William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘I warned you Roza,’ he said, flicking keys on a big ring. He turned his soured face on to hers. His hair was shaved all around, leaving a high crown of copper metallic bristles. ‘You should have listened.’

He yanked open the door and the guards, slipping and grunting, dragged Roza into a low, dripping room. A single bulb flickered like a fading life. Thick pipes ran the length of the ceiling, water drizzling from bandaged cracks and joints. Heavy globules dripped from a rusty central spout. Beneath it was an open cage. The guards kicked and shoved and then locked her in.

‘I warned you in the sewers, Roza,’ said Brack, as if all this were her fault.

The room became silent, except for the patter of splashing. Suddenly, the twitching light went out. Roza stared at the afterglow, the fast-fading sallow bulb on the wall of her mind. She found a word, but it came as a whisper: ‘Help…’

And then the pipes shuddered and the water exploded above her head.

Roza did not know whether it was night or day when the interrogation began again. She hadn’t been conscious when they took her from the cage. She’d opened her eyes to find herself strapped to a chair by a belt. On seeing her move, the watching guard had stubbed out his cigarette and brought Roza back to Major Strenk and the footstool. Otto was sitting in the corner.

‘Name?’

‘Roza Mojeska… you know already, I’m-’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

She breathed out the answers, and Major Strenk wrote them down with a pencil. It had been the same with every interrogation since her arrest six weeks previously Always beginning again as if nothing had gone before. The same wearing questions with a few afterthoughts. Only this last time they’d led to the cage, a first departure from the routine.

‘You say you’re an orphan?’ Major Strenk spoke as if he’d lifted the lid of a dustbin.

‘Yes.’

‘From birth?’ This was an afterthought.

‘Yes.’

‘Misfortune or abandonment?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Do you know anything about your parents?’ His tone of disgust suggested she might not, in fact, have any.

‘No. I like to think that-’

Major Strenk seemed to lower the lid. He’d smelled enough. Dutifully, he went back to work, wanting — again — the names of teachers, staff and all the other children at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. He listened, yawning, checking the replies against his existing list. Not entirely satisfied, he moved on to slowly cover the German Occupation seeking, as ever, names along the way For names gave associations. Associations gave suspects. And suspects were suspect. At no point throughout this quest for other degenerates did Roza so much as glance at Otto, who was watching intently from the corner. She simply left him out of the reckoning, though he too had been at Saint Justyn’s, in hiding during the war. He’d turned up in l943. They’d met in the attic by a window Roza just kept her eyes firmly, perhaps too firmly, upon Major Strenk, recounting her early life as if Otto had never been there. It was a kind of inverted Russian roulette: Otto was taunting her, daring her to pull the trigger and mention his name; and she refused each time, not to save him, but to save herself, for she’d settled on a way to survive this measured annihilation of her humanity.

‘You recall no one else?’ Major Strenk sharpened his pencil, frowning at the shavings and lead powder accumulating on his desk.

‘No.’

‘Quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

With the flat of one hand the Major wiped the debris into a cupped palm and then brushed his fingers clean over a wastebasket. Still frowning, he rummaged for a handkerchief. Between questions, his eyes on Roza, he made a short, dainty blow.

‘You knew there would be an uprising?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Soviet radio.’

‘You went to the Old Town?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your function?’

‘I was a messenger, ammunition carrier, a nurse. I did-’

‘-yes, yes, yes: whatever you could.’ Major Strenk finished off the sentence, disliking the answer, mocking the implied nobility as if Roza were trying to clean up her background. He looked inside the handkerchief to make sure he’d got what he was after and then turned a page on to the reasons for her escape.

‘I was told it was over, that we had to get out. I went into the sewer system and took a tunnel north to Zoliborz. When I lifted the cover they were waiting for me.’

‘They? The power-seeking criminals who wanted to use the Uprising for their own ends? The landowners and capitalists?’ He was looking inside his handkerchief again. ‘The enemies of progress and reform?’

‘No. Two Germans.’

Major Strenk paused, glancing down at his sheaf of names. ‘You escaped on your own?’

‘Yes. Others followed… others had gone before, but I went alone.’

From that moment Roza let her gaze fall. She’d left Otto behind; he’d been with her and waded out of her life through another tunnel; she didn’t need to protect him any more. And Major Strenk’s jaded expression had become unbearable.

‘Do go on,’ he said, as if he was no longer that interested.

Following her arrest Roza had been taken to a transit camp in Pruszkow Three weeks later she was one of fifty packed into an open coal wagon. The train went south to Wolbrom, near Krakow, where she was allocated a shared room in a fiat above a fire station. Curiously, Roza yet again kept to herself what mattered most. She said nothing of the singer and the song.

The journey had lasted almost three days. There was only standing room, the November sun high and bare, the intimacy of massed flesh intense. A single slop bucket in the corner filled within hours. At intervals the waste was tipped over the side planking on to the tracks. Occasionally apples and chunks of bread landed in the wagon, thrown by locals when the train slowed or stopped. Roza thought she might die. But then, on the morning of the second day, a child’s voice climbed higher than the rattling of the train and the stench of the bucket. A little girl had begun to sing.

‘Return our Homeland to us, Lord…’

The hymn had been sung for over two hundred years. But here, in this wagon, no one had the belief or the strength to join in. It was left to the child. Following the girl’s rising voice, Roza seemed to touch the clouds with the fingers of her soul. She’d escaped once through filth, but this was a kind of rescue; a moment of salvation. The journey ended that night. After climbing out of the wagon Roza hobbled between buckled over men and women, crying out for the girl, but no reply came back. It was as though God had come and gone.

For an instant, Roza almost forgot that she was being questioned by Major Strenk: her mind was juddering from the realisation that Otto Brack and that unknown child shared the same protected space in her memory.

‘When did you leave Wolbrom?’

Roza made a start. ‘After the war… nine months later.’

‘Why?’

‘To help rebuild-’

‘Yes, yes, yes, you tried to save Warsaw, and now you were going to help with the rebuilding. What was your function?’

Roza had worked alongside an architect retrieving and labelling fragments of ornate stonework in the Old Town. The whole area was to be restored to its original splendour using, whenever possible, original materials. Pavel Mojeska had been engaged in identical work with another specialist. She’d met him during a meeting when the experts had pored over close-up photographs of a painting by Canaletto. It had showed the buildings as they were once were. This was the complete picture and it showed them where the bits might go.

‘Mojeska’s date of birth?’