The Day of the Lie (44 page)

‘After the liberation of
the camp he was hospitalised in a part of Austria that fell under Soviet
post-war administration. Agents of Stalin’s security service found him. They
found him because they had a list of names, names of Communist Party members of
the wrong kind. The kind Stalin no longer trusted because he was mad with
suspicion and fear and dread.’

Brack’s mouth moved. A
lip twitched.

‘I’ve guessed that your
father never told you,’ said Anselm, ‘but he’d lost faith in Stalin as early as
nineteen thirty-eight, when the Party was dissolved by the Comintern, before the
Terror got underway I imagine he didn’t want to disillusion you with grown-up
talk about in-politics, divisions and back-stabbing. Maybe he just wanted to
keep the story about the field nice and simple, because it was worth believing
in; because he, himself; believed in it so much that he didn’t want the grass,
for you, to be polluted with stories of blood spilled over … what? How not to
build a fence? Your father saw further than Stalin, Mr Brack. He understood
that the death of innocent people kills off a good idea.’

Brack’s top teeth nipped
his lip.

‘The Terror reached your
father,’ said Anselm. ‘He was deported to a work camp in the Arctic Circle.’

‘When?’

‘Nineteen forty-six.’

‘Where?’

‘Vorkuta.’

The interrogator’s voice
came and went like air from a slow puncture. Brack’s face became eerily mobile,
the lines appearing at once as contortions rather than marks on a damaged
floor. The loose collar somehow constricted his windpipe.

‘He was still alive in
nineteen forty-eight when you applied to join the secret police in Warsaw’
Anselm’s flesh began to prickle, his back aggravated by sweat. He didn’t like
this bargain, this bringing together of crime with mercy. But he was a part of
unfolding circumstances. The Prior had said that you have to go along with
them, sometimes, as an act of obedience; you had to let the head of the axe do
all the work. ‘Your prospective employers were concerned about your background.
They’d received a memo from the NKVD disclosing your father’s whereabouts and
his resistance to current Party ideology. Major Strenk, however, spoke up in
your favour.’

‘How?’

Anselm swallowed hard. ‘He
thought you were ideologically uncomplicated, hungry to subordinate yourself to
an institution and, if offered the paternity of the service, were likely to
offer back the devotion of a son. His demand that you abandon Róża was a
test of loyalty … proof to his superiors that he’d been right to support your
application.’

There was a long pause.
Both Anselm and Brack seemed to hear Strenk’s speech about men chosen by
history for the difficult tasks of the moment: the voice that had replaced that
of his father. Strenk had spoken for the institution that was dedicated to the
nitty-gritty of protecting what his father had believed in. This had been the
moment in Brack’s life when, in discarding Róża and everything she meant to
him, he’d sacrificed his own inner life: for he’d loved her, hadn’t he? Isn’t
that why he’d taken Celina? Something had stirred when he saw the child and he’d
tried to grasp what he’d thrown away for the sake of tomorrow Wasn’t that the
other image behind the failed indoctrination of the girl who wouldn’t listen?

‘Tymon Strenk knew that
my father was in Vorkuta?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even as I sat in the
interview room?’

‘Yes.’

Anselm drew a line in
his mind. He wasn’t going to say any more about Strenk’s relationship with
Brack. Sebastian was right: the file contained copious evidence that Strenk
effectively adopted Brack, moulding him and directing him in the ways of the
service, its ideals and its goals. That didn’t need saying: B rack already
knew; his mind was probably burning at the recollection. Brack was grimacing
again, though he’d said nothing, the discs on his eyes moving with each brief
spasm. Suddenly he spoke, his voice, like a soft gust of air.

‘What happened to my
father?’

Anselm sighed. He wanted
to ease out the disclosure, but Brack didn’t want forgiveness or compassion or
understanding. He wanted the reason for Róża’s mercy Anselm said, ‘He
escaped from Vorkuta. According to the NKVD he’d walked a thousand miles before
they found him. He’d said he was coming home to Warsaw He wanted to see his
son.

‘What did they do?’

‘They shot him.’

Brack’s mouth went into
a slight paroxysm; his legs started shaking like thin sticks in his trousers.

‘What year?’

‘Nineteen fifty-one.’

The hands began to
tremble, too. His head fell back slightly and the change in angle allowed
Anselm a glimpse into the abyss … at the eyes behind their glass walls …
they were closed and horribly creased. Brack was staring at the truth of his
past: in the very year that he tortured Róża and shot her husband, his
renegade father —the inspiration of his life — was executed by agents of the
wider security system he’d served; the system that had knowingly taken him
under its wing while dragging his father to the Gulag.

He’d locked the cage and
pulled the trigger for a system his father didn’t believe in.

They’d given him the key
and the gun.

With confounding speed,
the tremors to Brack’s limbs and face ceased. It was as though the plug to his
nerves had been kicked out of its socket. A hand came up and settled the
glasses more firmly on the nose. Once more his skin settled into a cracked,
hard surface, the stains like weights on his head.

‘I must leave this
place,’ he said, stumbling away his voice hoarse and dry ‘I have to get out, I
can’t … think. I’m …’

Brack couldn’t
articulate his despair and confusion because it was too deep. There was too
much to think about, too many events to reconsider, decisions to review A vast
crack had opened at his feet and he was falling into the darkness. The new
world worth killing for had come to an end: it wasn’t just a failed dream
beaten flat by the old vested interests; it had never existed. But the look on
Brack’s faced seemed to admit that this was something he’d
always
known
… ever since Celina walked out of the door. She’d taken all the colour with
her, leaving behind the grey.

‘Mr Brack,’ called Anselm,
instinctively rising. ‘Stop, just a moment. ‘The murderer and torturer who’d
escaped punishment was staggering down a long aisle, row upon row of empty
seats on either side. The delegates were on their feet laughing at the idiot
who’d done the dirty work; the fool who’d thought shooting people in a cellar
was an act of significance; the clown who’d abandoned those he’d loved. He
reached the Hall doors and pushed his way out, escaping the silent applause.

Anselm hadn’t moved. He’d
been rooted to the spot like one of the audience, only he hadn’t been clapping.
As if the conference was over, he left his seat and chased after the principal
speaker, but he’d gone.

One of the lifts was
descending, the numbers counting down.

He ran towards the
stairs, hoping to catch Brack before he left the building. He’d thought of
something to say even if he wasn’t sure it was true. Rounding a corner, he saw
him limping ahead. He caught up and tugged his sleeve, but Brack was the one
who spoke.

‘I knew someone, once,
and he used to say to everyone, “Harm the boy you harm the man”, but to me, he
said, “Save the boy you save the man”. He meant you saved him to do something
decent, worthwhile and good.’ He swayed as if he might fall, and moved on, as
if to catch his balance. ‘You know, I was the one with the matches. I knew
where I was going.’

Brack reeled away
quickly One shoulder had fallen lower than the other, the sleeve of his brown
jacket almost covering the hand. He began to drag one foot. Anselm followed,
half stammering, not able to call out, wanting to reach the person who’d once
loved Róża and been grateful to Mr Lasky.

‘Mr Brack,’ he managed,
again, as if the name was all he had to say.

But Brack was in the
foyer now, passing the reception desk, bright lights and glass everywhere, the
well-heeled from the four corners of the earth looking idly on at an old man
running away from a priest. Krystyna smiled and made a little wave. Abruptly
Anselm stopped and gasped.

Standing at the entrance
was Irina Orlosky She was holding out a gun, Brack’s gun, as if it were a Happy
Meal. Her arms were wavering under the strain.

‘No, Irina, don’t …’
called Anselm. But she made no response: her eyes were wide and levelled; and
Brack was heading towards her as if to welcome his old assistant. Screams broke
out and people stumbled for safety while Brack came to a slow halt, expectant
and resigned, the centre of a fast-widening circle. All at once — for Anselm —
the glittering foyer became a kind of dripping cellar. Brack had returned to
the place where the big decisions are made and where big people must swallow
hard and seize the moment.

‘Don’t be frightened,
Irina,’ he said. ‘Have courage.

Anselm tried to shout
but time had seized up, and with it his reactions. His lips gradually parted,
but then, suddenly came an immense bang … and Brack retreated three or four
juddering steps, like a buffoon at the circus after being hit on the head with
a frying pan. He paused, as if to think about it, and then fell on one knee.
Seconds later — with striking gentleness, and slowly — he sank to the floor,
rolling on to his back.

When Anselm reached him,
he instinctively removed the glasses. Clouds had gathered over green flames —
they’d come to life and were burning, but they were fast turning hard, becoming
cold glass, the light seeming to vanish inwards. He let Myriam’s words fall
out, still undecided if they were true or not: ‘You’re always more than your
past.’

And then, all at once,
Anselm noticed that he was surrounded by a hushed crowd. That Brack was dead,
and that he was on his knees.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Róża was told of Brack’s death the
same evening. She walked the length of her sitting room and slowly sat down, no
longer quite present. Examining her face, Anselm wondered if he caught the
slightest lift of that wave he’d noticed when she’d been told the contents of
Brack’s file. Sadness, pity or compassion, he’d never know, but it had led to
mercy And now with him dead, there was an edge to her quiet. It was almost as
if she and Brack were linked by a remaining thread of understanding, that with
the onslaught of terror, good and bad are swept into the one fire.

Celina seemed the most
confused, battling — Anselm suspected — against the upsurge of relief which,
once spent, made one feel vaguely unclean. Death did that. It demanded a moment’s
thought, requiring all those remotely affected to look with honesty at the
empty chair and check if the life extinguished had left anything worthwhile
behind: and Brack’s hadn’t. John was indifferent, though he drew emotions
vicariously from Róża and Celina, by turns reflective and furtively
jubilant. Speaking to Sebastian on the phone, Anselm found him angry He’d
wanted a trial. He’d wanted to see the law at work, its hands reaching back in
time to reclaim lost ground, making it holy again. But it remained out of
reach, unsanctified. Brack had died on a deep pile red carpet. It didn’t seem
quite right. In truth, Sebastian hadn’t understood Róża’s justice: that in
eschewing naked retaliation for the past she’d looked creatively forwards,
where even a murderer without a defence had an open future.

Coverage by the media
the next morning was spontaneously inter-connected, different commentators and
presenters effectively speaking to each other in public. Brack’s death, fast
upon his acquittal — peculiarly condemned and pitied by Róża Mojeska at
one and the same time — ignited a debate that moved from paper to screen to
radio: about the relationship between retribution and compassion. The argument
became heated, even in the hotel’s corridors. The final words of the Shoemaker
were discussed like never before. Róża, to the end, had been his loyal
messenger.

Anselm’s reaction? The
sight of the shooting itself profoundly disturbed him: the thud and the
staggering backwards kept recurring before his eyes and ears … followed by
the slow, comic drop to the ground. Even the death of a man like Brack stirred
something in the stomach. The sense of sickness wouldn’t go away.

He also felt peculiarly
responsible, asking himself if he should ever have entered the Warsaw Hall; if
he should ever have taken that oyster to Frenzel; if he should ever have
brought Irina Orlosky from Praga into the outskirts of Brack’s prosecution,
linking his anticipated conviction with the recovery of her self-respect.

He went to see her in
Mokotów, the prison built during the days of a tsar and now a remand facility.
They really ought to pull it down, he thought, as Irina was brought to the
visiting room on the ground floor. It stank of disinfectant — the sort of
chemical used by Madam Czerny to wash her hair. The lights were glaring, the
table and chairs bolted to the concrete floor. Anselm felt the past beating all
around him. Róża’s shouts, Pavel’s groans — the cries of agitators and
anti—Socialist elements. He listened to Irina’s quiet, controlled confession.

‘I don’t regret what I’ve
done,’ she said, drawing a circle on the table with her finger. ‘Quite the
opposite. I’m proud. Because now I can say that I, too, stood up to them. I hit
back for all those others that were shot, and the hundreds of thousands whose
lives they boxed away in a file … decent, reasonable people who’d never twist
a woman’s arm or take a man’s life, even such a man as that. Like the old
couple outside the court waiting for justice, holding on to that banner. Well,
I gave it to them. I’ve done something good, something that was right.’ She
wiped her eyes on a green McDonald’s sleeve, the tears appearing without the
usual disturbance of emotion.