The Day of the Lie (11 page)

‘When the Nazis had
finished, the Red Army crossed over to liberate the ashes. They never went
home. Their opposition lay buried under the rubble. People like Róża
crawled out of a hole and managed to stand up again. Brack and his like were
waiting. They’re always waiting …’

Anselm made a grimace,
and not just at the history and warning. His friend was pale and tense,
suffering from exclusion. Anselm was standing in his place. Fighting Róża’s
war, however hopeless the odds, had always been
John’s
domain. He’d
already explored the territory Before going to Warsaw, he’d travelled widely
throughout the Communist bloc. Protected by a pseudonym, he’d written of high
cultures brought to ruin and dissident voices who kept the faith in hiding. A
smart operator, the nearest he’d come to trouble was when he got arrested at
Bucharest airport and had to explain to the Securitate that
The Secret Agent
was a novel by Conrad and not an instruction manual produced by MI6. By the
time he’d met Róża he was already an ally committed to the struggle. And
now, when she faced her most important battle, he was … indisposed.

‘I’m sorry it’s me who’s
catching a plane and not you,’ said Anselm. ‘I know how you must feel.’

John snapped a match
between his teeth. ‘Thanks.’

‘But there’s a bright
side, at least for me,’ confessed Anselm. ‘I wanted to help years ago, do you
remember, when you came to stay at Larkwood after the accident? I’d planned to
dish out some of the stuff I’d read in books or heard in the Chapter Room …
anything that might help you deal with your blindness. Things didn’t quite work
out that way Which is good, in retrospect, because I had nothing of my own to
offer.’

‘The time wasn’t right,
Anselm.’

‘I know’

‘But it is now.’

The plane nosed into the mist. Down below,
buildings climbed in a kind of rush towards the sky proud and victorious, as if
defying the memory of so much devastation. Glass, chrome and steel glinted
amongst the flanks of brick and concrete. Leaning on the window, however,
Anselm let his mind scurry back to a sort of forbidden universe.

While throwing stones by
the lake and sipping coffee at the airport bar, his thoughts — at intervals —
had run wild, and he’d been obliged to haul them into line, ashamed of their
force and direction. Despite the Prior’s warnings — and like a man drawn to the
thrill of a street fight — Anselm was intrigued by Otto Brack and his dangerous
world. He appeared to be a man beyond redemption. Anselm wanted to know how he’d
got there and why What could have happened in his life that had taught him to
use good for evil? What was his story, once the words had been peeled back? The
questions seemed indecent, unseemly given the depravity of his actions. But
Anselm still wanted to know He reproved himself, closing an eye to the absence
of any real conviction.

On leaving Warsaw’s
airport, a garrulous taxi driver — singing more than talking, and not requiring
any reciprocal commitment — took Anselm to the Warsaw Hilton, a towering
edifice devoted to contemporary extravagance and the acute embarrassment of
mendicant travellers compelled by circumstance to stay there. The appointment
of his room was lavish: burgundy covers, cream sheets and heavy wood
furnishings. Vaguely disorientated, he unpacked his bag and placed two battered
books on a large desk near a floor-to-ceiling window.

As to the purpose of his
stay, John had organised everything. A faxed application to view the
Polana
file
had been processed by return and an appointment made for Anselm to consult its
contents. He was expected at ten the following morning at the IPN building,
another modern tower whose external lights clung to the walls like limpet
mines, ready to explode if anyone’s secret history bumped against them. Anselm
could see them now, a mere stone’s throw away resolute against a waning
skyline. With a sigh, he sat down, reaching for one of the books: his Psalter,
given to him by Sylvester on his first day at the monastery. Recalling the
Prior’s injunction to keep step with Larkwood’s rhythms, he mouthed the words
for Compline … but found himself whispering questions — of all people — to
John’s absent mother. Where did you go? She, too, had a story to tell,
beginning with her name. On closing the cover and formally entering his Great
Silence, Anselm was instantly sidetracked. Instead of turning off the light and
choosing which of the five pillows would be his solace and comfort, he opted
for the second volume on the table.

‘It’s out of date,’ John
had said, at the Departure Gate, another match between his teeth, ‘but the
important stuff never changes.’

Anselm flicked through
the guidebook as if it might contain a clue to the mystery of Otto Brack’s
character. All at once he stopped, warmed by a sudden melancholy: he’d landed
on a passage underlined in pencil … it was a schoolboy code linking numbers
to the alphabet, the means by which Anselm and John had noted timings for a
raid on the top floor dormitory. Underlined words had been thrown in to
distract imagined enemies; it was only the selected letters that had mattered.
Anselm smiled. It was as though John, boy and man, had come with him to Warsaw.
He studied the paragraph closely looking for more high mischief. EEHGF. 55876.

None the wiser, Anselm
gazed over a twinkling, sleepless Warsaw Numberless white and yellow stars
seemed to have fallen from the sky, jostling for space on the ground, colliding
and blending in the darkness. The IPN building stood tall, still and curiously
alone, like a gatecrasher at a cocktail party, someone who’d spoiled the fun
with talk of
Crime and Punishment.
Somewhere inside its walls lay the
file on the Shoemaker. Apparently it contained a copy of Róża’s
interrogations, carried out during the Stalinist Terror.

Anselm wondered what
they’d done to her.

Part Three

Mokotów Prison

Chapter Twelve

A guard kicked away the low stool. Róża
collapsed to one side, but the guard caught her by the hair. Swung to her feet,
she was thrown from the interrogation room into the corridor of low, yellow
light. Another guard appeared walking lazily his dull boots sagging like half
fallen socks. Róża backed against the wall, facing the open door. Major
Strenk was troubled, examining a fish hook under the glare of a desk lamp.
Looking up, as if he’d just remembered something, he nodded at Lieutenant Brack
who’d been sitting in the corner.

‘I warned you, Róża,’
said Brack, after carefully shutting the door. ‘You should have listened to me
in the sewers.

He gave a nod, just like
Major Strenk’s, and the guards dragged Róża, feet trailing, to an iron
staircase at the end of the corridor. Three floors down they came to a wet,
freezing cellar, the air misting with the rush of their gasps and panting.
Ahead, to the left, was a grey iron door.

‘I warned you Róża,’
he said, flicking keys on a big ring. He turned his soured face on to hers. His
hair was shaved all around, leaving a high crown of copper metallic bristles. ‘You
should have listened.’

He yanked open the door
and the guards, slipping and grunting, dragged Róża into a low, dripping
room. A single bulb flickered like a fading life. Thick pipes ran the length of
the ceiling, water drizzling from bandaged cracks and joints. Heavy globules
dripped from a rusty central spout. Beneath it was an open cage. The guards
kicked and shoved and then locked her in.

‘I warned you in the
sewers, Róża,’ said Brack, as if all this were her fault.

The room became silent,
except for the patter of splashing. Suddenly, the twitching light went out. Róża
stared at the afterglow, the fast-fading sallow bulb on the wall of her mind.
She found a word, but it came as a whisper: ‘Help …’

And then the pipes
shuddered and the water exploded above her head.

Róża did not know whether it was night
or day when the interrogation began again. She hadn’t been conscious when they
took her from the cage. She’d opened her eyes to find herself strapped to a
chair by a belt. On seeing her move, the watching guard had stubbed out his
cigarette and brought Róża back to Major Strenk and the footstool. Otto
was sitting in the corner.

‘Name?’

‘Róża Mojeska …
you know already, I’m—’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

She breathed out the
answers, and Major Strenk wrote them down with a pencil. It had been the same
with every interrogation since her arrest six weeks previously Always beginning
again as if nothing had gone before. The same wearing questions with a few
afterthoughts. Only this last time they’d led to the cage, a first departure
from the routine.

‘You say you’re an
orphan?’ Major Strenk spoke as if he’d lifted the lid of a dustbin.

‘Yes.’

‘From birth?’ This was
an afterthought.

‘Yes.’

‘Misfortune or
abandonment?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Do you know
anything
about your parents?’ His tone of disgust suggested she might not, in fact,
have any.

‘No. I like to think
that—’

Major Strenk seemed to
lower the lid. He’d smelled enough. Dutifully, he went back to work, wanting —
again — the names of teachers, staff and all the other children at Saint Justyn’s
Orphanage for Girls. He listened, yawning, checking the replies against his
existing list. Not entirely satisfied, he moved on to slowly cover the German
Occupation seeking, as ever, names along the way For names gave associations.
Associations gave suspects. And suspects were suspect. At no point throughout
this quest for other degenerates did Róża so much as glance at Otto, who
was watching intently from the corner. She simply left him out of the
reckoning, though he too had been at Saint Justyn’s, in hiding during the war.
He’d turned up in l943. They’d met in the attic by a window Róża just kept
her eyes firmly, perhaps too firmly, upon Major Strenk, recounting her early
life as if Otto had never been there. It was a kind of inverted Russian
roulette: Otto was taunting her, daring her to pull the trigger and mention his
name; and she refused each time, not to save him, but to save herself, for she’d
settled on a way to survive this measured annihilation of her humanity.

‘You recall no one else?’
Major Strenk sharpened his pencil, frowning at the shavings and lead powder
accumulating on his desk.

‘No.’

‘Quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

With the flat of one
hand the Major wiped the debris into a cupped palm and then brushed his fingers
clean over a wastebasket. Still frowning, he rummaged for a handkerchief.
Between questions, his eyes on Róża, he made a short, dainty blow.

‘You knew there would be
an uprising?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Soviet radio.’

‘You went to the Old
Town?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your function?’

‘I was a messenger,
ammunition carrier, a nurse. I did—’

‘—yes, yes, yes:
whatever you could.’ Major Strenk finished off the sentence, disliking the
answer, mocking the implied nobility as if Róża were trying to clean up
her background. He looked inside the handkerchief to make sure he’d got what he
was after and then turned a page on to the reasons for her escape.

‘I was told it was over,
that we had to get out. I went into the sewer system and took a tunnel north to
Żoliborz. When I lifted the cover they were waiting for me.’

‘They? The power-seeking
criminals who wanted to use the Uprising for their own ends? The landowners and
capitalists?’ He was looking inside his handkerchief again. ‘The enemies of
progress and reform?’

‘No. Two Germans.’

Major Strenk paused,
glancing down at his sheaf of names. ‘You escaped on your own?’

‘Yes. Others followed
… others had gone before, but I went alone.’

From that moment Róża
let her gaze fall. She’d left Otto behind; he’d been with her and waded out of
her life through another tunnel; she didn’t need to protect him any more. And
Major Strenk’s jaded expression had become unbearable.

‘Do go on,’ he said, as
if he was no longer that interested.

Following her arrest Róża
had been taken to a transit camp in Pruszków Three weeks later she was one of
fifty packed into an open coal wagon. The train went south to Wolbrom, near
Kraków, where she was allocated a shared room in a fiat above a fire station.
Curiously, Róża yet again kept to herself what mattered most. She said
nothing of the singer and the song.

The journey had lasted
almost three days. There was only standing room, the November sun high and
bare, the intimacy of massed flesh intense. A single slop bucket in the corner
filled within hours. At intervals the waste was tipped over the side planking
on to the tracks. Occasionally apples and chunks of bread landed in the wagon,
thrown by locals when the train slowed or stopped. Róża thought she might
die. But then, on the morning of the second day, a child’s voice climbed higher
than the rattling of the train and the stench of the bucket. A little girl had
begun to sing.

‘Return our Homeland to
us, Lord …’

The hymn had been sung
for over two hundred years. But here, in this wagon, no one had the belief or
the strength to join in. It was left to the child. Following the girl’s rising
voice, Róża seemed to touch the clouds with the fingers of her soul. She’d
escaped once through filth, but this was a kind of rescue; a moment of
salvation. The journey ended that night. After climbing out of the wagon Róża
hobbled between buckled over men and women, crying out for the girl, but no
reply came back. It was as though God had come and gone.