The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  ‘Tadek – anyone know what became of him?’

  ‘Okay, he’s okay. Tell you another day.’

  ‘So you came all this way, just about Helen’s visa?’

  ‘Well, no, not that. Sorry, but there’s not much we can do. Don’t even have the right to contact her, if she’s not a British subject.’

  ‘But she’s here, you have just contacted her!’

  ‘No, it’s you I came to contact.’

  There was a silence. Helen and I stared at her.

  ‘Mike, don’t be such a dope. Don’t you remember – “somebody will contact you”? Is there another room where we can talk?’

  ‘No! But I’ll leave you to it.’ Helen gathered up the book and the boy.

  ‘Margaret, so you are the “somebody”! But then you aren’t really a diplomat. You...’

  We both heard another car draw up outside, and then another. The sound of running steps in the snow. Margaret had time to clutch my sleeve and say: ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Oh God, they must have...’ before the men raced up the steps and crowded into the kitchen.

  I don’t recall it very clearly. Leather jackets, two uniforms. The Polish woman from upstairs beginning to scream and sob. They shouted ‘Where’s your transmitter? Where’s your gun?’ Helen ran back into the kitchen as they began to hit me. I yelled in English: ‘Get out, get back to our room’, but she tried to kick one of the men in uniform and took a backhander across the face that flung her against the wall.

  Margaret was waving her diplomatic passport as she was bundled out of the house and into a car. The other raiders began a house search, tearing out the kitchen drawers and emptying them on the floor. I saw Mrs Papadakis holding Hughie against her leg and stroking his hair; she looked back at me grimly, without compassion. As they handcuffed me and shoved me towards the door, I called to her: ‘Look after her, look after the boy!’

  She nodded slightly. Helen was sitting on the kitchen floor, knees drawn up, a bloody handkerchief to her nose. Our eyes did not meet as they took me out. It was many years before I saw her again.

  *

  Solitary confinement was not the worst. I hardly remember it as a place, a cell; there was nothing to remember. If I had been younger, it might have destroyed me. But at the outset I looked carefully at my single bleeding wound: fear and guilt about Helen and the small boy. I looked and, seeing that there was nothing I could do about it, made myself consider the wound as a deep slash, perhaps in my thigh, which would scab over and cease hurting if I kept my fingers off it.

  Some people can command their dreams. I had a routine of exercises on the cell floor, pre-selected day-dreaming and mental gymnastics, and then self-directed sleep from which nightmares were banned. But the censorship was not completely vigilant, I’ll admit. Very often, in day-dream or night-dream, I saw a burning ship slowly twisting in pain, or a dead ship enlaced by rushing, indifferent water.

  Prison was horrible and foul, but the best word is ‘wretched’. The horror stopped after some time, the foulness came to seem unremarkable, but I remained for those years something less than fully human: a wretch.

  The first interrogators, in the first weeks, wanted to know about Captain Tadeusz Ostrowski – Tadek. They knew we had been close, trained together to parachute into Poland. What had his mission been? What was mine now?

  On the pretext of helping to liberate the country from the Germans, they assured me, his real purpose had been to set up an anti-Soviet spy and terrorist network. Equally obviously, my mission was to make contact with agent Ostrowski and his sabotage ring. When and where? Where was the transmitter I must have brought from London? Why did Lady Campbell visit me from the British Embassy in Warsaw?

  They were telling me, in effect, that Tadek had escaped. In return, I tried offering a version of the truth: I had no idea where he was, I had come back in good faith to rebuild my country, Margaret was just an old friend from Scotland. They scoffed. No, they didn’t torture in the classical sense – electrodes, fingernails, that stuff. But they hit me with fists and sticks, then left me naked in an unheated cell in the Polish winter. They did that several times, for a day and a night each time.

  They were amateurs, really. In the years that followed, experienced fellow prisoners shook their heads and laughed: no professional would interrogate a Figurant, a suspect, straight after torture or the ice-box treatment. How could anything reliable be gained? But after the last ‘refrigeration’ I was wrapped in a blanket and hustled upstairs to the interrogation room. There some fool offered me a cigarette and I passed out on the floor in front of them before they had a chance to ask a question.

  There were usually three or four of them. One, a young fair-haired officer, wore Soviet uniform with a row of medals and the others deferred to him. He never spoke in my presence, but took notes. After my last appearance, I was carried to a new cell in the prison sickbay and woke up one afternoon to find this man sitting beside me.

  ‘I don’t speak Russian.’

  ‘No problem, I’m as Polish as you are. Why this uniform? Very complicated story, which began long ago in Moscow. But I have something to show you.’

  It was a bedraggled little document, clearly German. A sheet of paper enclosing it seemed to be a Russian translation. Opening it, I saw that it was a Nazi soldier’s Wehrpass, in the name of Hans Nuttgen. It was the document I had pulled out of the German tunic Johnston Melville had been wearing, one wet day in Pitnechtan. It was the paybook which I had passed on to Tadek and his fake-papers team, in the secret camp up the road so very long ago. I felt its worn texture, and couldn’t speak.

  ‘Ostrowski was carrying it when we arrested him. A Nazi identity pass.’

  ‘Because he thought he would be fighting Germans with our partisans. It would get him through checkpoints...’

  ‘I know that. You know that. But the old bitch who is president of the court will use it for one of her death sentences, when he’s caught again. Where is he, by the way?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Our view is that hanging and shooting for this sort of thing has become counter-productive. Some of the Polish comrades don’t agree. We’ll have to deal with them, but it’s delicate.’

  He pulled the Wehrpass out of my fingers and slipped it carefully into his briefcase. ‘I wonder if we could arrange to lose this. Returned to Moscow, retained for analysis... something like that. What do you say?’

  ‘Why ask me?’

  He looked at me. I must have been a repellent sight: bruised and leaking eyes, missing some teeth, bald-shaven. But his look was calm.

  ‘You’ll get life, not death – I can see to that, because of the uniform I’m wearing. It’ll mean a few bad years. I know the real reason you came back to Poland: not to be a capitalist saboteur, but because of that nonsense about the French ship. But I think there was something else, too. Something you and I share, Szczucki. I’m talking to you about hope for our ojczyzna – our country. And I don’t mean Russia.’

  He lowered his eyes. ‘There are terrible years ahead. The people who are taking absolute power now are scoundrels, who get their orders from... somewhere else. But even in the Party, there are still many of us who think differently. And our day will come.’

  He rose to go. ‘I don’t need to say this. One word to anyone about this conversation, and I will see that the Moscow friends – not the Polish comrades – transfer you to a place beyond the Arctic Circle.’

  ‘My wife? Can you help her?’

  But he left the cell without turning round.

  I am still not sure of his real name. But much later I met other convicts who had been in the Home Army and were interrogated in the same prison. They talked about a man they nicknamed ‘Fox’, a Pole in Soviet NKVD uniform.

  ‘They say he turned informer against other Polish prisoners, in one of the Pechora camps in the Soviet Union. So they made him an NKVD captain and Soviet citizen, the son of a bitch. Guess what I’ll do with those medals, if I ever see h
im again...’

  *

  I did see him again. It was after the terrible years. They came, but there were not so many of them and their weight – police terror, lies, hunger – fell mostly on people outside. I was inside. After receiving my life sentence for plotting anti-state activities, there was time spent in a filthy but adequately heated prison built in the Tsarist years. Then forced labour in coal mines, the construction of a sulphur works, building a dam in the Tatra foothills. At my age, in my forties with a limp, I usually ended up doing storeman’s work, with a stove in the background, rather than outdoor manual labour.

  When I saw him again, Stalin was long dead. A year after that happy event, somebody put me on a list for revision of political sentences. A year later still, pallid but free, I was allocated a tiny room in Warsaw and a job translating articles for a foreign-language magazine. In the office, I drank vodka with rowdy young journalists who jeered at Soviet art and listened to American jazz on Radio Free Europe.

  Everybody was angry. Everything was coming apart. Men and women long given up for dead came walking from the east with tiny rucksacks, staring at the new buildings.

  Everything forbidden had meaning. One evening I went to a cellar-club where a boy was reading Spinoza aloud to the music of a saxophone, while a girl student stood on a table and gravely stripped her clothes off. Upstairs, on the street, long queues were waiting for special editions at the newspaper kiosks. Hungary was in revolution. Soviet tanks were said to be on the move towards our own cities.

  It was the next day that I saw him. Half a million people with Hungarian flags and Polish flags had come to the marble plain outside the Palace of Culture. They were singing; they wanted to attack, to burn. They cheered our new Party leader as he shouted in his shrill old voice that all our internal affairs would now be decided only by ourselves, and that Comrade Khrushchev had agreed. They cheered, but then chanted ‘Budapest! Budapest!’ As they chanted, I suddenly saw my old interrogator.

  His blond hair was parted in the middle now, and he wore a patriotic red-white armband. Standing on the plinth beside the new leader, in a row of unfamiliar faces, he seemed to be laughing with joy and excitement.

  I asked a journalist: ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s Witold Kaniewski. Incredible man! He took over the press section of the Central Committee today. He’s going to abolish all censorship tomorrow. Witek, Witek!’

  He glanced towards us, but I don’t suppose he saw me. The October evening was growing dark. The newspapers did indeed print what they pleased for about a year. But then the new leader brought back censorship, and the security police resumed their duties. Kaniewski, if that was his true name, lost his job and was expelled from the Party. He hung around the Warsaw cafés for a few months, then vanished for ever.

  A few years ago, I met a visiting Warsaw editor who had worked under him during that ‘Polish October’, and I mentioned my own memories. He became furious: it was inconceivable that Witek could ever have been a Soviet intelligence officer. But just the other day I told the story to the young Pole who runs Greenock’s best sports shop. ‘So what? Who gives a fuck? All those Communists were Russian agents anyway.’

  *

  When it seemed safe, I went to the British Embassy. For a time, after that October, it was not too hard to get a passport to go to the West, so I applied for a British visa. But I had other questions to which the Embassy might have answers and, although the Consulate staff grew impatient with me, a very young, pink-faced diplomat eventually trotted downstairs to see what I wanted.

  He had never heard of a Margaret Beaton-Campbell on the Embassy staff. I said that perhaps she hadn’t been exactly a diplomat. He gave me a helpful smile but said that he wasn’t sure what I meant. Anyway, nobody of that name had been around in his time.

  I asked about British war brides. Instantly, he brightened up (he was a nice boy, really). What a story that had been! As years of police terror set in, soldiers who had returned from the West had been arrested, leaving their young Scottish and English wives abandoned in distant villages – often pregnant or with tiny children, not speaking Polish, penniless and treated as spies by local Party officials. But because they had given up their British citizenship in order to marry foreigners, the Embassy had no right to help or even to contact them.

  ‘So the Embassy raised hell back home, we really did – got a lot of MPs on our side. The girls’ families were often their constituents, after all. Anyway, the Labour government rushed through a new Nationality Act making the wives British subjects again, so we could get out there and help them. And our chaps went whizzing about those frightful roads in Embassy cars, clutching wads of new British passports. Wish I’d seen that, but it was all before my time.’

  Yes, he could probably find out about Helen, if nobody had thrown the papers away yet. Take a day or so.

  But the truth was that I knew already what had happened to Helen. When I was released, I had written to Mabel Melville in Greenock, and after several months a letter from her told me that Jackie was at Glasgow University but that Helen and Hughie were in Canada. I wrote to the Ontario address she gave me, and eventually an oversize postcard of Niagara Falls came back to Warsaw.

  She was working as manageress in a Toronto hotel. Hughie was big and a fair devil at the hockey. I couldn’t imagine the ‘fun and games in that town of yours before my exit’, but that must wait till she saw me. But she didn’t say when or where that might be, and she answered my long next letter only with a musical Christmas card which hoped I was keeping well and warm. Somebody had damaged the card when opening the envelope to see if it contained dollars, and its music was only a rusty yelp which reminded me of Helen’s laugh.

  So I knew the basics: Helen had gone, from this country and from me. But I somehow needed to see her footprint, the paperwork of her departure, all that remained to prove that we had really been here together.

  When I went back to the Embassy, it was a different, middle-aged man who was waiting for me. He was civil rather than friendly. But the papers he showed me said that Helen Szczucka-Douglas, aged thirty-eight, had been issued with a British passport for herself and her son in February 1949 and had been assisted by the Consulate with a train fare later that month.

  I thanked him. ‘No, don’t go just yet. I hear you were asking for a Margaret Beaton-Campbell. Can you tell me why you are interested in her?’

  ‘An old friend. From my time in Scotland in the war.’

  ‘Oh, but didn’t you run into her later? In this country, for instance?’

  I knew now what was coming, and what he was. I said: ‘Once. It was in 1947.’

  ‘Yes, well. But now you want to leave, go back to the UK. Are you quite sure about that? I think we could find you some interesting work here, not badly paid either.’

  ‘I am absolutely sure. I don’t want to stay.’

  ‘Well, understandable after what you have been through. Still... look, here’s a telephone number. Just in case you change your mind, eh?’

  Some anxious weeks followed. But the visa was granted, I heard nothing more of the middle-aged man, and on a lovely May morning the train growled reluctantly across the girders of the Spree bridge into West Berlin. In the station, the Bahnhof Zoo, I jumped out and ran to a stall and bought a real banana. Everything smelled different. I felt weightless, child-like.

  *

  Edinburgh? From the Waverley steps I saw it hadn’t changed much. The trams were gone from Princes Street and a few shops had grown fragile glass walls. But the scent of breweries still came on the west wind, past the black fang of the Castle and its rock. And on the pavements, the usual dignified crazies were performing.

  I noticed a perfectly well-dressed man crying and shouting to himself and waving his arms. Further off was a grave fellow equipped for the Flanders trenches in tin hat, gas cape and puttees: his khaki pack and water bottle dangling. I remembered him well.

  To cross Princes Street I had to pass cl
ose to the noisy, weeping man. He snatched at my sleeve. I freed myself, but as I glanced into this face ugly with tears, I realised that it was me that he had been shouting at so madly, for so long. ‘You dear idiot, are you deaf or blind? Is it really you, Maurycy?’

  Tadek had grown a big brown moustache and wore a brown felt hat; he looked like a British country gent. I wept too. We held each other.

  ‘Come on now, what will the Morningside ladies think we are? Meg is over there, in Fuller’s. We both saw you as you came out of the station.’

  Margaret’s embrace smelled like Elysium, or Harrods in London. ‘God, darling, your clothes – you look like an east European refugee. Well, of course you are one.’ She hadn’t changed: still slim, maybe redder in those healthy cheeks.

  They told me Tadek’s story, as we sat at the back of Fuller’s. All around us, ladies had draped their fur coats over chairs. The Edinburgh coffee tasted expensive but weak. Margaret ordered dry little rock cakes which made me cough, but I reached for more of them. I hadn’t eaten that day.

  Tadek had been freed by those guerrilla ‘locals’ Margaret had told me about. They ambushed the police convoy taking him to Warsaw, blew up a road bridge to slow pursuers and gave him a pouch of gold coins. With the money (‘they had a bloody sack of Swiss twenty-franc pieces!’) Tadek had paid to be smuggled over the mountains into Czechoslovakia, where the British consul in Pilsen helped him into the American zone of Germany. All arranged by Margaret and her underground contacts from Warsaw, where she had been not really a diplomat.

  ‘Still a bit hush, even after all this time.’

  Next came a plate of sugar-dusted shortbread fingers.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Well, as soon as Tadzio was out, I mean in London, I resigned. They didn’t like that a bit, but... anyway, we rushed back here and got married in Forfar, and now Tadzio is the laird of Balbrudie. All done up now, that floor mended, even some heating. Tadzio is so good at finding plumbers... But now you have to come and stay. Helen in Canada? But that boy wasn’t yours, right?’