William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘Nineteen twenty-one.’

It was another pointless question. Pavel had been arrested three hours before Roza. He was in the same building, in another cell. They must already know But they trawled everywhere so as to compare accounts, looking for any inconsistency He was poring over his own pictures.

‘As to his parents?’

‘They were killed in Ochota.’

‘Any siblings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Names.’

Roza’s voice cracked. ‘They’re dead. Two girls and a boy all dead. They were in Ochota… Ochota. Do you really need me to tell you what happened?’

‘On reflection, no:

As the Nazis poured troops in to crush the Uprising, special units were deployed to flush out any survivors. In the districts of Ochota and Wola thousands of civilians were executed, heaped and burned, regardless of age or gender. The Major sighed.

‘Where was the criminal Mojeska?’

‘Fighting in the-’

‘-yes, yes, stop.’ Though he’d asked the question he couldn’t endure any more heroics. He started scouring their relationship, leaning forward like one of the architects over those photos.

‘You were married in what year?’

‘Nineteen forty-eight.’

‘Your age?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘His age?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

She gave the bare facts. She wasn’t going to tell Major Strenk how they’d rebuilt each other: how Roza, who belonged to no one, had given herself to Pavel who’d lost everyone; how each had complementary wounds with a complementary power to heal. She wasn’t going to tell Major Strenk how it was possible to remain injured at heart and yet laugh as if for the first time. No, the major got what he could understand: facts; dates, places and times. For two days he dutifully wrote the answers down with his pencil. On the third day he changed subject and tone.

‘You are aware the criminal Pavel Mojeska is a provocateur?’

‘A what? I’m sorry, I don’t-’

‘That he is planning to restore the rule of landowners and capitalists?’

‘No.’

And she had no idea that he was implicated in the publication of subversive material against the people. Major Strenk paused. He became eerily still, like a man watching a lake for the skip of life below the surface.

‘Who is the Shoemaker?’ he said, unblinking.

‘I don’t know’

‘Who are the Friends of the Shoemaker?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Where is the printing press?’

‘I don’t know’

The one reply uttered with every difference of inflection imaginable, all of them variations of begging. Major Strenk pulled open a drawer and took out a small vice and a metal tray Roza watched him in complete horror. First he took a fish hook from a compartment of the tray; next, he locked it between the clamps of the vice, leaving the shank free; and then, finally he looked up, his eyes remote and dull.

‘Think again. Who is the Shoemaker?’

Roza couldn’t speak.

‘Who are the Friends of the Shoemaker?’

This minute, transferred attention to the making of a fly was exactly what had happened three days earlier, before she was kicked off the stool and taken to the pit. The threat was heavy between them, his unblinking, timeless gaze upon her. She opened her mouth but no sound came from her throat. Major Strenk peered into the metal tray and selected a bobbin of bright green thread. He tied a knot on the hook and reached for some tweezers.

‘Where is the printing press?’

Roza began to shiver. She heard the dripping in her mind. Her voice was quiet and beseeching, ‘I’ve told you, Comrade, I don’t know’

Major Strenk put the tweezers between his teeth and picked up his pencil. While writing down the answer, he nodded vaguely towards Brack. The guard behind Roza kicked the footstool away.

Roza woke up soaking wet and freezing. She’d been strapped to a chair with a belt. She did not know if it was night or day The guard stamped on the butt of his cigarette and brought her back to the interrogation room.

‘Name?’

‘Roza Mojeska.’ Her voice was so faint she hardly heard her own reply.

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Major Strenk picked up a magnifying glass and examined the tied fly He didn’t seem especially pleased. Something had gone wrong. He suppressed a belch and said, ‘Date of birth?’

On the third day, while testing the mechanism of a fishing reel, he asked about the Shoemaker. It whirred efficiently like a drill, eventually slowing to a series of dry clicks. Roza watched and listened unable to speak. The major opened a drawer and nodded at Brack. Without resisting, without remembering the hauling down the corridor of waxen light, Roza fell into the darkness and the deluge. A last conscious thought, like fingernails hooked on the ledge of sanity, was about life: the irresistible, inexorable power of life. It was as though her mind was lit for a moment by a spark of divinity. She knew she was pregnant. She carried a life that Major Strenk would never catch.

After the third visit to the cage Roza was dragged back to her cell. There were nine other women sitting on the floor. A tenth with straggling ashen hair walked around aimlessly, moaning to herself. She wagged a dirty finger at Roza, admonishing the air long after Roza had slumped in a corner. The walls were damp and gouged with hatch-patterned desperation: the days crossed out in blocks of seven becoming weeks, months and years. All the prisoners were a strange grey-green, melding them to the plaster. One of them with cropped blonde hair watched Roza guardedly over knees held tight against her chest. Roza pressed her face into the wall. She was the bearer of life. She had to survive so that this child might one day sing. Her mind turned to Otto Brack who, given time, without a war and without conflicting ideologies, just might have been the father.

A boy turned up in February 1943. He was first seen with Mr Lasky, the caretaker, helping to shave a door that had never jammed. He had to be about fifteen. A few questions to one of the more indiscreet nuns produced the unlikely disclosure that Mr Lasky wasn’t getting any younger and the building was only getting older, so his nephew had come to help out with the chores. Everyone knew it was another secret: he was being hidden from the Nazis, like Magda, the girl in Roza’s dormitory. They had the same tragic look that comes with enforced separation.

Roza met the boy by accident one Sunday afternoon.

The top floor of the orphanage was reached by a set of warped stairs by a broom cupboard, understood by tradition to be haunted by seven orphans who’d fallen off the roof and a nun who’d killed herself with a candlestick, though no one knew how Few used the stairs, either from fear, or because the attic held nothing of interest save bedsteads, worn mattresses and broken furniture. But Roza discovered something else: a window, the highest in the building. It looked out over Warsaw, and this was where she came on Sunday afternoons to escape the institutional existence she led down below — it couldn’t be any other way, but she was tired of the discipline and the very public life of a locker without a key She would daydream, gazing over the rooftops, imagining an existence with some colour: brothers and sisters round a table, a mother in the kitchen, and a father playing the banjo. One Sunday Roza climbed the stairs and found the door ajar. On entering she saw the boy by the window It was wide open and he was smoking.

‘Do you want one?’

‘Yes.’

He’d made them out of old newspaper that had lined a drawer and threads from a doormat. His hair was rust brown, his eyes a deeper brown, flecked with green. His skin was naturally dark, as if he’d just come back from a holiday in the sun. Like Roza, he was thin, lacking muscle on his arms and legs. His shoes and jacket were too big. The boots had come from Mr Lasky.