The Day of the Lie

Chapter Twelve

A guard kicked away the low stool. Roza collapsed to one side, but the guard caught her by the hair. Swung to her feet, she was thrown from the interrogation room into the corridor of low, yellow light. Another guard appeared walking lazily his dull boots sagging like half fallen socks. Roza backed against the wall, facing the open door. Major Strenk was troubled, examining a fish hook under the glare of a desk lamp. Looking up, as if he’d just remembered something, he nodded at Lieutenant Brack who’d been sitting in the corner.

‘I warned you, Roza,’ said Brack, after carefully shutting the door. ‘You should have listened to me in the sewers.

He gave a nod, just like Major Strenk’s, and the guards dragged Roza, feet trailing, to an iron staircase at the end of the corridor. Three floors down they came to a wet, freezing cellar, the air misting with the rush of their gasps and panting. Ahead, to the left, was a grey iron door.

‘I warned you Roza,’ he said, flicking keys on a big ring. He turned his soured face on to hers. His hair was shaved all around, leaving a high crown of copper metallic bristles. ‘You should have listened.’

He yanked open the door and the guards, slipping and grunting, dragged Roza into a low, dripping room. A single bulb flickered like a fading life. Thick pipes ran the length of the ceiling, water drizzling from bandaged cracks and joints. Heavy globules dripped from a rusty central spout. Beneath it was an open cage. The guards kicked and shoved and then locked her in.

‘I warned you in the sewers, Roza,’ said Brack, as if all this were her fault.

The room became silent, except for the patter of splashing. Suddenly, the twitching light went out. Roza stared at the afterglow, the fast-fading sallow bulb on the wall of her mind. She found a word, but it came as a whisper: ‘Help…’

And then the pipes shuddered and the water exploded above her head.

Roza did not know whether it was night or day when the interrogation began again. She hadn’t been conscious when they took her from the cage. She’d opened her eyes to find herself strapped to a chair by a belt. On seeing her move, the watching guard had stubbed out his cigarette and brought Roza back to Major Strenk and the footstool. Otto was sitting in the corner.

‘Name?’

‘Roza Mojeska… you know already, I’m-’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

She breathed out the answers, and Major Strenk wrote them down with a pencil. It had been the same with every interrogation since her arrest six weeks previously Always beginning again as if nothing had gone before. The same wearing questions with a few afterthoughts. Only this last time they’d led to the cage, a first departure from the routine.

‘You say you’re an orphan?’ Major Strenk spoke as if he’d lifted the lid of a dustbin.

‘Yes.’

‘From birth?’ This was an afterthought.

‘Yes.’

‘Misfortune or abandonment?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Do you know anything about your parents?’ His tone of disgust suggested she might not, in fact, have any.

‘No. I like to think that-’

Major Strenk seemed to lower the lid. He’d smelled enough. Dutifully, he went back to work, wanting — again — the names of teachers, staff and all the other children at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. He listened, yawning, checking the replies against his existing list. Not entirely satisfied, he moved on to slowly cover the German Occupation seeking, as ever, names along the way For names gave associations. Associations gave suspects. And suspects were suspect. At no point throughout this quest for other degenerates did Roza so much as glance at Otto, who was watching intently from the corner. She simply left him out of the reckoning, though he too had been at Saint Justyn’s, in hiding during the war. He’d turned up in l943. They’d met in the attic by a window Roza just kept her eyes firmly, perhaps too firmly, upon Major Strenk, recounting her early life as if Otto had never been there. It was a kind of inverted Russian roulette: Otto was taunting her, daring her to pull the trigger and mention his name; and she refused each time, not to save him, but to save herself, for she’d settled on a way to survive this measured annihilation of her humanity.

‘You recall no one else?’ Major Strenk sharpened his pencil, frowning at the shavings and lead powder accumulating on his desk.

‘No.’

‘Quite sure?’

‘Yes.’

With the flat of one hand the Major wiped the debris into a cupped palm and then brushed his fingers clean over a wastebasket. Still frowning, he rummaged for a handkerchief. Between questions, his eyes on Roza, he made a short, dainty blow.

‘You knew there would be an uprising?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Soviet radio.’

‘You went to the Old Town?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your function?’

‘I was a messenger, ammunition carrier, a nurse. I did-’

‘-yes, yes, yes: whatever you could.’ Major Strenk finished off the sentence, disliking the answer, mocking the implied nobility as if Roza were trying to clean up her background. He looked inside the handkerchief to make sure he’d got what he was after and then turned a page on to the reasons for her escape.

‘I was told it was over, that we had to get out. I went into the sewer system and took a tunnel north to Zoliborz. When I lifted the cover they were waiting for me.’

‘They? The power-seeking criminals who wanted to use the Uprising for their own ends? The landowners and capitalists?’ He was looking inside his handkerchief again. ‘The enemies of progress and reform?’

‘No. Two Germans.’

Major Strenk paused, glancing down at his sheaf of names. ‘You escaped on your own?’

‘Yes. Others followed… others had gone before, but I went alone.’

From that moment Roza let her gaze fall. She’d left Otto behind; he’d been with her and waded out of her life through another tunnel; she didn’t need to protect him any more. And Major Strenk’s jaded expression had become unbearable.

‘Do go on,’ he said, as if he was no longer that interested.

Following her arrest Roza had been taken to a transit camp in Pruszkow Three weeks later she was one of fifty packed into an open coal wagon. The train went south to Wolbrom, near Krakow, where she was allocated a shared room in a fiat above a fire station. Curiously, Roza yet again kept to herself what mattered most. She said nothing of the singer and the song.

The journey had lasted almost three days. There was only standing room, the November sun high and bare, the intimacy of massed flesh intense. A single slop bucket in the corner filled within hours. At intervals the waste was tipped over the side planking on to the tracks. Occasionally apples and chunks of bread landed in the wagon, thrown by locals when the train slowed or stopped. Roza thought she might die. But then, on the morning of the second day, a child’s voice climbed higher than the rattling of the train and the stench of the bucket. A little girl had begun to sing.

‘Return our Homeland to us, Lord…’

The hymn had been sung for over two hundred years. But here, in this wagon, no one had the belief or the strength to join in. It was left to the child. Following the girl’s rising voice, Roza seemed to touch the clouds with the fingers of her soul. She’d escaped once through filth, but this was a kind of rescue; a moment of salvation. The journey ended that night. After climbing out of the wagon Roza hobbled between buckled over men and women, crying out for the girl, but no reply came back. It was as though God had come and gone.

For an instant, Roza almost forgot that she was being questioned by Major Strenk: her mind was juddering from the realisation that Otto Brack and that unknown child shared the same protected space in her memory.

‘When did you leave Wolbrom?’

Roza made a start. ‘After the war… nine months later.’

‘Why?’

‘To help rebuild-’

‘Yes, yes, yes, you tried to save Warsaw, and now you were going to help with the rebuilding. What was your function?’

Roza had worked alongside an architect retrieving and labelling fragments of ornate stonework in the Old Town. The whole area was to be restored to its original splendour using, whenever possible, original materials. Pavel Mojeska had been engaged in identical work with another specialist. She’d met him during a meeting when the experts had pored over close-up photographs of a painting by Canaletto. It had showed the buildings as they were once were. This was the complete picture and it showed them where the bits might go.

‘Mojeska’s date of birth?’

‘Nineteen twenty-one.’

It was another pointless question. Pavel had been arrested three hours before Roza. He was in the same building, in another cell. They must already know But they trawled everywhere so as to compare accounts, looking for any inconsistency He was poring over his own pictures.

‘As to his parents?’

‘They were killed in Ochota.’

‘Any siblings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Names.’

Roza’s voice cracked. ‘They’re dead. Two girls and a boy all dead. They were in Ochota… Ochota. Do you really need me to tell you what happened?’

‘On reflection, no:

As the Nazis poured troops in to crush the Uprising, special units were deployed to flush out any survivors. In the districts of Ochota and Wola thousands of civilians were executed, heaped and burned, regardless of age or gender. The Major sighed.

‘Where was the criminal Mojeska?’

‘Fighting in the-’

‘-yes, yes, stop.’ Though he’d asked the question he couldn’t endure any more heroics. He started scouring their relationship, leaning forward like one of the architects over those photos.

‘You were married in what year?’

‘Nineteen forty-eight.’

‘Your age?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘His age?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

She gave the bare facts. She wasn’t going to tell Major Strenk how they’d rebuilt each other: how Roza, who belonged to no one, had given herself to Pavel who’d lost everyone; how each had complementary wounds with a complementary power to heal. She wasn’t going to tell Major Strenk how it was possible to remain injured at heart and yet laugh as if for the first time. No, the major got what he could understand: facts; dates, places and times. For two days he dutifully wrote the answers down with his pencil. On the third day he changed subject and tone.

‘You are aware the criminal Pavel Mojeska is a provocateur?’

‘A what? I’m sorry, I don’t-’

‘That he is planning to restore the rule of landowners and capitalists?’

‘No.’

And she had no idea that he was implicated in the publication of subversive material against the people. Major Strenk paused. He became eerily still, like a man watching a lake for the skip of life below the surface.

‘Who is the Shoemaker?’ he said, unblinking.

‘I don’t know’

‘Who are the Friends of the Shoemaker?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Where is the printing press?’

‘I don’t know’

The one reply uttered with every difference of inflection imaginable, all of them variations of begging. Major Strenk pulled open a drawer and took out a small vice and a metal tray Roza watched him in complete horror. First he took a fish hook from a compartment of the tray; next, he locked it between the clamps of the vice, leaving the shank free; and then, finally he looked up, his eyes remote and dull.

‘Think again. Who is the Shoemaker?’

Roza couldn’t speak.

‘Who are the Friends of the Shoemaker?’

This minute, transferred attention to the making of a fly was exactly what had happened three days earlier, before she was kicked off the stool and taken to the pit. The threat was heavy between them, his unblinking, timeless gaze upon her. She opened her mouth but no sound came from her throat. Major Strenk peered into the metal tray and selected a bobbin of bright green thread. He tied a knot on the hook and reached for some tweezers.

‘Where is the printing press?’

Roza began to shiver. She heard the dripping in her mind. Her voice was quiet and beseeching, ‘I’ve told you, Comrade, I don’t know’

Major Strenk put the tweezers between his teeth and picked up his pencil. While writing down the answer, he nodded vaguely towards Brack. The guard behind Roza kicked the footstool away.

Roza woke up soaking wet and freezing. She’d been strapped to a chair with a belt. She did not know if it was night or day The guard stamped on the butt of his cigarette and brought her back to the interrogation room.

‘Name?’

‘Roza Mojeska.’ Her voice was so faint she hardly heard her own reply.

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Major Strenk picked up a magnifying glass and examined the tied fly He didn’t seem especially pleased. Something had gone wrong. He suppressed a belch and said, ‘Date of birth?’

On the third day, while testing the mechanism of a fishing reel, he asked about the Shoemaker. It whirred efficiently like a drill, eventually slowing to a series of dry clicks. Roza watched and listened unable to speak. The major opened a drawer and nodded at Brack. Without resisting, without remembering the hauling down the corridor of waxen light, Roza fell into the darkness and the deluge. A last conscious thought, like fingernails hooked on the ledge of sanity, was about life: the irresistible, inexorable power of life. It was as though her mind was lit for a moment by a spark of divinity. She knew she was pregnant. She carried a life that Major Strenk would never catch.