A Grain of Truth (44 page)

“Mr Myszyński, for pity’s sake.”

“I just wanted to set the mood somehow.”

“You’ve succeeded. Less of the baroque, please.”

“OK, anyway, a hard winter set in, the country was devastated after the war, there was no medicine, food, or men, but there were Communists, a new regime and poverty. Even in Sandomierz, which had miraculously escaped being reduced to a heap of bricks by either side. And there’s a story about a Lieutenant-Colonel Skopenko, who stopped with the Red Army on the other side of the Vistula—”

“And he liked the town so much that he spared it, thanks to his strategic wisdom and his love of fine architecture,” Szacki interrupted him, thinking that if Myszyński couldn’t stop bogging his narrative down with digressions, it was going to be the longest Friday of his life. “I know, everyone tells that one here. I’ve also heard the alternative version, according to which the Lieutenant-Colonel had such a bad hangover he wouldn’t let them use the artillery. Mr Myszyński, please get on with it.”

The archivist gave him a sad look; the reproach of a wounded lover of a good anecdote that showed in his eyes would have melted the hardest heart. The prosecutor just pointed meaningfully at the shining red light on the Dictaphone.

“A harsh winter, people devastated, hunger and poverty. Of course, there was an empty space where the Jewish district used to be, and of course the best flats and tenements were occupied by Poles. But not all – from what I have managed to establish, a few Orthodox Jews came back after the war, though unfortunately they weren’t welcomed with flowers, no one here was looking forward to seeing them again. All the real estate had been claimed, as had the wealth and possessions left behind for safekeeping, and every Jew meant a pang of conscience that perhaps not everyone had behaved as they should have during the war. I don’t know if you’ve read Kornel Filipowicz’s stories, but he does a very good job of describing the dilemma of feeling that even if you’d done a lot, it was always too little, there were always pangs of conscience. And if you hadn’t done anything at all, had watched the Holocaust passively, or even worse, of course nowadays it’s hard to imagine—”

“Mr Myszyński!”

“Yes, of course. So a few Jews came back to the smouldering ruins and had to hear stories of how the Torah scrolls had been used as boot liners, and how the remains of their relatives shot by the Germans had been dug up in search of dollars and gold teeth. Stories went round about the cursed soldiers, especially the ones in the National Armed Forces, who were hunting down surviving Jews. Some of them are true, I’ve seen the trial documents. A strange, dark time…” Myszyński paused for a moment. “Some Poles managed to kill entire Jewish families, and others, both cases from Klimontów, were prepared to risk their lives to keep on hiding Jews, this time from the anti-Communist partisans. Yes, I know, stick to the point. Anyway, the Jews had nothing to look for in a place like Klimontów or Połaniec. But Sandomierz was a city, and those who didn’t fancy emigrating to Łódź came here and tried to make a life for themselves at any cost.”

“But that was straight after the war. You were going to talk about the winter of 1946 to 47.”

“That’s right. That autumn a Jewish family arrived. Strangers, no one had seen them in Sandomierz before. He was a doctor, his name was Wajsbrot, Chaim Wajsbrot. With him were a pregnant woman and a child of two or three years. From what I’ve gathered, the fact that they were strangers helped them. They weren’t returning to old haunts, so no one had to look them in the eye as former neighbours, or explain away the new sideboard in the kitchen – they were just plain victims of the war. They were quiet, they didn’t cause any trouble or make any claims, and what’s more he could help people. There had been a Jewish doctor in Sandomierz before the war too, a man called Weiss, who was greatly respected, and so naturally somehow people respected this one too.”

“Let me guess – the house on Zamokowa Street is his, right?”

“The house on Zamkowa Street is nobody’s, it belongs to the local council, but at one time it did indeed belong to Dr Weiss, and apparently, by that token Wajsbrot and his family moved in there. But that’s just local hearsay, I haven’t any written proof of that.”

“But why is it empty now?”

“Officially, ownership issues; unofficially, the place is haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“It’s a scary place.”

“Why?”

“We’re just coming to that.”

Szacki nodded. Unfortunately, he knew this was going to be yet another story without a happy ending, and he felt reluctant to hear it out, but he hadn’t lost hope of learning something thanks to it.

“The winter went on, and people did their best to survive, Wajsbrot treated patients, and the woman’s belly grew. The doctor was particularly willing to help children, people said he had a good touch, and preferred to go to him rather than to a Polish doctor. All the more because it turned out the Jewish doctor had something the others didn’t have.”

“What?”

“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 enemy, 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.”