Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
A Grain of Truth (7 page)
The policeman nodded and tore the filter off a cigarette; Szacki felt an overwhelming sense of resignation. He wanted to leave for Warsaw. Now. This minute. At once.
“What about the relationship between them?”
“People usually pair up with partners in the same league, I’m sure you’re aware of that principle. The beautiful with the beautiful,
the stupid with the stupid, the prodigal with the prodigal. Whereas Mrs Budnik was from two or three rungs higher than her husband. How should I explain it to you?…” Wilczur fell into thought, which made his face take on a ghostly, corpse-like expression. In the dim light of the pizzeria, behind a veil of cigarette smoke, he looked like an incompetently animated mummy. “People only put up with him because she chose him. They think, too bad, he may have a screw loose but essentially he’s right, and if there’s a woman like that at his side, he can’t possibly be bad. And he knows that. He knows it’s contrary to nature.”
Sobieraj had said: “I’d like a man to be that much in love with me for all those years. I’d like to see that sort of adoration in someone’s eyes every day of the week. From the outside they may have looked ill-matched, but they were a wonderful couple. I would wish anyone that sort of love, that sort of adoration.”
“He adored her, but there was something sordid about that adoration,” said Wilczur, exuding his poison, “something possessive, clinging, I’d say. My ex was working at the hospital over ten years ago, when it became clear that Mrs Budnik wouldn’t ever have children. She was in despair, he wasn’t at all. He said at least he wouldn’t have to share her. It was a passion, for sure. But you know what people with passions are like.”
Szacki did know, but he didn’t want to agree with Wilczur, because he was finding him less and less likeable, and any fraternizing with this individual seemed abhorrent. Nor did he wish to prolong the discussion. Two people had told him about the Budniks today, but he felt as if he still knew bugger all – this emotionally stamped quasi-knowledge was of no use to him at all.
“Have you questioned Budnik?” he asked at the end.
“He’s in a terrible state. I asked him a few technical questions, I’m leaving the rest to you. He’s under discreet surveillance.”
“Where was he yesterday?”
“At home.”
“And where was she?”
“At home too.”
“Sorry?”
“So he claims. They watched television, snuggled up and went to sleep. He got up at dawn for a glass of water, and she wasn’t there. Before he’d had time to get really worried, he got the call from Basia Sobieraj.”
Szacki couldn’t believe his own ears.
“That’s a load of crap. The silliest bunch of lies I’ve ever heard in my entire career.”
Wilczur nodded in agreement.
XI
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki tossed into the bin the leftover cold meat and cheese that was festering in the fridge, a half-eaten tin of pâté and a piece of tomato; for a moment he hesitated over the contents of the frying pan, but finally the day-before-yesterday’s bolognese sauce ended up in the rubbish too. The greater part of the food he had cooked. He had made far too much, enough for a three-person family and some chance guests. In Sandomierz he had no family, no friends or acquaintances and guests; as it was, he had to force himself to cook at all, because the ritual of standing on his own at the cooker and eating alone was dreadful. He tried to eat with the radio or the television on, but this fake version of someone else’s presence just made matters worse. He couldn’t swallow a bite, the food stuck in his throat, and he was starting to think of eating as such a tough, depressing activity that after every meal it took him a long time to recover. And he was finding it more and more arduous.
He went shopping as if it were a punishment. He was learning to buy less and less. At first, as with the cooking, he automatically got as much food as ever, accustomed to the fact that however much he bought, it would all disappear from the fridge. Someone would make themselves a sandwich, someone would come home hungry, or have a snack in front of the evening telly. Here there was just him. First
he gave up buying anything that was in a packet. The packs of cold meat and cheese were too big for one person, and he was throwing things away on a daily basis. He started buying by the weight, but still bought too much. Two hundred grams of smoked sausage, a hundred and fifty, a hundred. One day he was standing by the till in a shabby co-op on the market square. One bread roll, a pot of cottage cheese, a small carton of orange juice, fifty grams of ham and a tomato. The checkout girl joked that he didn’t have much of an appetite. He left without a word, somehow kept a grip on himself on the way home, but once he got there he cried as he made himself breakfast, and when he sat down at his plate with two sandwiches on it, he sobbed hysterically, and couldn’t stop; there were tears and snot smeared across his face. And he went on howling, rocking backwards and forwards, unable to tear his misted gaze from the ham sandwiches. Because he realized he had lost everything he loved, and would never get it back again.
Since moving from Warsaw he had lost fifteen kilos. People didn’t know him here – they thought he’d always been a skinny guy. But his suits were hanging off him, his collars had become too loose, and he had had to burn extra holes in his belts with a nail heated on the gas.
He thought of throwing himself into a whirl of work, but there wasn’t that much work to do here. He thought of going back to Warsaw, but he had nothing to go back to. He thought of finding someone for company who wouldn’t just be there to share the bed, but he hadn’t the strength. He did a lot of lying down, and a lot of brooding. Sometimes he felt that things were better now, that now he was standing on solid ground, but then the ground would give way and he’d have to take a step back again. He couldn’t see what was there behind him, but he took that step. On the other side of the crevasse was his old life, there was Weronika bustling about, Helka, Kuzniecow and his friends. Light, noise, laughter. Where he was, on one side there was darkness, and on the other the crevasse. Another day, another landslip, another step backwards. Finally he was surrounded by darkness on all sides,
but even so, each day he took another step backwards. He had come to terms with the idea that that’s how things were going to be from now on.
He poured a little water into the dirty frying pan and put it down on the cooker. He’d clean it up eventually.
It can’t be like this, it occurred to him, as he pushed away the conscious thought that this conviction had come to haunt him every day. It can’t be like this. People go on living in harmony after a divorce, they sometimes make friends and bring up children jointly, Demi Moore was at Bruce Willis’s wedding and vice versa, you don’t have to sleep in the same bed or live in the same flat to be a family. After all, he, Weronika and Helka would always be a family, regardless of what had happened and what would happen.
He reached for the phone – he still had Weronika on speed-dial. Except that now it said “Weronika”, not as it once had, “Kitten”.
“Yes?”
“Hello, it’s me.”
“Hello, I can see that. What do you want?”
She didn’t have to be friendly. He realized that.
“I’m just calling to see if everything’s OK. How you are, how’s Helka?”
There was a short silence.
“Again?”
“What do you mean, again? I’m sorry, but is there a time when I can call and find out how my daughter is?”
He heard a sigh.
“Your daughter’s fine, I’ve been nagging her to do her homework, she’s got a test tomorrow.” She sounded tired and unenthusiastic, as if she were completing an unpleasant task, and Szacki could feel a lump of aggression rising in his throat.
“What’s the test on?”
“Nature. Teo, is there something in particular? Sorry, but I’m quite busy.”
“In particular I wanted to find out when my daughter is coming here. I get the impression you’re obstructing her contact with me.”
“Don’t be paranoid. You know she doesn’t like going there.”
“Why so? Because as soon as she starts to visit me, then her step-father will have competition and your wonderful new relationship won’t be quite so wonderful?”
“Teo…”
“Well all right, but she has to understand that I live here now.”
He hated himself for letting a plaintive tone creep into his voice.
“Explain it to her yourself.”
He didn’t know how to answer that. Helka was reluctant to talk to him and reluctant to listen. She liked her new home, and not her father’s bachelor den, which was two hundred kilometres away. At one time she had tried to hide her disgust, but lately she had stopped bothering.
“All right, in that case maybe I’ll come there.”
“Maybe. As you wish. Teo… please, if you haven’t got anything in particular…”
“No, thanks, kiss my little bunnikin for me. OK?”
“OK.”
She was waiting to see if he’d say any more; he could feel her reluctance and impatience. He caught some sounds coming from the other end. The television was on, a pot was clattering, and someone laughed, a child. Weronika hung up, and in the little flat on Długosz Street in Sandomierz unalloyed silence reigned.
Szacki had to do something to avoid thinking. Work – he did after all have a proper case at last. He must prepare a case hypothesis, do some thinking, prepare the operational stages and draw up a timetable. Why wasn’t he doing it? Normally he’d have had three exercise books full of notes by now. He impetuously flipped his laptop open to look for information and get ready for tomorrow’s interrogation of Budnik. The man must have featured a great deal in the media, both he and his wife. He should look through some editorials, gossip, and reports from sessions of the City Council. Everything. The unique sound of being teleported from Myst Island informed him that a new message had come in.
From:
[email protected]
Subject: Re: Prosecutor asking about razor-machete
To:
[email protected]
Date: 15 April 2009 19:44 CET
Hello,
You gave me a proper fright with the word “Prosecutor” – I thought we’d infringed some paragraph of the law by showing pictures of too big knives :-) But to get to the point, I had to ask a few serious collectors in order to confirm my own identification, and they all agree that your “razor-machete” is a
chalef
, a knife for the ritual slaughter of animals as used by a
shochet
, a Jewish butcher.
From the dimensions one may conclude that it is designed for the slaughter of cattle (the smaller ones are for poultry and lambs), and from the condition that it could still easily be used in many a kosher abattoir. You ought to know that knives for ritual slaughter must be in a perfect state, and the slightest scratch, chip or bump renders them unusable. The blade is tested with a fingernail before and after each use, the point being that only a perfectly sharp knife can cut the oesophagus, larynx, main jugular vein and artery at a single stroke, and such are the conditions for ritual, kosher slaughter. The Jews believe that this is the most humane and painless way of killing (how much truth there is in that is another matter).
I hope this is helpful, and that the knife – by the way, I love the definition “razor-machete” – has not been used for any ignoble purpose ;-)
Yours sincerely,
Janek Wiewiórski
Editor
Szacki read the e-mail several times, no longer thinking about his personal problems at all. So in a churchy city with an anti-Semitic past he was supposed to conduct an inquiry into a case involving the
murder of a well-known social benefactress, who had been ritually slaughtered like a cow in a Jewish abattoir.
Someone knocked at the door.
This is going to be a bloody mess all right, thought Szacki, at the same time reproaching himself for the unfortunate choice of words, and opened the door. Klara was standing on the other side of it as naked as the Lord God had made her. He looked at her lovely, supple body, her pert young breasts and the chestnut locks tumbling down her neck. And he smiled happily and encouragingly, without feeling anything for her at all.
But the smile was sincere. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had a case, and he was very happy about it.
For Jews in the diaspora it is the solemnly observed final day of Passover, for Christians it is the fifth day of the Easter Week and for Poles it is the final day of national mourning following the tragic hotel fire. The Polish Army is celebrating Sapper’s Day, actress Alina Janowska her eighty-sixth birthday and the Warsaw stock exchange its eighteenth. In Włocławek the municipal guard picked up a priest and his altar boy, in their vestments, both roaring drunk and aggressive. They turned out to be laymen who had pinched the outfits from one of their mothers, a seamstress. A British firm has found enormous deposits of gas under Pozna
ń
, and according to the British press, the piece of music most often played at funerals is Frank Sinatra singing
My Way
; also high on the list is
Highway to Hell
by AC/DC. In the second leg of the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup the winners are Dynamo Kiev, Shakhtar Donetsk, Werder Bremen and Hamburg, who face fratricidal encounters in the semi-finals. Sandomierz is outraged by the relocation of its vegetable market, which must vacate its site to make way for a car park serving the new stadium. Whatever their views on this matter, all the citizens have another cold day. The temperature does not rise above fourteen degrees, but at least it is sunny, with no rain.
I
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki did not like cold weather, stupid cases, incompetent lawyers or provincial courts. That morning he got a triple dose of all of them. He glanced at the calendar: spring. He looked out of the window: spring. He put on his suit and coat, threw his gown over his shoulder and decided to take an invigorating walk to the courthouse. By the time he reached Sokolnicki Street, where he slipped on the frosted cobblestones, he knew it was a bad idea. Somewhere near the Opatowska Gate his ears went numb, at the water tower he had no feeling in his fingers, and when at last he turned into Kościuszko Street and entered the dirty-green courthouse, he had to spend a few minutes recovering, blowing on his frozen hands. It was like the North Pole in this bloody, windswept dump – damn the place, he thought.
