The Day of the Lie

Chapter Thirty-Six

John didn’t like the Dentist. He’d expected an ascetic, an intellectual with tortured eyes, one of the brains in the SB, whereas he’d been… what? Unconsciously vulgar? He’d wanted to impress, sporting handmade shoes and a stock-broker’s coat from Aquascutum. There’d been something wretched and lazy about his way of walking, as if he’d felt there wasn’t much point to sorting out the mess; as if there wasn’t much point to anything. The Dentist wasn’t what he’d seemed.

John’s shaking hand eventually got the key in the hole. The door yielded and he stepped into the flickering shadows of his flat. A projector clattered on the dining table, a roll of film unwinding from one spool to another. Images of tanks trundled across a sheet pinned to the wall. Soldiers tramped through the snow.

‘You’re late.’ Celina was hunched in the darkness, bent over a writing pad. Her hair was crazy, clipped back. Her glasses caught the sharp light. She was a wild cat in a wild night. John could just see the pencil moving. ‘What kept you? I’ve been worried.’

Do I love her? Or is it what she means to me? What she represents? Am I using her?

He drew back a chair and sat down, the projector whirring between them. ‘I got held up with a story.’

‘It’s always a story’

‘Yep, my life’s a story.’

She was everything he needed. A real dissident. Her father had been a mover in the Club of the Crooked Circle, a shaker in the Band of Vagabonds. He’d been a man of secret societies. An uncle on some side had rotted in a Tsarist prison. An aunt had been deported to Siberia and she’d died walking back. Celina’s mother had dumped the father because he wouldn’t swallow official ideology. She’d wanted the special hampers that came at Christmas for those who towed the line. She’d found a cleaner, sharper mind with access to the special shops where scarce goods could be bought at low prices. They were a family ripped apart by principle.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not hungry. What are you doing?’

‘I’ve got a meeting with the censor tomorrow I’m cutting out the best bits.’

Celina was the non-conformist renegade daughter, kicked out of school and educated underground. She dressed outside known fashion trends. Torn jeans, bright coloured socks, beads and bangles, careless scarves, huge shapeless jumpers. No makeup. Oval, dark framed glasses, windows on to a delicate uncompromising intelligence. She walked on the other side of any drawn line.

‘I’m starving,’ she said, twisting the knob. The riot police with their floppy long white truncheons vanished, swamped in darkness. Celina’s chair creaked; she was leaning back, straining for the light switch. Snap. The white sheet appeared, pinned to the wall and hanging like a shroud.

‘What happened?’ She was standing up, a hand over her mouth, her dyed hair in ordinary disarray Her tone was shocked and quiet. Moving round the table, keeping her hands on its edge, she whispered, ‘What story was this? What happened?’

Do I love you? Is it those untied laces? The jumper with holes? Or is it your past? The allure of the heretic?

‘Tell me what they did?’ She was on her knees, holding his hands. Her nails were painted different colours. There was no pattern or sequence. One of them had minuscule blue dots. She must have used the single hair of a paint brush.

Is there any love in this? Or is it the romance of straying near the fire that burns around your feet? The fire you stoke and bank, mocking their norms and laws and incantations?

‘John, speak to me.

Am I using you to redeem the shame of my past?

Her hand was stroking his swollen jaw Horrified, she touched the dried blood on his lip. John sank off the chair on to his knees and pushed his hands into her tangled hair. His mind and body lost all individuation. He reached out, into the flames, wanting to get inside her skin and bones, her difference, her purity.

He told her he’d been at the Powazki Cemetery when someone got arrested. He’d tried to capture the moment on film and then the brawn had burst out of nowhere. It made you think. ‘They might just be everywhere, do you know what I mean?’ Celina nodded. Maybe they were, she said. Maybe we can’t breathe any air but theirs. They breathe it out, we breathe it in. They’re in our bodies. Their atoms mingle with ours, making new gases and compounds. There’s no escape. They haunt graveyards and kitchens, breathing out their sickness. They climb into your bed and reach over to turn out the light. She spoke with immense disgust, counting up the planned cuts to her film: the removal of scenes she knew the censor wouldn’t like; images of the riot police in action. The ZOMOS, Caesar’s Praetorians.

They stayed up all night watching images flicker across the shroud. After breakfast Celina went to her meeting with the censor, John went to the woman who knew the Dentist.

John knocked. No reply He knocked again. He tried the handle. The door gave way.

Roza was sitting on a dining room chair. She’d pulled it back and sat down without drawing herself towards the table. It made it look as if she were stranded, facing nowhere. She still had her coat and hat on. She wore light blue woollen gloves, the only colour of substance in the room. Her hands were on her knees. John’s eyes shifted to an empty bookcase in one corner, to a drab-looking canape that hugged a wall, to an armchair with the appeal of an unwanted visitor. There wasn’t much else… a lamp stand holding a washed out shade, tassels dangling. John looked again, not quite sure at first: a bullet on a shelf beneath a mirror. He came to Roza’s side.

‘It wasn’t me, Roza,’ he said, sinking to a chair, daring to place his hands on her arms. ‘I promise, I swear, it wasn’t me. I don’t know what they were doing there, I don’t know how they knew, I said nothing to no one, I’d never risk doing or saying anything that might have…’

She wasn’t listening. She stared ahead in a kind of trance, as if she were watching Celina’s film. Deep shadows like heavy paint lay around her eyes. John had never been this close before. He couldn’t help notice the fine hairs on her skin. She appeared at once innocent and fragile despite what she’d seen, despite what had been done to her, despite what she was looking at now.

‘Roza, I have friends… on both sides of the fence.’ John squeezed her arm, trying to get a reaction. It was like holding a bone from the butchers. ‘I can try and find out what went wrong. It’s my job, you know I’ll dig around and find out who-’

‘John.’ She spoke his name like it was a kind of slap to the mouth. Her voice crackled, strangely detached, unwired from the muscles round the lips. Harrowed and still in a stupor, she turned to John as if she’d fallen overboard, water framing her oval face, the hat, jaw and chin; her eyes wide with knowledge… knowledge of a life lived and a coming death. The mouth slowly opened, the skin of the lips seeming to tear across the centre. Her tone was dried out and paper thin. ‘John, promise me you will do and say nothing.’ She seemed to wait for a reply whereas she was trying to stay afloat. ‘Forget about the Shoemaker; forget about the Friends, forget about me: Then, not even noticing his beaten face, she turned away and drowned. She’d gone. There was no point in mentioning a passport.

John tiptoed out of the flat — a sort of reverential act to the body he was leaving behind. He crept down the stairs, hugging the wall.

‘How did she know the Dentist?’

The question echoed in the entrance hall. It tore at John all the way home. Had the Dentist said anything to Roza? Had he told her about CONRAD? Did Roza know what John had been doing? Of his place in the Big Game, his central place? The answers circled lazily like buzzards above carrion, black and distant, wings large and still.

John couldn’t get the key in the lock. Metal rattled against metal with his shaking. He knocked. Celina opened the door. Without looking, she walked back inside, dark against the light.

‘They won’t allow the film,’ she said, slumping on a chair by the dining table. Her eyes were bright and wet, her cheeks horribly black from the run of thick eyeliner. She’d given face paint a go. She’d gone out looking like Nefertiti. Now, she was… something from the Hammer studios. The bandages had been unwound and a curse unleashed.

‘I can’t take it any more, John.’ Her bare feet pointed inwards, her shoulders were low. A pink silk scarf had been wrapped into her hair. ‘My life has been cut into long strips. I want to be whole again. I want to be — ’ she dropped her head into her hands — ‘I don’t want much, I’ve never wanted much. I just want to be happy and free.’

John’s insides turned. He thought they might tip out on to the floor of his flat.

Do I love her? Or is it what she represents? She cleans me. She gives me tomorrow.

He looked at her narrow black jeans. Everyone else wore blue denim bell bottoms. Her toes were curled as if she were clinging on to a perch. He’d seen the nails that morning. They were coloured like a row of Smarties.

The telephone rang.

John made a start. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Celina. Her tears were dripping like rain from a blocked gutter.

The ring seemed to grow louder. Impatient. Angry.

John made a snatch for the phone, sending the console crashing to the ground, the wire tangled round his wrist. He yanked up the receiver and barked out some words — he didn’t know what he said, his eyes were still on Celina.

The announcement came after an offended pause. A few obvious details were confirmed first, but then the nameless functionary read out a text written by some other nameless bureaucrat. John sank to the floor, worked his wrist free and threw the phone as far as the wire would allow.

‘They’ve kicked me out.’

Celina didn’t react at first.

‘I’ve got two days.’

She sat up, turning around, one arm hanging over the back of the chair. She looked like a painting out of the Louvre, something unseen by Ingres, David or any of them. She was classical, offending and timeless.

‘My accreditation has been withdrawn.’ He was leaning back against the wall, hands loose in the gap between his legs. He wanted a beer. He wanted to be happy and free. ‘I’m finished. For collecting materials of an espionage character.’

He told her because it was going to come out. This was a fire he couldn’t hide. Now he was going to get badly burned. The masterpiece wasn’t moving. She was awfully still, terribly sad, agonisingly attentive: the watched and the watcher. He longed, desperately to crawl over to touch every brushstroke, feel every rise and fall in the impossible contours of her face, her arm, her hands, asking himself, ‘Is this real?’, but he daren’t move.

‘I can’t take it any more, John,’ she repeated. The black had reached her lips. The pink silk scarf had come loose and lay along one cheek.

She suspects nothing, thought John, coldly.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said, with a brutal, hopeless finality.

The phrase turned in John’s mind like a light switch. Instantly he saw something odd. Anselm had used the very same words only recently just before John had come to Warsaw For some inexplicable reason — ostensibly for a jaunt — he’d brought John to a monastery in Suffolk. They’d gone up the bell tower. He’d looked down and said, ‘I’ve had enough.’

‘What of?’

‘Trying to find reasons.

‘For what?’

Anselm had just leaned on the stone ledge, four whopping bells behind his head, looking down at the dots of people on the ground — like Harry Lime in The Third Man, high up on the Ferris wheel in Prater Park. Only Anselm hadn’t got the eyes of a man cynical about the boundaries of pity… he’d been melancholy outreaching, vaguely desperate…

‘You’re not in love, are you?’

There’d be no reply.

‘Who is it? That ballet dancer? Your clerk? No… the jazz singer with the veils? Veil after veil will lift, but there must be veil upon veil behind?’

Anselm had just kept his gaze on the dots and the pink tiled roofs below Obliquely he’d muttered, ‘It’s like a stone in the shoe. Asking why it’s there doesn’t get rid of it. Chasing reasons is like…’

What had Anselm said? John couldn’t remember, damn it, but the message was clear enough: there’s no point in trying to find out why you love something… or someone… you’ve just got to get on with it, regardless of the implications.

‘Come with me,’ John blurted out.

Celina stared back, like Anselm had stared down.

‘Bring your film to London,’ mumbled John. ‘I’ve got friends. We’ll get it out in a diplomatic bag.’ She didn’t react. She just looked at him as if she were grieving. John made it across the floor and took the dangling hand. It was warm, the nails a dark purple, like mussel shells. He kissed each one, feeling the bangles against his forehead. ‘Please come with me.’ His eyes closed and he made a leap into the dark. He let himself fall, no longer resisting, knowing this moment had been coming ever since they’d first met to discuss art and resistance.

‘I love you,’ he said, for the first time.

John dialled 55876. Celina’s passport was organised for the same day Later in the afternoon, he tried to call back. He had to know if the Dentist had spoken to Roza about CONRAD; and he wanted to ask about the file… the file at the heart of their relationship. But it was too late. The line had gone dead.