The Day of the Lie (42 page)

‘I have nothing further
to say’

Mr Fischer looked up as
if the lights had come on at two in the morning. Momentarily he was caught in
the glare of unimaginable good luck: a win was careering straight towards him,
a win he’d never thought possible. Blinking, recovered, coughing and suave, he
came to his feet, oblivious that his client had suddenly begun to move,
writhing in his suit.

‘Moved as we all are by
the words of the witness, I’m obliged to remark, however, that the crime she
identifies — grave though it be — is not known to the law’ He reminded Anselm
of the kind of opponent he’d most disliked: denigrating in the robing room and
then fussy in their courtesy after a case abruptly turned their way He tugged a
cuff into place, gloating. ‘I’d be grateful if those representing the
interests of prosecution would clarify — for the avoidance of all doubt — that
this lady has indeed completed her evidence. The court will anticipate that in
those curious—’

‘I said I had finished,’
replied Róża, speaking for herself. ‘There is nothing more to be said.’

‘In that case,’ began Mr
Fischer, tugging the other cuff, ‘I would have thought that the proper way
forward — in the interests of justice — is for Madam Czerny to reconsider her
position and that of those whom she represents. I’m reluctant to state the
obvious to someone as distinguished as my learned colleague, but it would seem
there is no lawful basis upon which the continued prosecution of my client can proceed.
It is difficult to know precisely …’

Mr Fischer lost his
thread because Róża had reached down to her table and picked up another
edition of
Freedom and Independence.
Again, the presiding judge raised a
calming hand, his expression as sympathetic as it was sad: he’d recognised what
the whole court must know; Róża Mojeska, the survivor of the Terror, had
suffered profound, enduring wounds to the mind. She’d lost her grip; she was
throwing away her only chance of vindication. He sighed, audibly surrendering
the collapse of the trial to the one person responsible. Let her have the last
word, he seemed to say.

‘Let me read you the
concluding reflections of the Shoemaker,’ said Róża, turning to the inside
back page. ‘This is what he said, in late nineteen eighty-two. He hasn’t spoken
since. “One day we will win. It is inevitable. But then we must turn to the
question of justice. We will have to look back, never forgetting how difficult
it was to steer a morally straight course when, in the day to day, we were
obliged to live a double life, one in private and the other in public. We will
need to recognise that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, bolstered up the
system we now accuse. We will have to recall that there was a chasm between
thinking and speaking, believing and doing and that not many of us managed to
cross the divide without a fall. Each of these painful truths, when
recollected, should make passing judgement a delicate exercise. Remember:
collaboration had a grading. Let our reprimand be proportionate. Name wrongs
and move on.”‘ Róża turned the page, coming to the final paragraph. “‘But
what happens when we are obliged to judge someone and, try as we might, we
cannot find the shades of grey known to us all? When there is no name to
describe the wrong? When we linger in mourning? What are we to do? I have this
one final thought: our justice can never be like theirs. It can never be a
process without hope. There must always remain the possibility, however
slender, that in certain strange circumstances even great crimes can be met
with an even stranger mercy.

Róża folded up the
paper and laid it with the others on the table.

All eyes in the court
were upon her. She was the only person standing, now Madam Czerny and Mr
Fischer had resumed their seats, superfluous to the drama in which they’d
played a part. Brack glared from the dock, paralysed and unnaturally dark —
from rage or confusion or from the choking realisation that the trial was
coming to an end. Róża addressed her final words to him.

‘I was going to return
your bullet, Otto,’ she explained, conversationally ‘But I’m glad the court
took it from me. I’d be worried that when you left here a free man you might
use it, and I’d only blame myself.’

Without any further
acknowledgement to the court, or even the dismantling of her own — she left the
table covered with editions of
Freedom and Independence,
for anyone who
might want a copy —Róża began walking from the hushed room, plastic bag in
hand, as if she could, at last, get to the market and catch those two-for-one
bargains that weren’t really bargains.

‘I had hopes, too,’
shouted a strangled voice. Brack was upright and wavering; a fist punching at
the air. But Róża wasn’t listening; she just kept strolling towards the
courtroom entrance, frowning to herself as if she’d forgotten to bring a
shopping list. Brack stumbled forward, pushing Mr Fischer aside. ‘I have a
story, too, about birds shot from a tree, Yes, tell that to the Shoemaker …
come back … I have a right to be heard … I demand it. Come back …’

But Róża had gone:
the door had swung shut behind her with a soft thud. The trial was over. Or
rather, the two trials had ended. Only Róża had spoken. She’d achieved the
inconceivable: she’d condemned a man with mercy.

There was no doubting Róża’s victory —
at least in the minds of those who understood her — but no celebration took
place; and not because Brack’s technical acquittal was a matter of regret in
several quarters. There was no party because Róża did, in fact, go to the
market — the biggest in Eastern Europe, on the Praga side of the river. It was
just another day it seemed. Sebastian, subdued and defeated, went back to work,
leaving Anselm, John and Celina in a crowded bar near the court sipping
Żubrówka.

‘Who was that bizarre
woman?’ asked Celina. ‘The one that wouldn’t leave?’

‘Some crackpot,’ offered
John, who’d only heard the rumpus.

‘Eventually the ushers
called the police … it took three of them …’

Anselm had watched
uneasily from on high. As the court had emptied Irina had simply stood there,
like someone in the cheap seats who hadn’t understood the play The allusions
had gone over her head. People had to push past her while she stared at the
empty stage and the vacant chair that Brack had occupied; from which he’d
walked a free man. She’d been forcibly escorted from the building.

‘She was a victim,’ said
Anselm with a snap.

The memory of Irina’s
ejection haunted him: she was the only person left behind in Breughel’s hell.
She’d fallen outside of Mad Meg’s raid on the underworld. Anselm had tried to
talk to her in the street, but her disappointment had imploded; she’d drifted
away unseeing, just like that young woman outside Mokotów He was still thinking
of her, dishevelled and disorientated, when the phone rang in his bedroom later
that evening. He’d been wondering whether to call round, unannounced, bringing
more flowers and a pizza, with something fizzy and sweet for the son.

‘Father, there’s someone
here,’ began Krystyna, tentatively For once she wasn’t cheery. ‘They want to
know if you’ll hear their confession.’

Chapter Fifty

There were no appropriate quiet corners.
There were no small rooms available. Every conference facility was booked, even
the Warsaw Hall, a 15,000-square-foot auditorium large enough for two thousand
delegates. But the place wasn’t occupied for the moment. The management had
authorised its use, for an hour or so, with apologies for the lack of intimacy
Amused and perplexed at the same time, Anselm followed a suited porter to the
lift, up to the second floor of the hotel and through a half open door.

On stepping inside,
Anselm froze.

Light fittings like
coronets cast a phosphorous glow upon a red carpet patterned on loops like rows
of tabletops without their legs. Rank upon rank of seats faced a small wooden
podium with a microphone. Just beyond, to one side, sat Otto Brack, waiting to
address the plenum. Unmoved and unmoving he watched Anselm’s slow approach to
the front row.

‘You were responsible
for that fiasco, weren’t you?’ His German was low and hoarse as if he’d been
shouting. The glasses, dark in reaction to the light, made his eyes look like
deep brown holes in his head. ‘I’m told there’s been a meddling priest who
wanted to understand why I shot men and tortured women.

He pointed to a facing
seat and Anselm sat down. They were six feet apart, sitting on either side of a
circle in the carpet.

‘I never had Frenzel’s
loathing for you lot,’ continued Brack. A thin arm moved woodenly in the loose
brown suit, shoving aside his colleague’s aversions. ‘I just thought you were
too concerned about the next life and interfered too much with this one. There
was work to be done. Great work.’

‘What do you want?’
asked Anselm. To his own surprise, he wasn’t afraid. People who link their fate
to greatness always appear small.

‘The truth.’

‘You’ve had it.’

‘No, I haven’t; and
neither has Róża. She thinks I had some scheme to escape laws written by
the victors. There was no scheme. ‘He appraised Anselm through those strange
openings in his head.

‘You and I hold two
parts of one story. Together they make the truth that the court didn’t hear.
Because of your interfering, they didn’t come together. This is what I propose:
I’ll explain the crime, if you explain the mercy The result will be the trial I
never had. Is it a deal?’

Anselm didn’t have the opportunity to walk
away from the negotiating table, because Brack opened up — his pitch low and
grating, the phrases cold and prepared — implementing his side of the bargain.
Frenzel had evidently said nothing of the file. He’d given his boss a tip-off,
a taster, knowing it would send him to the priest; knowing it would flush out
an old mistake.

‘Have you ever seen a
city reduced to a heap of stones? Have you seen the dead bodies of children
floating in a sewer? Have you seen the world you know stamped on and beaten
flat?’ Brack rasped his authority. He knew about desolation. He’d seen things
that set him apart. When he saw that Damascus wasn’t there any more, he’d heard
an unearthly voice. ‘Of course you haven’t. Few have. But I did. I’ve seen it
and I’ve felt the ash in my hands afterwards.’ The indignation and
self-aggrandisement poured out like the complaint of a servant who’d never been
properly thanked. ‘That’s what I faced in forty-five,’ he said, stabbing his
leg with a bony finger. ‘I looked around and all I could see was a bare
horizon.’

Brack came to his feet,
head held high, as if waiting for the absent applause to stop. When he heard
the hushed silence, he moved instinctively to the podium, as if drawn by a
magnet. On arriving, he listened surprised but attentive as his breathing
grated through the loudspeakers … by some awful act of forgetfulness the
microphone had been left on.

‘What’s private
property?’ His voice, amplified, soared over the empty seats of the auditorium.
He was getting back to basics. ‘I’ll tell you what my father told me. It’s a
fence that someone’s put round a field and everyone else is simple enough to
think that the grass on the other side was never theirs. What’s history? It’s
the misery of the majority brought in afterwards to do the ploughing for a
pittance. Well my father didn’t live to see the day but all the fences had
gone. It was time to think again, from scratch. The reconstruction? It wasn’t
about where the fences used to be; it was about how we shared the fields. Those
of us who survived the war … we had a chance to build something new Something
different. Something noble and good. Except, good things are never that simple.’

He scanned the room as
if Anselm wasn’t there, drinking in the absent nods and shared indignation. The
crowd knew where the speaker was going.

‘Because those old
landowners, the old
szlachta,
would never accept change. They just want
to turn up with their maps and title deeds and start rebuilding their
interests, putting up the old boundaries —Brack leaned forward, urgent and
raucous, stabbing the air, now —’well someone has to stop them.’

He leaned back,
listening to the echo of his realpolitik, nodding significantly.

‘Someone has to have the
courage to do difficult things.’

He paused again, his
voice resounding.

‘Someone must step forward
to meet the demands of the moment.’

Brack turned towards
Anselm as if appraising a snake in the grass. He seemed to be wondering if a
man concerned about the next world had the slightest idea about how to handle
this one, especially when it was in the throes of regeneration. Tentative and
guttural, he tried to explain.

‘There’s a time in a
child’s life when it’s most vulnerable. Those responsible for its growth must
protect it at all costs. They act according to high instinct. Moralities are
written afterwards.’ A shaking hand briefly tugged at a lapel, implying a kind
of modesty. ‘It is no different with the renewal of society. There is a moment
in its growth, just after its birth, when it is weak and defenceless. When
those vested interests can creep into the nursery and suffocate the child, the
child that will grow to overthrow their kingdom.’

Anselm tried to peer
inside the two brown discs that seemed to hover over Brack’s face. His
repugnance at the imagery of child protection was slightly overtaken by an
almost technical observation: he’d heard two voices, that of Brack’s father
talking to a boy about the field and fences; and someone else’s, making a
speech about men born for the moment. Anselm thought it was Strenk’s.

‘There are men called to
act in defence of tomorrow They must forget themselves.’ Brack’s teeth chafed
his bottom lip. ‘They must do what others dare not do, for their sake. They
must shoulder the burden. And they do it by terror. A brief wave of terror, to
frighten off the agitators and hooligans.’ He looked aside, as if he’d heard a
noise offstage — some whispering from the wings. Replying, huskily he became
petulant, his voice barely sounding in the loudspeakers: