A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  He was feeling odd. The end of an inquiry and catching the culprit always brought with it a certain emptiness, post-investigation depression, withdrawal syndrome. But this time it was something else; at a rapid pace the void was being filled by anxiety, the familiar anxiety in his brain cells, signalling a mistake, an oversight, an omission.

  He had no idea what it was about, and he didn’t want to brood on it. Not now. Now he pulled himself off the bench and walked up Sokolnicki Street to the market square. He passed a bar selling pierogi, he passed the Chinese which he had never dared to peep inside, and stopped briefly at the Mała Café, wondering whether a frothy coffee with a sprinkling of icing sugar might not be what he needed. But no, he didn’t want coffee, he didn’t want waking up – he wanted a shower and bed.

  He reached the market square just as the clock on the town-hall tower began its antics to mark two o’clock in the afternoon. He stopped for a moment and observed how the city was changing, gearing up for the tourist season, which would start, like everywhere else, on the long May weekend. He hadn’t seen Sandomierz in this guise yet; he had come to live here towards the end of the year, when everything was shut, there wasn’t a trace of the Polish golden autumn left, and the cobblestones in the Old Town were either wet, snowed over, or coated in ice. Now the town looked like a sick person waking from a coma, who isn’t able to get up and run at once, but is gently testing to see what he can and can’t do. The terrace of the Kordegarda restaurant was already up and running, outside the Mała the owner had set two small tables in the open air and outside the Kasztelanka two waiters were setting up a garden fence. In the distance, maybe outside the Cocktail Bar, someone was cleaning a large parasol with a Żywiec beer logo on it, and outside the Ciżemka Hotel a green ice-cream booth, which had been tightly boarded up until now, was opening its doors. It was still cold, but high in the sky the sun clearly had no intention of giving up and Szacki sensed that this weekend would be the first of the real spring.

  But he wasn’t tempted by any of the bars or cafés; he turned towards the Vistula, and a few moments later he was at his flat, for the first time since Wednesday morning. He wasn’t bothered by the clothes lying about the place or the empty fridge; he took off his suit and buried himself in the bedding, which still smelt of Klara’s sweet, youthful scent.

  I can’t understand why I’m not feeling relief, dammit, he thought.

  And fell asleep.

  V

  A few hours later he was woken by a phone call from Basia Sobieraj. She had to see him right away. “OK,” he said, and went to take a shower, forgetting that where Sandomierz distances were concerned, “right away” meant “instantaneously”. When he emerged from the bathroom, with water dripping from his hair onto the collar of his dark-blue dressing gown, Basia was standing at the door with a shapeless package in her hand and a strange expression on her face.

  She gave him the package.

  “This is for you.”

  He undid the brown parcel paper, and inside there was a prosecutor’s gown, the blackness of which had long since ceased to be black; the redness of the trim had faded too.

  “My father asked me to give it to you. He said he doesn’t want to look at it any more, he wants to die looking at me, not that piece of rag, which was his costume his whole life. And he says I’m to give it to you, because only you will know how to make use of it. Because apparently you understand something that I don’t – I don’t know what it means.”

  That everyone tells lies, thought Szacki.

  He didn’t say anything, just put aside the gown and used his dressing-gown collar to wipe away a trickle of water running from his hair down his cheek. He gestured to invite Sobieraj inside, wondering why she had really come to see him. Did she want to talk about the case? About the murders? Dead bodies, sins and hatred? He thought bitterly that he was a good partner for that sort of conversation – it’d be hard to find a better one in Sandomierz.

  He didn’t feel like talking. He sat down on the sofa and poured generous helpings of Jack Daniels into some thin antique shot glasses. Sobieraj sat down next to him and downed her bourbon in one draught. He looked at her in amazement and refilled her glass. Once again she drank it in one go and blinked funnily; she was behaving like a child who’s afraid to say he’s broken a vase, even though he’s about to give himself away. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear and looked at him with a nervous, slightly apologetic smile.

  Please, not today, he thought. He really was bloody tired.

  Nevertheless, he leant forwards and kissed his colleague, wondering if that was what he wanted or not. He liked her, he liked her very much, more and more by the day, but he wouldn’t have said a romance was developing between them, or a passion, not to mention love. If he had had to put a name to the feeling, he’d have used the word “friendship”.

  But he decided to skip the theorizing for the time being. Still kissing her, he drew her towards the bed and started gently but methodically undressing her.

  “If you don’t want this, you know, tell me, otherwise I’ll feel bad. I’ve never been in this situation,” she said, raising her arms above her head to let him remove her thin dark red polo-neck, “and I don’t really know how to behave. I just very much wanted to, but if you don’t want to…”

  “Tough, I’ll force myself somehow,” he said, running a finger down her freckled chest, which looked like a join-the-dots picture, jumped across the wire of a tight bra the same colour as her top, and came to her navel.

  “Is that a Warsaw joke? I swear, I don’t know if I can manage,” she said, but laughed when he made a rascally face as he peeped into her knickers. Which, incidentally, were also a touch too small, cutting into her stomach and making a nice little fold of flesh above the elastic.

  Click.

  “Hey, that package you got on Wednesday…”

  “Yes, all right, laugh at me, because I wanted to have something pretty for you. Just imagine, there aren’t ten shops full of designer lingerie in Sandomierz. But of course it didn’t occur to me that over the winter I’ve grown a size and, well, it doesn’t look super-aesthetic, I’m sorry…”

  He laughed out loud.

  “Let’s get them off as fast as possible before they make marks on you!”

  “Oof, thanks.”

  They went back to kissing, they were both naked now, when suddenly Sobieraj sat up on the bed and shamefully covered herself with the quilt. He gave her a questioning look.

  “God, I feel strange, as if I should be asking him for permission. To make it all right.”

  “OK,” he said slowly, waiting for the next bit.

  “I’ve never been unfaithful to Andrzej. Not that I don’t want this, you understand, I want it very much, I just thought you should know. That I’m not just a pushover. And I’m terribly nervous. There are stories going around about you, there’s Klara, and Tatarska was going into raptures too, and she’s usually so stern…”

  Now he understood, at this precise moment, what it meant to live in a small town.

  “…and I’ve been with the same guy for fifteen years, and not that often either, and I’m simply afraid my repertoire is, you see, more for a chamber than a symphony orchestra. And I know how that sounds, I just wouldn’t want you to judge me too quickly, do you see?”

  “Woody Allen,” he said, pulling the quilt over his naked body because he felt cold.

  “What about Woody Allen?”

  “This is like a scene out of Woody Allen – instead of screwing we’re talking about screwing.”

  “Yes, I know, I know.”

  “So maybe let’s take it ever so slowly, and see what happens next, eh?”

  They took it ever so slowly, and that suited him very well after all the perverse acrobatics he’d been forced into by his lovers of late. Instead of striving and straining, he could slowly revel in intimacy, enjoy finding his own and Basia’s pleasure; she turned out to be a sensual and intelligent lover, as well as
funny and delightful in her self-consciousness. She tried various things with the caution of a little animal, but then quickly picked up speed, and not much time had gone by before they had advanced from the stage of mild moaning to the point where she was burying her head in the pillow to avoid alarming the whole of Sandomierz with her shouts. He suddenly remembered about her weak heart and was worried.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “I was thinking of your heart.”

  “Relax, I took some drugs. If the orgasm isn’t too intense I might just survive.”

  “Very funny.”

  The orgasm was moderately intense, and luckily both parties survived it. Szacki cuddled Basia to him and thought that if they became lovers, it would be a completely new experience for him – usually he was the one who wasn’t free.

  “I’m still in shock,” she whispered, “still at the stage of disbelief, it hasn’t really sunk in yet.”

  “Just let me get warmed up and I’ll show you.”

  “Silly, I meant Wilczur.”

  “Aha.”

  “I read what the archivist found, it all fits together, there are no gaps, as far as the motive goes. Then I remembered he was the first to get to Ela’s body, he was there when the razor was found and he showed us the recordings from the cameras and coordinated the witness interviews – he could have been manipulating us however he liked. Especially you – you don’t know this town, you don’t know the people, you took things on faith that I probably wouldn’t have swallowed.”

  “If you’re so smart, he should have been locked up earlier.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. I think he must have had the entire plan worked out long ago, but the opportunity only came up when you appeared in Sandomierz. He could be sure the star from Warsaw would get the case. A star, but an outsider.”

  “On the first day he said he’d help me, he’d explain who was really who.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  For a while they lay in silence.

  “I find it horrifying – to nurse hatred for so many years. But when I read the documents from the Wajsbrot case…”

  “Yes?”

  “The post-war brutality – it never gets talked about here, and when occasionally a researcher or a journalist ‘from Warsaw’ drags it up, he doesn’t even become public enemy number one, it simply isn’t talked about.”

  “You’re not the exception here. It’s like that all over Poland.”

  “I can’t stop imagining it. How those people came home from the camps, kept alive by the hope that maybe by some miracle their bathroom and kitchen had survived, that when they finally got there they’d make a cup of tea, have a cry and somehow manage to get on with life. Except there was someone else standing in their kitchen, their life wasn’t convenient for anyone – a friend from school came back a week ago and they’d already tortured him to death, they’d hanged him on a birch tree. That is, I knew things like that happened, but Wajsbrot puts a face to those events, I can see him banging his fists against the wall of his cell in Nazareth House and howling, and his wife dying a few hundred metres away, because the midwife was terrified of a Jew. Do you think she can have died in Wilczur’s arms? He must have been four or five then.”

  “That doesn’t justify what he did.”

  “No. But it helps to understand it.”

  The phone rang. He picked it up and leapt to his feet.

  “Yes, of course, I’m on my way, I’ll be waiting at the stop.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “My daughter’s coming to stay with me for the weekend.”

  “Oh, that’s great – so you’ll be bringing her over with you tomorrow?”

  “How’s that?”

  “We made a date for a barbecue. Don’t you remember?”

  VI

  The pressure of thoughts and emotions is making my head ache. I’m pacing from corner to corner, but the room is small and uncomfortable, I can’t just go outside the usual way. I can’t concentrate, I can’t make up my mind, as ever I can’t make up my mind. I know the most sensible thing would be to accept that this is the end, and to be done with it all. It’s only an unnecessary risk that won’t bring any advantage, and might ruin everything, everything! I know that, but I can’t let it go, not this time. Besides – besides, maybe the risk isn’t that great.

  11

  Saturday, 25th April 2009

  International Noise Awareness Day. Egypt is celebrating the twenty-seventh anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, Iceland’s Social Democrats and Greens are celebrating a win in pre-term parliamentary elections, and Al Pacino and Polish actor Andrzej Seweryn have birthdays. The world is starting to get hysterical about swine flu. In Germany an anonymous collector pays 32,000 euros for some watercolours by Adolf Hitler, depicting rustic landscapes. Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman causes a scandal in the USA by announcing during a concert that he’s not going to play any more in a country whose army is trying to control the entire world. In his homeland the Law and Justice party demands an explanation from the Ministry of Defence as to why soldiers in the guard of honour do not take part in ceremonial masses; the Ministry replies: Because if they faint from standing to attention for hours on end, they could do someone an injury with their bayonets. At tax offices all over Poland it is open day, and next week the deadline passes for filing tax returns. At the District Museum in Sandomierz an exhibition of “tectography” and unique prints by Grzegorz Madej opens. It is dry, sunny, a little warmer than yesterday, but not above seventeen degrees.

  I

  He was nervous about the meeting with his daughter, and although he would never have admitted it to anyone, he went to fetch her from the bus station with his heart in his mouth; it was situated not far from the Jewish cemetery, where a few days earlier he had had the supporters of national socialism arrested. Incidentally, he was surprised that after getting out of the can none of them had taken the trouble to paint a Star of David on his door or just give him a smack in the gob.

  Helka came flying out of the bus laughing and happy, full of the longing, admiration and empathy of an eleven-year-old. Empathy, because the bandage on his hand still looked suitably serious, and admiration because the television reports combined with the little girl’s fertile imagination had created the image of a hero, oblivious to the dangers as he battles against evil and crime.

  They had a very nice evening over pizza, and a wonderful morning, the major elements of which were a walk (including races and a game of badminton) by the Vistula and breakfast at the Mała Café, hot chocolate and sweet pancakes. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki gazed at his bright little spark with the chestnut hair, engrossed in reading one of the tatty old comics, who was just starting to pupate from a lovely child into an awkward teenager, and for the first time in ages he felt calm. Not tired, but calm. And, picking up with daughterly sixth sense that her father had a few rough days behind him, Helka spared him the sulks, hysteria and heart-rending crying that she wanted everything to be the way it used to be, or she’d never be happy again.

  And then they went to see Basia and Andrzej Sobieraj.

  The very idea of visiting Basia and her husband, not just with a child, but after yesterday’s heady evening, seemed to him as bizarre as it was attractive, and the only thing preventing him from enjoying this perverse situation was the fact that he still had the conversation with Leon Wilczur ahead of him. He would gladly have put it off to Monday, but he couldn’t. For if Wilczur decided to confess – and Szacki supposed that would happen sooner or later – it would add strength to the temporary arrest warrant. For the time being, however, he pushed the thought of Wilczur into a corner and cheerfully threw his squealing daughter over the Sobierajs’ low garden fence, then jumped over it himself, which he thought very sporty, but could only do because the fence came no higher than his knees.

  Helka and Andrzej Sobieraj very quickly found a common language,
mainly thanks to the gadgets he showed her, things with which the little girl, brought up in a high-rise, was unfamiliar. She had already played with the secateurs and the lawnmower, and now it was the turn of the garden hose, which to her, judging by her lively reaction, was something like the holy grail – the ideal toy.

  “At last you don’t look like Joseph K.”

  Indeed, he hadn’t made the same mistake as a week ago, and had come to the Sobierajs’ garden in jeans and a thick grey polo-neck sweater; he left the suit he had to put on later for the interview in a cover in the car.

  “At last you don’t look like a girl guide,” he retorted.

  They were sitting together at a small table on the patio.

  “Better save up for a house with a garden!” shouted Andrzej Sobieraj from behind the hedge. “This kid’s got the makings of the owner of a garden centre!”

  “Daddy, Daddy, I want a lawnmower!”

  “For your hair perhaps!”

  Helka ran up to the table.

  “You’ve forgotten I want to have long hair. Down to here,” she said, waving her hand at kidney height.

  Andrzej Sobieraj came trudging after the child, clearly out of breath. Szacki watched him take a big slug of beer from a can, and wondered if the Sobierajs had had sex yesterday. On the one hand he would have been truly surprised, on the other he had learnt by now that contrary to popular opinion, it’s the small towns that are a hotbed of all manner of debauchery.