William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘You need to understand where you’re going,’ he said. ‘It’s no ordinary place. The people in the street… they buy bread and milk, like me and you, but they breathe a different air. It carries the memory of ancestral insurrection — seventeen ninety-four, eighteen thirty, eighteen sixty-three; it carries the heat of recent destruction. Brack, Roza, the informer… the Shoemaker, the Friends… they all know the taste of history. It set them against each other in a fight to the death.

‘During the Second World War, eighty-five per cent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, seven hundred thousand people perished in the displacement, fighting and massacres. There were two uprisings and then the districts west of the Vistula were systematically blown apart street by street. The suffering was apocalyptic, the latter stages observed by the Soviets calmly eating borscht on the eastern banks of the river.

‘When the Nazis had finished, the Red Army crossed over to liberate the ashes. They never went home. Their opposition lay buried under the rubble. People like Roza crawled out of a hole and managed to stand up again. Brack and his like were waiting. They’re always waiting…’

Anselm made a grimace, and not just at the history and warning. His friend was pale and tense, suffering from exclusion. Anselm was standing in his place. Fighting Roza’s war, however hopeless the odds, had always been John’s domain. He’d already explored the territory Before going to Warsaw, he’d travelled widely throughout the Communist bloc. Protected by a pseudonym, he’d written of high cultures brought to ruin and dissident voices who kept the faith in hiding. A smart operator, the nearest he’d come to trouble was when he got arrested at Bucharest airport and had to explain to the Securitate that The Secret Agent was a novel by Conrad and not an instruction manual produced by MI6. By the time he’d met Roza he was already an ally committed to the struggle. And now, when she faced her most important battle, he was… indisposed.

‘I’m sorry it’s me who’s catching a plane and not you,’ said Anselm. ‘I know how you must feel.’

John snapped a match between his teeth. ‘Thanks.’

‘But there’s a bright side, at least for me,’ confessed Anselm. ‘I wanted to help years ago, do you remember, when you came to stay at Larkwood after the accident? I’d planned to dish out some of the stuff I’d read in books or heard in the Chapter Room… anything that might help you deal with your blindness. Things didn’t quite work out that way Which is good, in retrospect, because I had nothing of my own to offer.’

‘The time wasn’t right, Anselm.’

‘I know’

‘But it is now.’

The plane nosed into the mist. Down below, buildings climbed in a kind of rush towards the sky proud and victorious, as if defying the memory of so much devastation. Glass, chrome and steel glinted amongst the flanks of brick and concrete. Leaning on the window, however, Anselm let his mind scurry back to a sort of forbidden universe.

While throwing stones by the lake and sipping coffee at the airport bar, his thoughts — at intervals — had run wild, and he’d been obliged to haul them into line, ashamed of their force and direction. Despite the Prior’s warnings — and like a man drawn to the thrill of a street fight — Anselm was intrigued by Otto Brack and his dangerous world. He appeared to be a man beyond redemption. Anselm wanted to know how he’d got there and why What could have happened in his life that had taught him to use good for evil? What was his story, once the words had been peeled back? The questions seemed indecent, unseemly given the depravity of his actions. But Anselm still wanted to know He reproved himself, closing an eye to the absence of any real conviction.

On leaving Warsaw’s airport, a garrulous taxi driver — singing more than talking, and not requiring any reciprocal commitment — took Anselm to the Warsaw Hilton, a towering edifice devoted to contemporary extravagance and the acute embarrassment of mendicant travellers compelled by circumstance to stay there. The appointment of his room was lavish: burgundy covers, cream sheets and heavy wood furnishings. Vaguely disorientated, he unpacked his bag and placed two battered books on a large desk near a floor-to-ceiling window.

As to the purpose of his stay, John had organised everything. A faxed application to view the Polana file had been processed by return and an appointment made for Anselm to consult its contents. He was expected at ten the following morning at the IPN building, another modern tower whose external lights clung to the walls like limpet mines, ready to explode if anyone’s secret history bumped against them. Anselm could see them now, a mere stone’s throw away resolute against a waning skyline. With a sigh, he sat down, reaching for one of the books: his Psalter, given to him by Sylvester on his first day at the monastery. Recalling the Prior’s injunction to keep step with Larkwood’s rhythms, he mouthed the words for Compline… but found himself whispering questions — of all people — to John’s absent mother. Where did you go? She, too, had a story to tell, beginning with her name. On closing the cover and formally entering his Great Silence, Anselm was instantly sidetracked. Instead of turning off the light and choosing which of the five pillows would be his solace and comfort, he opted for the second volume on the table.

‘It’s out of date,’ John had said, at the Departure Gate, another match between his teeth, ‘but the important stuff never changes.’

Anselm flicked through the guidebook as if it might contain a clue to the mystery of Otto Brack’s character. All at once he stopped, warmed by a sudden melancholy: he’d landed on a passage underlined in pencil… it was a schoolboy code linking numbers to the alphabet, the means by which Anselm and John had noted timings for a raid on the top floor dormitory. Underlined words had been thrown in to distract imagined enemies; it was only the selected letters that had mattered. Anselm smiled. It was as though John, boy and man, had come with him to Warsaw. He studied the paragraph closely looking for more high mischief. EEHGF. 55876.

None the wiser, Anselm gazed over a twinkling, sleepless Warsaw Numberless white and yellow stars seemed to have fallen from the sky, jostling for space on the ground, colliding and blending in the darkness. The IPN building stood tall, still and curiously alone, like a gatecrasher at a cocktail party, someone who’d spoiled the fun with talk of Crime and Punishment. Somewhere inside its walls lay the file on the Shoemaker. Apparently it contained a copy of Roza’s interrogations, carried out during the Stalinist Terror.

Anselm wondered what they’d done to her.

A guard kicked away the low stool. Roza collapsed to one side, but the guard caught her by the hair. Swung to her feet, she was thrown from the interrogation room into the corridor of low, yellow light. Another guard appeared walking lazily his dull boots sagging like half fallen socks. Roza backed against the wall, facing the open door. Major Strenk was troubled, examining a fish hook under the glare of a desk lamp. Looking up, as if he’d just remembered something, he nodded at Lieutenant Brack who’d been sitting in the corner.

‘I warned you, Roza,’ said Brack, after carefully shutting the door. ‘You should have listened to me in the sewers.

He gave a nod, just like Major Strenk’s, and the guards dragged Roza, feet trailing, to an iron staircase at the end of the corridor. Three floors down they came to a wet, freezing cellar, the air misting with the rush of their gasps and panting. Ahead, to the left, was a grey iron door.