A Grain of Truth (30 page)

But Mala had gone, Granny Kołyszko thought, as she downed the rest of the liqueur. She remembered her leaving. Doctor Weiss had gone away then too, the man who had treated her tonsillitis since she was tiny. He was thrilled with the Germans, saying they were a civilized nation, that he had never seen the like before… they wouldn’t harm the Jews. Granny Kołyszko’s father had tried to persuade him: “Don’t sign, Doctor, don’t own up.” But he had insisted: “What do you mean? The Germans are civilized.” Apparently he poisoned himself on the loading ramp at Dwikozy. He didn’t board the train, he preferred to die like that. From the window she had seen them leading him away, and she had cried terribly, because she was fond of the doctor; the doctor had stared in at their windows as if he wanted to say goodbye, but her mother wouldn’t let her speak to him. Then Mrs Kielman had been walking along with her twins, two four-year-old girls, so lovely. A German had fired at one of them, that little girl had been left outside their house. What sort of people, what sort of a nation fires at a crying child? A small child being held by her mother, and that man comes up and shoots. Her father came home that evening and told them lots of their friends were there, and they’d wanted to save someone, give someone a hand, but it was completely impossible, they were entirely surrounded.

And Mala had gone. The people who were there in Dwikozy said she had tripped and failed to jump across the ditch the Germans
had dug opposite the station to test who was strong and fit. But how could Mala have failed to jump it? She was more nimble than all the women put together.

She had never had a friend like that again.

VIII

When they dropped him at the garden gate and wished him good evening, he almost jumped down their throats. Swine, bloody swine promoted above their station; common country bumpkins with straw coming out of their mouths. The prosecutor was no better. Got his socialist-realist queers mixed up indeed – not surprising, probably the only classics he knew were by Sienkiewicz, whose novels every schoolboy had to read.

He went into the house, threw his jacket on a hook, and without switching on the light poured himself half a glass of Metaxa. He had a weakness for the sugary Greek brandy. He sat in an armchair and closed his eyes. Before five minutes were up he was sobbing uncontrollably. He knew the theory, he knew he was still in the phase of disbelief and that this phase suited him, but sometimes pain broke through the disbelief, through the conviction that it was all just a game, a sham, and that when the show was over everything would be the same as before, a pain that drove him close to losing consciousness. At those moments all the images of the past few months flooded him in a wave, their happiest times, and definitely the happiest times in his life. Ela drinking coffee, the sleeve of her sweater pulled down so she wouldn’t burn her hand on the cup. Ela reading a book, with her feet up on the armrest of the sofa, her hair gathered on one shoulder so it wouldn’t get in the way. Ela winding hair round her finger. Ela joking. Ela babbling. Ela shouting at him. Ela, Ela, Ela.

Suddenly he sensed he was not alone. His eyes had got sufficiently used to the darkness to make out a ghost – a dark figure sunk into a chair in the corner of the sitting room. The figure shuddered and
stood up, then slowly came towards him. On this side it was brighter; although the lights were off, there was enough yellow lamplight coming in through the fog outside for him to see the figure’s features more and more clearly, until finally he recognized it.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

7

Tuesday, 21st April 2009

At ten a.m. on the dot, Israel comes to a standstill for two minutes as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Day, is solemnly commemorated. At Auschwitz the March of the Living is held, and the Israeli deputy prime minister taking part in it compares Iran’s political line to that of Nazi Germany. Iranian public prosecutors announce that they will demand the death penalty for those caught producing pornographic Internet sites. In Belarus the ice-hockey trainer whose club dared to win against Alexander Lukashenko’s team loses his job – undefeated until now in the national championships, the president’s team has only ever been thrashed by the Russians. Poland’s MPs receive a government report on preparations for the Euro 2012 UEFA football championships (it’s not bad), the tax department refuses to allow cohabiting parents to be accounted for as a couple, and the Wrocław firewomen are complaining that they can’t go on operations because there are no ladies’ changing rooms. It turns out communal changing rooms don’t bother them, even less their male colleagues. The weather is the same as yesterday – sunny but cold.

I

“Anyway, I’ll quote it to you, it has just been published in
Your Weekend
: ‘Broad-minded female, 30, seeks gentleman or gentlemen, 55 to 65, interested in erotic experiments, with no strings attached, but with plenty of tying up.’ And a sort of semicolon face to say it’s funny. ‘French without, chocolate starfish, two-hole snooker, bondage and a touch of pretend violence.’ And again a sort of face with a winking eye. And my phone number. You can imagine what happens when it says in this sort of paper there’s a woman looking for an over-the-hill bloke for erotic games, right? Half Poland calls. And the other half sends a text – look, here’s an advert from the Internet two weeks ago: ‘I like to talk dirty in texts, I’m bored out here in the country, I want a few dreams to wet my hasslebag…’”

“Hasslebag?”

“That’s what they say in the borderlands for, well, you know what for. But that’s not all. ‘Write, I’ll be sure to write back, and maybe I’ll even send a text, lags welcome’. Of course, you know what lags are?”

“I’m a prosecutor.”

“Well, quite. Then for two days solid, every fifteen minutes I get a message that’s a vulgar summary of a porn flick, and what’s more it’s all so boring – I can’t think why every other con has to write about sticking it through the bars. Have they got some sort of standard version? Is that the fashion? And don’t tell me to change the number – I’ve spent a fortune doing that, and not a week goes by before the same thing happens again. But I’m in trade, I can’t do without a phone, I’ve got customers, wholesalers. As it is, it’s getting worse and worse, people keep complaining that they can’t get in touch, but how can they if I’ve got a new number every week? I thought it would pass, but it hasn’t. So I’d like officially to report a crime, I mean a suspected crime, and I hope that slag who goes with other people’s husbands ends up serving time.”

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had a soft spot for ladies of the Communist-era queen-of-the-bazaar type who spoke too fast and were too expressive, maybe because they reminded him of his mother, and
he knew that behind all those words, curls, rings and fluffy suits – always adorned with an amber brooch – there usually lay a heart of gold and an innate inability to do anyone harm. He felt all the more sorry that he had no good news for Mrs Zgorzelska, sitting on the other side of his desk.

“Firstly, you have to take this matter to the police – it comes under the Code of Misdemeanours, and even if I take down your report the police will deal with it anyway, so there’s no point increasing the paperwork.”

“Misdemeanour! That’s a good one. And what about the fact that my sons’ schoolmates always find out about it by some strange chance? And that my customers smile strangely, too? I’ve already reached the point where I’d rather they hit me, attacked me or something, and it was off my plate. But it’s impossible to live like this. What’s the maximum she could get for it?”

“If it’s possible to prove she did it, one and a half.”

“Years?”

“Thousand zlotys fine.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. There’s been some talk about changing the rules to include stalking under the Penal Code and introduce a sensible deterrent, probably two or three years. But for now there’s just paragraph 107 of the Code of Misdemeanours, which mentions malicious harassment.”

Mrs Zgorzelska was shattered.

“But she’s loaded with money. One and a half thousand? She’ll pay up and send me a fax confirming the transfer. And what if it doesn’t stop? Another one and a half thousand?”

Szacki gave a confirming nod. It wasn’t the first time, when talking to injured parties, that he’d had to feel ashamed of the Polish legal solutions. Out-of-date, convoluted regulations that couldn’t keep up with the times and were either curiously mild, de facto removing criminal liability from the culprit, or – the result of two decades of populist governments – absurdly punitive, causing the prisons in Poland to be full of people who shouldn’t be in there, after taking part in drunken brawls where nothing had happened to anyone,
simply because a penknife with a beer-bottle opener qualified as a dangerous instrument.

“But if she’s punished for the same thing a second time, the judge can slap a sentence on her. From five to thirty days. It doesn’t seem much, but I don’t think your…” – he bit his tongue, he’d very nearly said “competitor” – “persecutor would be quite so desperate. Besides, after the first sentence you can sue her for the losses, but that means going to a lawyer.”

“Sue someone in Poland,” snorted Mrs Zgorzelska. “I’m almost fifty, I might not live to see the first hearing.”

What could he say? That the most sensible thing to do was to hire someone to put the frighteners on the woman? He smiled apologetically and gave her a meaningful look. In actual fact this conversation shouldn’t have been happening at all. As chance would have it, when he got to the office before seven, hoping to be early enough to avoid the journalists and use the time to review the case documents again, Zofia Zgorzelska was waiting on the steps. She was so frazzled and frozen that he didn’t have the heart to send her away – he was clearly getting soft in his old age.

He got up, wanting to say goodbye, and just at that moment, the door opened abruptly without a knock, and there stood Basia Sobieraj, out of breath, still in her hat and scarf, her face flushed. She looked charming. It occurred to Szacki that with her heart problems she shouldn’t run. And that he very much didn’t want to hear whatever she had to tell him. It couldn’t be good news.

II

The worst thing was the antlers. During his previous visit they had just seemed tacky, a typical small-town ornament – he’d seen them all over the place here. Now every wild boar’s head and every deer’s skull seemed to be laughing at him. Cool as a cucumber on the outside, inwardly he was seething with the desire to destroy, to seize the poker and smash it all to smithereens. So badly that his fingers were itching.

“She’s seventy years old, why on earth should we have any doubts, Mr Prosecutor? This isn’t Warsaw, people are friendly here, they help each other,” repeated the policeman.

Small and slight, with a big nose, he looked like a comic-book kike. Szacki half-closed his eyes, to avoid seeing him. He was afraid that if he took just one more look at that red snout and those apologetic eyes he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from attacking the man. The whole thing was like a bad dream. Two police officers had driven Jerzy Szyller home last night, parked outside his gate and got ready for all-night guard duty. Just after that, at about eleven, Szyller’s neighbour, a lady with the strange Greek name of Potelos, had brought the policemen a thermos of coffee. She did that every day, because she had a kind heart and knew it was a thankless job – her son was a policeman in Rzeszów. She had given them the coffee, chatted for a while, droned on about her ailments and left, wishing them goodnight. Those words were prophetic – just one mug of coffee and the policemen had fallen into a very deep sleep, from which they had only woken up at seven a.m., so frozen to the marrow that the doctor said they had frostbitten ears, noses and fingers – which incidentally said a lot about the nature of the spring in the Year of Our Lord 2009.

“Is it possible that Szyller met up with her? That he went to her house and drugged the coffee?”

“No way. We had him under observation the whole time, we took it in turns to walk around the property. We only dragged him out to go to over to Sucha Street, where we met up with you, Mr Prosecutor. And then she came by, a short time after the door had closed behind him.”

Something creaked behind Szacki. It was Wilczur.

“She didn’t see anything, she doesn’t know anything, she’s in a panic. There are no signs of a break-in, but she isn’t sure if all the doors and windows were locked either. We’ve sent the thermos and the coffee tin for analysis. I’d bet on the thermos – the lady says she wondered why it was standing on the tabletop, not on the draining board. But at that age, as you know, a person only wonders for a moment.”

Szacki nodded to say he’d taken that on board. What pissed him off the most was that there wasn’t even anyone to yell at. They had never
had enough on Szyller to press charges and lock him up, and actually it was a courtesy on his part that he had agreed to stay indoors – any court would have overturned the decision to place him under house arrest in five minutes flat. And the fact that the cops had accepted coffee from the old lady next door, whom they knew well? So what if they had – he’d have accepted it too. The worst thing was not knowing what happened next. Had he run off? Had someone abducted him? He realized that in actual fact he was furious with himself. Maybe if he had thought quicker, put two and two together better, if he’d been able to notice something that he must already have seen, but the significance of which he had failed to understand – maybe, maybe, maybe.

“There’s no sign of a fight,” he said.

“None,” muttered Wilczur. “Either he walked out, or he was carried out.”

“I thought of that. Send the bottles from the minibar and the glass that was on the piano to be checked. Maybe they put something in his drink too. And left prints as well. That would make a nice change.”

“Arrest warrant?”

“Out of the question, I’ve had enough humiliations for one case already. I don’t want to find out in a while that the next main suspect is hanging on a hook somewhere. Send an announcement to the media to say we’re looking for an important witness in the case, and we’ll stick to that version. A witness, an important witness.”