head and struck a match.

‘I told her I’d find out
who it was,’ stressed John, gesticulating with a sweeping arm towards Anselm. ‘I
said I had connections, friends on both side of the fence, that it was my job
to investigate, that I’d walk through fire … and she just cut me dead. She
stared ahead, face stricken, and told me to do and say
nothing
… to
forget what had happened in the cemetery, to forget the Shoemaker and the
Friends — to forget her.’ He pushed smoke out of the side of his mouth, shaking
his head in a kind of sickened wonder. ‘I don’t know what they did to her in
prison, or what they’d said, but make no mistake. She’d lost. This was a
defeated woman:

‘Shortly afterwards you
were thrown out,’ recalled Anselm.

‘Yep.’ John blew hard
and took another deep drag.

‘You kept your promise.’

‘Yep.’

‘Which was why you
couldn’t tell me anything during the libel proceedings.’

John nodded.

‘What’s changed John?’
Anselm removed his glasses, and held them up to the light of the fire. Cleaning
them on his scapular, he said, ‘You’ve kept that promise for twenty-eight years.
Why break it now? I’d have thought …’ He paused, suddenly understanding.

John counted the steps
back to his seat and carefully lowered himself into the armchair. Taking his
drink, he nursed it again and said, ‘Róża knocked on my door last night.
She wants my help after all.’

Anselm listened with the helpless
compassion that he often felt in the confessional. He identified with other
people’s lives and dilemmas; he railed against the random sequence of events whose
ordering caused as much grief as any want of goodness. John evidently blamed
himself for Róża’s collapse. He was the one who’d badgered her for that
interview And someone had used the circumstances to engineer her spiritual
obliteration.

‘She rang first,’
explained John. ‘There was no “How are you?” or “Long time no see”. She just
said she was in London and went straight to the point. “John, I wear two
wedding rings. You’ve seen them. The second belonged to my husband. He was shot
in nineteen fifty-one. Pavel, and another man … they were killed like beaten
dogs. I was there, in the cellar of Mokotów After my release, I could do
nothing for him, for both of them, except wear the rings. I feel them every
day; I’ve never forgotten the sight and the sound of that gun, or the face of
the man who pulled the trigger.” She was whispering hard and I told her to
slow down but she sort of pushed past me, her English breaking up as she
ploughed on.

Róża had switched
to her mother tongue, speaking with deadly emphasis.

‘She said, “You, too,
have seen his face. It belongs to Otto Brack. He arrested me at the grave of
Prus in nineteen eighty-two. Do you remember?” I said I did, and then her voice
dropped even lower. “When we got to Mokotów, he warned me that if I ever chose
justice for Pavel consequences would follow, that he’d expose the informer he’d
used to catch me … he’d spill their past all over the floor. Then he let me
go. Do you understand what he did? He gave me power over their future, a power
that could end their life or save it.” Her voice cracked again and seemed to
vanish down a hole and I just waited and waited … and all 1 could hear was
her breath dragging at the other end of the line. Then she said, cold and
quiet, “That power … I’m going to use it.”‘

John gave the remaining
exchanges without commentary. Anselm seemed to pause in a Hampstead corridor,
listening hard.

‘Why now, Róża?’

‘Because sooner or later
someone else will name the informer.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. There are files in
Warsaw Lawyers are reading them.’
John paused to light another Sobranie,
struggling with the matches.
‘If they’re named later, Brack might be dead.
I have to act now’

‘Absolutely’

‘But the informer must
know that I don’t seek to condemn them. That’s not my objective, it’s not what
I want.’

‘That’s … generous, Róża.’

‘If they face the past,
then I can, too. This is the only way to catch Otto Brack.’

‘Yes, I see that now’

He leaned forward,
feeling for an ashtray.

‘You once offered to
walk through fire, John, do you remember?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, I’ve written
something that’ll help you get to the other side.’

‘You better bring it
round. We need to look each other in the eye.’

Sitting back, it was as though John had put
the phone down in London and returned to Larkwood’s calefactory, short of
breath and vaguely agitated.

‘She obviously wanted me
to find the informer, to reassure them and appeal to their conscience, prior to
some sort of meeting … but she couldn’t see me of course, she didn’t know
that I’m as blind as a bat, that all I could do was stumble in the dark.’