A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Penicillin.”

  “Where was the Jewish doctor supposed to have got penicillin from?”

  “I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone knew then either, because the penicillin was American. Had he brought it with him, or was someone smuggling it in to him, or did he have some unusual contacts on the black market? I don’t know, it’s all equally probable. But when he cured one and then a second child of consumption, the news ran round the neighbourhood like wildfire. Can I get a Cola?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m going to get myself a Cola. I’m going to the kiosk. I’ll be right back.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  Myszyński ran off, and the prosecutor got up to do a few stretching exercises – every muscle ached, literally every one. It was cold, so he began waving his arms energetically to warm up. Hard to say if it was this dodgy spring, or if the climate of the story had infected him. A harsh winter, snowdrifts among the wreckage of the houses in the Jewish district, post-war inertia and desolation. The weak light of a candle or an oil lamp shines from the window of the walled mansion on Zamkowa Street. The generously called “mansion” – it must already have been in ruins then, just as it was now, if they had let outsiders come and live in it. The doctor and his wife must have fixed up a room on the ground floor as their accommodation, maybe two rooms, but there can’t have been any luxury. And there stands that ruin with yellow light in one window, a mother holding a child in her arms knocks at the door, the moon is full, the woman casts a long shadow on the silvery snow, in the background the dark bulk of the castle and the cathedral obscure the stars. A long time goes by before a pregnant woman with black curls opens the door and lets the worried mother in. Please, please come in, my husband is expecting you. Was that what it was like? Or was he getting carried away by his imagination?

  The archivist came back out of breath and red in the face with five cans of Cola. Szacki didn’t pass comment.

  “And so news of the penicillin ran round the district,” he said, switching on the Dictaphone. “And I guess it wasn’t only concerned mothers who heard about it.”

  “Not only. Wajsbrot was visited by the cursed—”

  “Let me guess: the KWP?”

  “Exactly. They came to see him and they demanded a contribution for their fight against the Red invaders, a contribution in the form of antibiotics. Wajsbrot told them to get lost, and they gave him a terrible beating, but apparently somehow the local people managed to save their doctor. That lot threatened they’d come back and kill him.”

  “How do we know all this?”

  “From the explanations Wajsbrot gave in his trial for espionage.”

  Szacki made a surprised face, but didn’t say anything.

  “In fact we owe most of our information to this trial. And which came about because the partisan commander couldn’t swallow the insult of being refused.”

  “So he came back and killed him?”

  “Denounced him. Which in turn we know from the trial of his comrades. Would you believe it? The major went so mental at the Jew’s refusal that he betrayed him to the loathsome Reds, which says a lot about the scale of hatred in Poland – I wonder where the queers would have fitted into it.”

  “Mr Myszyński…”

  “OK, OK. It didn’t take much, it was enough to mention the American penicillin and the secret police locked up Wasjbrot in seconds flat – this time the Sandomierz populace could only stand and watch. And it was just before spring, Easter was approaching, so was Passover, and so was Mrs Wajsbrot’s date of delivery.”

  Szacki closed his eyes. Please, I beg you, anything but that, he thought.

  “The doctor was in prison, apparently somewhere on the grounds of what is now the seminary, I don’t know if that’s true. And his wife wasn’t a doctor, she had no penicillin, on top of which she usually kept behind the scenes, so she hadn’t made friends with anyone in the town. Nevertheless, people helped her and didn’t let her die of hunger.”

  “And what happened?”

  “As I said, her due date was approaching. Wajsbrot’s wife was of a frail constitution, as they used to say. The doctor was going crazy, he knew they wouldn’t let him go, but he begged them to let her come to the lock-up for a few days so he could deliver the baby. I read the transcripts, they’re shocking – he kept alternately admitting everything and then denying everything, anything just to suck up to the interrogator. He spilled some made-up names and promised to expose an international band of imperialist contacts if they’d only let him do that. Well, they didn’t. Actually, judging by the sound of the interrogators’ surnames, it was his own brethren who wouldn’t let him.”

  “And Mrs Wajsbrot died?”

  Myszyński opened a can of Cola and drank it in one go, then another one. Szacki was tempted to ask why he didn’t just buy a two-litre bottle, but he let it go. He waited calmly for the archivist to gather his thoughts.

  “Yes, but she needn’t have. The townspeople liked the good doctor and sent the best midwife to deliver the baby. As bad luck would have it, the midwife came with her daughter, and she was superstitious. Both she and her daughter. Well, the rest is easy to guess. She entered the house, and the first thing she saw standing in the doorway to the cellar was a barrel of cucumbers, and of course she thought it wasn’t a birth at all but a trap, that the Jews were lying in wait to kidnap her lovely little daughter, drain out her blood to make matzos and wash the newborn’s eyes with it so it wouldn’t be blind. So she took her child and left.”

  “But there was no one there apart from the pregnant wife.”

  “There aren’t any ghosts either, but people are still afraid. She ran away. Another midwife came, but not as skilled, and the labour was complicated. Mrs Wajsbrot screamed all night, and at dawn she and her baby died. Apparently to this day you can hear her screams and the baby’s crying on Zamkowa Street. Wajsbrot hanged himself in his cell the next day.”

  Roman Myszyński fell silent and straightened the papers lying in front of him, arranging them in a neat pile. And opened another can of Cola. Szacki stood up and leant against the window sill, gazing at the Sandomierz houses and the roofs of the Old Town looming in the distance. He had been in the house on Zamkowa Street, he had been in Nazareth House, the site of the former secret police torture cells. Corpses everywhere, ghosts everywhere – how many places like that had he been to in his life, how many places branded by death?

  Myszyński cleared his throat. In theory Szacki should have been very keen to hear more – after all, this was just the background, now the archivist would match the heroes of today’s drama with the heroes of the post-war drama and everything would become clear. Why was he hesitant to find that out? This information meant an arrest, the end of the case, success. He was hesitant because he was being consumed by inner anxiety, some sort of resistance. He couldn’t define it, he couldn’t name it. In a moment everything would jump into place, the scattered pieces of the puzzle would finally be fitted together, all the bigger and smaller clues would be explained. Despite which, though he didn’t yet know the details, he was burning with a strange sense of fakery that is often felt by the audience at the cinema or the theatre. It may be well written, it may be well directed and acted too, but you can feel it’s just theatre – instead of the characters you can see the actors, the spectators and the chandelier above the auditorium.

  “Jerzy Szyller?” he finally asked.

  “His father was the commander of the KWP unit, the one who informed on Wajsbrot and accused him of espionage. A curious character – before the war he lived in Germany and co-founded a Union of Poles there with some others. When the war broke out, he came here to fight and his name went down in the annals of the underground as a hero with lots of sabotage operations to his name, some of them highly spectacular. But then he realized he hated the Reds more than the Germans, so he went into the forest. They didn’t catch him in the Stalinist era and after that he was no longer a public ene
my, despite which he left for Germany and died in the 1980s. His son Jerzy was born in Germany.”

  “Grzegorz Budnik?”

  “Son of the head of the secret police lock-up.”

  “The one who wouldn’t let the doctor deliver his wife’s baby?”

  “He had more on his conscience than just that, but yes, that’s the one. Budnik Senior lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully in the 1990s.”

  “What about Mrs Budnik? How was she connected with these events?”

  “I admit that for ages I didn’t think she was – I imagined she was only connected via her husband, and that’s why she was killed. I reckoned that if someone’s mad enough to track down the children of those to blame for a tragedy that happened seventy years ago, maybe he’s mad enough to hunt down their families too.”

  Szacki nodded; the reasoning made sense.

  “But for the sake of form I wanted to check all the leads – luckily I met a very capable archivist.” Myszyński blushed slightly. “She worked her magic spells on various databases and guess what turned up? Mrs Budnik moved here from Krakow when she was still Miss Szuszkiewicz, but she was born in Sandomierz in 1963. Her mother in turn is from Zawichost and was born in 1936.”

  “In other words, when the Wajsbrots died she was eleven,” said Szacki, and the remaining pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. “A little girl like that, brought up in a Jewish shtetl where she belonged to the minority and where she used to hear all sorts of stories, a little girl like that could have been extremely frightened when she saw a terrifying barrel in a ruined Jewish house.”

  Myszyński didn’t comment; the truth was self-evident. There was just one thing left for Szacki to find out. One single thing. And once again, there was something catching him by the throat, as if it didn’t want to let him pose that final question. It was senseless, the first time he had ever had such a feeling. Tiredness? Neurosis? Age? Were there some vitamins he was missing? It all fitted together so nicely. Three victims from years ago, three corpses today. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. The son of the partisan who informed on the doctor. The son of the secret policeman who wouldn’t let him deliver his wife’s baby but did let him commit suicide. The daughter of the little girl who through her belief in the legend of blood had condemned the doctor’s wife to die in childbirth. But why now? Why so late? Earlier on it would have been possible to get the people who were really responsible – you can’t punish the children for the sins of their parents. Was it a deliberate act? Maybe the killer had only discovered the truth this late on? That was really the last thing he had to find out. The question was taking shape on his tongue, but it was refusing to push its way out of his mouth. Fuck it all, Teodor, he shouted at himself mentally. You must find out who it is, even if you find the solution very unpleasant. You’re an official in the service of the Republic, and you’re just about to know the truth. Nothing else matters.

  “So what was the fate of the Wajsbrots’ other child?” he asked coldly.

  “Officially, no such person exists. However, there is someone whose age would tally. I came upon the trail rather by accident, because this person had been rummaging in the Institute archives and their name was left in the signing-in book. This individual was brought up in an orphanage in Kielce; before that there’s no trace of the person in the registers, or of any forebears – I did a thorough search. This person has an extremely Polish surname, a family, a daughter. And works in your profession, i.e. with the forces of law and order.”

  II

  Everything has been accomplished, there’s nothing left to do now but to start a new life. What sort of a life will it be? How long will it last? What will it bring? Will it be possible to fill the void with love and friendship? Somewhere, some day. I’m laughing. Love and friendship, that’s a good one. Suddenly I feel immense regret for lost youth and lost love. Although I console myself with the thought that there’s no such thing as real youth or true love… After all these black deeds there’s no chance left of filling my soul with light. But it doesn’t matter. Emptiness and darkness are not an unreasonable price to pay for peace, for the fact that finally I don’t feel that stifling hatred. I shudder when there’s a knock at the door. Strange – I’m not expecting guests.

  III

  “You’re wrong, Prosecutor.”

  Teodor Szacki said nothing; in this particular function he didn’t have much to do – it was purely a job for the police. Indeed, the Marshal was stammering and looking apologetic, but he performed all the duties stipulated by the law. He introduced himself, he introduced the legal grounds and the case relating to the arrest, checked the detainee’s identity, searched him, took away his gun, handcuffed him and told him about his right to have a lawyer present and about his right to refuse to make a statement.

  Inspector Leon Wilczur submitted quietly to the procedures without saying a word; after all, he knew them from the other end. He didn’t look surprised, he didn’t struggle or argue, or try to escape.

  “You’re wrong, Prosecutor,” he repeated with emphasis.

  What was Szacki to say? All his muscles ached, so did his ripped-up hand and now his neck too; he really was bloody tired. Reluctantly, he glanced at the old policeman. Without a jacket, just in his scruffy shirt, trousers and thin socks he looked even more pitiful than usual. An old codger, spending his day of sick leave in front of the television in a neglected flat full of dusty antiques. He forced himself to look up and meet Wilczur’s gaze head-on, his dry, slightly yellow eyes. He had always thought there was antipathy towards the world hidden behind them, plain old embitterment and typical Vistula-valley frustration. But hatred? My God, how much emotional effort you would have to put into nursing your hatred for years on end to commit three murders in the name of revenge for things that happened seventy years ago. How much toil not to let that hatred die out or fade, not to lose sight of it for an instant.

  The experts wouldn’t confirm it, and quite right too, but for him Wilczur was a madman. He had seen various murders and various killers. Plaintive, obstreperous, aggressive, remorseful. But this? This was off his scale. What could be the point of killing the children and grandchildren of people to blame from years ago, even if their crime was awful and painful? No code in the world stipulated that children were responsible for the sins of their parents – that was the basis for civilization, the border between the intelligent human race and animals driven by instinct.

  “‘Fathers shall not be put to death for their children’s sins, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers’ sins; a person shall be put to death for his own sin’,” Szacki quoted the Book of Deuteronomy.

  Without tearing his eyes from Szacki’s for an instant, Wilczur twittered some incomprehensible words that sounded now sing-song, now husky, pervaded with a bluesy nostalgia – it must have been Yiddish or Hebrew. Szacki raised an eyebrow enquiringly.

  “‘For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations.’ The same book, a few chapters earlier. As you very well know, Prosecutor, you can find a Bible quote for anything. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re wrong, and this mistake could have terrible consequences.”

  “I could tell you how many times I’ve heard that remark from arrestees, Inspector, but why should I? You’ve heard it even more often, and you know even better than I do how much truth there is in it.”

  “Sometimes a little.”

  “Where the truth is concerned, a little is nothing.”

  He nodded to the Marshal to take Wilczur away.

  “We’ll meet tomorrow for your interview – have a good think in the meantime about whether you really want to complicate proceedings. Those killings, that stylization, that sick staging, that insane vengeance. At least be sure to answer for all that with style.”

  Wilczur was just walking by, his face passed centimetres from Szacki’s and the prosecutor could clearly see the th
ickened surface of his eyeballs, the pores of his skin carved with deep furrows, the yellow stain of cigarette smoke on his moustache, and the sharp hairs in the nostrils at the base of his prominent nose.

  “You’ve never liked me, have you, Prosecutor?” wheezed the policeman with unexpected regret, breathing his sour breath into Szacki’s face. “And I know why.”

  Those were the last words uttered by Leon Wilczur in connection with the case in which he had been arrested on a charge of three murders.

  IV

  Szacki didn’t go back to the prosecution building. He just had two short phone conversations with Miszczyk and Sobieraj; he didn’t want to see them, he didn’t want to explain and elaborate, he didn’t want to react to their fulsome oohs and aahs and OhmyGodhowcanthatbes. The most important thing, in other words the results of Roman Myszyński’s research, was lying on their desks, and that was enough to issue an arrest warrant, which Sobieraj would deal with later. A laconic statement was also to go to the media to say a suspect had been arrested. The rest of it was really up to Wilczur. If he confessed, in three months an indictment would be ready, but if he dug his heels in, someone had a long and tedious circumstantial trial ahead of him. Most probably not him – there was a healthy custom that cases involving police officers and civil servants were sent to a different prosecution service. Teodor Szacki was hoping that this time, however, it would be possible to keep the case here, or ultimately to persuade the people at the regional prosecution office to give it to him somewhere else. He was eager to be the one who wrote the indictment and defended it before the court. He couldn’t imagine it would be any other way.

  Whatever, he didn’t have to deal with that today – today he could rest. He couldn’t remember when he had last been so incredibly, dreadfully tired. To such a degree that just plain walking was an effort; as he stood beneath the Opatowska Gate, opposite the seminary building where many years ago Chaim Wajsbrot had hanged himself, and outside which the little Leon Wilczur may have stood, hoping to see his daddy, he couldn’t keep going, and sat down next to a tramp on a small bench. Just for a moment. The tramp looked familiar; he searched his memory for a while – yes, sure, it was the one who had accosted Wilczur that evening as they were leaving the “Town Hall” bar together; he’d wanted the police to look for his missing pal. Szacki thought of striking up a conversation, but didn’t bother. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun; even if it wasn’t providing any warmth, maybe he could sunbathe a bit; he couldn’t stop worrying about looking so pale on TV, like an emaciated maggot.