The cleaner was called Lidia Zelk. A timid woman, we didn’t speak for three years. She’d never married. Like Barbara, she eventually joined the Friends of the Shoemaker.
Chapter Twenty
While waiting for Róża’s statement to be translated, Anselm sat at his desk humming Bunny Berigan’s trumpet solo from ‘I Can’t Get Started’. His eyes drifted on to the orange file. He’d left it open. Róża’s two faces peered back from the prison photographs. All that lay between each snap of the shutter release was a couple of years, during which time … Anselm’s humming came to an abrupt halt: he’d noticed a tiny scrap of blue paper sticking out towards the bottom of the pile.
Swivelling the block round, he lowered his head to examine the fragment more closely It was held in place by the string fastener that kept the documents together. The relevant sheet had evidently been detached from the bundle, leaving behind the corner section. Puzzled, he closed the cover. He’d only just tied the bow when Sebastian entered with the translation of Róża’s statement.
‘Let me know what you think,’ he said. ‘Our rat is in there somewhere.’
As he reached the door, Anselm heard himself say ‘Can I just ask an idle question?’
‘Absolutely’
Sebastian turned and leaned on the jamb, hands in his pockets.
‘Can’t understand a thing in here, of course,’ said Anselm, tapping the orange file, ‘but why are there two kinds of paper … white and blue.’
‘The white was used by the interrogators, the blue by the nurses.
‘Nurses?’
‘Yes. The colour coding was common to all prisons. In Róża’s case, having any medical notes is laughable. I mean, what did they do? Dish out the aspirin when they’d finished with the rack? That’s probably why it’s blank. They didn’t do anything.’
‘Blank?’
‘Apart from her name at the top. I don’t know why it’s in there at all. I imagine they lumped all her papers together, even when they hadn’t been used.’
Anselm’s mind made a sort of grinding noise. Sebastian was talking as if the blue paper was still in the file. He’d seen it. He knew it was blank. But it wasn’t there now Some primitive caution stopped Anselm from revealing his thoughts. Instead he asked if he could venture some more questions peripheral to their investigation.
‘Is anyone else involved in this case?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone else read the files?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Just wondering if you’d got a second opinion on the Polana material.’ That was completely untrue. Anselm had wanted to know who might have had access to the orange file. His intuition had already leapt at the answer. He quickly pressed on.’ seeking confirmation. ‘I know this is neither here nor there, but what did Róża do when she saw the transcripts? That white and blue paper must have knocked her flat:
‘She didn’t even open the cover.’
‘Really?’
‘The sight of the files winded her. Wanted to be alone. When the door opened her eyes were on the “Way Out” sign.’
‘How did you change her mind?’ The question was entirely superfluous. Anselm had found out what he wanted to know.
‘I said I had a story, too,’ replied Sebastian. ‘She stared at my shirt and shoes and then, for some reason, she just weakened. I pushed some more and she finally gave in. The fact is, she wanted to speak. Everyone who’s been brutalised has to speak, needs to speak. And Róża went as far as she was able … but I very nearly lost her.’
Anselm made a mischievous nod. Sebastian was no different. That reference to an untold story had come from a dropped guard. Already the lawyer was backtracking, heading into the corridor before Anselm’s curiosity could tug at the admission.
‘Don’t ask,’ he intoned. ‘I’ll tell you after Brack’s conviction.’
Until that moment, Anselm had thought that Sebastian was simply a dedicated lawyer born of the generation that dealt with the sins of their fathers. There was clearly another facet to his energy. Anselm recalled the box files and the photograph of the elderly woman standing behind a wheelchair. Who should have been sitting there? Were they linked to Sebastian’s investigation into Brack? Anselm turned as from the ghost to have a quick word with Róża.
‘I said nothing to Sebastian, because you didn’t,’ he said, confiding and quiet. ‘I’m respecting your privacy. You removed the blue paper because you didn’t want anyone to know you’d been in the infirmary. Fair enough. Your choice. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’
He waited, but no reply came to his imagination.
‘But I’m in some difficulty. You went to John for help and, for all I know, he’d just walk straight through the fire. But you’ve ended up with me. I’m different. I’m easily distracted. And I can only help by stumbling around on the sidelines — it’s my way Comes with monastic life, you know, head half in the clouds. So bear with me, because I now want to know why you vandalised the national archives.’
With that resolution in mind, Anselm picked up Róża’s statement.
Anselm read the document three times with increasing attentiveness — a monastic practice vaguely similar to deep sea diving without the benefit of lead boots, each appraisal an attempt to break beneath the surface tension of the page. The objective: to descend into the dark and find the strange light not always visible from the side of the boat. He lingered here and there on individual phrases, letting his mind sink and swim where it willed.
His first reaction on drying himself down, so to speak, was completely irrelevant to the matter in hand. He was hurt. And confused. At first he’d found the references to John touching. They’d given bright glimpses on to the young man who’d left East Berlin for Warsaw.’ the gifted journalist driven to document the struggle of an oppressed people. But then, like a sudden power-cut, came that reference to John’s mother. He’d told Róża what he’d never told him. Suppressing his disappointment, Anselm focused instead on Róża’s staggering misfortune. She’d walked out of Mokotów into the house of an informer.
Anselm’s second reaction, then, was pity Immense pity for Róża, but also for the husband and father who’d become FELIKS. Presumably there’d been pressure or the allure of reward, but Edward Kolba had evidently come to an arrangement with Otto Brack. With or without his wife’s connivance, he’d kept an eye on their guest. For sure, Róża had been welcomed with open arms. But she’d also been placed at the centre of an ongoing surveillance operation. If FELIKS did betray Róża in 1982 then that would certainly explain Róża’s silence afterwards: her loyalty to him, but perhaps more so to his wife.’ Aniela, who’d shared the unforgettable experience of Mokotów. She too got Anselm’s pity.
His third reaction was more clinical.
Róża had amended and amplified the transcript, making it a carefully polished document. Each section dealt neatly with people and places and their significance in her life. Every word had its place. Which made Róża’s mistake all the more illuminating.
She’d slipped up.
The tiny window in her cell was so high she had to strain her neck ‘to see the clouds’. Eight minutes later she confessed that the greater part of her remained in Mokotów ‘by a large window that looking on to a cherry tree.’.
Where was that big window? It had to be located in the prison infirmary. Róża wouldn’t have had the run of the place. There was no gym, television room or sauna. Where else could she have been if it wasn’t her cell? The textual inconsistency was of no small importance. It explained Róża’s startling opening remark that she wanted to remain incarcerated. Fine, she’d forgotten how to boil an egg, but think again (Anselm said to himself): she was effectively saying that she longed to remain at the scene of a double execution. Dogs do things like that, not human beings. Not wives. But this is what Róża said she wanted to do. And it was not credible. In an otherwise crafted testimonial where nothing had been given away without a specific reason
, Róża had made an accidental admission. She’d kicked and screamed and beaten the prison door not because she wanted her cell back but because she longed to be near that larger window; an infirmary window Where else if not there? It haunted her. And all because it looked on to a tree?
‘Well, what do you think?’
Anselm made a start. He hadn’t heard Sebastian enter. The lawyer pulled over a chair and straddled the seat, his chin lodged on his folded arms as if he were looking into that eye testing machine at the opticians. He worked too hard, that was Anselm’s verdict. The whites were yellowed and bloodshot.
‘Something isn’t quite right.” said Anselm.
‘In what way?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He made a sigh of self-deprecation. ‘Can’t read a damn thing without brooding on it for months. At Larkwood we tend to chew words slowly. swallow them even more slowly and then wait for this sudden kick of understanding, right here —’ he pointed at his stomach — ‘it’s a bit annoying, really I read stuff ten years ago and I’ve still got indigestion. The only cure’s watching and waiting.’
‘Well, you’ve got till nine-thirty tomorrow morning.’ Sebastian reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a scrap of paper. He held it up to Anselm so he could read the address scrawled across the middle. ‘You have an appointment with Marek Frenzel.’
Locating the former secret policeman had been no more difficult than tracing Irina Orlosky According to the tax people, Brack’s assistant, now aged sixty-two, had left the SB to join the peace of mind industry and was now a branch manager in central Warsaw He’d shown a flare for insurance. He was still looking after the People: house and contents; the whole caboodle.
‘Does he know what we want?’ asked Anselm, taking the paper. ‘I told his secretary that an old policy had finally matured.’
So the stage was set. If Anselm’s hunch was correct, he’d shortly buy back the missing contents of the Polana file. And that would confirm if Edward Kolba had gone the distance. But in truth Anselm’s curiosity, lambent with expectation, lay just as much elsewhere: on the sidelines.’ far from the fire.
Chapter Twenty-One
IPN/RM/13129/2010
EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT MADE BY
RÓŻA MOJESKA
33.41
If it wasn’t for Bernard, I might never have gone back to the Shoemaker. When he was a child, I told him the story of the dragon and I like to think that his first steps towards resistance came from hearing that tale of intellect against brute force. Later, without prompting, he began to ask the ‘wrong’ sorts of question, like, ‘Why do we have a special relationship with the Soviet Union?’. Edward used to pull his hair out, begging him to stick to algebra. Clean problems that could be solved cleanly He just wanted his boy to do well at school.
36.22
At university Bernard started talking about all kinds of freedom … freedom to read books banned by the censor; freedom to watch any film he wanted; to say what he liked; to meet whom he liked; freedom from the restraint that kept everyone in line, an ideological line drawn more for Moscow’s approval than theirs; freedom to pick his own leaders; freedom of information; freedom protected by the law Freedom, pure and simple. Edward would shake his head, stabbing one finger upwards, warning Bernard that they might be bugged, while Aniela would dust the flour from her hands, round on him and shout back, ‘What are you on about? You’re getting a free education!’
38.54
Bernard belonged to that group of intellectuals whose strong belief in socialism — its vision of fairness and equality — had turned restive. Their problem was that, in practice, it wasn’t working properly. They demanded reform not revolution — a reform that had been promised year on year by the Party leadership. All they wanted was for the apparatchiks to stand back so that he and his educated pals could lift the bonnet on the government’s engine. With a bit of major tinkering they were sure they could fix those grinding noises that everyone was complaining about. But eventually he lost his faith. One of his professors was expelled from the Party for condemning the lack of political, social and economic development. That was when he — and many others — realised that without a revolution of ideas there was little hope for change. He wrote a letter saying so to both the rector and the Party leadership — actions for which he could have been kicked out of the university Happily he only received a disciplinary warning. Bernard got his degree later that year and I still remember Edward when the results came out. He sat with his mouth open, tears of joy pouring on to his thick moustache. There was a scholar in the family.
41.52
They got Bernard after he’d started post-graduate studies. One domino hit another: in 1968 the censor banned Forefather’s Eve after the audience had a field day jeering the czarist agent as if he were a latter—day soviet stooge. The students took to the streets in protest so the rector shut down a string of Departments. Thousands of young people — Bernard, among them — had their schooling cut short. They all got ‘wolf tickets’, blacklisting them when it came to finding a job. Edward’s face set into a mask. This was one affair he couldn’t resolve by wangling. He had to watch his boy scratch around for bit work.
42.58
Bernard didn’t only lose his future; he lost a childhood friend, Mateusz Robak. They’d gone in different directions, Bernard to books on philosophy and Mateusz to an electrician’s manual. When the demonstration had erupted Bernard the Student had wanted Mateusz the Worker by his side. But Mateusz had laughed him down: ‘I’m not risking my job so you can watch a play written two hundred years ago.’ They never spoke again, not until 1982. By then Mateusz was in charge of my security.
53.21
I lost a friend, too. Magda Samovitz. We’d met in Saint Justyn’s, where she’d been hidden during the war. The German secret police had taken her away with Mr Lasky in 1944 but she’d survived Treblinka and come back. Well, the government now blamed the student unrest on Zionists, and Magda lost her job simply because she was Jewish. I couldn’t believe that those who’d survived and returned, like her, would one day leave again with the little they could carry in their bags. Thousands lost their jobs and left the country. Magda went to England.
54.39
Bernard became heavily involved in unofficial union activity which was how he met his wife, Helena. A close friend of theirs was shot dead in 1970 at Gdynia, one of a crowd chanting ‘We want bread! We want truth!’ at the machine guns. They carried his body on planks behind a banner saying ‘The Blood of Children’. Others were killed in the Radom riots of 1976 when food prices doubled. Demonstrators unfurled the white eagle and set the Party building on fire. I listened to the news, still not feeling the stab of a needle. According to the presenter, ‘drunken hooligans and hysterical women led the crowds’.
1h.02
Bernard always said that Solidarity grew from that banner and those martyrs, because afterwards the students and workers came together. But I would add something else, a remark I heard on the bus last week: no Church, no Solidarity, no revolution. And it’s true. Behind this coalition of minds and hands was the presence of those strong arches, arches that had refused to bend or break despite the weight of Soviet Occupation. Even if there were men of God who’d become men of Brack, that changes nothing, and it never can: the story has been told; the arches didn’t sway I, and millions like me, stood beneath them.
Anyway the students and workers, united to this spirit of resistance.’ overwhelmed the Party. Our special friends had to swallow it. Solidarity became official.
What followed, however, was chaos. Strike after strike. I ended up brushing my teeth with imported Bulgarian toothpaste. Frankly though.’ I was more interested in Helena’s pregnancy. I watched her slowly grow large. I didn’t quite notice the hunger marches or the trucks jamming the central roundabout or the rumours that the Russians were mobilising. I just saw Helena’s radiant face. Aniela watched her, scared there’d be a knock on the door; that they mig
ht come back in their leather jackets and jeans.
1h.08
They came on the night martial law was declared, barging in, guns everywhere, masked men dressed like warriors from the Middle Ages, with helmets and big sticks and whatnot. And shouting, terrible shouting. Aniela screaming, Edward pulling at his son. This time they’d really got him.
That’s when it happened. Moments later, sometime after midnight. Just as they dragged Bernard away. Helena fell to her knees. Aniela dropped beside her. I was frozen to the spot, overwhelmed with … fear … no, awe, I suppose. The child was born there, in the flat, before my eyes, with Aniela stroking the mother’s hair.
1h.15
I went on to the street next morning. Soldiers were warming themselves by makeshift fires. Tanks rolled over the snow By a lamppost I found a sheet of paper. There were others, lying around like litter. On it was a list of names … the names of people who’d been picked up the night before. The ink was running in the melt water. I think it had been made from tea or carrot skins, I don’t know, but someone had printed off this bulletin before morning, even before the soldiers had gone home to bed.
That’s when I decided to go back to the Shoemaker — not because of martial law or Solidarity or because I was worried about the cost of meat or the Russians. I went back because a little boy had been born. His father had been taken to prison before the child had even got his name.
1h.19
I packed some clothes into a shopping bag, knowing I’d have to vanish, for as soon as Freedom and Independence appeared again, Brack would come for me. Half an hour later I knocked on the door of Father Nicodem Kaminsky He was the Threshold to the Shoemaker. I’d last seen him with my husband in November 1951.
The Day of the Lie Page 14