William Brodrick: The Day of the Lie

For three days she paced round Warsaw, waiting for the transcript of her narrative to arrive from the IPN. When the post came, on the fourth day, she set to work. First, she carefully checked that the text presented a balanced picture of her life between 1951 and 1982. Second, with a red pen, she inserted all the names she’d left out while making the recording. Third, with a black pen, she deleted convoluted expressions, repetitions and digressions. The result was a crafted manuscript that suited her newfound purpose — something the Shoemaker would have been proud of. Every word had its place. They presented a kind of landscape ordered by signposts, only the most important indicator was missing, its absence serving to point without pointing, identifying the informer without a trace of condemnation. When she’d finished she went straight to the IPN and gave it to Sebastian.

‘I’ve changed my testimony,’ she said quickly standing in the entrance hall. ‘Could you type it up, please?’

‘Sure.’

‘Now, while I’m waiting.’

‘Consider it done.’

Roza stepped outside to pace some more, refusing the offer of coffee, tea or Bison Grass. After what seemed an age, Sebastian returned with a clean copy in a brown envelope.

‘Changed your mind, as well?’ he quipped, seriously.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to do?’

A phrase of the Shoemaker’s came to mind. ‘Raise the dead and shatter the illusions of many’

‘Okay sounds reasonably apocalyptic. That’s fine. And in the meantime, what do you expect from me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Not fine. Tell me what you’re up to.’

She shook her head with approbation. ‘You’d never have survived the fifties. You ask far too many questions.’

With that judgement, she left him bewildered by the leaning tree. On returning home she rang her old friend Magda Samovitz in England, a woman who’d survived the Nazi holocaust only to be hounded out of Warsaw by a Communist pogrom in 1969. Magda had bought a ticket to a new life. For years she’d been sending Roza postcards of Trafalgar Square which bore one simple message: ‘Come and feed the pigeons’. That time, too, had finally arrived.

By the evening of the next day Roza had bought her flight and packed her bags. There was no need for a phrase book. She’d been learning English since 1989. It had been a hobby of sorts. Twenty-four hours later Roza was in the upstairs box bedroom of Magda’s Georgian house in Stockwell, south London, lamenting the absence of a phrase book that would have helped an elderly dissident cope with a different kind of Underground. Once again she couldn’t sleep. Her mind whirred like the air vent back in Warsaw.

Sebastian had been right about something else. He’d seen something obvious to which Roza had been blind; blind because, as a matter of principle, she’d excluded the possibility from the outset. The last thing that Brack expected was that Roza would arrange to meet the informer. That she’d sit down at their table. That the betrayer and the betrayed would somehow find the courage to talk together, deeply of all that lay hidden. That Roza would open up the possibility — for the informer — of another, more authentic existence, a public and private identity based on the truth. This was the landscape that lay beyond Brack’s imagination: that his informer would stomach disclosure of the past and face the dread of an uncharted future. And that defined Roza’s task: to persuade the informer that even now after all these years, the pain of a life in the open was preferable to a numbed existence in the dark.

There was, however, one remaining catch. A relatively large one, too.

There could be no forced entry. The door had to be left unlocked from the inside. Roza would have it no other way. She needed an invitation to enter and sit down, her host knowing full well that the unexpected guest intended to talk about their mutual relationship with Otto Brack. It was a great gamble with great risks… but if this, Roza’s stratagem, worked, Brack would be left defenceless. Once the informer accepted exposure, Roza would be free to accuse her husband’s killer.

Roza switched off her bedroom light, her thoughts and prayers resting with a man she’d first met in 1982. He’d found her through the distribution chain of Freedom and Independence. She’d thought of him looking at the monument to Prus — they’d met there countless times. He’d been a romantic. An outsider. An Englishman of ancient courtesies. He’d been kicked out of the country for getting too close to the fire. His name was John Fielding, a British journalist who’d longed to find the Shoemaker.

Anselm cut the engine dead. The wipers swung home with a soft thud. Outside autumn rain fell quietly in the darkness, the drizzle lit a strange yellow by the distant street lamps. A mist had drifted east off the river Cam smudging the clean-lined portico of Cambridge station. It was the same back at Larkwood: an afternoon of intense sunshine had brought a fog off the Lark to hide the fields and smooth the tangled roofs and walls of the monastery. An apple wood fire blazed in the calefactory and Anselm was keen to get back to the hearth and warm his hands.

‘I need a lawyer,’ quoted Anselm, pensively tapping the steering wheel.

Those had been John’s exact words. Not, it seemed, a monk.

‘I’d better explain in person. You know I don’t like the phone.’

‘When do you want to come?’

‘Tonight.’

Anselm had put down the receiver and shuffled off to the woodshed. There, musing and recollected, he’d split some green logs and sized them for a decent fire.

John Fielding was Anselm’s oldest friend. They’d been to the same boarding school where, following a walk around the cricket square, they’d become allies in mutual understanding, a hallowed state that was later sealed over a bottle of purloined altar wine. While at university — John at Exeter, Anselm at Durham — they’d skilfully negotiated the transition from boyhood to manhood, that time of awkward flowering when, in making momentous decisions, many who were once close find themselves subtly apart. John, a linguist, had chosen journalism. Anselm, drawn by the thrilling mix of courtesy high theatre and linguistic violence, had opted for the Bar. Both noted, with satisfaction, that the distance between Fleet Street and Gray’s Inn was negligible.

While Anselm had forged a career defending the washed and unwashed alike, John had secured a position as foreign correspondent, serving first in East Berlin with Reuters and then landing a prized BBC posting to Warsaw in early 1982. He’d arrived just after the Communist Junta put its troops on the streets in their doomed fight against Solidarity. He’d covered the scrap meticulously until, much to the surprise of his employer, he’d been shown the door. More accurately he’d been tossed on to a plane bound for Heathrow Following which he’d told Anselm that he needed a lawyer.

Only there’d been a short interlude; a brief time when John was something of a reluctant hero in the pubs scattered around Gray’s Inn and the watering holes favoured by writing hacks at the bottom end of Chancery Lane. John had clout. He’d been a friend of Lech. And everyone wanted to know what had happened out there in the cold. John parried questions from all quarters, only disclosing — with reluctance — the barest of details. He’d gone to a graveyard for a clandestine meeting with an underground activist (a remark that pulled a few laughs) but no sooner had he arrived at the chosen spot when agents of the security service appeared, arresting both John and his contact. Three days later his accreditation had been withdrawn. No amount of coaxing or flattery from the audience would persuade John to add anything further, either about the activist, or the candidates for betrayal — the person close to home who’d sold him down the river. The troubled disinclination to elaborate simply buffed up John’s unwanted glamour and increased the aura of mystery surrounding his narrative.