The Day of the Lie (27 page)

‘He let it ring for a
long time and for some reason I couldn’t move.” said Irina. ‘I just knew he was
looking into my corner, checking if I was there … and then he finally picked
up the receiver and said, “This is the Dentist.”‘

‘The Dentist?’ repeated
Anselm, with a light cough.

‘Yes,’ replied Irina. ‘He
said, “I’ll come immediately” And that’s when I stood up. He swung round and
looked at me as if I had a gun in my hand. I’d never seen him look so smart.
Normally he wore his uniform or a limp suit, but this time he was well turned
out, as if he was off to a wedding.’

‘When was this, Irina?’

‘Towards the end of the
Polana
operation, November nineteen eighty-two. The whole thing was wound up the
same week. The phone vanished overnight.’

‘How do you know he was
side-stepping Frenzel?’

‘Because he asked me not
to tell him about the Dentist. He said it was an operation unrelated to the
joint SB/Stasi mandate … then he was off … presumably to meet whoever it
was that had just been on the line.’

Anselm couldn’t order
his thoughts properly. The caller had almost certainly been John; Brack had
been John’s legitimate contact, a voice on the end of a telephone line. Anselm
couldn’t get the measure of the surprise because Irina had returned to
something they’d touched on earlier: Frenzel’s intuition that Brack had met Róża
in the past.

‘Mr Frenzel is not a
nice man,’ she said, without apparent understatement, ‘but he’s clever. He has
a nose for things. And he’d sniffed something out of Brack’s past. After that
slip where he’d used her first name, Mr Frenzel was always making smutty
allusions, insinuating that there’d been some lost love in Brack’s life before
he’d joined the service. I won’t repeat the kind of disgusting things he used to
say.

‘You don’t need to. I
can well imagine.’

‘Maybe that’s why I
stopped him shooting himself,’ said Irina, as if finding a new angle on to her
own behaviour. ‘I suppose I felt sorry for him. Don’t misunderstand me, but he
was like a monk —early to work, ascetic, dedicated, diligent, one thing on his
mind …’

Anselm didn’t quite nod
in recognition, but he coughed again, trying to wave on the epithets, wondering
whether to let slip a few details about life at Larkwood. He opted for mute
submission; the subject was just too big.

‘… self-sacrificing,
unswerving … but for all that he was hollow His emotions had been poured out
somewhere … that’s why I found him such a frightening man. He was all ideas,
simple ideas.’ without feeling … cold … hard … terribly, terribly
sure
about everything … about what he was doing and why But as far as I could
see, he felt nothing. He used to look straight through me. I was there for a
purpose, not as a person. He was like that with everyone … they had a function
rather than any value. For that reason I couldn’t imagine anyone loving him.
The stuff that love latches on to just wasn’t there, he was like a ladder
without rungs; somehow he stayed together without falling apart, but I had no
idea what kept him upright.’

She paused to clear the
plates and Anselm made a flap, trying to help, but there wasn’t much to be
done. Irina’s back was towards him again. She’d switched on the kettle and was
spooning out coffee.

‘You know, I met his
wife, once,’ she said, still following the stream of her previous reflections.

‘Brack was married?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was she like?’

‘I only met her once.
There’d been a final party after all the shredding and this overweight brunette
on the other side of the room kept giggling at someone’s jokes, shoving his
shoulder and spilling her drink. All I knew was that she was married to some
top brass who was a son of even higher brass. Then Mr Frenzel came over and
whispered that she’d once been Mrs Brack.

‘Couldn’t take him any
more, he’d said, laughing. Who could? She’d divorced him for … get a hold of
this —
Kyrie eleison
— a go-getting careerist higher up the SB ladder.
The best part: the new hubby’s father had been stumping Brack’s promotions ever
since the second wedding. Does it get any better than that?

‘Mr Frenzel had done his
homework,’ said Irina, her face soured by the reproduction of his voice and
manners. She came to the table and laid the cups of coffee between them. ‘But
he didn’t know everything and that bothered him. He hadn’t found out why
Polana
was so important to Colonel Brack, or why Róża appeared to be
significant. It frustrated him. He liked to know things, to have information on
people, no matter how insignificant, but especially about their mistakes. He
used to say that mistakes were currency for the future —’ she slowed a fraction,
and Anselm instantly realised that this was part of Frenzel’s continued hold on
her; he had something jingling, deep in his pocket: her past — ‘that mistakes
never go away and their value always goes up … and he knew that
Polana
wasn’t
what it seemed. That’s why he cleaned the file himself. He reckoned Colonel
Brack had made some big mistake.’

In August 1989 the
Stasi, unhappy about the scale of shredding, had arrived with a truck to
collect all the joint operations material — a concession made by some high-ups
who hadn’t cared where it all went anyway Sensing an opportunity Frenzel had
let them take Róża’s interrogations, which should, by rights, have been
returned to the main SB archive. ‘Your right hand shouldn’t know what your left
is doing, isn’t that how it goes?’ he’d said with a smile, holding up most of
the contents lifted from the
Polana
file. ‘Everything comes down to give
and take, doesn’t it, my girl?’ Frenzel might not have known everything about
Colonel Brack’s past but he knew enough to make an investment.

‘When I found Colonel
Brack at his desk with that gun in his mouth,’ said Irina, ‘I think he’d just
found out that Róża’s file had gone missing. Now I understand what must
have been going through his mind. He’d glimpsed the future … that someone,
someday would uncover those executions, that they’d go to Róża with
questions, that all he’d have to rely on was her willingness to protect an
informer.’ She looked up suddenly at Anselm, smiling broadly with amusement in
her eyes. ‘To think … I saved his life so he could stand on trial.’

The plastic clock
ticked, slicing up the quiet between them. It was dark outside now Anselm
noticed that there’d been no gunfire. The Afghans had either called it a day or
their nemesis was planning a surprise attack. There hadn’t been a sound from
the living room, and no used plate had been brought back into the kitchen. It
was as though Anselm and Irina were completely alone. The sensation prompted
him to push the boat out.

‘Irina, did you ever
read Róża’s file?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

She leaned her cheek on
the back of her hand, eyes cast down. One finger drew a circle on the Formica
table, going round and round. ‘She was a woman, like me. I wondered why we were
so different … what it was I lacked.’

‘Did you read each and
every page?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even the blue one?.’

Irina’s finger stopped
dead. She slowly straightened her back, appraising Anselm with a surprising but
unmistakable coldness.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even
the blue one.’

‘But it was blank. There
was nothing to read. But that didn’t render it meaningless, did it?’

The clock’s ticking
seemed to grow louder.

‘I’m not Marek Frenzel,’
said Anselm. ‘Information isn’t my kind of money Usually, people give me
secrets for nothing. They know I won’t spend them. But in this case I came
across one by accident. Róża removed that piece of paper from the file —
no one knows, except me and you. I’ve said nothing to the powers that be. But I
suspect that it’s important … only I don’t know how’

Irina chewed her bottom
lip, wondering what to do. Keeping a secret was part of her dignity, the last
vestige of self respect: the woman who’d sold out to work amongst the
information gatherers had discovered something by herself and she’d kept
schtum. To give her a gentle push.’ Anselm said ‘Can’t you tell me about the
infirmary?’

Irina’s finger began
another circle on the table. ‘Is this why you came here?’

‘No. I came to say that
I was profoundly sorry. I didn’t expect to ask you anything about Róża
because I didn’t expect to trust you, but I do, entirely’

Watching the circle grow
smaller, Irina said, ‘There was more than one infirmary in Mokotów. They were
at different ends of the building. The first was for the sick, the second was
for mothers.’ She nodded at her hand, assuming Anselm was unbelieving. ‘That’s
right, in those days, during the Terror, some women gave birth in prison. They
didn’t let you go just because you turned out to be pregnant. They kept you for
as long as they wanted. I don’t know if Róża had a child or not. When I
worked at the ministry I knew there were registers in the archive that had been
brought over from Mokotów in the sixties, but I wasn’t allowed to see them …
I was just one of the administrative staff and I didn’t have the clearance. ‘She
laughed to herself, sadly ‘In a way, I didn’t care if Róża was one of
those secret mothers or not. For me, it was just something important that I
would never reveal to Mr Frenzel; and when I looked at Róża’s prison
photographs, wondering why we were so different, I just thanked God that while
I’d lost everything that Róża had preserved, I’d at least kept my child.
The comparison was a kind of comfort … it made sense of my situation in life.’

A certain transparency comes with shared
confidence. One can sense things that haven’t yet been said. And when Anselm
rose to leave, he vaguely knew the answer to his own question. It had grown at
the back of his mind during the soft lulls in conversation, when he’d pitied
Irina Orlosky.

‘Who owns this building?’

‘Mr Frenzel.’

Always that ‘Mr’; that
appellation
contrôlée
of respect.

‘He’s my landlord.” she
continued, leading Anselm into the corridor. ‘The whole block has been sold to
developers. Everything’s going to change for the better … They’re going to
build a football stadium for the opening match of the European Cup.’ there’ll
be a metro station for the fans, and an Olympic swimming complex … There’ll
be lots of other changes and all for the better. Mr Frenzel calls it his
favourite investment because he bought the place with his SB pension.’

She drew back the door
chain but Anselm involuntarily paused, looking to his left. The son for whom so
much had been sacrificed lay fast asleep or sedated on the floor, one arm
around the cushion, his Kalashnikov by a plate of uneaten pizza crusts. He’d
lost the battle. He was one of the nameless fallen, known only as Irina’s
child. Her voice roused him.

‘Mr Frenzel didn’t take
my identity,’ she said, evenly ‘I lost it on the day I entered the ministry building.
I can’t get it back … I tried, and it didn’t work out. But if Colonel Brack
stands trial … if I really have helped to bring about justice for Róża
Mojeska then.’ who knows, maybe I’ll have the right to walk on the same side of
the street. That would be nice.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

Disgust and melancholy tailed Anselm
through the dark, empty streets of Praga. History — always alive in this city —
asserted itself once more. It was precisely because the Soviet Army had been
camped here during the Uprising across the river that the buildings in Praga
had remained standing. This was all that was left of the old Warsaw that Róża
would have known. And it was here that Marek Frenzel, the cute investor in
people’s mistakes, had made his fortune, bleeding profit from Stalin’s shameful
failure to stop the slaughter. The irony was toxic. Hands in his habit pockets,
Anselm dwelled upon another history of destruction, that of Róża, and the
murmur of her uprising.

Irina may have been
undecided, but Anselm was certain: Róża had given birth to a child in
Mokotów He hadn’t considered the possibility because he hadn’t known what the
blue paper might represent. But now he knew. And, thinking now of her
statement, he understood at last why children lived and breathed on every page.

‘Even so, I should have
seen it from the pavement,’ he said, out loud. ‘The writing was on the prison
wall.’

He recalled the young
woman in the Rolling Stones T-shirt. Her emotions had imploded, disappearing
comprehensively with shocking speed. At the time he’d simply perceived the
incongruity at the heart of Róża’s statement: there was no hint of
visceral feeling on the page despite the traumatic events she recounted.
Intellectual commitment to the Shoemaker, yes; but no fire in the belly; no
stabbing passion.

‘I knew then that your
emotional life had remained in Mokotów. And now I understand why you wanted to
stay there. It was the place you last saw your child.’

There was another
certainty — Anselm looked up to take his bearings, retracing his steps towards
the river.’ noting the streets were less dirty the buildings smarter; that the
tide of investors was on the way, bringing all sorts of changes for the good,
Frenzel riding the wave like a sea slug on wreckage — Róża arrived at the
Kolbas alone.

‘You let go,’ he
declared, opening his hands with dismay ‘Why? Because you looked into the eyes
of someone who, one day, would have to be told about their father; someone who
could be spared unnecessary pain. This is what it all comes down to, isn’t it?
It’s always about avoiding suffering. Your child’s, Kaminsky’s.’ the Church’s.’
anyone’s, but never yours. You just accept it, for them.’

Róża had accepted
adoption. She’d let her child out of prison. She’d let another family take her
place: a better, simpler, happier family where people laughed and cried for all
the usual reasons, where no one spoke of torture, martyrdom and the magnitude
of the Shoemaker. But Róża had still made a big mistake, because shielding
other people from suffering isn’t always possible. It’s not always a good idea.
Which is why her decision to see Brack in court had become her last obsession.