The Day of the Lie (12 page)

For an instant, Róża
almost forgot that she was being questioned by Major Strenk: her mind was
juddering from the realisation that Otto Brack and that unknown child shared
the same protected space in her memory.

‘When did you leave
Wolbrom?’

Róża made a start. ‘After
the war … nine months later.’

‘Why?’

‘To help rebuild—’

‘Yes, yes, yes, you
tried to save Warsaw, and now you were going to help with the rebuilding. What
was your function?’

Róża had worked
alongside an architect retrieving and labelling fragments of ornate stonework
in the Old Town. The whole area was to be restored to its original splendour
using, whenever possible, original materials. Pavel Mojeska had been engaged in
identical work with another specialist. She’d met him during a meeting when the
experts had pored over close-up photographs of a painting by Canaletto. It had
showed the buildings as they were once were. This was the complete picture and
it showed them where the bits might go.

‘Mojeska’s date of
birth?’

‘Nineteen twenty—one.’

It was another pointless
question. Pavel had been arrested three hours before Róża. He was in the
same building, in another cell. They must already know But they trawled
everywhere
so as to compare accounts, looking for
any
inconsistency He was
poring over his own pictures.

‘As to his parents?’

‘They were killed in
Ochota.’

‘Any siblings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Names.’

Róża’s voice
cracked. ‘They’re dead. Two girls and a boy all dead. They were in Ochota …
Ochota.
Do you really need
me
to tell
you
what happened?’

‘On reflection, no:

As the Nazis poured
troops in to crush the Uprising, special units were deployed to flush out any
survivors. In the districts of Ochota and Wola thousands of civilians were
executed, heaped and burned, regardless of age or gender. The Major sighed.

‘Where was the criminal
Mojeska?’

‘Fighting in the—’

‘—yes, yes, stop.’
Though he’d asked the question he couldn’t endure any more heroics. He started
scouring their relationship, leaning forward like one of the architects over
those photos.

‘You were married in
what year?’

‘Nineteen forty-eight.’

‘Your age?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘His age?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

She gave the bare facts.
She wasn’t going to tell Major Strenk how they’d rebuilt each other: how Róża,
who belonged to no one, had given herself to Pavel who’d lost everyone; how
each had complementary wounds with a complementary power to heal. She wasn’t
going to tell Major Strenk how it was possible to remain injured at heart and
yet laugh as if for the first time. No, the major got what he could understand:
facts; dates, places and times. For two days he dutifully wrote the answers
down with his pencil. On the third day he changed subject and tone.

‘You are aware the
criminal Pavel Mojeska is a provocateur?’

‘A
what?
I’m
sorry, I don’t—’

‘That he is planning to
restore the rule of landowners and capitalists?’

‘No.’

And she had no idea that
he was implicated in the publication of subversive material against the people.
Major Strenk paused. He became eerily still, like a man watching a lake for the
skip of life below the surface.

‘Who is the Shoemaker?’
he said, unblinking.

‘I don’t know’

‘Who are the Friends of
the Shoemaker?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Where is the printing
press?’

‘I don’t know’

The one reply uttered
with every difference of inflection imaginable, all of them variations of
begging. Major Strenk pulled open a drawer and took out a small vice and a
metal tray Róża watched him in complete horror. First he took a fish hook
from a compartment of the tray; next, he locked it between the clamps of the vice,
leaving the shank free; and then, finally he looked up, his eyes remote and
dull.

‘Think again. Who is the
Shoemaker?’

Róża couldn’t
speak.

‘Who are the Friends of
the Shoemaker?’

This minute, transferred
attention to the making of a fly was exactly what had happened three days
earlier, before she was kicked off the stool and taken to the pit. The threat
was heavy between them, his unblinking, timeless gaze upon her. She opened her
mouth but no sound came from her throat. Major Strenk peered into the metal
tray and selected a bobbin of bright green thread. He tied a knot on the hook
and reached for some tweezers.

‘Where is the printing
press?’

Róża began to
shiver. She heard the dripping in her mind. Her voice was quiet and beseeching,
‘I’ve told you, Comrade, I don’t know’

Major Strenk put the
tweezers between his teeth and picked up his pencil. While writing down the
answer, he nodded vaguely towards Brack. The guard behind Róża kicked the
footstool away.

Róża woke up soaking wet and freezing.
She’d been strapped to a chair with a belt. She did not know if it was night or
day The guard stamped on the butt of his cigarette and brought her back to the
interrogation room.

‘Name?’

‘Róża Mojeska.’ Her
voice was so faint she hardly heard her own reply.

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Major Strenk picked up a
magnifying glass and examined the tied fly He didn’t seem especially pleased.
Something had gone wrong. He suppressed a belch and said, ‘Date of birth?’

On the third day, while
testing the mechanism of a fishing reel, he asked about the Shoemaker. It
whirred efficiently like a drill, eventually slowing to a series of dry clicks.
Róża watched and listened unable to speak. The major opened a drawer and
nodded at Brack. Without resisting, without remembering the hauling down the
corridor of waxen light, Róża fell into the darkness and the deluge. A
last conscious thought, like fingernails hooked on the ledge of sanity, was
about life: the irresistible, inexorable power of life. It was as though her
mind was lit for a moment by a spark of divinity. She knew she was pregnant.
She carried a life that Major Strenk would never catch.

Chapter Thirteen

After the third visit to the cage Róża
was dragged back to her cell. There were nine other women sitting on the floor.
A tenth with straggling ashen hair walked around aimlessly, moaning to herself.
She wagged a dirty finger at Róża, admonishing the air long after Róża
had slumped in a corner. The walls were damp and gouged with hatch-patterned
desperation: the days crossed out in blocks of seven becoming weeks, months and
years. All the prisoners were a strange grey-green, melding them to the
plaster. One of them with cropped blonde hair watched Róża guardedly over
knees held tight against her chest. Róża pressed her face into the wall.
She was the bearer of life. She had to survive so that this child might one day
sing. Her mind turned to Otto Brack who, given time, without a war and without
conflicting ideologies, just might have been the father.

A boy turned up in February 1943. He was
first seen with Mr Lasky, the caretaker, helping to shave a door that had never
jammed. He had to be about fifteen. A few questions to one of the more
indiscreet nuns produced the unlikely disclosure that Mr Lasky wasn’t getting
any younger and the building was only getting older, so his nephew had come to
help out with the chores. Everyone knew it was another secret: he was being
hidden from the Nazis, like Magda, the girl in Róża’s dormitory. They had
the same tragic look that comes with enforced separation.

Róża met the boy by
accident one Sunday afternoon.

The top floor of the
orphanage was reached by a set of warped stairs by a broom cupboard, understood
by tradition to be haunted by seven orphans who’d fallen off the roof and a nun
who’d killed herself with a candlestick, though no one knew how Few used the
stairs, either from fear, or because the attic held nothing of interest save
bedsteads, worn mattresses and broken furniture. But Róża discovered
something else: a window, the highest in the building. It looked out over
Warsaw, and this was where she came on Sunday afternoons to escape the
institutional existence she led down below — it couldn’t be any other way, but
she was tired of the discipline and the very public life of a locker without a
key She would daydream, gazing over the rooftops, imagining an existence with
some colour: brothers and sisters round a table, a mother in the kitchen, and a
father playing the banjo. One Sunday Róża climbed the stairs and found the
door ajar. On entering she saw the boy by the window It was wide open and he
was smoking.

‘Do you want one?’

‘Yes.’

He’d made them out of
old newspaper that had lined a drawer and threads from a doormat. His hair was
rust brown, his eyes a deeper brown, flecked with green. His skin was naturally
dark, as if he’d just come back from a holiday in the sun. Like Róża, he
was thin, lacking muscle on his arms and legs. His shoes and jacket were too
big. The boots had come from Mr Lasky.

‘This is my room,’ said Róża,
curtly taking the cigarette.

The boy ignored her and
lit the rolled matting, his lips held tight when he exhaled. While Róża
coughed and spluttered, he stared enquiringly over the bombed, sunlit capital.

‘What are you doing?’
asked Róża, after she’d picked some fibres off her tongue.

The boy breathed in the
black fumes and said, ‘I’m thinking of my father and my mother.’

Róża met the boy in
that room frequently thereafter. They made no arrangement, but over the next
few weeks Sunday afternoons became the time they smoked by the window He never
again revealed anything about himself or what he cared about, what he’d lost
and what he hoped for. He told her his name, and no more. He was Otto. That
single flash of sincerity and vulnerability was replaced by a mature frown and
long simmering silences. With his top teeth he’d scrape his bottom lip and Róża
wondered if he might open up the skin. Once, for something to say, Róża
told him her daydream: of a red dress and red shoes, and a deep green jacket,
and a father who played the banjo. He listened, drinking in her hope for
something better.

These two moments of
brief sharing — of his loss and her dreams — created a bond between Róża
and Otto. Something that could turn into love was slowly catching fire, like
the dried matting wrapped in yesterdays news. By choice or chance they’d both
been walked on and thrown aside; but they’d found each other among so much
bric-a-brac; they’d opened a window on to something different. Which was why Róża
instinctively risked her life for him the following April when the German
secret police arrived with their whistles and dogs.

The community and all
the children were ordered into the rear yard, but Róża and Otto made for
the top floor.

‘I wouldn’t go up there
if I were you,’ said Róża to the squat interpreter, shaking uncontrollably.

‘Why not?’

She was barring his way
at the foot of the stairs, arms outstretched. Behind him stood two men in long
leather coats. Otto was in the cupboard, two feet away.

‘There’s a dead nun
waiting with a candlestick.’

They laughed and one of
them tousled her hair — not affectionately, but as if she were a dog that had
learned a trick. It took them half an hour to search the attic, during which
time Otto hid in a room that had already been ransacked. When they’d gone, Róża
learned that the Prioress and Mr Lasky had been taken away at gunpoint and that
Magda had been found in the infirmary: she’d had no papers and no temperature.

Róża was completely
distraught. At night she lay awake, staring at Magda’s empty bed. During the
day she kept looking out for Mr Lasky, expecting to find him mending a
perfectly serviceable sash window A couple of weeks later the explosions
started. The rumour was that those in the Ghetto were fighting back. Standing
beside Otto in the attic she watched part of the Warsaw horizon gradually
collapse in clouds of smoke and dust. When the noise came to an end there was a
ringing in her ears that wouldn’t go away — not from the bombs but the lost
voices.

Otto heard the same
sounds. The arrest of Mr Lasky had a deep effect upon him. He was adrift for
the second time in the space of two months — first from his parents and now the
man who’d played a part in his rescue. Róża sensed him leaning upon her
more heavily though he never deliberately touched her. It was in his eyes and
the glance that followed a brush of shoulders.

‘Where’ve they taken
him?’ he asked, sucking in the smoke.

‘Pawiak Prison,’ replied
Róża, quoting the indiscreet nun.

‘He’s dead.’ Otto’s
voice was angry and correcting.

‘But we aren’t.’

Róża’s reply didn’t
so much show up the base instinct of survival as reveal the peculiar duty that
settles upon survivors, upon those who have been saved: to live and make the
living worthwhile. ‘We have to make it count,’ she said, pulling at Otto’s sleeve
as if they might go somewhere. ‘For their sake.’

A year and a bit later,
they did. Soviet Radio had called for an Uprising. The Red Army was approaching
from the east. The Nazis were finished. All that was needed was a quick shove.

‘I’m going to the Old
Town.’ He lit two cigarettes, wincing, and passed one to Róża. ‘Are you
coming?’

‘To do what?’

‘Fight.’

His eyes were unable to
rest for long upon her but, having strayed, they kept coming back, hungrily;
and Róża saw once more the sudden flare of vulnerability, the not wanting
to be left alone again to face another crisis without the support of those he
… relied upon? Loved? It was a mortified admission of affection, made immense
by where she stood in Otto’s life. Róża hadn’t dared believe that she
might be so important. They left that night, scurrying like rats along walls
until they linked up with a Home Army unit on Podwale Street.