The Day of the Lie

Chapter Thirty

The Polana file named SABINA as Father Nicodem Kaminsky According to his ‘Statement of Intent’, written in 1949 and carefully filed away in the dossier bearing his chosen code-name, he’d been a dedicated communist since reading the Manifesto of Marx and Engels, considering its trenchant paragraphs to be a ‘watershed document in the history of social, political and economic thinking’. Fair enough, thought Anselm; but he’d volunteered his services to the organs of State Security. He’d wanted to do his bit in the struggle between the age-old servants of Capital and the newly woken brotherhood of oppressed Labour. He’d counted the cost of losing; and a price was to be paid for the winning.

‘He wrote it with his own hand,’ observed Anselm, recalling the precise signature. ‘He chose his own words. He knew what securing the win would involve.’

‘And he lost.” observed Sebastian, drily ‘Now he picks up the tab:

Sebastian was lodged at his cramped desk.’ slowly turning the pages of an orange folder. Stripped of their plastic sacks, SABINA’s massive output lay on the floor like columns of paving stones in a builder’s yard. For an hour and a half Sebastian had been leafing through selected volumes, murmuring to himself, occasionally swearing under his breath. Legs crossed in an armchair, Anselm had reviewed Roza’s statement, his gaze shifting on occasion to the night sky and the fallen stars on the streets below.

‘And to think… he’s one of my lot, a Gilbertine,’ said Anselm, ruefully. ‘Where are the Jesuits when you need them?’

Father Kaminsky’s short manifesto revealed that the priest had left his monastery before the war and never returned. His political convictions would not sanction a ‘self-interested’ withdrawal from the crisis. The forging of a new future, built on the disillusionment of yesterday, required ‘uncompromising engagement with the times’. He had committed himself to social action within the concrete circumstances of history.

Anselm berated himself for not having recognised Roza’s guiding hint, now seen as glaring and underlined in red pen. Only once in her entire statement did she explicitly refer to the activity of informers: she’d identified those men of God who’d become men of Brack. And if that wasn’t enough, Anselm’s own deconstruction of Roza’s text had drawn a bright yellow highlighter over the priest’s name. He’d topped the poll of references, in a document crafted to lead its reader to one specific individual.

‘He’s the last person she’d have suspected,’ said Anselm, talking to himself. ‘Why? Because she and her husband had entrusted him with their lives. He’s the last person she’d want to see exposed. Why? Because a bombshell would hit the arches of Saint Klement’s and every other church in the country; because the Shoemaker would find out that his closest confidant had betrayed him from the outset; because Roza was worried that Kaminsky might choose to drown himself rather than face the jeering in the street.’

Sebastian turned a page. One finger moved slowly down a margin.

‘I can imagine Kaminsky squaring historical materialism with his belief in God.” continued Anselm, as if delivering judgment in the Court of Appeal, ‘and I can accept that he dreamed a costly dream, but the sand in the gears is capital. He got paid — ’ at the back of an expenses file Sebastian had found an account of monthly instalments, running, without interruption, between 1949 and 1982 — ‘so what was his motive? The money or the dream? And who could dream dreams after Stalin?.’

Sebastian looked up. ‘Sorry?’

‘Oh nothing, just the idle thoughts of the disenchanted: Anselm dropped Roza’s statement on the floor by his side and knitted his fingers on his chest. ‘Tell me what you’ve learned about my confrere. Since I’m going to wrestle with his conscience I’ll need to know what he’s done, and why.’

Sebastian closed a file, pushing it away as though he’d tasted foreign food. He hadn’t enjoyed himself.

‘Brack became his handler in nineteen fifty,’ said Sebastian, drawing a hand through his tangled hair. He swung round, crossing his feet on the edge of his desk. ‘They met every month for three decades. He informed on friends, associates, priests, bishops, two cardinals and a shooting gallery of dissident thinkers. He moved around, did Kaminsky In high places and low And he told Brack everything he heard. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The overall effect, laughed Sebastian, mordantly, was a kind of multi-volume encyclopaedia on opposition thinking. Quite apart from entries revealing the informed reflections of ‘ordinary’ citizens.’ the views of almost every major dissident intellectual in Warsaw were represented in the files. Their arguments, neatly laid out and persuasively presented, were frequently penned in Father Kaminsky’s elegant script. Sometimes he’d obtained a Samizdat draft from the author’s own hand, with key passages underlined in red. It’s a howling irony: the SB preserved for posterity the very ideas that had been banned by the Party They’d built up an archive of the books the censor would never have printed. Come on, you’ve got to laugh.

Anselm tried and failed. ‘I’m troubled.’

‘By?’

‘Two questions. First, Kaminsky knows the Shoemaker. He was the Threshold. But he never told Brack. He kept quiet, leaving his handler to look under all the beds in Warsaw. Meanwhile Roza is being tortured. Her husband is taken out and shot. So is Stefan Binkowski. How does all that fit into the price worth paying? Why didn’t Kaminsky lead Brack to the Shoemaker in nineteen fifty-one?’

Sebastian had been nodding while Anselm spoke. The point had struck him, too. He’d arrived at an answer while examining the files.

‘My guess is this. When Kaminsky presented himself after the war, he was planning on a long and lucrative arrangement. Long, because he genuinely believed in Stalinist socialism; lucrative because, as he said, tongue in cheek, he’d counted the cost of losing and wanted to be paid for his trouble… up front, right now’ Sebastian loosened his tie, one finger pulling at the knot. ‘He retained the one piece of information that his controller wanted because that kept their relationship vital… and it kept the payments coming. He gave his controller a few gems close to the target, like Roza and Pavel, but the main prize, the Shoemaker, is left out of reach, keeping Brack on the move. And along the way, rebel voices, drawn to the Shoemaker like bees to jam, are systematically betrayed.’

The snapshot appalled Anselm: Kaminsky had been using Brack in a counter-subversion operation of his own invention; by leaving the Shoemaker free, he’d caught more insects. In that light, the money appeared more as a salary for having managed his handler than a top-up for his stipend. Anselm stared at the night sky behind his own reflection. ‘And Brack thought he was running the show when, in fact, he was being led by the hand…’

‘Yes, led to do the rough stuff required by an “uncompromising engagement with the times’.’.” added Sebastian, swinging his feet off the table. He walked to the shelving units that covered the wall and pulled out a box file. Back at his desk he flipped open the cover and took out a flimsy publication.

‘This is a copy of Freedom and Independence,’ he said, bringing it to Anselm, ‘the last edition before printing ceased in October nineteen fifty-one.’

Anselm held the paper in his hands with an instinctive reverence. His eyes ran across the imposing letters and words, his finger traced the soft indentations made by the stamp of the press. Not being able to understand anything, a blasphemy instantly suggested itself: why would anyone die for these impressions on paper? How on earth could they matter so much? They were just shapes; they made an arresting pattern. But then again, what was an idea if not flotsam in the mind? How could anything so insubstantial turn out to be so strong; so insignificant, and yet so important?

‘The publication was silent until thirty years later,’ said Sebastian, leaning against the front of his desk, arms folded. ‘He only spoke because Roza insisted. Prior to that moment he’d been silenced by Kaminsky Even the Shoemaker was being led by the hand.’

Anselm looked up, ‘How?’

‘It all comes back to those executions,’ replied Sebastian. ‘As the Threshold, Kaminsky knew how the organisation was structured. He knew that the Shoemaker was the indispensable figure who had to stay out of reach, for the sake of Freedom and Independence. Others could die, but not him, never him; he was the living breath behind the living word. He had to be protected. But that was all in theory. No one had been killed. But then Pavel and Stefan were shot in Mokotow What did Kaminsky say to the Shoemaker afterwards? I reckon he told him enough is enough. He told him the cost of his words was a touch too high. He roused the guilt that came with the privileged position of the protected. Who’d argue with that? Who’d want to write about freedom after Roza had been tortured and widowed?’ Sebastian drew breath, arching his eyebrows. ‘Kaminsky ran a brilliant operation: he hid the Shoemaker from the SB because he was a lure; manipulating that lure, he snagged the capitalists who were out for a fight with Marx; and, almost by default, he secured what he and Brack wanted above all, the suppression of the most powerful and respected dissident voice in the country. The real professional was Kaminsky Brack, with his obsession for one man in hiding showed himself to be what he was… an amateur. The butcher used by the State to work in its secret abattoir.’

Anselm couldn’t argue with the harsh lines drawn by Sebastian. The former Gilbertine was the still point in a world of whispering and death. He was, ironically a man who’d skilfully effected a ‘withdrawal from the crisis’, leaving Brack to think he was leading the charge, using the likes of Edward Kolba to watch Roza the widow and Magda the Zionist. Far away in his parish, with his eye on the greater picture, and without attracting the slightest suspicion, he’d no doubt consoled the Shoemaker. Assured him that he’d done his bit. Cried with him over the untold fate of the unsung martyrs. And as soon as Roza turned up, he sucked in a few more flies and then told Brack where to catch them.

‘You have a second question?’

Sebastian was looking upon Anselm with the camaraderie of shared disappointment. While it was illogical, he understood only too well that Kaminsky’s standing as a religious figure affected him personally.

‘How am I going to speak to such a man?’ murmured Anselm, trying to envisage the encounter. The former monk was alive and well, his address listed at the back of Roza’s statement, along with all the others. ‘What can I appeal to in his past that might have some bearing on the present? Why would he agree to co-operate with Roza’s quest for justice?’

Sebastian’s humph showed he had no answers this time. As if to leave him completely empty-handed he took back Freedom and Independence and filed it away.

‘Funny, really, that he never cleared off altogether,’ said Anselm, recalling Roza’s cited dictum: no church, no solidarity, no revolution. ‘He stayed on as part of the institution. An institution that had helped put a nail in the coffin of his beliefs… his political beliefs.’

The mirroring of that word gave Anselm a fresh angle on to Father Kaminsky’s complex character. ‘He still believes,’ said Anselm, obviously.

‘What?’

‘Roughly what I believe and what Roza believes about the silence in Saint Klement’s. It’s got a shape, a pattern, like those strange marks on the page.’ even if you can’t understand them half the time… and to him who listens, to him who believes, it’s important. It’s worth a fight with a lion, knowing you’re going to lose. And whatever else, Kaminsky cares enough about his church to forgive her role in the demise of his utopia:

‘You’ve lost me.’ Sebastian had returned to his desk and was bending a paperclip to occupy his hands.

‘Kaminsky has two faiths,’ explained Anselm, tentatively ‘One for this world and another for the next. How they impinge on each other is anyone’s guess, but a meeting point might be murder. Maybe the executions were a step too far, a price he didn’t want to see paid by anyone — least of all on the back of his informing.’

A picture of Father Kaminsky radically different to that described by Sebastian began to filter into Anselm’s imagination: a tormented man, perhaps, limping through the years, powerless to go back and erase his footprints, not daring to turn around and see once more where they’d been. Leaving the monthly payments aside — a feature difficult to excuse from any angle — Kaminsky could have been horrified by Brack’s brutality, finding himself implicated in actions he would never have sanctioned.

‘He handed over information, reflected Anselm. ‘He gave them essays, lectures, illegal books… the ideas he didn’t like… it’s a long way from endorsing summary justice.’

‘Where are you going with this?’ asked Sebastian.

‘I have one chance,’ said Anselm, increasingly sure of his ground. ‘If Kaminsky feels any compassion for what happened to Roza, then he might be prepared to help her — especially when I tell him that the only reason she chose silence over justice was out of respect for their shared beliefs.’

Sebastian leaned back, agreeably surprised. From a height he dropped the paperclip into a wastebasket, and said, ‘Looks like I was wrong. The way folk tick matters.’

‘You were right, though,’ replied Anselm, with reciprocal charm. ‘Kaminsky did use Brack — in relation to the procurement of information; but Brack also used Kaminsky — to suppress evidence of gutter killings, State murder beyond the law. It’s all there on the last page of Roza’s statement: he placed Kaminsky’s name and his faith right at the heart of his scheme to silence Roza, and I don’t think Kaminsky would swallow that… not even for the sake of a better tomorrow He didn’t sign up in forty-eight to finish his days as Brack’s spattered shield. I’m hoping it’s the one price he won’t pay.’