‘Why not?’
‘He can’t be trusted. He breaks rules.’ An ironic smile warped his face. ‘And I’m not sure he’d want to marry into the family you know what I mean? Your connection to me might put him off. Christmas with the in-law? I don’t think so. That’s why I’m going to keep well out of the picture. Frankly it’s better for him and for you if he leaves Warsaw thinking he’s some kind of hero.’ Shaking his head in dismay he looked down at the journal. ‘Put that thing back with his socks, will you? He really should have listened.’
Celina wondered what would happen next. She was fearful and loath to be dependent on him. ‘Will you find her … this woman?’
‘Me?’ He walked to the chair and shrugged on his overcoat. ‘No, you will.’
‘What?’
‘Who else?’
‘But what can I do?’ Celina was crouched on her chair, looking up.
‘Save him from himself, like I saved you. Do what you don’t want to do, for his good. Forget yourself. Co-operate with me.’
‘But I can’t follow him.’
‘No. And you can’t ask him either.’
‘What then?’
Celina’s father made an impatient sigh, as if to say he’d done enough already ‘Why not see if your boyfriend writes something interesting in his journal? For once the damned thing might serve some good purpose … it’ll keep all three of you out of prison. Find some other way if you like. It’s up to you. I’ll help, but this time you’ve got to pull your weight. You can reach me on five-five-eight-seven-six.’
The fire crackled and spat.
‘Do you see what he was doing? What he did?’ Celina’s voice rose slightly ‘He’d already been to you. He’d already sent you towards Róża. You’d already found her, and so he came to me. I didn’t know, I suspected nothing.’
Róża made the slightest moan, so low and so unobtrusive that in other circumstances it wouldn’t have been noticed. But here, in this vast yet cramped room, it was as though a flagstone had cracked. Something immense was disintegrating within Róża. But there was no collapse. Her eyes were on John, bleeding with emotion.
‘I read your journal.’ Celina’s admission came like a tearing at the mouth. ‘I knew where you’d been and where you were going.’
She’d read it every day worried that time was ebbing away; that her father would come back to arrest them both. She finally learned of a planned meeting by the grave of Prus. Celina was whispering now She’d dialled Brack’s number as if she were lodging a complaint at the passport office. It had been a quick, cold call.
They were silent.
The truth, at last, was out. The informer used by Brack had been his own daughter … but Anselm was running now, following the fizz of the burning fuse, head down, not seeing where he was going. Brack had told Róża the name of the informer and what they’d been doing for years. And that had silenced her … but why? She’d never met Celina. Brack’s delinquent child couldn’t be that significant.
‘You came home beaten by them,’ said Celina, carefully unfolding the tissue. ‘The next day I didn’t go to the censor. I rang my father. We met in the cemetery.’
Celina had sent him back to Prus, to where he’d betrayed her. She’d hit him hard across the face. His head had flown back with the force of the blow, but, on righting himself, he’d hardly seemed present. One calm hand had gone into his drab overcoat and he’d taken out a passport.
‘I threw it on the floor.’ Celina dabbed the corners of her eyes. ‘I wanted my freedom but not thanks to him. Then, when I came home, the phone rang. They’d given you two days. You asked me to come. You made a call for a passport.’ She clutched the tissue as if it were a shred of hope. ‘Was it the embassy?’
‘No.’
‘Five—five—eight—seven-six?’
‘Yes.’
Everything was ready thought Anselm, awed. Everyone had been put into position. Everyone had been moved. Polana was a game of wit and patience for three or more players. Waddington’s couldn’t have dreamed up the goal, the rules or the cost. Brack had won. But only because Celina’s importance was …
‘I couldn’t speak at the trial, John, because it was me who’d got you thrown out of Warsaw’ Celina was looking at her daisy again. ‘I left because I knew I couldn’t remain and keep the lie going, year on year. I’m sorry.
We’d both lost out, she seemed to say Something simple and beautiful had died, without even withering. Celina turned to Róża, her face anguished. Her hands came together. ‘I’m sorry I brought him to you. To this day I don’t know what my father was doing, or why’
Anselm wasn’t entirely sure that Róża was breathing. Her thumb had stopped moving. Her face remained drawn and shadowed; her eyes were open; the stare fixed. John seemed to look back, yet neither was really looking at the other. Why was Róża looking at John?
‘He was saving himself,’ replied Róża from her inner refuge.
‘But from what?’ asked Celina. ‘Why use me to get to John, and John to get to you?’
‘He was frightened.’
‘What of?’
‘The claims of the law My claims, those of my husband … and those of …’
My child. The fuse went phut just as the word burst inside Anselm’s mouth.
He sat, lips apart, as if watching torn clods fall in slow motion to the ground: he recalled what Róża had said in the bright light of what she had not said. There and then an elemental fusion took place in Anselm’s mind between the deeper depth of Róża’s statement and its surface meaning: Róża’s child lay beneath the page on blank blue paper, its name the one name she’d refused to disclose on the surface of the page.
‘I’ve understood, Róża,’ he said. ‘I know what happened in nineteen fifty-three.’
Disclosing certain tragedies can’t be done slowly There can be no cushioning. But Anselm was going to try He reached over and took one of Róża’s hands in his. Watching the tears spill free, he said, deliberately and slowly ‘Celina, Otto Brack is not your father.’
Anselm could feel the impact of his words. They’d crashed into Celina and a stunned hush had bounced back. As if he needed any confirmation, Anselm felt the slightest pressure from Róża’s fingers.
‘He’s not your father,’ repeated Anselm, even more slowly. ‘And your mother never sat in the corner lost in a puzzle, not minding what the day might bring. She minded more than she’ll ever be able to say.
Anselm couldn’t speak any more. The fire snapped and murmured, sending sparks upwards in a spray of light.
Chapter Forty-Three
There were many images and sounds, all seared into Anselm’s memory, which kept him awake that night. His mind became a screen showing nothing but the moments any censor of discretion would have cut and hid away — the parts where the actors broke down while the camera was running; the elements of tragedy best left to inference, for fear they unsettle any respectful observer. Sophocles knew his stuff: Oedipus tore his eyes out off stage; all the audience got was a man with blood streaming down his face. There are certain things you’re just not meant to see.
What was the more harrowing: the moment when Róża, trembling with fear, timidity and courage, took Celina’s hand from his? Or was it the slow, seeping words when Róża — her eyes closed, her head bent in an attitude of veneration and penitence — said, over and over again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’? ‘For what?’ mumbled Celina, confused and overcome. ‘For having failed you, for having let you go, for not being there as you grew and changed, changed so much.’ Anselm had been rigid, choking. Róża had nothing but a frayed string of lost years, and now this, this moment of regret and misery and jubilation with her daughter. So much to explain; so much to understand — with so much more time behind than was left in front. She’d looked so terribly alone, like a passenger who’d been left behind on the platform.
Or was it immediately afterwards when Celina, disorientated, asked about her
father — when Róża had to explain in simple, direct words that he was dead, that he’d been shot? By the man who’d taken his place in her life.
‘I tried to find you,’ said Róża. ‘But I’d let you go without a name, to set you free. I didn’t know where you were until Brack told me what he’d done. But in telling me, he knew I couldn’t come to you. I couldn’t bring you the truth, because I knew it would be shattering. It’s taken me all these years to understand that it was your right to know, even if it destroyed who you’d become. You had a right to know who you really are. To know what had been done to you, to me and to your father.’
Or was it the sound of Celina’s breathing, catching like a broken zip, the unsteady movement jamming when she tried to reply? She’d taken Róża’s other hand, tears jolting from her eyes. They’d stood like that, motionless, speechless, their arms a kind of low swing bridge between them. Somehow, they had to cross the immeasurable distance, finding their own balance, all the while terrified of a fall, of some weak plank breaking underfoot.
If Anselm was forced to choose it would have been a quiet moment late next morning, seen by accident from the kitchen window It was the sight of Celina leading Róża through the crisp snow to her car parked beneath Larkwood’s plum trees. They moved cautiously fearing a sudden slip on hidden ice. Celina had one arm around Róża’s shoulder, the other holding her elbow, their heads leaning close together. Anselm had lingered, thinking that Róża had suddenly and dramatically aged. It wasn’t necessarily a dark thought, but he knew she was ready to die.
After Celina’s car had turned out of the gate, its occupants beginning the longest journey of their lives, Anselm, John and Sebastian — boots and coats borrowed where necessary — went for a long walk in the woods. They were white, silent and deep, every branch collared and tied with icicles and snow Feet crunched along hidden paths known only to Anselm; voices rose, gathering in the facts, an occasional outburst of anger echoing through the forest.
They spoke of the criminal Otto Brack.
In 1951, protected by the State, he’d shot two men. Threatened by a widow with future justice, he’d tricked her into letting go of her child as if it were an act of sacrifice. But he’d secretly taken the new life as his own, knowing that in the years to come the widow could never touch him without harming her own child: for who could tell their child that the man they hold as their father is, in fact, his killer?
Then, in 1982, when the possibility of overthrow first reared its head, Brack had organised Operation Polana, its goal to catch the Shoemaker; its secondary purpose to find Róża and tell her what he’d done: to warn her of the cost of justice. To give her a passport. To push her beyond arm’s length.
They spoke of Celina, the child abandoned by the woman who wasn’t her mother.
By using her Brack had secured her eventual silence, in the event that she ever learned of her past. A snide remark from the likes of Frenzel, if he’d ever uncovered the adoption, might have sent her on a quest. At its term she’d have learned that the woman in John’s journal was her mother: a woman she had betrayed. Brack had silenced mother and daughter with reciprocal shame. Even Sophocles, the specialist in unusual parent—child issues, hadn’t thought of that one.
And they spoke of the victim Róża Mojeska.
For thirty years she’d believed that Celina was proximate, if not close, to Brack. That she believed him to be her father. How had she grown? Who had she become? Róża had been paralysed by two conflicting imperatives, each with a moral character: to speak or not to speak; the claims of the truth as against the benefits of ignorance. Ultimately she’d recognised Celina’s rights.
But there was more to it than that.
Brack’s scheme exploited the natural bond between a mother and her child. He knew that Róża would choose silence rather than damage her daughter with information she need not know She’d been trapped by love. But Sebastian had urged her to do the last thing Brack would expect: to give her another reason for living. The challenge had led Róża to realise that shielding her daughter from the truth was many things — pity, compassion, mercy self-sacrifice — but it wasn’t love. So she’d set her hand to the unthinkable task of wounding her own child. But it had to be done with enormous care. As a preliminary, she needed the smallest indication from her daughter that she was prepared to talk about her past and the shadow of her presumed father. For that, Róża needed the gentle touch of an intermediary Which brought them on to her statement — that implement crafted to help her representative.
Frankly as an identification tool, it hadn’t worked. But as an example of moral technology it had the qualities often ascribed to Audi engineering. It ran smoothly to its destination; and so quietly you might not know it had arrived. Vorsprung durch Technik. Róża had placed Celina’s collaboration in its complete context: against the backdrop of the Shoemaker operation, fully described, showing, in effect, that she had done nothing to compromise its aims. Crucially she had not used her name. She’d asked about the film-maker as often as John had asked about the Shoemaker. This had been the one, decisive clue.
They came back to Larkwood chattering with cold, enchanted by the magic of the woods. John and Sebastian left for Cambridge railway station like old friends, a certain complicity between them as Sebastian explained the next steps to be taken upon his return to Warsaw: the obtaining of a witness statement from Róża to be followed by the arrest, charge and prosecution of Otto Brack.
‘You’ll keep me informed?’ asked John.
‘As matters develop:
It was as though John worked at the IPN. The only question was who had the senior position.
As Anselm drove slowly back from the station to Larkwood, minding snow drifts, distracted now and then by the magnificence of blank fields at evening, his thoughts turned to something that hadn’t been explored during that walk in the woods: the mind of Otto Brack.
On the plane out to Warsaw, Anselm had thought about the mystery of the man’s character: how he’d ever come to use good for evil ends. He’d been curious as a man might leaf through a textbook, seeking a simple explanation for why the moral cells broke down. But that was then, on the plane. He now knew what lay in Brack’s dangerous world. He couldn’t contain his meditation or understand its direction. He sought out the Prior, ostensibly to report back on the outcome of the Round Table talks, finding him once more in the woodshed. This time there was no work. Anselm sat on the piano stool, the Prior on the chopping block. He spoke the inimitable phrase:
‘Go to the end of your concerns.
As ever the Prior was inscrutable, not reacting when told of John’s innocence, nor seeking any tribute for being right about John’s intentions in coming to Anselm (he knew about Lebanon Cedars, why they fell and the direction of their grain). His only response was a sharp contraction of the eyebrows when Anselm explained the mechanism and consequences of Brack’s plan. As if they were both seated in its shadow, Anselm moved directly on to the matter that troubled him. It was a kind of fear.
‘I think I’ve been naive.’
‘Never accuse yourself on that score.’
‘No. I’ve been naive about evil, as if it wasn’t there. I’ve always tried to excuse it away you know, defeat it by pretending it’s not what it is. When I was at the Bar, I told myself the only reason one man brutalised another without any regret is because deep down he hadn’t made a free choice … he’d been beaten and starved as a child, he’d gone to the wrong school, made the wrong friends, and in the end, there’d been a screw loose in his free will. Or maybe he believed — sincerely but wrongly — that unrestrained violence was just one of the more unusual ways of doing something good. I still want to hold on to these … difficult routes to mercy.
‘And?’
‘Well, a part of me wants to find the path to Brack’s actions, precisely because what he has done is unconscionable. What happened to him, that he could do such things? Was he abused and deprived or does he just thin
k wrongly? Alternatively is he that which scares me most, and which I’ve dared not consider — a simply evil man, with all the screws intact, none too loose, none too tight, a man who can’t blame his circumstances.’ Anselm hesitated, ashamed. ‘He killed men as if they were animals. He treated women as if they were rags to clean the mess off the floor. And now he turns the pages of a stamp album lamenting the gaps in his collection. And yet I still want to know if there remains in the darkness a narrow route to mercy.
The Prior reached down and picked up some wood shavings and splinters. He began sifting them through his fingers as if he were looking for something. Finally he let them drop and dusted dry his hands.
‘I’m no Father Zossima, Anselm,’ he said. ‘I’m no wiser than you, no more foolish, but I’m sure of this: evil, simply present? You’ll never understand it and neither will I. Ultimately that’s what evil is … it’s something bad without an explanation. Which is why it’s terrifying. And as for mercy in the dark — well, what is salvation if not a light greater than all the shadows, something good which cannot be explained? It, too, can be terrifying. I doubt if men like Otto Brack would dare to look in its direction.’
The Prior’s words stayed with Anselm for the remainder of the day He saw the wood chips falling from his hand, back on to the floor. And he saw Róża in a completely different light. For the naming of Brack as Brack, without any understanding or indulgence, revealed who she’d been up against, and the scale of her accomplishment in stepping through and beyond the suffering he’d prepared for her. She’d trusted again, in the full knowledge that things can end badly She brought the truth to light knowing that Celina would be harmed and that she might reject her. She’d trusted in something stronger than his hate. She was simply a good woman.
Over the following months, Anselm waited apprehensively to learn of outcomes. As ever, he was encouraged to learn that evil, named and exposed, always loses some of its power.
The Day of the Lie Page 28