The Day of the Lie (30 page)

The curate brought Anselm to the front
door, wanting to know if everything had gone well. The exclusion was still
eating away at his curiosity. He was staying with an unconfirmed legend, a man
of rumour who wouldn’t tell any tales.

‘What did he say about
his childhood?’ asked Anselm, gripping the
Sun
under one arm while he’d
buttoned up his coat. Apparently the sports pages were muscular and without a
trace of ambiguity; as for the leader page …

‘Not much, frankly’ The
curate made a clucking noise, going over the dross. ‘Just that he’d been happy.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

John didn’t like the Dentist. He’d expected
an ascetic, an intellectual with tortured eyes, one of the brains in the SB,
whereas he’d been … what? Unconsciously vulgar? He’d wanted to impress,
sporting handmade shoes and a stock-broker’s coat from Aquascutum. There’d been
something wretched and lazy about his way of walking, as if he’d felt there
wasn’t much point to sorting out the mess; as if there wasn’t much point to anything.
The Dentist wasn’t what he’d seemed.

John’s shaking hand
eventually got the key in the hole. The door yielded and he stepped into the
flickering shadows of his flat. A projector clattered on the dining table, a
roll of film unwinding from one spool to another. Images of tanks trundled
across a sheet pinned to the wall. Soldiers tramped through the snow.

‘You’re late.’ Celina
was hunched in the darkness, bent over a writing pad. Her hair was crazy,
clipped back. Her glasses caught the sharp light. She was a wild cat in a wild
night. John could just see the pencil moving. ‘What kept you? I’ve been
worried.’

Do I love her? Or is
it what she means to me? What she represents? Am I using her?

He drew back a chair and
sat down, the projector whirring between them. ‘I got held up with a story.’

‘It’s always a story’

‘Yep, my life’s a story.’

She was everything he
needed. A real dissident. Her father had been a mover in the Club of the
Crooked Circle, a shaker in the Band of Vagabonds. He’d been a man of secret
societies. An uncle on some side had rotted in a Tsarist prison. An aunt had
been deported to Siberia and she’d died walking back. Celina’s mother had
dumped the father because he wouldn’t swallow official ideology. She’d wanted
the special hampers that came at Christmas for those who towed the line. She’d
found a cleaner, sharper mind with access to the special shops where scarce
goods could be bought at low prices. They were a family ripped apart by
principle.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not hungry. What
are you doing?’

‘I’ve got a meeting with
the censor tomorrow I’m cutting out the best bits.’

Celina was the
non-conformist renegade daughter, kicked out of school and educated
underground. She dressed outside known fashion trends. Torn jeans, bright
coloured socks, beads and bangles, careless scarves, huge shapeless jumpers. No
makeup. Oval, dark framed glasses, windows on to a delicate uncompromising
intelligence. She walked on the other side of any drawn line.

‘I’m starving,’ she
said, twisting the knob. The riot police with their floppy long white
truncheons vanished, swamped in darkness. Celina’s chair creaked; she was
leaning back, straining for the light switch. Snap. The white sheet appeared,
pinned to the wall and hanging like a shroud.

‘What happened?’ She was
standing up, a hand over her mouth, her dyed hair in ordinary disarray Her tone
was shocked and quiet. Moving round the table, keeping her hands on its edge,
she whispered, ‘What story was this? What happened?’

Do I love you? Is it
those untied laces? The jumper with holes? Or is it your past? The allure of
the heretic?

‘Tell me what they did?’
She was on her knees, holding his hands. Her nails were painted different
colours. There was no pattern or sequence. One of them had minuscule blue dots.
She must have used the single hair of a paint brush.

Is there any love in
this? Or is it the romance of straying near the fire that burns around your
feet? The fire you stoke and bank, mocking their norms and laws and
incantations?

‘John, speak to me.

Am I using you to
redeem the shame of my past?

Her hand was stroking
his swollen jaw Horrified, she touched the dried blood on his lip. John sank
off the chair on to his knees and pushed his hands into her tangled hair. His
mind and body lost all individuation. He reached out, into the flames, wanting
to get inside her skin and bones, her difference, her purity.

He told her he’d been at the Powązki
Cemetery when someone got arrested. He’d tried to capture the moment on film
and then the brawn had burst out of nowhere. It made you think. ‘They might
just be everywhere, do you know what I mean?’ Celina nodded. Maybe they were,
she said. Maybe we can’t breathe any air but theirs. They breathe it out, we
breathe it in. They’re in our bodies. Their atoms mingle with ours, making new
gases and compounds. There’s no escape. They haunt graveyards and kitchens,
breathing out their sickness. They climb into your bed and reach over to turn
out the light. She spoke with immense disgust, counting up the planned cuts to
her film: the removal of scenes she knew the censor wouldn’t like; images of
the riot police in action. The ZOMOS, Caesar’s Praetorians.

They stayed up all night
watching images flicker across the shroud. After breakfast Celina went to her
meeting with the censor, John went to the woman who knew the Dentist.

John knocked. No reply He knocked again. He
tried the handle. The door gave way.

Róża was sitting on
a dining room chair. She’d pulled it back and sat down without drawing herself
towards the table. It made it look as if she were stranded, facing nowhere. She
still had her coat and hat on. She wore light blue woollen gloves, the only
colour of substance in the room. Her hands were on her knees. John’s eyes
shifted to an empty bookcase in one corner, to a drab-looking canapé that
hugged a wall, to an armchair with the appeal of an unwanted visitor. There
wasn’t much else … a lamp stand holding a washed out shade, tassels dangling.
John looked again, not quite sure at first: a bullet on a shelf beneath a
mirror. He came to Róża’s side.

‘It wasn’t me, Róża,’
he said, sinking to a chair, daring to place his hands on her arms. ‘I promise,
I swear, it wasn’t me. I don’t know what they were doing there, I don’t know
how they knew, I said nothing to no one, I’d never risk doing or saying
anything that might have …’

She wasn’t listening.
She stared ahead in a kind of trance, as if she were watching Celina’s film.
Deep shadows like heavy paint lay around her eyes. John had never been this
close before. He couldn’t help notice the fine hairs on her skin. She appeared
at once innocent and fragile despite what she’d seen, despite what had been
done to her, despite what she was looking at now.

‘Róża, I have
friends … on both sides of the fence.’ John squeezed her arm, trying to get a
reaction. It was like holding a bone from the butchers. ‘I can try and find out
what went wrong. It’s my job, you know I’ll dig around and find out who—’

‘John.’ She spoke his
name like it was a kind of slap to the mouth. Her voice crackled, strangely
detached, unwired from the muscles round the lips. Harrowed and still in a
stupor, she turned to John as if she’d fallen overboard, water framing her oval
face, the hat, jaw and chin; her eyes wide with knowledge … knowledge of a
life lived and a coming death. The mouth slowly opened, the skin of the lips
seeming to tear across the centre. Her tone was dried out and paper thin. ‘John,
promise me you will do and say nothing.’ She seemed to wait for a reply whereas
she was trying to stay afloat. ‘Forget about the Shoemaker; forget about the
Friends, forget about me: Then, not even noticing his beaten face, she turned
away and drowned. She’d gone. There was no point in mentioning a passport.

John tiptoed out of the
flat — a sort of reverential act to the body he was leaving behind. He crept
down the stairs, hugging the wall.

‘How did she know the
Dentist?’

The question echoed in the
entrance hall. It tore at John all the way home. Had the Dentist said anything
to Róża? Had he told her about CONRAD? Did Róża know what John had
been doing? Of his place in the Big Game, his central place? The answers
circled lazily like buzzards above carrion, black and distant, wings large and
still.

John couldn’t get the
key in the lock. Metal rattled against metal with his shaking. He knocked.
Celina opened the door. Without looking, she walked back inside, dark against
the light.

‘They won’t allow the
film,’ she said, slumping on a chair by the dining table. Her eyes were bright
and wet, her cheeks horribly black from the run of thick eyeliner. She’d given
face paint a go. She’d gone out looking like Nefertiti. Now, she was …
something from the Hammer studios. The bandages had been unwound and a curse
unleashed.

‘I can’t take it any
more, John.’ Her bare feet pointed inwards, her shoulders were low. A pink silk
scarf had been wrapped into her hair. ‘My life has been cut into long strips. I
want to be whole again. I want to be —’ she dropped her head into her hands — ‘I
don’t want much, I’ve never wanted much. I just want to be happy and free.’

John’s insides turned.
He thought they might tip out on to the floor of his flat.

Do I love her? Or is
it what she represents? She cleans me. She gives me tomorrow.

He looked at her narrow
black jeans. Everyone else wore blue denim bell bottoms. Her toes were curled
as if she were clinging on to a perch. He’d seen the nails that morning. They
were coloured like a row of Smarties.

The telephone rang.

John made a start. But
he couldn’t take his eyes off Celina. Her tears were dripping like rain from a
blocked gutter.

The ring seemed to grow
louder. Impatient. Angry.

John made a snatch for
the phone, sending the console crashing to the ground, the wire tangled round
his wrist. He yanked up the receiver and barked out some words — he didn’t know
what he said, his eyes were still on Celina.

The announcement came
after an offended pause. A few obvious details were confirmed first, but then
the nameless functionary read out a text written by some other nameless
bureaucrat. John sank to the floor, worked his wrist free and threw the phone
as far as the wire would allow.

‘They’ve kicked me out.’

Celina didn’t react at
first.

‘I’ve got two days.’

She sat up, turning
around, one arm hanging over the back of the chair. She looked like a painting
out of the Louvre, something unseen by Ingres, David or any of them. She was
classical, offending and timeless.

‘My accreditation has
been withdrawn.’ He was leaning back against the wall, hands loose in the gap
between his legs. He wanted a beer. He wanted to be happy and free. ‘I’m
finished. For collecting materials of an espionage character.’

He told her because it
was going to come out. This was a fire he couldn’t hide. Now he was going to
get badly burned. The masterpiece wasn’t moving. She was awfully still,
terribly sad, agonisingly attentive: the watched and the watcher. He longed,
desperately to crawl over to touch every brushstroke, feel every rise and fall
in the impossible contours of her face, her arm, her hands, asking himself, ‘Is
this real?’, but he daren’t move.

‘I can’t take it any
more, John,’ she repeated. The black had reached her lips. The pink silk scarf
had come loose and lay along one cheek.

She suspects nothing,
thought John, coldly.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she
said, with a brutal, hopeless finality.

The phrase turned in
John’s mind like a light switch. Instantly he saw something odd. Anselm had
used the very same words only recently just before John had come to Warsaw For
some inexplicable reason — ostensibly for a jaunt — he’d brought John to a
monastery in Suffolk. They’d gone up the bell tower. He’d looked down and said,
‘I’ve had enough.’

‘What of?’

‘Trying to find reasons.

‘For what?’

Anselm had just leaned
on the stone ledge, four whopping bells behind his head, looking down at the
dots of people on the ground — like Harry Lime in
The Third Man,
high up
on the Ferris wheel in Prater Park. Only Anselm hadn’t got the eyes of a man
cynical about the boundaries of pity … he’d been melancholy outreaching,
vaguely desperate …

‘You’re not in love, are
you?’

There’d be no reply.

‘Who is it? That ballet
dancer? Your clerk? No … the jazz singer with the veils? Veil after veil will
lift, but there must be veil upon veil behind?’

Anselm had just kept his
gaze on the dots and the pink tiled roofs below Obliquely he’d muttered, ‘It’s
like a stone in the shoe. Asking why it’s there doesn’t get rid of it. Chasing
reasons is like …’

What had Anselm said?
John couldn’t remember, damn it, but the message was clear enough: there’s no
point in trying to find out why you love something … or someone … you’ve
just got to get on with it, regardless of the implications.

‘Come with me,’ John
blurted out.

Celina stared back, like
Anselm had stared down.

‘Bring your film to
London,’ mumbled John. ‘I’ve got friends. We’ll get it out in a diplomatic bag.’
She didn’t react. She just looked at him as if she were grieving. John made it
across the floor and took the dangling hand. It was warm, the nails a dark
purple, like mussel shells. He kissed each one, feeling the bangles against his
forehead. ‘Please come with me.’ His eyes closed and he made a leap into the
dark. He let himself fall, no longer resisting, knowing this moment had been
coming ever since they’d first met to discuss art and resistance.