A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  Szacki shook his head, faintly curious to know what was coming next, but only faintly. He felt he was running out of time. That he should find something out and get back to work as soon as possible.

  “It’s like this – when a tour group comes here from Israel to visit the camp at Majdanek, they take their own bodyguards with them to the disco. And before they get on the coach to Warsaw airport, they have to listen to a talk on how to behave in case of an anti-Semitic attack. I was brought up in Israel, and I went on one of those tours, which mainly consisted of shocking us with the Shoah.” Maciejewski pronounced this word in a guttural, sing-song way, and now Szacki realized that the strange, plucked tones he had heard from the start in his fluent Polish must be traces of Hebrew. “But not just that. It consisted to the same extent of bullshitting about omnipresent anti-Semitism, stirring up suspicions, xenophobia and the desire to retaliate. In fact, when it comes to building an identity on dead bodies we’ve done better than the Poles.”

  Despite the solemnity of the subject, Szacki burst out laughing and raised his glass.

  “I’ll drink to that, because if it’s true” – here he paused – “you’ve achieved the impossible.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “Does the abbreviation KWP mean anything to you?” asked the prosecutor, shunting the conversation onto the topics that interested him. He wanted to bring it to an end.

  “No, why?”

  “What about Konspiracyjne Wojsko Polskie – the Polish Underground Army?”

  “I don’t know, it rings a bell, but only a faint one. Is it something like Freedom and Independence, or the National Armed Forces?”

  “Yes, exactly, they were one of the partisan groups known as the ‘cursed soldiers’.”

  The rabbi sighed and gazed at the dark window, as if posing for a photo session in which sportsmen pretend to be thinkers.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Various clues imply that present events might be connected with it. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Yet another painful topic. The cursed soldiers fought against the Communist regime, some of them right into the 1950s. I’ve read about them, the whole issue has lots of overtones, over the decades all sorts of legends have grown up around it, and as is usually the case in Poland, there’s no truth in them.” The rabbi smiled unexpectedly. “By the way, I love your Polish characteristic of sticking to emotional extremities, either euphoria or black depression, great love or blind rage. With the Poles, nothing’s ever normal. Sometimes it drives me mad, but even so, I like it – I’ve learnt to treat my addiction to the Polish character as a harmless vice. Anyway, that’s not the point, the point is that your anti-Communist partisans are spoken about in extreme terms, too. For some people they were flawless heroes; for others they were harmful troublemakers who sought an excuse to fight and brawl; and for yet others they were bloodthirsty Jew-baiters who organized pogroms.”

  “Were there incidents of that kind?”

  “Frankly, I don’t have that much knowledge. Don’t forget, these were generally right-wing units – the left wing more or less believed in the new regime. And this was the pre-war, National-Democratic right wing, streaked with anti-Semitism, especially in the case of the National Armed Forces. But remember too that since the Holocaust every act aimed against a Jew has been presented as an expression of anti-Semitism, which doesn’t have to be true. The cursed soldiers fought against the state apparatus, against its functionaries, and Jews were killed in the fighting because there were a lot of them in the Communist secret police.”

  “I thought that was an anti-Semitic lie.”

  “The way facts are interpreted can be anti-Semitic, but not the facts as such. With regret, because it is not a very clear page in my nation’s history, I admit that until the mid-1950s more than one third of the operatives at the Ministry of Public Security were Jews. That is a fact, and there’s nothing anti-Semitic about it. Of course, presenting it as a Jewish conspiracy aimed at Poland is quite another story. Especially since most of them were common or garden Communists – they just had Jewish origins.”

  Szacki organized the new information in his head. He was pleased – the theory he had come here with was starting to gain flesh.

  “Why quite so many?”

  Maciejewski made a gesture of helplessness.

  “Because any regime other than the German one seemed good to them? Because before the war, Communist ideology was already attractive to the Jewish poor? Because the regime by its nature preferred cosmopolitan Jews to patriotic Poles who disliked the Russians? Because there’s just as much truth in the rumours of anti-Semitism among the Poles as there is in the ones about Jewish antipathy towards the Poles?” Suddenly the rabbi paused, and crooned sadly: “I wanted to be someone, because I was a Jew, a Jew who wasn’t someone, was a no one through and through.” Szacki recognized Jacek Kaczmarski’s famous song about the Communist-Polish-Jew.

  “Because for some people it was a means of getting revenge on their neighbours?” added Szacki.

  “Right. Looking for the guilty parties is the simplest way of coping with trauma. If you point at someone who caused you harm, at once it’s easier. There weren’t any Germans, but the Poles were to hand. And the Reds, whispering in their ears that those National-Democrat gangs were organizing pogroms. It’s no accident that the department for combating what the official terminology called ‘banditry’ was run by Communists of Jewish descent – the technique of inflaming and antagonizing always works well.”

  Szacki listened in amazement.

  “I wasn’t expecting to hear anything like that.”

  “Of course you weren’t, you’re oversensitive, like every educated Pole. You’re afraid you only have to squeak and at once they’ll fetch out the pogroms at Kielce and Jedwabne for you. That’s why, unfortunately, like the rest of the world, you’re incapable of making a reliable judgement. I myself am a Jewish believer and a patriot, but I regard Israel’s politics as harmful. Instead of being the leader in the region, we’re like a fortress inhabited by paranoiacs with a siege mentality, antagonizing nations that already hate us anyway. Presented, of course, as terrorists and Hitler’s henchmen. Besides, I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the radio today, but it’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, and our deputy prime minister is at Auschwitz, exploiting it to compare Iran to Nazi Germany. It is so disheartening – some of our politicians, if they didn’t drag out Hitler at every opportunity, would lose their raison d’être.”

  Szacki smiled to himself, because there was something very Polish about Maciejewski’s commentator’s ardour and ritual beefing about the authorities. It smacked of vodka, vegetable salad and smoked sausage laid out on a silver platter. Time to wind it up.

  “Of course, you know why I’m asking about all this?”

  “Because you’re considering the option that it might be the work of a Jew, and you want to know if it’s possible. If we were talking about someone normal, I’d say no, but anyone who has two people’s blood on his hands is a madman. And with madmen anything is possible. And there’s something else, too…”

  “Yes?” Szacki leant forwards in his chair.

  “Everything you talked about – Sandomierz, the painting, the quotes, the knife for shechita, the corpse in the barrel…” Maciejewski made his thoughtful boxer’s gesture. “It’s impossible to acquire all that knowledge in a weekend. In theory you’d simply have to be a Jew, and then one who’s perfectly au fait with his culture. Or someone who studies it.”

  “Why in theory?” Szacki had switched on all his radars – there was something in the rabbi’s tone that told him to be on high alert.

  Maciejewski turned the photograph of the Hebrew inscription on the painting in the cathedral towards him and pointed at the middle letter in the middle word.

  “That’s het, the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s written wrongly, but not so wrongly that you could explain it by dyslexia, for instance. It
’s the mirror image of a correctly written letter – the curve should be on the right, not the left. No Jew would write it that way, just as you’d have to be drunk or on drugs to write a B with the loops to the left. I think someone’s just cunning, trying to resurrect enough demons to be able to hide among them. The question, my dear prosecutor, is whether in the crowd of phantoms and apparitions you’ll be able to make out the face of the killer.”

  VI

  The words about phantoms resonated in Szacki’s head as he drove back to Sandomierz that night. As he passed the villages and towns of the Lublin region, he wondered how many of them had been Jewish shtetls before the war. How many Jews had there been in Kraśnik? In Annopol? And where had they ended up? In Majdanek, in Bełżec? Maybe some of them had lived until the death marches? An ignominious end, with no burial, no funeral rites, no one to see their souls off to the other side. If the folk beliefs were true, all those souls should be roaming the world, trapped for seventy years between dimensions. On days like this one, Yom HaShoah, could they tell they were being remembered? Did they then return to Kraśnik or Annopol, looking for familiar places, and did the Polish inhabitants glance over their shoulders, feel a chill more often than usual, and close their windows earlier?

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt anxious. The road was strangely empty, the dark Lublin villages looked abandoned, and from Kraśnik onwards there was fog trailing along the highway, sometimes hardly noticeable, like dirt on the windscreen, sometimes as thick as cotton wool, visibly parting before the bonnet of the Citroën. The prosecutor recognized his own apprehension by the fact that he was more focused than usual on the old car’s moans and groans – a faint knocking on the left side of the suspension, a hissing from the hydraulic fluid pump and a grumble from the air-conditioning compressor. It was completely irrational, but he was eager not to have to stop right now in the fog and darkness.

  He cursed and turned the steering wheel abruptly when a black figure loomed out of the fog; he only just managed to miss the hitchhiker, who was standing almost in the middle of the road. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, but all he could see was blood-stained darkness and fog aglow with red lights. He was reminded of Wilczur’s recording from outside the archive, and remembered the Jew dissolving in the thick fog above the Vistula.

  To occupy his thoughts, he started mentally rewinding the conversation with Maciejewski, recalling the moments when he had felt the familiar tickling in his brain. Once when revenge for the death of a family came up, definitely. And a second time towards the end, when the rabbi had said it was impossible to acquire that sort of knowledge in a weekend. An idea had flashed through his mind at that moment, one that was valuable and not obvious. No, the point wasn’t to look among experts on Jewish culture, no. Maciejewski had noticed a lot of details in Szacki’s account, small points that formed a complete picture.

  “And what about me?” said Szacki aloud, his hoarse voice sounding strange inside the car.

  Have I noticed all the details? In this nightmare, have I failed to focus on the most visible things? When there’s a corpse stuck in a barrel hanging from the ceiling, no one wonders why it has strange, deformed feet – but now it came back to his mind. When there’s a naked woman lying in the bushes, and a little further off there’s a butcher’s razor, no one thinks about how she came to have sand under her nails. But now he remembered it – the corpse had not soil, not dirt, but yellow, seaside sand under its fingernails. How many of these details had he overlooked, how many had he regarded as unimportant? The whole incident in the cathedral, the quotation on the painting, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” – he was following the obvious, intrusive trail of Jewish revenge. Just as the murderer wanted. Instead of acting contrary to his expectations by looking for mistakes in this whole performance, he was letting himself be led by the nose. Like the ideal spectator of an illusionist’s show, who isn’t looking to see what the other hand is doing, for fear of spoiling his evening’s entertainment.

  He was just passing through Annopol, so he only had to cross the Vistula, turn south, and in half an hour he should be there. The town was empty and wreathed in fog, despite which he felt safer in the presence of street lamps. So much so that he drove onto the hard shoulder and took out his mobile to get on the Internet. He found an online Bible, and as he was waiting for the link to load, he opened the window to combat his rising drowsiness. Cold and damp poured into the car, filling it with a strong, earthy smell of melting snow, a harbinger of spring, which was just about to burst onto the scene, eager to make up for the weeks it had lost.

  Remembering the references, he found the biblical quotations. Why were they so long? It would have been enough to give the one verse containing the phrase “an eye for an eye”, and the whole thing would have been clear. He wrote them all out in his notebook. The one from Leviticus was the shortest and simplest; it spoke about punishment for disfigurement and for death. “Whoever kills a man shall be put to death.” Szacki was struck by the legalistic style of the phrase – paragraph 148 of the Polish Republic Penal Code started the same way: “Whoever kills a man shall be subject to a penalty of loss of liberty…”

  The second quote talked about the penalty imposed for hurting a pregnant woman during a fight between men, which must have been a way of defining war or conflict. For causing a miscarriage the only punishment was a fine, but if the woman died, it was death.

  Finally the third, from Deuteronomy, was the most tortuous – almost as bad as the modern Penal Code. And at the same time it was the strictest rule, aimed against bearing false witness, or – to put it in modern terms – against perjury. The Jewish legislator – which is really a strange definition of God, thought Szacki – gave orders for a perjurer to get the same punishment that would have been meted out if his lies were taken as the truth. In other words, if as the result of one man’s unfair accusations, another man could have been condemned to death, and the matter came to light, then the perjurer would get the noose or whatever was used in those days. It was also curious that the severity of the regulation was dictated by the principles of deterrence. It was plainly written that “those who remain shall hear and fear, and hereafter they shall not again commit such evil among you”. In a way, lying was treated as the worst crime of all.

  Perhaps rightly, thought Szacki, and closed his notebook; he closed the window too, and did up his jacket – the night was damnably cold. What were the quotations about? About killing, harming a pregnant woman and perjury. Coincidence, or essential detail?

  He switched off the light above the rear-view mirror, blinked a few times to accustom his tired eyes to the foggy darkness outside, and froze as he saw some dark figures crowding by the car. Feeling the panic rising in his throat, he started up the engine, and the headlights filled the milky mist with light. There were no shadows. Just a deserted town on the Vistula, a walkway made of paving bricks and an advert for Perła beer above a grocery shop.

  He moved off abruptly, driving away towards the river. The fog swirled behind the Citroën’s broad rear end.

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki didn’t know it, because he couldn’t have done, but he was just leaving one of the typical pre-war shtetls, a town occupied mostly by an indigent Jewish population, which in Annopol, just before the war, had accounted for more than seventy per cent of the inhabitants. There was a Hebrew school here, run by the Tarbut movement, cheders, a Talmud Torah Association and secular schools for girls and boys, and there was even a modest yeshiva, after which the boys continued their rabbinical studies in Lublin. There was a small commemorative stone left on the site of the old Jewish graveyard on the edge of the town, surrounded by a decorative path made of pink paving bricks.

  VII

  Disbelief had appeared on the girl’s face, but she was still letting him keep his hand on her thigh – a good sign. For this reason, Roman Myszyński allowed himself to move it a little higher, onto the bit of skin above her lacy stocking top, except that there wasn’t an
y lace there, or any skin. Oh no, don’t say girls go out clubbing in tights these days. What is this, some sort of vintage party, or what? Was he just about to find out she’d got a spandex bra and hairy armpits? Couldn’t he just for once in his life get a normal girl? Not once a month, not once every six months or even once a year. Just once, once ever.

  “So you’re something like a detective?” she asked, leaning towards him.

  “Not something like, I just am a detective,” he exclaimed, making a mental note never, ever again to offer anyone squid in garlic sauce on a date. “I know how it sounds, but it’s true. I sit in an office, someone comes along, first he spins me a yarn – he’s checking to see if he can trust me. And then,” – here he paused – “and then he reveals his deepest secrets to me and I get a commission from him. You have no idea how complicated people’s fates can be.”

  “I’d like to see your office. Reveal my secrets to you.”

  “Your deepest ones?” he asked, feeling the tackiness of that riposte dampening his desire for a thrill-filled evening.

  “You have no idea!” she shouted back over the music.

  Soon after, they were sitting in a taxi, which was taking them from the centre of Warsaw to his “office”, in other words his small bachelor pad in Grochów. The place may not have been luxurious, but it was atmospheric, in a pre-war villa covered in creepers, squatting beneath the flat blocks of the Ostrobramska estate, known locally as Mordor. They were kissing passionately when his phone rang. A private number. He answered, mentally imploring all the gods in heaven for it not to be his mother.

  For a while he listened.

  “Of course I know, Prosecutor,” he said in a businesslike tone, lower than usual, casting the girl a meaningful look. “Things like that aren’t quickly forgotten… Yes, right now I’m in Warsaw… Right… Aha, aha… I see… Of course… I’ve got to grab a few hours’ sleep, it’ll take me three to get there, so I can be with you at eight… Yes, sure, goodbye.”