The Day of the Lie (9 page)

Anselm shut the window,
muffling the clamour of the trees and the great sighs of the wind. He was
troubled by his unremitting failure to recognise the pikestaffs in his life.
All these years he’d thought 1982 was the one subject they’d never spoken
about, forgetting that this other, older crisis remained, for the greater
part, unexplored. They were blood brothers, but John had kept two secrets
beneath his skin, not one, The first had now been ventilated. Strange, really
(thought Anselm, climbing into bed) that tonight he should think of the oldest.
He’d forgotten all about it.

Chapter Nine

Anselm dreamed vividly receiving the
special enlightenment that comes from the paradox of watching oneself in
action. It was as though his psyche — exasperated once more with its host’s
predilection to skate past the obvious — hit back, hurling into the sleeping
mind something simple but significant about John’s motivation in coming to
Larkwood. Something else he’d forgotten: Faithful to the facts, the drama
unfolded like a black and white newsreel from a forgotten war.

Anselm had been a monk for about eighteen
months and hadn’t heard from John at all. For his part, Anselm had sent tape
recordings in place of letters, describing the rough and tumble of life around
a cloister. He’d told funny stories about the older duffers. He’d passed on
some of the wisecracks from the Prior. But nothing came in return. With the
passage of time Anselm had grown anxious because he couldn’t expunge his last
memory of John: unshaven, the buttons out of order on his shirt, the coloured
socks that didn’t match. And so, with the Prior’s permission, Anselm had taken
an early train from Cambridge and turned up unannounced at John’s flat.

‘I thought we might have
breakfast,’ said Anselm, as the door opened.

‘Have they kicked you
out?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Are you wearing
sandals?’

‘Yes.’

‘O God.’

Anselm followed John
down the dark corridor, weaving between unopened mail and slumped rubbish sacks
loose at the neck, horrified at what he’d just seen: the bloodless face behind
dark glasses; the creased, slept-in clothing; the saffron stains on the open
shirt. Cautiously he entered the kitchen, smelling a nauseating blend of
cigarettes, stale beer and spices. The work surface and sink overflowed with
filthy crockery, half empty aluminium take-away trays, empty bottles and
crushed cans. On a table, by a tape recorder, lay a saucer heaped with ash and
stubs. One of Anselm’s cassettes was in the deck. The others, salvaged from the
corridor but still in their envelopes, were piled to one side.

‘I take it you’ve made a
significant effort to continue your engagement with the local community?’
queried Anselm.

‘I feed my neighbour’s
cat.’

‘You’ve sought help from
professionals trained to help a talented young man come to terms with
restricted vision?’

‘Don’t be shy. The word’s
“blind”.’

‘You take frequent and
regular exercise?’

‘Without fail. I go
upstairs … and then I come down again.’

John was opening
cupboards, patting his hands inside, trying to find a jar of instant coffee.

‘You’re relatively
happy, grappling with the exciting question of what comes next in your life?’

‘I’m raring to go.

‘I assume you have a
suitcase?’

John turned around,
letting his arms drop.

‘A suitcase,’ repeated
Anselm. ‘Let me pack it. You’re expected at Larkwood. I realise you’ll be
leaving behind a vast, carefully constructed support network, but you’ll find
another community, different help, lots of exercise and as much time as you
need to grapple. Sandals, too, if you want.’

‘And a whip?’

‘No. And leave yours
behind. The point of coming is to learn to do without.’

John was not the first
person overwhelmed by depression to stay at Larkwood. Many tortured men and
women had taken a room in the guesthouse while learning to grope through
various kinds of darkness. John was allocated a room on the ground floor. In
lieu of a white stick, Anselm cut down a sapling with twists and turns produced
by a struggle with a winding creeper. John was given a job picking apples,
alternating with bottle washing and waxing floors. He was given a structure.
Early rising, quiet, work, more quiet, more work, recreation (sometimes
raucous), a Great Silence, early to bed. Between times: mysteriously bad meals.

‘This is good, Anselm,’
he said after three weeks. ‘I’m beginning to find my way.’

It was a warm, grateful
but cryptic comment. Anselm had anticipated that John would eventually start
shaving, pick fruit and — when the moment was ripe — open up about the terror
of finding himself blind, haunted by the memory of colour. However, only a
portion of those expectations came to pass. He did shave. He went one step
further: despite strong warnings to the contrary, he asked Larkwood’s unskilled
barber for a haircut. He wandered through the orchard, arms reaching up into
the lower branches feeling for apples that were ready to fall, removing them
with that gentle twist required by Brother Aiden. But he didn’t open up. At
least not to Anselm. In the evenings, in that quiet hour before Compline,
Anselm often saw John walking with
the Prior,
the man whose pungent
remarks had made it on to the cassette left in the tape deck. Heads bowed, they
ambled along the Bluebell Walk; they sat on the railway sleeper overlooking Our
Lady’s Lake; they paused in the woods, suddenly alert, as though wondering if
someone had tailed them. Moving once more, the Prior listened intently his arm
hooked into John’s, nudging or pulling as the turns of the lane required.

‘You’re back to your old
self, John,’ remarked Anselm six months later as they rinsed bottles in the
scullery. ‘And I’m glad, real glad.’

‘I’m not quite there,’
he replied, plunging his hands into the hot water. ‘But I’m learning … slowly
learning … to bide my time and wait.’

Wait for what?
Anselm
wanted to know but he couldn’t ask. There was something confessional about John’s
talks with the Prior which, by their nature, excluded repetition, even to a
close friend. Anselm understood this, but it didn’t erase the jealousy: his
wanting to be an important — if not decisive — part of John’s recovery. The
sense of exclusion was all the more difficult to manage because John became
increasingly relaxed with Anselm. He joked again, as they’d done at school. He
sought him out to talk about everything but the past: he confided to Anselm not
the path travelled, but his plans for the future.

‘I can still contribute,’
he said cautiously almost lapsing into the Prior’s strange Glasgow-Suffolk
dialect. ‘I can write. I can teach. I can see certain things without my eyes
… things I might not have seen unless I’d been forced to look in a different
way Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Anselm did. It
applied to his life of faith.

John left Larkwood after
seven months. By his own account he wasn’t ready to handle life alone in
Hampstead but the time was right — like one of those apples that need a little
twist to leave the tree. Anselm drove him home, a restored but still broken man
— that contradictory state of the injured who have come to accept their injury
and the limitations it brings.

‘Thanks for the tapes,
Anselm,’ said John after they’d tidied up the kitchen.

‘No problem.’

‘Thanks for coming to
get me.

‘Sure.’

‘Thanks for bringing me
back. I can take care of myself, now.’

A pause fell between
them. Anselm’s failure to reply contained the unspoken hurt: that he’d planned
his own wisecracks and counsel only to find himself employed as the chauffeur.

‘Anselm?’

‘Yes?’

‘If ever I needed help —
real help … with something far more difficult than what to do when you can’t
see the end of your nose … I’d only come to you.

At those words Anselm woke up as if someone
had snapped a thumb and forefinger.

He showered and threw on
his habit, glancing afresh at the milestones to John’s professional
rehabilitation. After leaving Larkwood he’d found a place at St Anthony’s
College, Oxford, and completed a PhD, a
meisterwerk
on the contribution
of dissident thinking to political theory in East-Central Europe. Honoured with
a copy Anselm had confined himself to the first and last pages, thus missing
those abundant references to the Shoemaker. Fortunately, more discriminating
readers had considered its merits and John had been offered a tiny room in
Birkbeck College, London. There, speaking from a cloud, Sobranies to hand, he’d
entranced successive generations with tales of the movers and shakers behind a
peaceful revolution; of how he’d once rubbed shoulders with greatness.

But the dream had left
another imprint on Anselm’s mind: the recollection of something altogether
personal. The bell for Lauds came like a herald: John’s request for help had
been planned long ago, even as he’d stumbled through the woods at Larkwood.

Chapter Ten

The jubilant opening antiphon did not
command Anselm’s undivided attention. He kept thinking of Melanie Fielding
propped up in a facing stall, pool cue in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the
other. Beside her stood another phantom, this one empty handed: John’s real
mother, the woman he’d never named. They seemed to watch Anselm with different
kinds of appeal, wanting by turns to be understood and forgiven. They were at
his shoulder when, after Lauds, he tugged at the Prior’s scapular. Standing in
the cloister, he spoke in a hushed voice from one cowled shadow to another, the
shamble of feet around them growing still. Given the hour and the place he
restricted himself to the sparest details.

‘John Fielding has asked
for my help,’ whispered Anselm.

Nod.

‘He wants me to walk
through fire.’

A reasonable-request
nod.

‘If I make it to the other
side a killer from the Stalinist Terror will be brought to justice.’

An as-you’d-expect nod.

‘Will you tell him it’s
just not possible? Monastery walls, and all that?’

The Prior nudged his
glasses and the two round discs glinted suddenly in the darkness. His reply was
barely audible. ‘This afternoon, two-thirty’

The meeting was convened in the parlour, a
bright and draughty room opposite the reception desk where Sylvester endured
his long face-off with the telephone. Anselm strongly suspected that the Watchman
had quit the front line trench and had scouted silently to the door where he
could listen to John’s explanation.

The Prior listened, too,
but in that intimidating way for which he was renowned. He didn’t move, sitting
on the edge of his seat, his dark eyes alive with an intense concentration that
threatened to consume whoever was speaking. His cheap wire glasses, round and
slightly out of shape, seemed to have been damaged by the force behind them.

‘Where is Róża now?’
he said, the accent more Glasgow than Suffolk.

‘I don’t know,’ said
John. ‘She’d gone before I could ask where she was going.’

The Prior made a humph. ‘She
waited fifty-nine years,’ he calculated, drawing out the words. ‘And then, when
she finally decided to use the power given to her by this man Brack, she turned
to you. Not one of the many Friends who’d served the cause of the Shoemaker,
but you, a man she’d only known for a matter of months … it’s as though she
could trust no other. It’s as though you were part of her lost opportunity’

The Prior humphed again,
and Anselm winced, waiting for his spiritual father to express pained regret:
that the monastic enclosure represented an environment of inner freedom born of
stability and that Anselm, without duress, had chosen to live within it; that
he was no longer free to be anyone’s eyes and hands. Instead the Prior sat back
and said, ‘What can be done?’

Like Róża said, explained John, there
are files.

During the eighties, the
Warsaw SB and Stasi personnel from East Germany formed a unit to tackle
underground printing in the city They kept a joint archive in German. No one
knew of its existence until six months ago when a plumber found two crates in
the basement of a condemned office block in Dresden. The contents were now
lodged with the
Instytut Pamięci Nardowej
in Warsaw, the Institute
of National Remembrance, commonly known as the IPN. After Róża’s disappearance
John had lunged for the phone, wondering if she’d been there and hoping to
track down a contact number. He’d failed on both scores for reasons of
confidentiality but mention of the Shoemaker and his own arrest elicited a
reference to the newly found documents. As a victim of the former communist
regime and someone directly linked to the fortunes of
Freedom and
Independence,
he was entitled to inspect them.

‘The operation that led
to my arrest was called
Polana,’
he explained. ‘Obviously, the target
was Róża, not me. The point, however, is that the file generated by the
operation was stored in one of those crates. As I say, all the paperwork is in
German.’

The last observation
came with an angling of the head towards Anselm, neatly making reference to his
passable competence at the language. As an adolescent Anselm had been
enthralled by all those dark words for dread and anxiety along with heavyweight
mindbenders like
vergangenheitsbewältigung:
the assumption of one’s
past. He’d relished that one, even before he’d had a past to assume. With the
same hunger he’d scoured a dictionary for like terms in a fearless endeavour to
acquire intellectual depth. He’d drop them carelessly into ordinary discourse
as if to say English had unfortunate conceptual limitations. It was only much
later, after the war criminal Eduard Schwermann had claimed sanctuary at
Larkwood, that Anselm returned to the language with the sober application that
comes with middle age. He’d been taught by the community’s gardener, Brother
Eckhart, a former bookseller with unsubstantiated connections to the Austrian
aristocracy His tuition had been unconventional, grounding Anselm’s vocabulary
in horticultural matters, thirteenth century mystical theology and the
requirements of polite table conversation.