William Brodrick: The Day of the Lie

‘Do you like opera?’

‘Yes, but jazz has the edge, except for sixties Bebop… when something went wrong in the state of Denmark.’

‘Ah.’

‘Why?’

‘Have you seen Prodany a Prodana, The Bartered and the Bought? It’s Czech nationalism set to music. Melodic resistance, if you like:

‘No. Why?’

‘Well, it turned out the guy who wrote the words was an informer. Did it for money so he could write. He denied it. But no one believed him. He couldn’t walk down the street for fear of being attacked. Lived in hiding. Died an outcast. He was called Sabina.’

SABINA.

Anselm flicked his wrist — a French gesture meaning lots of things, but in this case ‘that was a close one’. He thought of Father Nicodem meeting Strenk. They’d have talked about this and that — the weight of history and men of moment — and when it came to choosing a code-name the mocking priest had made a reference his duped handler would never have understood. Behind every philosopher is a jester, laughing with or laughing at… it depends on the integrity of the person on the other side of the table: someone has to come away a fool. And Father Nicodem was effectively saying, yes, Tymon, I do appreciate the scale of the risk I’m taking, but…

Anselm flicked his wrist again: Father Nicodem’s name remained on paper as an informer, but without any disambiguation. This wasn’t a close call: this was a major accident. The SABINA joke was about to crash into the public domain.

‘What are you going to do with the files?’ asked Anselm.

Once they were back in the archive, Father Nicodem would be drowned in controversy There’d be detractors and protagonists, Frenzel choking with glee on his oysters, Roza swearing by his integrity.

‘What are you going to do?’ repeated Anselm.

‘Burn the lot. Brack’s included.’

‘I appreciate the sentiment, but… how much did the IPN spend?’

‘Nothing, I did.’

‘You?’

‘Yep. So they’re my property.’ He was gripping the wheel firmly as if the car might go in a different direction. ‘It’s better the archive is left as we found it in eighty-nine — incomplete and dangerous. I’m not going to try and tidy it up or fill in any blanks. It stays as is.

‘You paid for them?’ repeated Anselm.

‘Yeah.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Pity to get rid of it all. It’s like burning Bonhoeffer’s prison papers or Havel’s letters. The material Father Nicodem and his friends sent to the SB… it’s a unique outpouring of dissident thought — all of it beautifully written. But, there you go. We can’t stick a label on the front of every cover saying, “These essays were deliberately crafted for the eyes of the security apparatus and were disclosed with the consent of the various authors.” How many people my age swallow that? The priest-collaborator is a far better story. Actually it would serve a useful purpose.’ He’d turned mocking, now ‘The files in the archive have become a lot more than a record of informing. They’re our primary documentary access to the past; and we’re a nation in search of villains. We need them. You can’t bring Communism crashing down without having a few executions afterwards. We have to find the traitor to make sense of the hero. Where else to look if not the files? Forget the fact that half the time they represent words twisted on to paper. With Father Nicodem, of course — and this is funny I suppose — it’s the other way around: his words were straight, trying to bend his twisted readers back into shape — but he remains, like many others, an easy useful target. They can all take the rap… relying on what? The files? Half the story? I don’t think so.’

Anselm tried to read Sebastian’s features, distracted and surprised to learn that he’d used his own money to meet Frenzel’s premiums. He offered no comment on the ethics of handling the SB’s paper legacy though he observed with gratification the parallel between Sebastian and Roza: they’d both pillaged the national archives to protect someone they cared about.

‘Does the name Olek mean anything to you?’ asked Sebastian, in a lighter voice, changing subject.

Anselm couldn’t place it. Why use your own money? He played along. ‘Composer or writer?’

‘Neither.’

‘What, then?’

‘Informer.’

‘Another one?’

‘Yeah, only I knew Olek.’

He used to take Sebastian bird-watching. It was an incredibly peaceful activity… tiptoeing in the woods, looking and listening. Sometimes they’d just stand still, barely breathing. Olek knew a lot about birds — their colouring and habitats, what they ate, where they went, migration patterns and all that.

‘He used to draw them,’ said Sebastian. ‘Spent ages with his pencils and crayons.

Anselm was no longer smiling. At first he’d been taken in, but now he was thinking of the elderly woman standing behind an empty wheelchair; the hint of a couple surrounded by pending investigations.

‘I didn’t find out about his forgotten life until I came to the IPN,’ said Sebastian. ‘He’d been in a strange mood ever since I got the job. Argued with my grandmother — and they’d been a quiet couple… and what do you expect? They’d been together donkey’s years. They’d made the allowances old people come to make.’

OLEK.

Anselm placed the name. It was capitalised in the memo attached to Roza’s photographs in the orange file from 1951. He didn’t immediately appreciate the significance of his recollection, because OLEK hadn’t informed on Roza — she’d been arrested simply because of the link to her husband. Then Anselm took the next, obvious step:

OLEK had been Brack’s man in his first attempt to find the Shoemaker. He was one of the strangers whom Pavel had trusted.

‘He was more than an informer, actually’ said Sebastian, as if hearing Anselm’s thoughts. ‘He wormed his way into the Freedom and Independence set-up and then let Brack know when Pavel Mojeska was planning to meet the Shoemaker. So, you see, my grandfather was the one who put Roza and her husband in Mokotow. Aleksander Voight is the man who made friends with Pavel and Stefan and then sent them both to the cellar.’

And you’re the man who chased Roza round Warsaw and wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer, thought Anselm. You tried to make up for what Aleksander had done.

Sebastian had confronted Grandpa in private, thinking of containment, not sure what he was going to do; wanting, at least, the truth. But that was enough. That little chink of light — shone in the living room while Grandma was out — did all the damage. Sebastian’s grandfather said nothing in reply No explanation, no defence. He simply wheeled himself away as if the rare bird he’d been watching for years had finally flown off. When his wife came back, her hair nicely cut, he told her everything, stripping down their shared past as though it were an old engine that didn’t work properly At eighty-two she’d thrown him out. He’d left his wheelchair behind and died in an old folk’s home three weeks later.

‘Which is why I understood Roza when she didn’t want to pursue Brack for the murder of Stefan Binkowski,’ sighed Sebastian. ‘She let Edward keep his secret. That way Aniela kept her husband and Bernard kept his father: they didn’t lose what they’d known and loved. Moving on, head down? It works, sometimes. The family stayed together.’

Whereas Sebastian’s fell apart. His parents blamed him. They didn’t want to look backwards. They kept their eyes straight in front. ‘Can’t we just draw a line?’ bellowed his father, hands on hips. ‘Why do people like you have to keep pushing it further and further back to find out… what? Bits of information. You’re just another kind of informer. Damn it, we’ll never know the whole picture anyway so what’s the point of having a close-up from some corner near the frame? You studied law, at home and abroad. Well, good on you. You’re the man to teach us all about right and wrong. But a man willed himself to death and his wife is trying to make sense of what he did before you were born. Is that justice? Tell me, Sebastian, what’s wrong with just turning the page? Just leaving the bad time bad?’