A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” Wilczur tore the filter off another cigarette.

  Szacki knew what he meant. There was no visible tension between them, no argument or stubborn silence. There you had a couple out for walk on an Easter evening. It testified in favour of Budnik’s story that they had spent the holiday period as usual, given each other a dressing-down, she had gone off and… and quite, and what?

  “Didn’t that camera catch her on Monday or Tuesday?” he asked.

  “No, I had two people on the job of looking through everything from that moment until the time the body was found yesterday morning. Every single minute. She’s not there. We checked this camera and another one by the castle – if you want to leave for the city from Katedralna Street you have to go past one of them. The only other way is through the bushes, or over the cathedral wall and across the garden towards the Vistula.”

  “What about the neighbours?”

  “Nothing. But please look at this.”

  The second recording was from a camera on the market square, covering part of a row of restaurants including the Ciżemka, the Staromiejska, the Trzydziestka and that café whose name Szacki had forgotten, because he had never dropped in there. The camera clock showed it was Tuesday, shortly after four in the afternoon. There was nothing going on, just the occasional passer-by hovering about. The door of the Trzydziestka opened and out came Budnik, with two “laptops” – polystyrene food containers – in a transparent plastic bag. He headed energetically towards Mariacka Street, and quickly left the camera’s field of vision.

  Szacki knew perfectly well why Wilczur had shown him this piece of film.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” The old policeman leant back in his chair, pressing himself so far into a dark corner of the room that part of him must have been in the next-door property by now.

  “Very. Because if it’s true that his wife left him on Monday…”

  “Then why on earth take her dinner on Tuesday?”

  “Which would tally of course, but with his first version of events, the totally improbable one that even he has dropped.”

  Wilczur nodded – in the gloom his prominent, pale nose stood out. Szacki was thinking. He had only smoked one cigarette today, so he had two more left. Intuition told him it would be worth saving them for his date with Tatarska, besides which, simply by being in this room he had smoked a packet and a half. Nevertheless, he took out a cigarette. Wilczur gave him a light. Even if he was surprised the prosecutor smoked at all, he didn’t show it. He kept quiet while Szacki tried to sort out the possible scenarios in his head. The pieces went whirling around in his imagination, but each one was from a different set, and he felt as if he were forcing them to fit.

  On Sunday the Budniks were still together. Then he appears on Tuesday at the restaurant and buys two dinners. But she only turns up on Wednesday, as an alabaster corpse in the bushes by the old synagogue. What happened?

  Let’s suppose they really did have a row on Monday. She left, and set off across the fields in a rage towards the Vistula, unobserved by the cameras. There a mysterious madman got hold of her and murdered her. But why in that case did Budnik buy two dinners the next day? Why was there no evidence of a struggle or any attempt to escape on the victim’s body, why was there no sign of any blows?

  Let’s suppose they quarrelled on Monday so badly that Budnik battered his wife. Back a step – there were no marks on the body. Let’s suppose they quarrelled so badly that he smothered her with a pillow that night. Or he murdered her in the cellar and drained out her blood. Back a step, there’s no trace of blood anywhere in the house. In that case he drove her off to a secluded spot, murdered her there – back a step, the cameras hadn’t recorded Budnik leaving by car. He carried her out wrapped in a tight bundle – because once again there aren’t any traces – through the bushes to a secluded spot, murdered her and drained out the blood. To cover his tracks and make everything look normal, on Tuesday he went to the office, and got two dinners in order to have an alibi. That night, he went through the bushes again, dragged her to the other end of the Old Town and left her there. Does that sound credible? Totally and utterly, a thousand times no.

  So maybe let’s suppose he had the plan prepared for ages. That he had a motive which for the time being remains a mystery. He works at the city council, he knows the security system, the layout of the cameras. On Sunday he paraded past the camera, then dragged her out for a walk to a spot near where the body was found. So he wouldn’t have to lug the corpse right across town. He stunned her, murdered her and bled her dry. Once it was all over, he left the body there.

  “However you look at it, it’s clear as shit, isn’t it?” wheezed Wilczur out of his dark corner.

  Szacki agreed. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see any motives or proof, and the murder weapon had turned out to be as sterile as a surgical instrument made ready for an operation.

  “Here’s one more clip,” said Wilczur, pushing the laptop towards him.

  The image on the screen was completely white, the contours of the tenement houses so pale that they were virtually invisible. Szacki was reminded of Silent Hill.

  “Where is that?”

  “Żydowska Street. The camera is on the wall of the synagogue,” – Szacki noticed that Wilczur didn’t use the word “archive” – “set to face the castle. On the right there’s the parking area, and behind that there are the bushes where Mrs Budnik was found. The recording is from Wednesday morning, a few minutes before we were notified. Please watch this.”

  As Szacki watched, several seconds went by, then minutes, then the thin mist cleared a bit as it started to get lighter; now he could see that the camera was above a street, not submerged in a bowl of milk. Suddenly at the bottom of the screen a black semicircle appeared, and Szacki shuddered. The semicircle was advancing down the street, and as it moved away from the camera, it became apparent that it was in fact the upper part of a hat shaped like a bowler, but with a very wide rim. Beneath the hat there was a black coat reaching to the floor, long enough to make it impossible to see any feet or shoes. The effect was ghostly, as the black phantom in the hat levitated for a moment in the grey milk, only to disappear entirely soon after. Szacki rewound the image and pressed pause. He very much wanted it to remind him of something else, but there was no helping it – there, floating in the mist shrouding Żydowska Street in Sandomierz, was the phantom of a Hasidic Jew.

  He looked at Wilczur.

  “Of course you know what used to be there in those bushes where they found Mrs Budnik,” wheezed the policeman.

  “The city walls?”

  “First of all, they were higher up, and secondly, a long time ago, so you’re wrong. It was the kirkut – her corpse was lying right at the very centre of the old Jewish cemetery.”

  The cold evening air was like medicine, an antidote for the “Town Hall” bar. Szacki took a deep breath, while Wilczur tied a scarf around his neck and lit a cigarette. Behind them a door crashed shut, one of the tramps came out and was now looking at them hesitantly.

  “Mr Officer…”

  “Give me a break, Gąsiorowski. How many times is it now? And it always ends the same way, right?”

  “I know, Mr Officer, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But it’s a week now since Anatol’s been gone.”

  “Gąsiorowski, have pity on us. The police chase vagrants away, they don’t go looking for them. And certainly not tramps from another county.”

  “But—”

  “But there’s nothing more to say. Goodbye.”

  The tramp disappeared behind a door. Szacki gave Wilczur an enquiring look, but he was in no hurry to explain, and Szacki realized he didn’t have to know about every woe besetting the provincial police. They said a perfunctory goodnight.

  “We must find out where Elżbieta’s blood is,” said Szacki, doing up the collar of his coat. It was icy cold again.

  “In the matzos,” mu
ttered Wilczur and dissolved into the darkness.

  VII

  The windows are open, letting in a slight chill and the scent of the night. The antlers are asleep on the walls, and there are patches of blue light lurking under the tables, on the coat hooks and in the mirrors. My face looms out of the looking glass, as if from the bottom of a well. I know I can’t stay here – with every shudder of the hands on the clock in the hall I’m taking more of a risk; in defiance of reason, my entire body is raring to run away. And yet I must hold out until Saturday. If I hold out until Saturday, if nothing happens by Sunday, if on Sunday evening I am free – then Divine Mercy Sunday will truly deserve its name.

  VIII

  Buying a decent bottle of wine in the most beautiful old town in all Poland turned out to be impossible. The shabby little shops had nothing but some weird-looking kvass, and finally he realized it would be quickest to nip down the steps that descended the escarpment and buy a bottle of Frontera at the Orlen petrol station on the bypass. He put this plan into action, also wanting to get a Wedel chocolate torte along the way, which seemed to him a nice souvenir of Warsaw where it was made, but unfortunately there wasn’t any, so he bought a box of sweets that screamed of having been purchased at a petrol station, and a packet of condoms. He went back up the hill, trying not to sweat too much, because intuition told him he would be performing in the nude before the day was over. The rational side of his brain was telling him that although intuition always suggested the same thing to every guy, it was often proved wrong, but even so, he took care not to run.

  Now he was standing in Judge Maria Tatarska’s sitting room at her home on Żeromski Street, feeling surprised. Greatly surprised.

  At the interior decor, firstly. By now he had realized that the absence he was usually aware of when he entered people’s flats in Sandomierz was an absence of Ikea furniture. In Warsaw it was unthinkable for the average flat of a representative of the middle class not to have at least half its furnishings from the Swedish firm. Here, in the better homes, the Krakow-bourgeois style was de rigueur, in other words lots of fabrics carrying enough dust to kill an allergy sufferer, murky mirrors and heavy sideboards with plenty of drawers and shelves. The wealthier citizens without a pedigree lived in villas with wood panelling and holiday-home decor. The poor lived in blocks of flats, inside which there were brown room dividers and sticks of furniture dragged home from the market. He was expecting Tatarska to have the dusty bourgeois effect, or at most pastel modernity, imitation Ikea. But he saw… hmm, this room had something of the hospital ward about it. The colour white, chrome, mirrors and glass. The sitting room was white, quite literally white, so very white that on several of the shelves the books had been carefully covered in white paper, with the titles and authors’ names written onto them by hand.

  At the hostess’s decor, secondly. Judge Maria Tatarska was wearing a plain red cocktail dress and red stilettos. Not that he had expected to see her in a fleece and flip-flops, but her outfit was too showy for a casual evening over a glass of wine. In the white interior she looked like a bloodstain, and perhaps the effect was intentional. Szacki shrugged internally, aware that she was watching him. He liked normal and ordinary, flashiness didn’t impress him – at most it evoked pity that there are people capable of investing so much time and effort in things that don’t matter.

  At the decor of the courtyard, thirdly. Yes, above all the decor of the courtyard, because Judge Maria Tatarska’s garden was a cemetery. Not metaphorically, but literally. Szacki had only ever seen it from the other side, from the main entrance, as he walked or drove past along Mickiewicz Street. The beautiful, tree-covered necropolis stretched almost all the way to Żeromski Street, which ran below it, and where there were various monumental masons’ yards as well as Judge Tatarska’s house. The upstairs sitting room was only a fraction above the level of the tombstones, right against the cemetery wall. The light pouring from the house was strong enough for Szacki to be able to amuse himself by reading the names carved in stone. He noticed to his alarm that there were three forty-year-olds there. Exactly forty years old. And he only had a few months left to his birthday.

  He turned around, and saw the judge, sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine in her hand, the colours white and red with corpses in the background – how patriotic, thought Szacki, thinking of the Polish flag.

  “A memento mori,” she said, raising a foot in a red stiletto onto the sofa. She wasn’t wearing any knickers.

  3

  Friday, 17th April 2009

  For Catholics it is the sixth day of the Easter Week, Orthodox Christians are celebrating Good Friday, and for Jews the Sabbath begins at sunset, which in Sandomierz is at 18.31. According to Michael R. Molnar’s hypothesis, exactly 2,015 years have passed since the birth of Jesus Christ, and other people blowing out the candles on a birthday cake today include Polish rock star Jan Borysewicz, skiing champion Apoloniusz Tajner and Victoria Beckham. The news in Poland is boring: the prime minister is gaining support, the government is losing support and the president is losing support. Lech Wałęsa swears he was never a secret-police agent, and may he drop dead if he’s lying. In the world outside, the White House reveals that Bush allowed the torture of prisoners, the EU announces that the number of successful and unsuccessful terrorist attacks is falling, the Scottish police publicizes the fact that ten followers of the Jedi religion work for it, and the Vatican expresses regret that the Belgian government is criticizing Benedict XVI for criticizing the use of condoms. In the cinemas there are film premieres for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, directed by Woody Allen, and the underappreciated General Nil, with a superb performance by Olgierd Łukaszewicz in the role of General Fieldorf aka Nil. Warsaw football team Legia win 1–0 against Piast Gliwice, who play at home, and go to the top of the Premier Division. There is spring in the air, and in Sandomierz the maximum temperature is twenty degrees, but not thanks to the sun – it’s cloudy and it’s pouring with rain.

  I

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had had a classical education, and he knew that Eros and Thanatos have always gone hand in hand, he knew the legend of Tristan and Isolde, he had read Byron and also Iwaszkiewicz’s short stories about doomed lovers; there had even been a time when he couldn’t get to sleep without absorbing a few drops of the writer’s erotic angst. But never before in his life had those two elements combined so literally and in such an acute way. He woke up with a hangover and the aftertaste of too much wine on his tongue, and before he had realized where he was, he could tell it wasn’t thirst that had brought him back to consciousness, but an unbearable, throbbing pain in his male member. As he gradually came to, the memories of last night returned, when Tatarska had worn him out in ways that he had never even seen in a porn film before now. It had seemed silly just to disappear, because she evidently had great expectations, and he didn’t want to seem churlish, so he had taken part, without any particular sense of commitment, in a series of erotic exercises, half of which were tacky, half plain stupid, and all equally exhausting. They might have been described as the sort of sexual adventure you talk about for years, and remember for decades. But in fact Szacki wanted to forget about the whole incident as quickly as possible. He badly needed a shower.

  He opened an eye, fearing he’d see the judge’s body lying in wait for him to wake up and – yet again during this visit – he was amazed. Half a metre in front of his nose there was a window pane, and a metre beyond that there was a wet gravestone, on which it said: “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour.” Szacki closed his eye; he didn’t want to think about the fact that after all those bestial perversions he had woken up on a tombstone with an evangelical quotation from the parable of The Wise and Foolish Virgins as far as he remembered. How very much he wished he had been a foolish virgin last night, before whom the door was shut and who wasn’t allowed in to the wedding feast, for Judge Tatarska to have said to him last night “Verily I say unto you, I know you not” and sent him
packing. He turned his back on the earthly remains of fifty-two-year-old Mariusz Wypych and the quotation from the Gospel of St Matthew that was guarding him. The scene on the other side, within the house, wasn’t much better – there lay Judge Tatarska, snoring on her back with her mouth open; her face was shiny and puffy, and her ample breasts were flopping to either side. In the light of the April day her sitting room was not snow-white any more, at best faded grey. Szacki looked at his watch, cursed and set off from the funeral home of iniquity as fast as he could.

  An hour and a half later, washed and bathed, he was already at work, hoping the stinging he felt when he peed was just being caused by a bit of chafing, and not some mysterious infection. Strangely sure he had every one of last night’s acts written on his face, he shut his office door and buried himself in the world of symbols. After an hour he knew it was even worse with symbols than with knives – the number of graphic signs and associations, the multitude of logos and web pages devoted to them – there were millions. He decided to make his search more systematic.

  Naturally he started with the Jewish ones, and was soon feeling disappointed, because there weren’t many of them. The Star of David, the Menorah, the Torah scrolls, the Tablets of Stone and, surprisingly, the hand of Fatima. He had always associated that symbol with the Arabs, but it turned out to be used in Jewish amulets too. Clearly with cultures it was the same as with spouses – the more alike they are, the more they jump down each other’s throats. Szacki was reminded of the time when he had accidentally called some kosher lamb halal at a shop in Warsaw. The owner had almost exploded with rage. Szacki carefully looked through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but he couldn’t find anything like it. Reading about the Kabbalah was interesting, but in none of the drawings or designs, in none of the mystical writings did he find anything that was even vaguely similar to the badge lying in front of him.