William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘This is my room,’ said Roza, curtly taking the cigarette.

The boy ignored her and lit the rolled matting, his lips held tight when he exhaled. While Roza coughed and spluttered, he stared enquiringly over the bombed, sunlit capital.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Roza, after she’d picked some fibres off her tongue.

The boy breathed in the black fumes and said, ‘I’m thinking of my father and my mother.’

Roza met the boy in that room frequently thereafter. They made no arrangement, but over the next few weeks Sunday afternoons became the time they smoked by the window He never again revealed anything about himself or what he cared about, what he’d lost and what he hoped for. He told her his name, and no more. He was Otto. That single flash of sincerity and vulnerability was replaced by a mature frown and long simmering silences. With his top teeth he’d scrape his bottom lip and Roza wondered if he might open up the skin. Once, for something to say, Roza told him her daydream: of a red dress and red shoes, and a deep green jacket, and a father who played the banjo. He listened, drinking in her hope for something better.

These two moments of brief sharing — of his loss and her dreams — created a bond between Roza and Otto. Something that could turn into love was slowly catching fire, like the dried matting wrapped in yesterdays news. By choice or chance they’d both been walked on and thrown aside; but they’d found each other among so much bric-a-brac; they’d opened a window on to something different. Which was why Roza instinctively risked her life for him the following April when the German secret police arrived with their whistles and dogs.

The community and all the children were ordered into the rear yard, but Roza and Otto made for the top floor.

‘I wouldn’t go up there if I were you,’ said Roza to the squat interpreter, shaking uncontrollably.

‘Why not?’

She was barring his way at the foot of the stairs, arms outstretched. Behind him stood two men in long leather coats. Otto was in the cupboard, two feet away.

‘There’s a dead nun waiting with a candlestick.’

They laughed and one of them tousled her hair — not affectionately, but as if she were a dog that had learned a trick. It took them half an hour to search the attic, during which time Otto hid in a room that had already been ransacked. When they’d gone, Roza learned that the Prioress and Mr Lasky had been taken away at gunpoint and that Magda had been found in the infirmary: she’d had no papers and no temperature.

Roza was completely distraught. At night she lay awake, staring at Magda’s empty bed. During the day she kept looking out for Mr Lasky, expecting to find him mending a perfectly serviceable sash window A couple of weeks later the explosions started. The rumour was that those in the Ghetto were fighting back. Standing beside Otto in the attic she watched part of the Warsaw horizon gradually collapse in clouds of smoke and dust. When the noise came to an end there was a ringing in her ears that wouldn’t go away — not from the bombs but the lost voices.

Otto heard the same sounds. The arrest of Mr Lasky had a deep effect upon him. He was adrift for the second time in the space of two months — first from his parents and now the man who’d played a part in his rescue. Roza sensed him leaning upon her more heavily though he never deliberately touched her. It was in his eyes and the glance that followed a brush of shoulders.

‘Where’ve they taken him?’ he asked, sucking in the smoke.

‘Pawiak Prison,’ replied Roza, quoting the indiscreet nun.

‘He’s dead.’ Otto’s voice was angry and correcting.

‘But we aren’t.’

Roza’s reply didn’t so much show up the base instinct of survival as reveal the peculiar duty that settles upon survivors, upon those who have been saved: to live and make the living worthwhile. ‘We have to make it count,’ she said, pulling at Otto’s sleeve as if they might go somewhere. ‘For their sake.’

A year and a bit later, they did. Soviet Radio had called for an Uprising. The Red Army was approaching from the east. The Nazis were finished. All that was needed was a quick shove.

‘I’m going to the Old Town.’ He lit two cigarettes, wincing, and passed one to Roza. ‘Are you coming?’

‘To do what?’

‘Fight.’

His eyes were unable to rest for long upon her but, having strayed, they kept coming back, hungrily; and Roza saw once more the sudden flare of vulnerability, the not wanting to be left alone again to face another crisis without the support of those he… relied upon? Loved? It was a mortified admission of affection, made immense by where she stood in Otto’s life. Roza hadn’t dared believe that she might be so important. They left that night, scurrying like rats along walls until they linked up with a Home Army unit on Podwale Street.

The quick shove was soon ended by a deafening assault from tanks and planes and hammering rifle fire. The buildings seemed to spit out their broken teeth. Their bones were cracked and splintered. Roza had never seen so much death: on street corners, by heaps of rubble — the bodies sometimes splayed in the most awful shapes, so strange they seemed not to be human. She felt utterly abandoned. Where was the Red Army? Why had the Soviets urged them to rise up if they were not going to come?

In the scorching heat of this beating, Roza crouched by Otto in a makeshift hospital by the Old Town walls. There was no ammunition left to carry so they were ripping bandages from the clothes of the dead. Suddenly Roza gripped Otto’s hand. They were going to die and she didn’t want to go without giving the best of herself to someone. With shocking violence she pressed into his palm all the love she had left.

And he began to talk.

As if a door had been blown off its hinges, he began to speak about what he’d seen through the window in the attic, tears pouring down his face.

‘My father used to make me toys out of wood and bits of plumbing, pipes and joints, fantastic things, a musket, a revolver, a sword… they looked real, honestly people used to stop and stare. He’d take me fishing, bird watching, camping, hiking and when I lost a tooth he’d put a coin under my pillow in an envelope with a funny drawing of a mouse waving at me, my name written all over the page. For years I thought the mouse came for my tooth. My mother used to cook fish in lemonade, really I’m not joking, lemonade, and it made the trout all sweet, a special kind of sweet. She was always there, always-’

He stopped abruptly as if he’d run out of things to say The wall behind soaked up a bang and seemed to bend inwards.

‘Where are they?’

‘Don’t know… deported.’

‘Why were you hiding?’

‘My father was a communist.’ He spoke with a savage, loud pride. ‘He believed in a better world for everyone, for you, for me, for them-’ He ducked the crack of an explosion. Chunks of plaster bounced on the floor; an eerie white dust floated down.

‘Where are you from?’ The conversation was in pieces. They were getting it all in before the ceiling came down.

‘Polana.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Near the Ukraine.’

The ground made a judder as if the world had just been smashed off its axis. Then Roza thought of the sewers. They’d been used for gun running and messages. Pulling Otto she stumbled into the open, head low, making a scream to batter down her terror. Two hundred yards later they lifted a cover and scrambled into the hole. Thirty-four rungs down, Roza and Otto slid waist deep into the water and filth.

High, high above, the din continued. Otto struck a match. The cavern appeared.

Corpses floated silently by like sleeping watchmen. Roza and Otto began wading east, the black bricks shuddering overhead. The match died. Otto lit another. The smell of gas, spent grenades and dirt made them wretch. On they went, pushing aside the dead. The match slowly faded. Roza whispered to the darkness, not expecting a reply: