William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘It’s yours,’ said a nurse with a square jaw.

‘Mine?’ Roza cried, wanting wonder, feeling only a terrifying weight.

‘Have you thought of a name?’

Roza sank to a chair, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t look down. She’d already glimpsed the vast ocean-blue eyes, the gangling limbs. She could hear a soft sucking sound. She’d seen the lips, the little tongue working, the nails on small fingers hooked on to the blanket.

‘Name. Have you got one?’ The jaw was pushed forward as if she were holding a pin between her teeth. She tapped a pencil on a pad. ‘There are forms to be filled in.’

In abject misery, Roza turned her head aside, away from the bulky nurse with the muscular fingers, away from her pad, the notes, and the endless requests for names and dates of birth. Opening her eyes, Roza saw a window The frame was large, with bars fixed on the inside. Beyond lay the sky, puffs of cloud and, most agonising of all, a tree. Roza could see the pink cherry blossoms. A light breeze came in short gusts, plucking them free. They floated away by the handful, like scared butterflies.

‘I have a form.’ The pencil tapped impatience.

Roza looked at the large pad of blue paper with its columns and boxes, the gaps and dotted lines. ‘There will be no name.

‘Just a surname?’

‘Nothing.’ Roza couldn’t do it. She couldn’t reduce this mystery of life to just another fact in prison. ‘No name at all.’

‘I’ll leave it blank, then.’

Roza had a consuming dread that her milk would dry up from grief and the devastating guilt that came from bringing life into a prison. But as she fed the murmuring infant she looked out of the window and received something that made her strong and able to cope with the shock of hearing that first murder and the sound of Pavel’s execution, all set against the grotesque monotony of prison existence. She’d seen pink blossoms. She’d seen the wind that strips the trees.

‘One day we will win,’ said Roza, crouched on the footstool, when next summoned for an interrogation.

She’d never said ‘we’ before; she’d never spoken of a struggle for victory But now she was more than herself. She spoke for someone who didn’t yet have a voice; and she joined herself to all those beyond the prison walls who couldn’t speak, either from ignorance, complacency or fear, and she spoke for them. She pledged herself to a victory that they would all claim as their own, one day, with or without merit, a victory that she knew was utterly certain, a day of freedom that could only be delayed and never denied.

‘I can wait,’ she said. ‘Today, tomorrow, either in here or out there, it makes no real difference. It’s all about patience and waiting, and I can do both. Do you know why?’

Like the prisoners, Brack was barely distinguishable from the greenish walls. Even his brown hair seemed to have changed. The green in his eyes had grown stronger. He said nothing. Roza felt herself grow beyond her surroundings: even as she crouched, she filled the room.

‘Do you know why?’ she repeated, looking up, arms folded on her knees. ‘Because you can’t stop the Shoemaker. You can’t lock up his words. You can’t kill his ideas. They’re beyond reach. They have a life of their own. They’re for ever on the wind. And whether you like it or not, they are the future, yours and mine, because, fundamentally your ideas and your words aren’t as compelling as ours. They aren’t as good. They require force… bloodshed… suffering; whereas ours… ours demand nothing. First they persuade… only then do they ask for commitment and sacrifice.’

Brack’s top teeth scraped his bottom lip. He’d darkened at the assault on his beliefs, but then mastered himself, strangely unsettled — it seemed — by Roza’s assurance and indifference to his authority.

‘Today is your day’ admitted Roza. ‘This is your winter. But we’ll have the spring. Tomorrow is coming and when it dawns — ’ she nodded severity at him, and confidence — ‘there’ll be new laws, fairly framed; there’ll be honest, dedicated lawyers. There’ll be judges who don’t pass sentence in a damp cellar with a pistol. You’ll be spared what was done to me, but rest assured, you will be prosecuted for what you have done. I will give evidence against you. I will tell them about the cage and the merciless killing of two innocent men… whose only crime was to think differently from you and the barren system you serve.

Once more Roza expected Brack to ignite at her attack but again he said nothing. There was no outburst about choosing sides and warnings in the sewers. He looked at Roza over his desk and the heap of Major Strenk’s papers, his teeth gouging at the lip. And then Roza understood why he’d been silent throughout her credo. Like all lackeys he was scared of what might happen if the teacher went away: where he would be if, when tomorrow came, Roza was right and he was wrong. The recognition made Roza fire a shot at the present.

‘You can’t keep me here for ever,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I’m already outside. I’ve seen the wind in a cherry tree.’

Roza was allowed to see her child for two hours a day Then she had to leave the metal cot watched over by the nurse with thick fingers. Back in her cell she thought endlessly of the pink little mouth and the branches against the sky. For the first time since her imprisonment, she opened her eyes to those who were around her. She made friends with the woman with cropped blonde hair; the imprisoned nurse who’d held her hand during the birth.

Aniela Kolba was twenty-six, the mother of a five-year-old boy called Bernard who she hadn’t seen for eighteen months. She’d been arrested because her brother had been an officer in the Home Army, at first a hero of the Uprising, a patriot, but then a deemed enemy of the new order. Aniela’s offence was association by blood. There was no one else to go for. Her parents were dead, shot and burned like Pavel’s family in the Ochota massacres.

‘My boy hates fish,’ she said, a hand pulling at knotted strands, her face fulsome, her arms chubby Eyebrows, dark and fine, were twisted with pain. ‘He once threw the keys to the house in the river.’

Roza told Aniela of Saint Justyn’s and day trips with Mr Lasky to Chopin’s birthplace or the grave of Prus, while Aniela recounted holidays in the Carpathians to see the timber churches of the Lemks and Boyks. They took turns unfolding the story of Quo Vadis. Neither of them was called for interrogation, though Brack’s sunken face occasionally appeared at the Judas Window in the cell door. He’d watch, brooding for a moment and then vanish.

One morning the guards came for Aniela. She returned at midday, dressed in clothes from home — a light green dress with small orange flowers, a deep red cardigan with dark blue buttons. The colours were blinding, harsh against the scratched walls. Her hair was neat and tidy shining like brushed silk. She wore new brown shoes.

‘They’re letting me go,’ she admitted. Her loyalty bound her to Roza and the prison.

‘Why?’

‘They didn’t say I suppose I’m no longer a threat to the Party Maybe they’ve found my brother… I don’t know’

It was like her arrest: there’d been no reason to lock her up; there was no reason to let her go. She smoothed her dress, ashamed to be wearing glad rags. Her eyebrows twisted. ‘They’ve let me say goodbye.’

Roza thrust her face into Aniela’s neck and the wonderful smell of soap burned her nostrils. She pressed herself deep into those soft, open arms, from affection and to stifle the sound of gibbering from the other women — the frenzied requests to get a message out to their men and children.