A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “But don’t worry, I know a few good lawyers, they might even manage to get you a cell of your own for the second half of the sentence.”

  They burst out laughing, and a relaxed conversation began. Klara started telling them something about starting the procedure for her doctorate – he was stunned, he didn’t even know she had a degree – but she was interrupted in mid-sentence by the noisy entrance of the support band. Szacki almost dropped his beer in amazement, and the feeling stayed with him to the very end of the concert, the best he’d been to for ages. They turned out to listen to and play some shit-hot music out here in the sticks. The support band started off sounding very punk rock, then came down towards the melodic style of Iron Maiden. The next two bands – as far as he understood, both had their roots in a well-known group called Corruption, who turned out to be from Sandomierz – also played hard rock without any frills, rap-style interludes or moaning about me and you baby, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  With every track there seemed to be more people, everyone was bawling louder and jumping higher; as more and more endorphins accumulated in the cellar and the sweat began to condense on the metal grate, there was something of the tribal experience about it, which reminded him of the old Warsaw clubs he used to go to for rock concerts centuries ago. The first band was definitely better musically – here and there it came close to Soundgarden, and here and there it was like Megadeth, but flatter, without the surprises. The second one appealed to Szacki’s taste, pounding out fast, fresh energy in the style of Metallica’s Load and ReLoad albums. They sang in Polish, they had great lyrics, everything about them was a million times more interesting and a trillion times more genuine than the plasticky stars that filled Radio ZET’s airwaves.

  Somewhere up above, the world keeps turning. The traffic cops on the bridge are checking the cars leaving the city, and there are patrols carefully trawling the side streets with their roof lights off, on the look-out for a small figure with red hair. Jerzy Szyller is standing in the dark kitchen, watching the men on guard in a navy-blue Opel Vectra outside his gate. He is wearing the same shirt with the rolled-up sleeves and doesn’t feel like going to bed at all. Leon Wilczur is watching Alien 3 on Polsat and not smoking; the inspector never smokes at home. Barbara Sobieraj and her husband are having the tired conversation of a veteran married couple, and although it is about the emotional topic of adoption, even so it is stale with routine and the conviction that as ever it will lead to nothing. Judge Maria Tatarska is reading The Secret Garden in the original, telling herself she is practising her English, but in fact she just wants to read it again, and be moved to tears again. Maria “Misia” Miszczyk is eating a smoked sausage – by now she’s sick of all those cakes, which she has made her trademark – and looking at a picture of Budnik on Polsat News. The picture was taken by the police during his recent interview and Miszczyk thinks a politician’s job must be bloody awful, as Budnik looks so gaunt, half the man she remembers from the past. And that sticking plaster too. Mr and Mrs Rojski are sleeping peacefully, unaware how few couples there are who still sleep together under the same quilt after forty years of marriage. Two hundred and twenty kilometres away, in the Warsaw district of Grochów, Marcin Ładoń – at the same time as millions of other fourteen-year-old boys – is frantically masturbating, thinking about everything except the trip to Sandomierz awaiting him in the week ahead. And Roman Myszyński is having yet another dream about a china-white corpse coming after him inside the synagogue, walking stiffly like a dummy, but he cannot escape, because he trips over some stacks of documents written in Cyrillic.

  Somewhere down below, Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was whirling frantically to the tribal beat of metal rock ’n’ roll. With their arms locked, he and Klara spun round together until they lost their balance, drunk on beer and endorphins; her chestnut hair was stuck to her perspiring brow, her face was shining and her top was damp with sweat under the arms. Puffing and panting, they found enough breath to bellow out the chorus.

  “O Lord, my life can’t ever get no worse!” yelled Szacki, truthfully. “O Lord, my life is under the Devil’s curse!”

  Without waiting for the encores, he threw Klara her jacket and dragged her home to the flat on Długosz like a caveman with his prey. She smelt of sweat, beer and cigarettes, every cranny of her body was hot, damp and salty, and for the first time Szacki didn’t find her moans and screams at all vulgar.

  It had been a wonderful evening; even if he didn’t fall asleep happy, at least he fell asleep calm, and his final thought was that he’d break up with the kid in the morning – why spoil such a great evening for himself and for her?

  5

  Sunday, 19th April 2009

  Joseph Ratzinger celebrates the fourth anniversary of becoming Benedict XVI, he and other Catholics conclude festivities for the Easter Week by celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday, and at Łagiewniki Cardinal Dziwisz comments on the political situation by saying that it is a condition for public life to master the art of loving forgiveness. At the same time, MP Janusz Palikot accuses President Lech Kaczyński of alcoholism on the basis of the number of miniatures ordered by the presidential household. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, lays a bunch of daffodils at the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on the sixty-sixth anniversary of the start of the uprising. He has always done it at noon on the dot, but today he must wait until the official delegations have finished. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic preparations for the Führer’s birthday continue, and as the result of a Roma house being set on fire a two-year-old girl ends up in hospital in a critical state. The police inaugurate the motorbike season, warning against bravado with the slick slogan: “Spring is here, out come the vegetables”. Just outside Sandomierz there is a road accident – a car smashes into an electricity pylon and goes up in flames, killing a seventeen-year-old boy. It is sunny, but cold as hell, the temperature does not rise above twelve degrees, and at night it falls to zero.

  I

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t find a condom. Or an empty condom wrapper. Or an open packet of condoms. Or any evidence at all to confirm that they had used protection during last night’s ecstasies. But they always had before now – in other words she didn’t have a coil, or take pills. There are fertile days and infertile days, there is being careful, and above all there’s the bloody small-town Middle Ages of contraception, the oppressive need to put on a rubber. If there was a rubber. And that wasn’t at all certain.

  Szacki swept the room, searching every corner, feeling rising panic, wanting at any cost to assure himself that no, there was no chance he could have impregnated this charming girl from Sandomierz, fifteen years his junior. Whom, to cap it all – before becoming aware of the contraceptive catastrophe – he had dumped, as a result of which she had locked herself in the bathroom and was still in there, sobbing.

  The door slammed. Quick as a flash, Szacki rose from his knees and adopted an expression full of sympathy. Without a word, Klara began to gather up her clothes, and for a while he even hoped there wouldn’t be a conversation.

  “I studied in Warsaw, I studied in Göttingen, I’ve done a lot of travelling, I’ve lived in three capital cities. I won’t hide the fact that I’ve had various men too. Some for longer, some for shorter. What they all had in common was that they’re great guys. Even when we came to the conclusion that we weren’t necessarily made for each other, they were still great. You’re the first real prick that has stood in my way.”

  “Klara, please, why say such things?” said Szacki calmly, trying his best not to think about the double meaning of her last remark. “You know exactly who I am. A civil servant who’s fifteen years older than you, a man with a past who’s been through the mill. What could you hope to build with me?”

  She came up and stood so close that their noses were almost touching. He felt a terribly strong desire for her.

  “Nothing any more, but yesterday I wasn’t sure. You’ve got something about you tha
t won me over. You’re smart, funny, a bit enigmatic, handsome in a not-so-obvious way, you’ve got a sort of masculinity that appealed to me. And those suits are really great, adorably stiff and starchy.” She smiled, but at once grew serious. “That’s what I saw in you. And as long as I thought you saw something in me, from day to day I felt keener to give you more. But you saw me as a bimbo, a bit of country crumpet, a little slag from the provinces. It’s amazing you never took me to McDonald’s. Didn’t they tell you all the village cocksuckers like going for a Big Mac best of all?”

  “You don’t have to be so crude.”

  “You’re the one that’s crude, Teo. In every thought you have about me you’re a vulgar, crude, boorish misogynist and sexist. A sad little pen-pusher too, I grant you, but that only comes afterwards.”

  With these words she outscored him, then turned round abruptly, went over to the bed and threw off her towel. Ostentatiously she began to get dressed in front of him. It was nearing ten, the sun was high in the sky, high enough to light up her statuesque figure perfectly. She was lovely, slender, with feminine curves, breasts young enough to stick up pertly despite their size. Tousled after a night in bed, her long, thick, wavy hair that didn’t need any artifice tumbled down her neck, and in the sunlight he could see delicate down on the peachy skin of her thighs and arms. Without taking her eyes off him, she put on her underwear, and he was beside himself with desire. Had she really never made an impression on him?

  “Turn round,” she commanded coldly.

  He obediently turned round, comical in his four-year-old boxer shorts, faded from frequent washing, the only thing adorning his neglected white body. It was cold, he could see the goose bumps coming up on his skinny thighs, and realized that without a suit or a lawyer’s gown he was absolutely defenceless, like a tortoise removed from its shell. He felt ridiculous. There was soft sobbing coming from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw Klara, sitting on the bed with her head drooping.

  “And what will I tell them all?” she whispered. “I’ve talked about you so much. They said I should get a grip on myself, and I told them off, stupid girl.”

  He took a couple of steps towards her, at which she got up, sniffed, threw her handbag over her shoulder and left, without giving him a second glance.

  “Aha, one more thing,” she said, turning round in the doorway. “Yesterday you were charmingly insistent and delightfully careless. And to put it mildly, it was a very, very bad day to be careless.”

  She smiled sadly and was gone. She looked so beautiful that Szacki was reminded of the scene from Camera Buff when the wife leaves her obsessive film-making husband, who watches her go as if it were a scene he was filming.

  II

  The Cathedral Basilica of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Sandomierz was full. All the assembled believers were of one heart and one soul, if you believe the words of the reading from the Acts of the Apostles that were echoing off the stone walls. But – as is usually the case in church – no one was listening, everyone was just staring, lost in their own thoughts.

  Irena Rojska was gazing at Bishop Frankowski, sitting in his armchair, and wondering what the new bishop would be like, because this one was only here for a while, filling in since the old one had gone to Szczecin to be the archbishop there. It might even be Frankowski, but that wasn’t certain. People said he was too active on Radio Maryja, the highly conservative radio station. Maybe so, but Mrs Rojska remembered how he had defended the workers at the Stalowa Wola steelworks, how he had led the strikers along a secret tunnel into the church, and how the Commies had harassed him. No wonder he was hard on the Reds, and it hurt him to see that nowadays they were treated like good Poles, just as good as the people they’d put in prison. And where should he talk about it, if not on Radio Maryja? He could hardly do it on TVN – that was full of reality shows.

  Janusz Rojski finally tore his wistful gaze from the pew where his wife was sitting. He had an awful pain in his leg from standing up, which seemed to run all the way from his spine, from his kidneys down to his heel. But what could he do? All the pregnant women and all the senile old ladies in the diocese had come to the cathedral today, and to ask his wife for her seat was idiotic. He looked up at the paintings, at some poor wretch being devoured by a dragon, and at another one who was so effectively impaled on a stake that the end of it had come out through his shoulder blade. Those fellows had to do their suffering for their faith, so I can stand up for an hour, he thought. He was feeling bored, and already wanted to go to the café for a Sunday coffee, sit down in a warm, soft place and have a chat. He breathed on his hands. Another hellishly cold day – the spring will never come.

  Maria Miszczyk wasn’t a believer, and even if she had been, her local parish was twenty kilometres away. Yet this morning something had tempted her to come here. The Budnik case wasn’t giving her any peace and she had her mobile in her hand the whole time, switched to silent, so she wouldn’t miss the vibration when they called to say they’d caught him and the nightmare was over. But Budnik lived next to the cathedral, this was his parish, this was where that blasted painting hung, thanks to which every now and then her beloved city became the capital of Polish anti-Semitism. Prosecutor Miszczyk was standing in the left nave in a crowd of people, and she could feel the gaze of John Paul II fixed on her, whose portrait adorned the fabric hiding the painting. And she wondered if he could feel the gaze of the Jews fixed on him, as they drew the blood from Christian children and stuffed babies into barrels spiked with nails. And what he would have had to say on the subject.

  No one knew about it, but the non-believing prosecutor Miszczyk had once been an ardent believer, to such an extent that before taking her law degree, she had been a student at the Catholic University of Lublin, and had wanted to find out as much as she could about her God and her religion. But the more she learnt, the less of a believer she became. Now she was listening to Psalm 118 with everybody else, listening to the words “give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever”. And she remembered how once upon a time she had loved that psalm. Until she found out that in the Catholic liturgy several verses had been left out of it. That in its entirety it is a tale about having God’s help to fight battles and get revenge, about wiping other nations from the face of the Earth in the Lord’s name. “The right hand of the Lord is exalted; the right hand of the Lord hath done mightily.” She smiled weakly. How strange it all is – here were the Catholic congregation in a church with an awful, Jew-bashing daub on the wall, praising their God to the skies in the words of a psalm that actually gives thanks for the victory of Israel over its neighbours. Yes, knowledge was the most virulent killer of faith, and at times she regretted ever having acquired it. At the end she sang the chorus with everybody else: “We thank the Lord, for He is merciful.”

  Depressed by her thoughts about religion, the memory of her lost faith and of everything that had once been in her life but had left nothing but a void behind it, Maria Miszczyk was one of the first to leave the church; she got in her car and quickly drove away. That was the reason why Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was at the crime scene before her.

  III

  Janusz Rojski must have had to make up for keeping quiet for over an hour, not counting the responses, because as soon as they were in the vestibule he had started talking, and hadn’t shut up for a single moment since. It occurred to his wife that once they got to the café she would press a newspaper into his hands – maybe that would silence him.

  “Do you think he really did poke about in his side?”

  “Sorry? Who did what?”

  “Saint Thomas, poke about in Jesus’s side. Weren’t you listening to the reading?”

  “My God, Janusz, how should I know? If that’s what it says in the Gospels, then I expect it’s true.”

  “Because I couldn’t help thinking it’s quite disgusting, really. Touching his hands with a finger, that’s one thing, but then he had to put his w
hole hand into his chest. Do you think it was empty in there, or could he feel something? His pancreas, for example, or his spleen? Do you have a pancreas after resurrection?”

  “If you died at the age of thirty-three, then no, you don’t – it’s only after fifty that you find out you’ve got any organs at all. How’s your leg?”

  “Better,” he lied.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t let you sit down, I could see it was hurting, but I’ve got such awful palpitations…”

  In reply Mr Rojski hugged his wife and kissed her on her woolly beret.

  “I’m still not entirely sure what to do about it,” she continued – “maybe I should go for the operation.”

  “Why get chopped up for no purpose? Doctor Fibich said it’s not life-threatening, just unpleasant. And even if they cut you up, they don’t know if it’ll pass, it might just be your nerves.”

  “I know, I know, please let’s change the subject. Do you remember how we used to laugh at the fact that old folks talk about nothing but their ailments and pains? And now we’re just the same – sometimes I bore myself.”

  “No, no, I don’t think I do at all.”

  Mrs Rojska gave her husband a sideways look to see if he was joking, but no, the old boy had just blurted it out in all sincerity. To avoid causing him grief, she didn’t pass comment. Instead, she took his arm; she was feeling cold, and wondered if it were old age or just that the spring was so feeble this year – here they were at the end of April, but the apple trees in the cathedral garden were grey, without a single flower. If it went on like that, her lilac probably wouldn’t bloom until July. They stopped midway between the cathedral and the castle, beside the Second World War monument, which looked like an advertisement for a game of dominos. That morning they had debated going for a walk by the Vistula after mass, but now in silent agreement they had turned towards the town and started climbing up Zamkowa Street, which led to the market square; they didn’t have to discuss where they were going, as they always went to the Mała Café. It may have been a little dearer there, but somehow it was different, nicer. And they sprinkled the froth on the coffee with icing sugar. One time, Mrs Rojska had actually spent quite a while wondering whether to say in her confession that throughout the entire mass all she’d been thinking about was that when this torment was over she’d be able to go and have her sweet frothy coffee.