William Brodrick: The Day of the Lie

‘This was the last thing I’d anticipated,’ murmured the old monk. ‘And yet, with hindsight, the risk had always been there. I’d seen the Nazis coming in nineteen thirty-eight. I knew what Hitler thought of the Communists.’

Speaking hastily resolved to nip past a colossal part of his life, Father Nicodem said he’d had other contacts, folk involved in smuggling operations… not of guns or food, but people… children. His hand waved away the details — it wasn’t necessary to say any more because it wasn’t relevant, suffice it to say he was able to organise the hiding of Leon’s son. He’d gone to the house where Leon and his family were hiding to collect the boy.

‘The moment is burned into me,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘The promises, the tears, the whispers. Otto was distraught so he barely noticed me. That night I brought him to my old friend, Jozef Lasky — ’ he settled his hollow eyes upon Roza — ‘which brought him to you.

The family who’d given refuge to the Bracks was Pavel Mojeska’s. For a short while they’d known each other. Looking ahead, Anselm saw the full dimensions of Strenk’s test of loyalty: it hadn’t ended with the abandonment of Roza, he’d required Brack to execute the son of the family who’d saved his life. But that lay in the future. Father Nicodem was still recalling the early slightly simpler days.

‘Having met me, Pavel insisted on joining the operation,’ he explained, still speaking to Roza. ‘He wanted to work on Freedom and Independence. He wanted to meet the Shoemaker. That’s when I realised that Leon had found me too easily that the Shoemaker had to become somebody other than myself; a symbol, an emblem, a figure from a story, a writer that no one could ever find… for these were hard times. I told him the Shoemaker was out of reach… but that he could help me keep him even further away’

Pavel became the sole link between Father Nicodem and a new group of Friends. The myth of the Shoemaker was born. Father Nicodem dropped out of the picture. But on Pavel’s side of the equation, he was always breaking the rules, always trusting someone. Trust was the marrow in his bones. He trusted Stefan Binkowski. He trusted others. And one of those others betrayed him.

Not long after Pavel’s execution the handling of Father Nicodem moved to Brack.

When they first met, nothing registered behind Brack’s eyes. There was no hint of recognition. The distraught boy had gone: the memories of that time had been covered up, painted over. He seemed to look directly at no one; to never quite look at anything in focus. By then he’d been in Strenk’s shoes for several years; he’d grown into them.

‘I tried to win him back,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘I tried to talk to him with what I wrote, but he couldn’t listen. There he was, at the heart of the fight against our ideas, and he couldn’t understand them. The debate we tried to raise wasn’t just with the intellectuals; it was with ordinary people, anyone who cared about the kind of society we were going to reconstruct after the war, whether they accepted Soviet Occupation or not. In a way we faced a great opportunity. Everyone had come together to pick up the pieces, our ways of thinking included. So we were arguing with anyone who could read… from the vendor on a street corner to a minister in a government office… but Otto Brack was beneath all that… They’d placed him underground, out of sight, in a prison to do the kind of thing no reasonable man would ever do. That’s why they put him there. Pavel wasn’t handed over to a man with a mind. They gave him to someone who couldn’t think.’

Isn’t it always that way? thought Anselm. When extremists of any kind want to push for that apocalyptic finishing line, they always call on the people who can’t understand anything more complicated than a fable. And they in turn, protect the citadel mumbling their mantras, convinced that they’ve grasped something the clever ones will never understand. They’re the chosen ones. And they don’t seem to realise that what they do sets them against the noble ideal that gave birth to the story. Brack, proud and blind, defended authoritarian communism at the cost of democratic socialism. The man who would guard the nursery had done his best to kill off the newborn.

‘I’ve called you here for another reason,’ resumed Father Nicodem, after a brief silence. He was tiring. Outside, the wild garden came to light with a shift in the cloud. ‘I want to thank you, Roza, for your fidelity. To Freedom and Independence and to me, though I don’t suppose you ever thought I was the Shoemaker. Now that I’m dying we might as well name what I’ve never wanted to hear — because it’s too painful — but now is the time. You were imprisoned for me. Pavel was shot for me. You both accepted the consequences so that I could write, so that the ideas we all believed in could be published. For sixty years I’ve told myself the price was too high. But I wrote for you both, thinking of you both and all the Friends that I’d never know and would never meet, and-’

‘I’ve known you were the Shoemaker and the printer since nineteen fifty-one,’ said Roza, flatly ‘Your hands were too clean. You sounded the same, out of your mouth and on paper. And I found you still grieving when I came back in nineteen eighty-two. But I came back because I believed in your words. You said what I wanted to say You said what Pavel could no longer say You spoke for us both and all the people who had no voice. You changed how people looked at the world-’

‘I brought Otto Brack to your door, Roza,’ said Father Nicodem, faintly ‘I’m part of his story I helped make Brack into the man that you and Pavel met in Mokotow’

‘I’m afraid you didn’t,’ corrected Roza, as if she were taking away a sticky cake, nice to look at but bad for an old man’s teeth. Remorse, she implied, can be a bit too sweet. ‘You’re getting carried away; you always got carried away’ She leaned forward towards the bed, placing a hand upon Father Nicodem’s frail arm. ‘Thousands of people were executed during the Uprising… in Ochota, in Wola. They left children behind, Pavel among them. They didn’t all go and join the secret service afterwards. For once, you must listen to me, because this time I’m the one with the words you need to hear. Otto Brack made a choice, long before he met Strenk. I was there, in a sewer, beneath Warsaw I went in one direction, and he went in another. He knew what he was doing. No one pushed or pulled. He struck a match and walked away from his father’s humanity… and, in the end, it’s his father’s humanity that returned to condemn him. Not me, not a court in Warsaw… but his father.’

Anselm came to his feet and tiptoed out of the cell. Once in the cool, vaulted corridor he breathed deeply and made for a rounded door that had been left ajar. It opened on to a gravel path between a hedge and a rock garden of strange, mountain flowers, flowers he’d never seen before, again randomly planted. Listening to the crunch of gravel underfoot, Anselm thought of the Shoemaker’s craft and the price paid for the abstract raw materials. Words had always come cheaply at home; how could they cost so much abroad?

Anselm also felt slightly miffed. He’d been to law school and practised at the Bar for years, but he could never have conceived of a trial as fair as Roza’s private prosecution of Otto Brack. She’d taken everything into account, gauging the true weight of Brack’s responsibility And the Nazis had stopped her schooling when she was twelve. How had she done it? Reaching a slight elevation he turned towards the bell tower. The circling kestrel had gone.

Anselm and Sebastian hadn’t met to drown their sorrows because Sebastian hadn’t called, as agreed. The plan to meet the Shoemaker seemed to have blanked out his evening agenda. Somehow a kind of lull fell between them — of miseries not shared. They’d gone to and from the Shoemaker — three hours each way — saying little, except for those odd surges of energetic discussion that usually evince the avoidance of a particular subject. A similar mood installed itself on the way to the airport. Anselm was leaning with his head on the window, meditating on Madam Czerny’s coiffure — whether she actually paid someone to do it, or whether she improvised at home with a concoction of toilet cleaner and rose water.