William Brodrick: The Day of the Lie

Because in the long run it didn’t work, he’d shouted back… knowing full well that FELIKS had a family too. That Edward must have burned in private while the rest of them were free, ignorant of blood stains, torture and murder, consoled, if anything, by their own engagement in the history of resistance. The difficulty for Sebastian, however, was that the Kolbas weren’t the only people standing by the fire. Bad times left bad had not worked for Roza. A line could only be drawn in her case as a final step and not as a means of escape — either for Brack or the Voight family There had to be a public reckoning, regardless of the fall out.

‘I pursued Brack because he’d committed crimes that couldn’t be ignored, crimes which revealed the nature of an epoch, crimes where the free choice of an individual embodied the character of a system and its institutions. But then-’

‘Roza, of all people, saw things differently’ said Anselm.

‘Yes.’

And you were left with a family that might as well have stayed together — that could have met the Kolbas one afternoon at a bowling alley the adults sharing a beer while the kids knocked down the skittles. Everyone could have whooped — even if Edward and Aleksander were out of it, mooning over vodka at the bar.

‘I think we all see things differently now,’ said Sebastian, with flick to the indicator.

They said goodbye at the departure gate, Anselm promising to offer his services gratis if; on the off-chance, Sebastian netted a case of grave international importance. Justice, he quipped, it’s a slippery fish. How so? (Sebastian smiled warily looking so much older, at ease for once in his dark suit.) You catch some, you lose some, and then there are strange people who throw them back into the river. After shaking hands, Anselm said, ‘If you have any keep the pictures.’

‘Which ones?’

‘The birds:

‘Why?’

‘As you said, they’re the result of an unusually peaceful activity, something that you shared together.’

‘Often.’

‘Well, have a fresh look.’ Anselm shifted uneasily reminded again of Myriam’s confidence in human nature. ‘Maybe they’ve got nothing to do with OLEK. Maybe they were drawn by the Aleksander known to you and your mother.’

Spring had come to Larkwood, bringing colour to the fields. The orchards were pink with blossom, flimsy petals detached by the faintest breeze — making Anselm (an occasional and reluctant empiricist) wonder what was the point of blooming at all. He was struck because he found no tragedy in the swift coming and going, the sudden outburst of fragility before the fruit began to grow There was no point, as such, he concluded. It was simply beautiful. Here today gone tomorrow.

The observation, it transpired, had the character of a prophetic warning (though Anselm didn’t quite hear the message). Six weeks after his return to Larkwood, he received a call from a man who’d thumped out Colonel Bogey while marching through the bush.

‘You know, the trombone player,’ said Sylvester, frustrated, holding out the phone.

It took Anselm a few seconds to enter the Watchman’s lost world but then he understood. John’s voice was anything but musical.

‘Celina asked me to call you.’

Anselm listened, hardly speaking, overwhelmed by an incoming tide of sadness — something predictable and curiously inevitable. Roza had asked Celina if she might come to London for a short spell, explained John; they’d said goodbye only the previous week in Warsaw, but that was no matter. Both of them had wept, not wanting another leave-taking, not knowing how to handle letters or phone calls, hesitant about any more time spent apart and what with cheap flights these days and the spare room overlooking the metro line… She’d arrived at Heathrow thin, uncertain of herself; wanting the arm of a flight attendant even before she’d reached baggage control. She’d brought presents, cheap things from the market in Praga, desperate gestures it seemed towards the backlog of gifts never given because of their long separation. Celina had taken her home, to her flat in West Kilburn. On returning to the sitting room after a quiet evening meal — a comfortable time spent talking about an office bore, career hopes and a crack in the ceiling — Celina had found Roza apparently asleep in an armchair. For a long moment she’d stood looking down upon the peaceful face of mauve shadows, struck by a certain majesty, the frail hands open in her lap, the feet in blue woollen stockings, crossed at the ankle… and then she’d noticed that Roza wasn’t breathing. She’d gone. It was as though she’d left her coat behind, laid neatly on the chair. Amongst her few possessions Celina had found a one way ticket: Roza had come to London with that peculiar knowledge of the old.

‘Celina wonders if you’d conduct the ceremony ‘Of course.

‘She’s moved on already Anselm.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’d only just got her daughter back.’

The greater part of Brack’s legacy was now complete.

All the world came to Roza, it seemed. A small crowd gathered at the graveside in Kensal Green: Celina, of course, with John, and their different circles — people who’d never met Roza but who now felt involved in her life and death through an attachment to her daughter; Magda Samovitz with the memory of an orphanage and its caretaker, Mr Lasky; the Kolbas from Warsaw, along with Mateusz Robak and a number of elderly women brought by Sebastian, the pillagers of hell, all mentioned by name in Roza’s testimonial. The Friends formed a line, strangely together, strangely apart, like those two protesters at Brack’s trial holding on to a banner about justice. Even Father Nicodem took extreme measures to be there, dying two days beforehand, setting his spirit free to join the gathering. In the late afternoon, to the rhythm of a psalm of hope, they walked in turn past the mound of moist earth, dropping a flower into the deep shadow by their feet.

As the mourners drifted away Anselm approached Edward Kolba, a stooped figure wearing a charcoal grey trilby This was the wangler; the one who’d learned to live ‘on the left’. Anselm gripped his hand and wouldn’t let go. The old man tugged but Anselm wouldn’t release him. Eventually he lifted his face. Anselm had expected tortured remorse but he found a challenge, glared back with a quivering lip. ‘C’mon finish it,’ he seemed to say It was FELIKS. Anselm let the soft hand drop, seeing resentment in the old man’s eyes — not to him, but Roza, who’d brought the scourge of compromise into his life. ‘You cannot understand,’ his stare implied. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a child at home and a wife in prison. Our married life had just begun. Judge me all you like…’

Anselm didn’t, but he couldn’t say so because they were trapped without a common tongue and Aniela was watching, smiling gratefully at the monk’s attentiveness, assuming neither of them understood the other. It was time to go.

The rest had mourned. And Anselm, left alone by the grave with a fugitive conscience, asked himself if anyone apart from himself had dared to grieve for Otto Brack — not for who he was, but for who he might have been, knowing that there’d only been one person present in the State-run crematorium: a stranger who didn’t speak the language, a troubled monk who’d seen a flicker of green light in a man’s dying eyes.

Anselm returned to his monastery ill at ease. The violent storm that had begun during the Terror had finally blown itself out. And in that particular serenity that follows a cataclysm, Anselm tried to make sense of the devastation, wanting to find the meaningful ending when all those affected could finally applaud the victory of good over evil. In a sense, he’d found it — or at least he thought he had… he couldn’t be certain — but the finding (if that is what it was) had made him feel dirty again, all the more so because he’d glimpsed it in a place he’d least expected to find anything worthwhile. Anselm roamed around the cloister, head down, shuffling his feet. In choir he lost his place, pulling at the wrong ribbon in the wrong book. Taking his thoughts to his bees one morning, he passed beneath the branches of the surrounding aspens to see the Prior sitting on Anselm’s throne, an old pew in the circle of hives.