A Grain of Truth (33 page)

In my defence I would like to add that I acted under the influence of shock, mental pain and strong emotions.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki gazed at the heap of misfortune sitting in front of him. The boy was small and fair-haired. With large eyes and long black eyelashes, he looked like the ideal altar boy. He glanced
at the text of his statement on the computer screen. He didn’t let it show, but he was feeling the weight of responsibility – the fate of this boy and his family depended on him. And the point here was not how to classify the crime. It was evidently homicide, and even if an expert were to take pity and acknowledge extreme agitation, he’d still get a sentence from the higher end of paragraph four, which covered manslaughter: probably about eight years. The point was whether Szacki believed his tale or not.

“Where is your wife living now?” he asked.

“Well, after probate I inherited the house and the land, and she and our son are living there. Apparently she’s even done well, my cousin wrote to say.”

“Out of what?”

“She finally made the application to the Union for a land subsidy – there are people at the local administration who fill in the documents. Plus benefits. If I were already in prison, and not custody, I’d be able to earn some more, and send it.”

Magiera gave him a beseeching look. He was squirming on his chair; he didn’t know what the prosecutor’s silence meant. Meanwhile the prosecutor’s silence meant that he was trying to remember all the similar cases from the past. He couldn’t remember exactly when he had first placed himself above the Legal Code for some higher good, trusting more to his own judgement than a merciless piece of legislation. Maybe there were mistakes in it, maybe it was unfair, but it was the cornerstone of law and order in the Polish Republic. The moment he realized he was slipping in between its paragraphs should be the moment he ceased to be a prosecutor.

He had a choice of two options. The first option was to buy Magiera’s version of events and charge him with manslaughter, which would mean an easy defence of arguments set out in the case file in court. The defendant admits it, his wife confirms his version, there are no witnesses, there is no other relative of the father’s or private plaintiff, and of course there is no appeal. He’d serve a few years and go back to Zawichost, where his wife would be waiting for him. Szacki had no doubt about that.

The second option meant, as it is termed, “establishing the material truth”. Which in this case meant accusing both Magiera and also his wife of homicide as defined by paragraph one, in other words murder, and sentences from fifteen years and higher for both of them, while Tadek would be sent to a children’s home. Both of them had left fingerprints on the discus. Neither of them had alcohol in their blood. By some odd chance the child had ended up at a neighbour’s house two streets away before the killing happened. From the autopsy it appeared that Magiera Senior had died an hour and a half before the ambulance was called – they wanted to be sure he couldn’t be saved.

But everything the cherubic little gardener had said about his life with Anna and his relationship with his father was true too – witnesses had confirmed it. Even the notary had testified that it was utterly despicable how the old man had come to see him as if he wanted to discuss the issue of the land, but really to make a fool of his son and his tart of a wife. And managing to disgust a notary is quite an achievement.

Magiera went on squirming, sweating and making pleading faces. Szacki was turning a coin in his hand, but there was only one thought in his head: the truth, or half the truth?

V

“There’s a Jewish saying: half the truth is a whole lie,” said Rabbi Zygmunt Maciejewski, as he raised a toast with kosher wine. It was delicious, but unfortunately Szacki couldn’t drink a drop more if he didn’t want to stay overnight in Lublin.

A few hours earlier, as he had travelled the narrow, potholed road from Sandomierz to Lublin, he hadn’t placed much hope in the meeting ahead of him. He wanted to have a chat with someone who knew Jewish culture, to get some background information that, even if it didn’t lead to a breakthrough, might help him at a critical moment not to overlook a piece of evidence left by their madman. And to understand whether this bizarre game had a
subtext, a hidden meaning that he couldn’t perceive because he lacked the knowledge.

Although he hadn’t really thought about it, as he knocked at the door of a flat in the centre of Lublin he was expecting to see an amiable old man with a pointed nose and a white beard gazing with wise benevolence from behind half-moon spectacles. A sort of cross between Albus Dumbledore and Ben Kingsley. Meanwhile, the door was opened by a stocky man in a polo shirt, not unlike a hood from the Warsaw suburbs, looking equally intelligent and dangerous. Rabbi Zygmunt Maciejewski was about thirty-five and looked like the former boxer Jerzy Kulej – not Kulej now that he was old and an MP, but the Kulej of the black-and-white photographs in the days when he won Olympic gold medals. A triangular face with a sharply drawn chin, the pugnacious grin of a thug, the flat nose of a boxer, and above it deep-set, alert, pale eyes. And a receding hairline cutting into shortly-cropped black curls.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki carefully hid his surprise at the Jewish teacher’s appearance, but inside the flat he couldn’t hold back, and must have made an astonished face at the sight of its decor, because the young rabbi snorted with laughter. The fact that the sitting room was crammed with shelves full of books in several languages was not unexpected. But that in between the symmetrically positioned bookcases the walls were covered in posters of life-sized beauty queens in bathing costumes seemed to him strange. Szacki was curious to know what lay behind the choice – they didn’t seem to be Jewish girls, because only one of them, with a torrent of jet-black curls tied in a pony tail, looked like an Israeli army officer. He glanced enquiringly at Maciejewski.

“Miss Israels for the past ten years,” explained the rabbi. “I put them up because I realized you have to provide other evidence besides Jewish jokes, Sabbath candles, haggling in gaberdines and violin recitals on the roof.”

“Those Ukrainian models too?” asked Szacki, pointing at the slender blondes showing their curves in several of the posters.

“Did you think they all looked like Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie
? In that case, come to Israel. But say a tender farewell to your wife before you leave. I’m probably not very objective, but I’ve never known sexier
women. And that’s a lot coming from someone who lives in a Polish university city.”

The rabbi had a natural tendency not to keep anyone at arm’s length for long, and although in Szacki’s case it wasn’t the norm, they were soon on first-name terms. Along the way he explained that he had inherited his Jewish descent from his Israeli mother, his first name from the great Jew Sigmund Freud and his surname from a Polish engineer, who forty years ago had gone on a four-day business trip to Haifa and never returned from there to the wife and two children he had left behind in Poznań.

“Just imagine, now I’m making friends with my half-siblings.” Szacki couldn’t imagine how anyone could fail to make friends with Rabbi Maciejewski who was all heart. “Even though throughout their childhood they kept being told a Jewish witch had stolen their father. I always cite it as an optimistic example, whenever someone asks me about Polish-Jewish relations. And I understand that’s what we’re going to talk about?”

However, they started with Sandomierz. With the murders committed in the city, which the prosecutor described in detail. With the cathedral, the old painting and the legend about ritual murder, which could in some way be the key to the case. (Though intuitively Szacki would have preferred to exclude this particular hypothesis, rather than confirm it.) With the inscription on the painting. The rabbi examined the photograph, and first of all frowned, muttering that it was strange, and that there was one thing he’d have to think about; importuned by the prosecutor, he explained that the words should be read as “
ayin tahat ayin
”, that literally they meant “an eye for an eye”, and they did indeed come from the Pentateuch.

“The Christians and the Muslims often quote those passages as proof of the aggression and brutality of Judaism,” explained Maciejewski, pouring the kosher wine. It was called
l’chaim
and was a decent table Cabernet. “Meanwhile this rule was never taken literally by the Jews. I don’t know if you are aware that according to tradition, as well as the written Torah, Moses also received an oral tradition from God, in other words the Talmud?”

“Something like a Jewish catechism?”

“Exactly. The Talmud is the official interpretation of the Torah’s written rules, which are sometimes, well, debatable. If, God forbid, I were sceptical about my faith, I would say it was a very wise move by the people of Israel – to quickly write down practical interpretations of some impractical rules, and regard them as the voice of God, except passed on during a chat. But as I am very God-fearing, we’ll stick to the version that the wise God knew what to tell Moses to write down, and what to just say to him for remembrance.”

“And what did he have to say on the issue of gouging out an eye?”

“He explained to Moses that only a cretin could take it literally. Here’s a famous example: a person who has blinded someone in one eye is himself one-eyed. If the rule from the Torah were applied literally, as a punishment you’d have to gouge out the perpetrator’s remaining eye, which would make him completely blind. Would that be a fair punishment? Of course not. And so tradition very soon explained that the point of the rule ‘an eye for an eye’ is fair, monetary compensation, proportional to the injury. Because in the case of losing a leg, the harm to a writer is not the same as the harm to a professional footballer. In other words, in Jewish law there was never a principle that the punishment for blinding should be blinding. Is that clear?”

“In that case, where does the belief come from?” asked Szacki.

The rabbi poured himself more wine; the prosecutor’s glass was full.

“A lot of the credit for that is due to Matthew the Evangelist, who quoted Jesus as saying that once upon a time people were taught ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, but now they’re not to stand up to evil but turn the other cheek. A superstition was born out of this, which contrasts the merciful Christians with the bloodthirsty Jews. Which is even quite amusing.”

“In other words, the Jews don’t turn the other cheek?” asked Szacki, wondering to what extent the rabbi was open-minded, and to what extent politically correct, and whether he would send him packing when he found out he was actually testing a theory about a Jewish madman who had decided to play at ritual murders.

“No,” replied Maciejewski curtly. “Rebbe Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher rabbi, was fond of saying that the best way to fight evil is to do good. But there are situations where this strategy does a poor job. There have been moments in history when we were the victims, but our mythology is not a mythology of victims. Just look at the Jewish holidays. Passover commemorates the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. Hanukkah marks the successful Maccabbean revolt and the defeat of the invaders. Purim commemorates the fact that the massacre being planned for the Jews changed into the aggressor being put to the sword.”

“And what about revenge?”

“The Torah and the Talmud are unanimous on this topic: vengeance is against the Law. You are not allowed to disseminate hatred, you are not allowed to seek revenge, you are not allowed to harbour a grudge, you should love your neighbour as yourself. The same Book of Leviticus, which your quotation comes from. But a few chapters earlier.”

Szacki thought for a while.

“What about after the war? It would seem to me natural.”

Rabbi Zygmunt Maciejewski stood up and switched on a lamp that was standing on the table – it was starting to get dark. In the half-light the scantily dressed beauty queens seemed more alive than before, more like real people lurking in the corners than pictures on the wall. And among them stood the young Jerzy Kulej in the role of the Lublin rabbi.

“I don’t like talking about the Holocaust,” he said. “I don’t like the fact that eventually every conversation between Catholic Poles and Jews goes back to events from almost seventy years ago. As if there hadn’t been seven hundred years of shared history before that, and everything after it. Just a sea of dead bodies and nothing else. That’s why I put these models on the wall, whose presence seems surreal to me now, probably even more so to you.”

Maciejewski stared out of the window, and there was nothing to imply he would continue the conversation. Szacki stood up to stretch his bones and walked over to him. A strange atmosphere prevailed in the rabbi’s flat. Szacki felt his professional guard dropping, the cynicism
and irony draining away. He simply wanted to talk. Maybe this resulted from the fact that for ages he had had to watch every word – in Sandomierz everyone was suspicious, and no conversation there was just a conversation. He stood beside the rabbi and felt an urge to tell him about his big dream: he had always wanted to walk about Warsaw as it once used to be, to sense and taste its diversity, to walk along streets where Polish mixed with Russian and Yiddish. He felt the need to express his nostalgia for otherness, and opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again, fearing that he would just witter on meaninglessly, because like every educated Pole he was desperately afraid of sounding like an anti-Semite. Suddenly he felt irrationally angry with himself and quickly returned to his armchair. He drank a little wine, and diluted the rest with mineral water. The pensive rabbi went on standing by the window; in profile he looked like the boxer brooding on a lost fight.

“I understand you have some reason for asking about Jewish vengeance,” he said at last, coming back to the table. “To put it briefly, there wasn’t really anyone to take revenge here, or anyone to take it on. Not many Jews, or Germans either once the Red Army came through. Some of the Jews, and I’m not judging anyone, I’m just stating a fact, were skewered by Polish peasants who were terrified they’d demand their property back. Some of them hadn’t the slightest desire for revenge – revenge meant a risk, and a life saved by a miracle was too fragile to take any sort of risk. There were exceptions. Do the names Wiesenthal and Morel mean anything to you?”