The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  We were pebbles on the path to his door, whereas Father Nicodem … he was the Threshold. So he bore a terrible responsibility. It was etched into his face. On those two occasions when we met — in 1951 and 1982 — his cheeks and neck were covered in cuts from a razor. I’m sure it was from the strain, from a shaking hand. Some of them were quite large and I often wondered why he didn’t give up trying to keep still and grow a beard.

  1h.32

  When Father Nicodem opened the door it was as though he’d seen Brack. I had a fright of my own. He’d changed … almost beyond recognition. His eyes were heavy, pulling his head between his shoulder blades. He was in his late sixties by then, his hair a shocking white, as if he’d seen unmentionable things. A small detail comes to mind, in contrast to his face. His nails. They were beautifully clean and filed. They gave away his delicacy and sensitivity. They told you that he’d handle your soul with care.

  1h.36

  I asked him if the Shoemaker was still alive. He said, ‘Yes’. I asked why he’d said nothing since 1951. Father Nicodem said, ‘He’d been broken.’ By what? ‘The death of two Friends.’ He didn’t have to say any more. We understood one another. But he wasn’t ready for what followed. I told him the Shoemaker had to speak again and that I would spread his words. ‘Remember, I’m the sleeper. I’ve come back to wake the dead.’ He waved his arms around as if trying to warn a train that there were children on the line, but I told him he had no choice. He had to go back to the Shoemaker. He was to tell him that I, the widow, demanded it. Not just for the sake of those two Friends but for a child who’d just been born and left without a name. Father Nicodem was pacing up and down the room, saying, ‘No’, and that’s when I recognised an appalling truth about myself. I’d done what he was doing for thirty years. My life since fifty-two had been one long walk, head down, murmuring ‘No’. But there comes a time when you have to say, ‘Yes’. When life becomes a ‘Yes’, whatever the cost might be. When we have to take the word back from those who control what will and what will not happen. This was my choice, my decision. Not Pavel’s. But I needed Father Nicodem’s, and the Shoemaker’s. We all had to stand together once more and say, ‘Stop, enough.’ We had to say ‘Yes’ to a future of our choosing, and to put words out there to wake the dead … to shatter the illusions that make oppression acceptable.

  I told Father Nicodem that the first edition of Freedom and Independence would need to be ready within two weeks. He thought for a long, tortured time and then gave me the key to his back yard.

  1h.44

  Pavel had told me how to set up the Friends — how to keep them separate in order to keep them together. He’d told me who to contact for paper and ink. I didn’t even know if these old Friends were still alive or if they were still willing or in a position to help. But that’s what happens with a ‘Yes’. You have to work everything out afterwards. It’s only with a ‘No’ that all the problems have been lined up beforehand.

  1h.52

  As the hub of the wheel, my job was to hold the spokes, keeping them apart. I went first to Barbara and Lidia, women the SB would never notice; women who’d never thought they could fight back. I went to Mateusz, Bernard’s friend, who’d had his chance but fluffed it. The system was simple. We used prams. I collected the print run wrapped in parcels from a dustbin in Father Nicodem’s back yard. Over two or three days, trip after trip, I brought them to Barbara and Lidia who then trundled round Warsaw posting, dropping and giving. In time, as the circulation grew, and unknown to each other.’ they organised distribution teams. How they did it, I don’t know — any more than I knew who printed the paper. Sometimes I’d pick up my parcels and find an envelope with a shopping list and money. With the funds I’d go back to those old Friends who still had their ways and means, not to mention their children with minds of their own. The materials — paper and ink — would be delivered to me at a playground, a hotel, a station — it varied — and I’d drop them in Father Nicodem’s dustbin. It was magnificent. We were beating the tanks and armoured personnel carriers with a convoy of prams.

  1 h. 59

  Mateusz found safe-house lodgings and I moved every two weeks, borrowing clothes and shoes along the way Glasses, too, and hats. I never looked the same; I was never in the same place long enough for Brack to catch me. I paid my way by housework and cooking. I became, for the first time since leaving Mokotów, content.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After a long, scalding shower Anselm placed a pen and paper by the phone (as instructed) and then rang Sebastian to outline the contours of Marek Frenzel’s monologue. He left out those remarks demonstrating limited affection for the Church because they were broadly conventional — he’d read far worse in the English press — but he recited the rest, summoning again the man’s devouring presence. They agreed to meet that evening in the lobby bar, where, given the demand for more money, they might consider their options. With the remainder of the afternoon free, Anselm decided to make a ‘site-visit’ to the crime scene central to what had become a second, unofficial enquiry: the reason behind a mysterious attack on the national archives .

  Outside it was sunny with a fresh breeze. The hint of a cold evening was in the air. It tugged at Anselm’s hair and cleared his mind. And the first insight to crash home was that the luxurious showers of the Warsaw Hilton didn’t work. There’d been lots of levers, high pressure and free, heavily scented shampoo, but their combined force had failed to shift the dirt beneath Anselm’s skin. The Prior had seen this coming. He’d warned him about Brack’s world. He’d said it was a dangerous place. Anselm was reminded of those big mistakes in life where all you can do is accept what’s happened, hoping the years to come will remove the dreadful sense of failure. Anselm’s meeting with Frenzel belonged in the same camp, even though he’d had no choice but to sit near him and feel the cold, lap-lapping of xenophobia.’ anti-Semitism, and racism, that hint of homophobia showing what else he’d discover if he stayed in the mud much longer. The man was a swamp and Anselm had only just about managed to crawl to the bank. But he’d still failed. Before leaving he should have tipped the bucket of shells over Frenzel’s head.

  The second insight to crash home — with the force of a motorway pile-up — was that Frenzel had confirmed an important element in Anselm’s deconstruction of Róża’s statement. They’d agreed about something. It was like a pact in hell. They were, in a limited sense, companions in thought. Crossing the road as if to escape the consuming fire, Anselm let his mind run over the remaining, untarnished conclusions.

  The single most important characteristic in Róża’s narrative — the pattern behind the words — was the primacy of children. They determined her engagement with events (nonexistent, save and except for the fall of ‘sparrows’ and ‘The Blood of Children’). They established her viewpoint (exclusively focused on the growth of Bernard from boy to man).They coloured her phraseology (‘children on the line’). They ordered her priorities and interests, sometimes to an absurd degree (Helena’s pregnancy over a potential Russian invasion). They determined her moment of action (a traumatic home birth), who acted (initially the childless) as well as the manner of their acting (the use of prams). There were other instances, all springing from this fundamental authorial orientation. In terms of Róża’s vocabulary ‘child’ or ‘children’ occurred 16 times, ‘boy’ 7 times, ‘girl’ twice, and ‘son’ once.

  Children. They kept turning up like boils on Job’s back. Why?

  Anselm was cautious in his judgement. The text beneath the text, the deeper depth, evidently disclosed a primitive yearning; an obsession. For an instant, Anselm was transported to a smoky basement near Finsbury Park.

  He’d fallen silent once again, leaving John to twiddle his thumbs. The guest singer had just finished a soul tearing rendition of a Billie Holiday number, a lament about unrestrained murder in the south. To hear it more than once, Anselm followed her from club to club. After each performance he couldn’t speak. John presu
med it was on account of the singer and not the song.

  ‘You’re obsessed,’ he declared.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Trust me. All obsessions stem from unfulfilled longing.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Yep. Without treatment, you turn really boring and fat and sad.’

  ‘Is this the voice of experience?’

  ‘It is. And you, my friend, have turned. You’ve curdled.’

  Anselm woke to the sounds and sights around him. The singer had gone, leaving behind the echo of ‘Strange Fruit’, that Marseillaise of the oppressed. Disorientated, he looked to his left. He’d reached a vast building, an improbable hybrid of the Empire State Building and the Vatican. A glance at John’s guidebook told him this was the Palace of Culture and Science, a 40-million brick monument to ‘the inventive spirit and social progress’ donated by the one-time Soviet overlord. Statues with stern expressions gazed down from the entrance facade. Like Billie they didn’t look too pleased with how things had turned out.

  ‘Nor do you, Róża,’ muttered Anselm, pressing on.

  To use John’s expression, she’d ‘turned’. A deep sadness lay beneath her words. It had soaked into the paper of her statement, persuading Anselm that if Róża was to be restored, deeply and comprehensively, then she’d need more than a colour picture of Otto Brack in a prison cell. She’d need to deal with this underlying longing linked to children: their absence, caused by the brutal murder of her husband, Which brought Anselm face to face with his own mission, and its importance: to find the informer and persuade them to co-operate with an abused and abandoned widow There was nothing left for Róża to hope for. Anselm instantly rehearsed the final part of his telephone conversation with Sebastian. It had not gone smoothly.

  ‘Frenzel doesn’t think FELIKS was the informer.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Bernard.’ his son.’

  ‘If the cap fits, make him wear it.’

  There’d been a note of impatience in his voice. Sebastian hadn’t quite chimed with Anselm’s disgust at the man who loved the taste of the sea.

  ‘Easier said than done,’ Anselm had replied. ‘If Bernard handed over Róża in a bid to get out of prison, the whole truth would have to come out: that Edward had made the same move.’ years back, to save Bernard’s education. It’s not a pretty picture. I doubt if Bernard would look at it for long … not after he sees the blood drain from his mother’s face.’

  ‘That’s not your problem.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Because Brack made it Róża’s problem.’

  Sebastian’s replies had been quick and mechanical, like the fall of a guillotine blade. He didn’t seem to realise that Róża would have to be there for any public execution of Bernard: she’d have to stand with the baying crowd.

  It was an eventuality that would almost certainly come to pass. This was the unhappy point at which Anselm and Frenzel had found an uncomfortable agreement. If Róża’s statement was meant to guide John to the door of the informer — and it was — then the use of names would be an important feature. Numerically, Father Nicodem Kaminsky was top of the list with 20 references, but he could be excluded from suspicion because of his direct link to the Shoemaker. It was Bernard who clocked in next with 14. Edward staggered home with a mere five. All the signs suggested that the rebel student who’d once defended Professor Kołakowski had switched sides when the struggle turned personal. He’d kept his place in Solidarity but he’d changed irrevocably: he’d become Brack’s man, for the love of a child born into a crisis.

  Anselm shelved his deliberations. He’d arrived at the crime scene.

  Mokotów prison had all the demoralising features that characterise any place of detention: high surrounding walls, the dull brick curiously hard on the eye; stolid buildings set back with narrow, dark windows; a heavy sense of compressed humanity; the embodiment of architectural aggression. It was all fancy, of course, but Anselm had the impression that birds didn’t fly over the leaden airspace.

  As site—visits go, Anselm wasn’t expecting to discover much. But buildings speak. They, too, have a memory, and he wanted to listen to the echoes of Róża’s time. He began by examining the species of trees that flanked the perimeter walls, all the while turning to check the rows of windows sufficiently elevated to afford a view on to any foliage. After half an hour he found himself back at the main entrance, a large blue gate almost as high as the wall of yellow bricks. There’d been no cherry trees. Not one.

  Suddenly the low buzz of an electric surge came from the gate’s lock mechanism. The iron clanged and scraped. Moments later a straggling group of relatives left the premises. They were mainly women, several pushing a pram or holding a boy or girl by the hand. Apart from one or two joking teenagers, their facial expressions wore shades of darkness, the tell-tale hollows of dejection. Anselm had arrived in time to catch the end of visiting time, the departure of innocents torn apart by the crimes of someone they loved.

  He stepped off the pavement to make some room, but a woman lunged towards him, someone whose age and appearance fell somewhere between the laughing youngsters and the gloomier adults. Her skin was pocked and smudged with make-up. She wore tight stonewashed jeans and white, dirty trainers. The long, red tongue on a Rolling Stones T-shirt seemed to stick out beyond the open, padded jacket. She grabbed Anselm’s arms, her eyes drawn to his habit. For a moment he thought he was back at Wormwood Scrubs, or any of the other prisons where he’d bumped into the people who stuck by his clients. The young woman spoke quickly, shoulders hunched, one hand jabbing at the monolith behind her, as if she hoped to punch a hole in the State’s defences. She began to cry, tattooed fingers tidying her hair as if improving her appearance might sway Anselm’s mind. What did she want? An advocate? Prayers? A miracle?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Anselm. ‘I don’t understand … I’m a stranger … I’m just passing by.’

  On hearing his voice, realising that he didn’t speak her language, she suddenly stopped crying. Her emotions were sucked back inwards. A numb, glazed appearance displaced the turbulence. Looking through Anselm, she pushed past him on to the street and wandered aimlessly away.

  Anselm looked down and saw that his hands were shaking. Powerlessness doesn’t erase a sense of responsibility, and he felt he owed something to the woman whose cries had fallen on ears attuned to desperation but not meaning. She’d given him something important, even if he didn’t recognise it. In a most dramatic and disturbing way, she was, for him, Róża Mojeska. The past had returned to the present, and Anselm had been there to see her walk away from Otto Brack. He’d seen all the women walk out of all the prisons in the world.

  At that very moment, Anselm received a sort of kick to the stomach. Deconstructive insights aside, he at last understood why he’d found something incongruous with Róża’s statement. It was obvious, really.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The rich crimson carpet of the lobby bar reminded Anselm of the fractured pattern in the restaurant, making him wonder if Frenzel was nearby, listening while he licked his fingers. The interior design people had plumped heavily for variants of red. Scarlet fixtures, ruby lights, cherry napkins. The choice seemed incongruous. Anselm would’ve picked green. Something to do with spring. Outside the evening sky was a tender, pale orange, visible through vast glass panelling.

  Before turning to the question of money raised by Frenzel.’ Anselm decided to resume his last conversation with Sebastian. The driven lawyer had listened on the phone to Anselm’s anger and disgust with the former SB officer, but there’d been too many moments of silence on the line and too few return shots of indignation. Anselm had waited, bracing himself, but the ball had simply died on the other side of the net. He wanted to know why He sensed a rift between them.

  ‘Strange man, Frenzel,’ began Anselm, pouring fizzy water into two glasses, making sure the distribution was fair.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t imagine how his m
ind works.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’m still intrigued.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the dark places? Don’t you want to understand why he does what he does?’

  ‘No.’

  Dressed in tatty jeans, split trainers and an expensive pink shirt, Sebastian looked as if he owned the place and was thinking of selling. He sat, elbow on the chair rest, his hand locked in his tousled black hair. Anselm advanced a little further.

  ‘You surprise me. Maybe it’s just a monk’s view on to the mental engine, but I wouldn’t mind a quick look beneath the bodywork to see the state of his shock-absorbers.’ Anselm watched the irritation grow on Sebastian’s face. The lawyer reached for his glass as if he didn’t like water.

  ‘He handled people’s lives as if they were tools in a drawer,’ resumed Anselm, carelessly ‘He blunted them, one by one, and then threw them away Even now he’d pick up some chipped and broken file if he needed it to force open a window’

  ‘But he got results.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Anselm had arrived at the fault line between them. He played out the surprise, giving Sebastian room to show where he was standing and why.

  ‘What do you mean, results?’

  ‘He found out what he needed to know He opened windows. He got inside without having to kick down the front door. The alarm didn’t go off. The kids were left sleeping upstairs.’