The Day of the Lie (49 page)

‘You’ve answered your
own question,’ called Anselm. ‘He got more stupid.’

More than John realised:
Brack had destroyed JULITA’s file, too. He’d cleaned up John’s past when John
would have had it exposed. Anselm flicked the switch on the kettle and the
raging water gave a sigh. As he entered the dining room, a cup in each hand,
John said, ‘What did you make of him?’

Anselm eyed his friend —
his quizzical expression, the head angled — wondering just how much to say He’d
kept quiet about Róża’s blue piece of paper once, and now he didn’t want
to speak about the layers to Brack’s skin.

‘A man of hidden depths,’
said Anselm, guardedly.

That seemed reasonably
fair. John mused upon it, as if waiting for the finish of the wine. Satisfied,
he said, as though following on, ‘Tell you what, can we go up to the bell
tower? It’s been a long time since we leaned on that ledge and talked
cross-purposes, you mumbling about the cloister and me thinking of a singer in
Finsbury Park.’

There was a strong wind that couldn’t be
felt on the lanes below But up here, by the arched arcade, the current was
almost threatening, pulling at the hair, rousing exhilaration. Four bells,
still and imposing, hung beside their giant wheels. Ahead, the woods stretched
far away rising and falling like a stilled ocean. Patchwork fields and roads
knitted what remained into a sort of kingdom, lost down there, but wonderfully
visible from this crow’s nest high above the monastery.

‘Do you remember, we
talked about love? And you said chasing reasons is like … and I can’t
remember what came next.’

‘Neither can I.’

‘That’s a shame because
there are remarks that sow and remarks that reap. But yours do both, back then
and since. Róża found her daughter. Celina came home.’

Words that sowed and
reaped, coming from a man camped between the light and the dark: the Shoemaker
would have approved.

The sound of gently
churning gravel rose from far below A car swung into the parking area. A door
opened and closed. Birds fled from the nearby plum trees. Anselm picked out a
slim figure dressed in black. She was elegant, even at this distance. But what
caught the eye were the shoes … bright red shoes, like sparks from a fire.

‘Let’s go, John,’ said
Anselm. ‘Tomorrow’s already waiting.’

Acknowledgements

I’d like to express my appreciation to Wanda
Wawro (Cornell University Library, Slavic and East European Studies
Bibliographer), Romuald Lazarowicz (for his recollection of underground media
during the communist epoch in Poland), Sebastian Szulkowski (for advice on
legal matters and underground paper titles), Edyta Wróbleska (who sent me a
copy of her engrossing documentary film
Podziemny Tygodnik Mazowse
(2006)
which tells the story of the
Mazowse Weekly
through the testimony of its
founders and associates), Mikołaj Książek and Katarzyna Hołopiak
(staff at the IPN), and Françoise Koetschet and Sabine Guyard (attentive and
astute readers). All were generous with their time and advice.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ursula
Mackenzie for her guidance and understanding; for helping me find the book I
wanted to write. My warm thanks go to Daniel Mallory and Joanne Dickinson for
their energy and help with the emerging text. And finally — if this is not too
wide a grouping — I thank the dedicated and enthusiastic staff at Little, Brown
whom I rarely meet but who are essential to the life of every book I write.

Author’s Note

This novel began with an interest in the
three million SB files currently held by the IPN and the activity of
underground printing which, during 1982 alone, compelled the security forces to
confiscate (according to General Boguslaw Stachura, Deputy Minister of Internal
Affairs) ‘730,000 leaflets, 340,000 illegal publications and 4,000 posters’. In
both cases — the files and the printing — the raw material was ‘words’. The SB
gathered them in secret; the dissidents published them in secret. They’d been
used to tell profound lies and momentous truths. They’d been used to build and
to destroy And now those involved in transitional justice had to use the same
stuff to open up the future, mindful of its power to bring ruin or redemption.
This, I concluded, was an appropriately vexed moral landscape for Anselm to
investigate.

In order to enter this
most difficult area I followed an invented character, Róża Mojeska. I
placed her in Warsaw during the Martial Law years. She was, to my mind’s eye, a
woman who understood history, a woman who saw the present in the clear light of
the past. She was fifty-something. It was only at that point, when I looked
onto the city through her eyes, that I recognised what should have been obvious
from the outset. Such a person would have seen — to be brief — the Nazi
invasion of 1939, the reduction of the Polish people to a slave status, the
corralling of the Jewish community into the Nalewki district, the deportations
to the death camps from the railway siding near Dzika Street, the Ghetto
Uprising of 1943, the Uprising of 1944, the razing of Warsaw, and then, when
peace came with the overthrow of one tyranny the imposition of Stalinist
totalitarian communism. Róża would have witnessed all these events without
even leaving her teenage years. By the time she was involved in producing the
fictional paper
Freedom and Independence
in 1982 she’d have muttered the
litany of succeeding martyrdoms: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1981. And she,
like most other Poles, would have viewed her experiences in the light of a
shared cultural memory: the hundred and fifty years of partition disrupted,
here and there, by other failed uprisings. In short, having put Róża on
the page after the tanks rolled onto the streets in 1981, I realised that I
couldn’t look at the files and underground printing and transitional justice
and the overarching battle of ideas without recognising that every act of
resistance or collaboration had carried the weight of centuries. And with that
recognition, Róża became someone so much larger than herself — a symbol of
the ordinary person compelled to make far-reaching decisions in the darkness of
their time without even a match to find their way By extension Warsaw itself
became more than a city that had been reconstructed after the Second World War.
It was a symbol of the human refusal to be reduced to dust and cinders.

Of course, I was not
writing a social history of communism. With Anselm as my guide, I intended to
write a novel about one woman’s choice in a sewer set against those who’d taken
a different route to the surface; about the whispering that followed, set
against the riot of publishing; about the moral devastation of families razed
to the ground by force or compromise. About ideas and why they were important.
To do this, I gave the story three landmarks: the Stalinist Terror, the Martial
Law years and what I’ll call the aftermath, the struggle of a society to pass
judgement on what happened between 1945 and 1989. As a result, the final
narrative could not reflect in any great detail the differing ideas of nation,
the extent of any popular accommodation of the regime, or — most interestingly
(given the themes of this book) —the viewpoint of the many party members who
must have struggled to make sense of their convictions as the government
responded to a succession of intellectual, political and economic crises. I
hope the informed reader will understand that such questions were not germane
to Róża’s dedication to the Shoemaker.

As to the factual basis
of this novel, there was no joint SB/Stasi unit dedicated to fighting
underground printing in Warsaw (as far as I’m aware), although some 500 Stasi
agents did operate in Poland under communism, beginning in 1978 after the
election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. The Shoemaker did not
exist and there was no Shoemaker Organisation. That said, there were countless
similar publishing operations (and they often used prams). The fate of the
imagined character Pavel Mojeska was not out of the ordinary. A tablet on the
wall of Mokotów prison commemorates the names of 283 political prisoners
executed on the premises between 1945 and 1955. There were hundreds of others,
though their identities are not known. For the purposes of the plot I have made
a number of changes to the layout of the prison, the IPN, and the Warsaw
District Court. Procedure and language in the courtroom accomodates the
characteristics typical of an English criminal trial.