A Grain of Truth (21 page)

“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 whole 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.

“Do we really talk about our ailments all the time?” Mr Rojski switched on his running commentary again. “Maybe not, it’s just that Thomas put me in the mood, somehow I had it there before my eyes, the image of him poking about in Jesus’s side. Maybe it’s because of those paintings, I don’t know, I don’t like standing next to April, that’s where the very worst tortures are, that fellow impaled on the stake always grabs my attention, and he’s got something trickling down that stake…”

“Janusz!” Irena Rojska virtually came to a stop. “Just you shut up about those monstrosities.”

As if to emphasize her indignation, right beside her head, a blue-black raven landed on the wall surrounding an abandoned, tumble-down manor house; it was a really big bird, and it tilted its head as it looked at the old couple. They stared in amazement – it was only an arm’s length away. The bird must have understood it had committed a faux pas, because it quickly hopped down on the other side of the wall. Mrs Rojska made the sign of the cross, at which her husband tapped his forehead knowingly. Without a word, they continued their walk up the hill, and then the raven came back. This time it jumped down on their side, marched past underfoot, and disappeared in the gateway of the abandoned property. It was behaving like a dog that wants to show its master something.

Mrs Rojska felt anxious and increased her pace, but her husband, whose eyes were ageing more slowly than hers, stayed on the spot,
staring at the granite paving stones. The bird had left behind small, characteristic three-point tracks, as if it had deliberately dipped its claws in dark paint earlier on.

“Are you coming or not?”

“Wait a minute, I think something’s happened.”

There was a flutter of wings, and now there were several ravens sitting on the pitted wall. As if hypnotized, Mr Rojski stepped over a signboard warning that the building was in danger of collapse and went into the overgrown garden. Standing amid the bushes, the two-storey mansion was also partly covered in weeds and had been rotting away here for decades, until it had acquired the lifeless look so typical of abandoned buildings. The walls had gone green, part of the roof had caved in and the windows were like empty eye-sockets, making it look like the face of a water demon looming out of the duckweed for a moment to hunt down its next victim.

“Have you gone completely mad now? Janusz!”

Mr Rojski didn’t answer; pulling aside the grey branches of the bushes he was walking slowly towards the house. His leg hurt like hell, so he could only shuffle along torpidly. The courtyard was full of ravens, which weren’t flying, or cawing, just walking about in silence, staring expectantly. The house’s empty windows made him think of the tortured martyrs from the cathedral again, their burnt-out eyes, grimaces of pain and mouths open for a scream. Behind him, his wife was making a fuss, scaring him with her palpitations and threatening never to make another meat loaf if he didn’t come back instantly. He heard and understood, but he couldn’t stop. As he went inside the house, the rotten floorboards didn’t so much creak, as make an unpleasant squelching noise.

His eyes took a while to adapt to the semi-darkness; the windows were quite small, and partly boarded up, so, despite the sunshine, not much light could force its way inside – or at least not into the ground floor, because there was a bright glow coming from upstairs, and that was where Rojski headed. The ravens stayed outside; one, the biggest, stood on the threshold, cutting off the retreat. The old gentleman stopped at the foot of the stairs and thought this wasn’t a good idea;
not many of the steps were left, and the ones that were did not inspire confidence. Even if he had been an extremely light, extremely brave cat he should have decided against it. Nevertheless, he started going up, mentally reproaching himself the whole time for being a silly old codger, telling himself that the days were long since over when after each adventure, once he had recovered, he could say: “Oh, what the heck, it always turns out well”.

The banister was slippery with damp and mould, and it was impossible to get a grip on it with his bare palm, so he wrapped his hand in his scarf. The first stair broke as soon as he set foot on it, but luckily he was ready for that. The second one was solid, so was the third and they all looked the same up to the eighth, but just in case he left out the seventh, which had a strange bulge in it. After that it was worse. The ninth stair was missing, and so were the eleventh and twelfth. As for the tenth – well, anyway he’d come too far to go back, so he stood on it and quickly pulled up his painful leg. The stair gave a warning groan and creaked, then started to tip slightly and Rojski felt himself slipping on the rotten wood. Afraid of falling, quickly for his age he jumped across the hole, and that was the moment when he should have given up, but he had the floor of the upper storey at eye level, and that was his undoing. Wanting to cross the finish line as fast as possible, he rapidly surmounted two more steps, but his bad leg let him down and he lost his balance. Afraid of tumbling down the stairs, he threw himself headlong into the stream of sunlight falling through holes in the roof and a large French window. Something cracked, but unfortunately it wasn’t a floorboard; the pain from his broken wrist flooded Rojski’s body in a hot, sickening wave. Groaning, he turned over onto his back, and the sunlight dazzled him; as a reflex he shielded his eyes with the broken hand and felt a stab of pain, a terrible sensation, as if the bones in his forearm were being ripped out with pincers. He let out a loud scream and pressed his hand to his chest, breathing fast and heavily through clenched teeth; then he felt faint, and under his tightly closed eyelids the afterglow of sunlight fought for space with scarlet spots. Nevertheless he managed to clamber to his knees and open his eyes; the first thing he saw was a family of tiny mushrooms
growing from a chink in the red floor. This sight was so absurd that he had to laugh. What a silly old codger, why on earth had he climbed up here at all? And how was he going to get down now? The fire brigade would have to fetch him down, like a cat stuck up a tree.