Chapter Forty-One

The Old Mill had stood by the Lark for four hundred years. The original grinding mechanism, fragile and jammed, remained visible in the large room where Anselm had made the fire. The floor was flagged and uneven, worn down by the feet of peasant farmers who’d brought their threshed wheat to be ground into flour. In the centre stood a waxed round table, brought in by Anselm as a learned allusion to the groundbreaking Round Table talks of 1989 between Solidarity, the Communists and the Church; the negotiations that had launched a new order in social relations. There were four mock Chippendale chairs — a nod towards English fair play — occupied by the delegates invited by Anselm. A standing crowd of Suffolk ghosts seemed to watch expectantly cloth caps in hand.

‘This isn’t going to be easy’ said John, nudging his dark glasses. ‘I don’t want to make a speech. I can’t see you… it would help if you’d ask questions, reply anything, only don’t leave me floating in the darkness.’

Roza had come by train with Sebastian who was now in the guesthouse eating his nails. She sat upright, her back away from the chair. A face of shadows, thought Anselm. Shadows that were deep with the movements of dusk. She wore a silver brooch clipped to her white blouse. Her eyes seemed to speak a forgiving but frightened tenderness.

‘Why don’t you start with Klara?’ suggested Anselm, his voice dry and spare. ‘The road to this table begins with her, doesn’t it?’

Beside Roza sat Celina Hetman. She’d been held up by the snow drifts. Anselm had thought she might not come after all. He’d remembered a vibrant intellect and a kitsch, plastic belt. They’d only met two or three times. He’d once tried to imagine her in the Royal Courts of Justice speaking on John’s behalf, the judge intrigued, if not distracted, by the decorated headband. He needn’t have worried. She’d fled from John’s life. When the car had finally pulled up at Larkwood, Anselm hadn’t recognised her. On the understanding that the outlandish don’t always wear that well, he’d expected a middle-aged multicoloured prune but he’d met a timeless woman whose refinement made him stammer. She was dressed in black — cashmere wools and matt leather shoes — in contrast to the coral pink of her lips. On her little finger was a large ring: a daisy; a spot of yellow enamel with long white petals. Her hair was jet black and very short, like a distressed belle’s in a Chaplin film: boyish curls by the ears and incredibly feminine. Skilled with her courtesy, she’d been delighted to meet Roza and pleased to see John once more, but Anselm — a man familiar with troubled voices — sensed anxiety and old wounds. She looked at John as he ran a finger behind his roll neck collar, but then Roza suddenly spoke, a voice soft and musical, small and knowing: ‘Perhaps you should start with Otto Brack.’

The call came after John had been in Warsaw a couple of months. He said, ‘Call me the Dentist.’ He said he needed help. He said he wanted out. That’s how it all began: with a plea for help. He urged John to trust him, to understand how dangerous it was for him to speak to a British journalist. He didn’t trust his own organisation and he didn’t trust any in the West: ‘I need to find someone outside the system. Do you understand?’

Anselm shifted in his seat: this wasn’t the kind of call he’d expected Brack to make. Why would he want out? The point — Anselm had imagined — was to get John in.

‘The Dentist wanted me to vouch for him with a government minister, whom he’d later name, right over the head of MI6,’ John’s hand, flat on the table made a polishing motion. ‘He was flattering me; building up my self-importance. I was easy meat.’

John had two questions — and he asked them with all the aplomb of an experienced handler: first, what did the Dentist have to offer?

Second, why come to John? Warsaw was packed with foreign journalists.

‘He said he’d bring the entire SB battle order. He had lists of informers within Solidarity and the Church. Copies of correspondence between Moscow and Warsaw He knew the colour of Brezhnev’s underpants

… you name it, the Dentist had pulled it from some top drawer marked “Secret”, and it was mine to hand over. Part of the dowry that would secure my place in the annals of Cold War history — unread by all, save the major players on either side of the Wall.’

Anselm was cut loose. A dowry? How could a mock defection by Brack lead to John betraying Roza? Once more — and this time with complete finality — Anselm abandoned a convincing interpretation of the evidence. John might have been CONRAD but CONRAD was no willing spy… and Roza’s eyes were resting upon him; she hadn’t strayed once; she held on to his voice as if it were a handle. I’ve got everything wrong, except for this meeting; and even now, I don’t know why it’s right.

‘He was typical of many people I knew back then,’ said John — he’d become swift and fluid; his memory set in motion by the relief of letting go — ‘he was convinced that but for martial law the Russians would have invaded. They’d marched into Budapest in fifty-six, Prague in sixty-eight and Kabul in eighty. He thought they still might come to Warsaw, which was why he wanted out now, and fast.’

‘But why you?’ Celina’s tone was frail, like tearing paper. ‘Why did he pick you?’

Anselm involuntarily abridged Bogart’s gin-joint line — of all the food queues in Warsaw, why did you have to walk into mine? And he understood that she grieved, even now, at ever having met him.

‘Because I was a stranger,’ replied John, hearing — Anselm was sure — the same tone of regret. ‘Because he’d done some research. He knew a great deal about my family Far more than me; he’d guessed why I’d come to Warsaw.’

He knew John was the son of a diplomat; the son of a woman who’d committed suicide; the son of a tragedy He’d read his mother’s file. He’d calculated that John’s embarrassment went deep into his identity; that he carried a kind of transferred guilt.

‘Suicide?’ repeated Celina, softly.

The subject was too large for the moment — like Anselm with Irina on the unswerving ardour of monks — but Celina was simply reaching out to him from a new understanding. She knew there was more to be said… that might once have been said, if things had been simpler between them.

‘Yes,’ replied John. ‘I’ve come to see it very differently over the years. Once it was a betrayal. Now? I think she wanted to eternalise her regret. To say sorry for ever — to me, to my father. Brack smelled that, too.’

He’d been deeply sympathetic. The pressures of the time had been awful (Brack said) — ‘I was there, I know what it was like; I felt the heat’ — with friend pitted against friend to demonstrate their innocence. He’d only raised the matter because he felt that John, of all people, would understand why the Dentist wanted out; that John, of all people, might want to rectify the past — by helping him; by purging the mistake of his mother.

‘He didn’t use those words, but that’s what he meant.’ John’s hand had stopped moving. ‘And that was the trick. Within minutes of listening to him, the table had slowly turned. He was offering to help me. And you might find this difficult to believe, but I was grateful. Really grateful. Without the assistance of an insider, I’d never know what my mother had actually done. I thought a great chance had come my way.

The Dentist asked John to think about it because there were dangers on both sides. A week later the phone rang again. To prove his bona fides, he offered John copies of telegrams sent to the KGB dealing with Solidarity’s- ‘I didn’t want them. I told him I was prepared to take the risk.’ But the Dentist said that’s not how things worked. That trust was a kind of deal, a bargain, an exchange of services. And, if he was to help the Dentist, there were rules.

‘First, we were never to meet. I could only call him on a secure number, five-five-eight-seven-six. Second, names were dangerous, that’s why he was the Dentist, so I had to pick one. I went for Conrad. It was a joke. The Secret Agent… Heart of Darkness. But he didn’t get it. Third, I was to keep a journal recording all the leads he’d send my way each of which would focus on the fight for freedom of speech, accountability, democratic blah, blah — ’ John smoothed the table once more, moving quickly — ‘Fourth, I was to take this journal with me to the minister he’d later name as evidence of the Dentist’s values and commitment to political reform. This was the deal: if I prepared his passage to the West, he’d help me understand my mother’s story. He’d bring her file.’

John couldn’t see any problem: he wasn’t giving anything to the Dentist. All the traffic would be coming the other way His only role was to be a messenger operating outside the system, his task to bring a request to someone at the heart of government.

The Dentist was true to his word. He gave John all manner of information, placing him one step ahead of every other Western journalist in Warsaw He placed John’s ear at the door of the Junta. Only John didn’t notice that all the ‘stuff sent his way’ would have made it into the public domain eventually; that he only received advanced notice; that he was only given two scoops of substance. The first was on underground printing.

‘He told me the publication most feared by the government was Freedom and Independence.’ He looked towards Roza, as if their eyes might meet. ‘It’s run by someone called the Shoemaker, he said; only turns up when times get really bad, and he’s turned up now This is the voice you should hear. It had last been heard during the Terror. Get his words into the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph — ’ he threw imagined copies on the table — ‘get his message out of Warsaw’

The only known point of contact was a woman called Roza Mojeska, and he was trying to find her.

‘I got there first, Roza,’ he said, heavily He faltered, like a man stepping suddenly off the pavement. ‘In all that we spoke of, Roza, I never once lied. I just didn’t tell the truth of how I came to find you.

Roza nodded but didn’t speak. Her eyes were boring into him out of those mauve shadows. John seemed to fall, knowing there was no hand that could reach him. ‘He called again, said he’d loved the “Lives Lived in Secret” piece, it was wonderful, marvellous, this was our win, our first strike back, he was halfway to London, and now he had someone else. A documentary film-maker. She’d spent her life winding up the authorities. She was a wild cat. Wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t go. They’d been offering her a passport for years and she wouldn’t take it. They put people like her in prison and threw away the key Not six months, ten years, so get on to her, she’s another life lived in secret.’

‘And you put all this down in your journal?’ asked Celina, her voice transparent like India paper. Anselm couldn’t quite see through it; something was on the other side; he wasn’t sure she’d even asked a question. Her lips moved slowly beautifully.

‘I kept the rules,’ said John. ‘My journal was the contemporaneous account of his bona fides. It was the means to get him out. It was the way to open my mother’s file… I wanted to see with my own eyes what she’d done to my father.’ He turned to Roza, reaching out again with blind eyes. ‘I didn’t tell him about the plan to meet the Shoemaker. I turned up and saw you walk to a man that I’d never seen before. Then I got my head kicked in. I didn’t know the Dentist was the guy in the graveyard until he walked into the cell. I was thrown out of Warsaw before the end of the week. He’d used me to find you, Roza. He’d used my pride and self-importance. He’d used my mother’s mistake. He’d used my longing to change what she’d done.’

Roza showed no emotion. A hand moved to the brooch, a silver triangle, a complex of tiny sculpted flowers. The dusk round her eyes had grown dark. A kind of night settled on her face. Silence pounded from her closed mouth. The fire snapped, a log rolled into flame.

‘I didn’t tell you about her because I didn’t know what to say’ John had turned to Anselm. ‘There’s nothing worse, you know Shame without knowing why My father never spoke about her when I was a child. At ten I’d seen her name on my birth certificate. But he wouldn’t tell me anything about her life, except that she’d ended it. He’d razed her life to the ground. He’d built a golf course on top and a club house with bourbon on tap. I only learned about her past when they picked me up in Bucharest. They made a call to the SB in Warsaw and the next thing I know a sort of Eton Old Boy walks in, the real thing, genteel English with the vaguest Russian accent. “A cigarette? A cup of Earl Grey? No scones, I’m afraid.” What did I think of Reagan? And what about Thatcher? Then I was free, a favour to the memory of my mother, he said. Because of the price she’d paid for socialist values. That’s why I took the job with the BBC. I wanted to learn about her values. Her country, her history, her roots. My country, my history, my roots. I wanted to find her. And then the Dentist called. If only I’d known of his place in your life, Roza; if only I’d known that he’d picked me with you in mind.’

John threw his head back. He was almost done. Coming forward, he planted his face in his hands, slipping his fingers behind his glasses. He appeared at once the tragic buffoon: hands covering his eyes, with spectacles on top; hiding behind lenses that wouldn’t let him see even if someone pulled his arms away.

‘I didn’t use you, Celina.’ His voice was muffled into his palms. ‘I loved you. I was completely devastated by who you were. Your crazy shoes and rings and torn trousers. Your hair always in a mess. Your beads and bangles. But I couldn’t see straight. I didn’t know if I wanted you for who you were, or because you were everything my mother should have been, a rebel, someone who’d fought back. I didn’t know if I loved you because you cleaned up the weird guilt shovelled on to me by my father, by not talking, by not explaining — ’ his breath ran out in a sigh of fatigue and surrender — ‘God, in those days I thought too much. It was all so much simpler than I realised.’ He came to an exhausted halt and dropped his hands. In an act of total surrender he took off his glasses. Anselm had never seen him without them — not since he’d agreed with John (post op) that he had a faraway look… no, not Martian, just far off. The glasses had become a heat shield easing his entry into a new, dark world. And he’d taken it down. Tiny scars ran over his lids, above and below. The eyes were the palest brown, with tiny clouds and frail red streamers flying over the whites, the pupils awfully still, not reacting to the firelight. ‘I thought too much. I did love you, simply and innocently I knew that after you’d gone.

Notwithstanding John’s immolation before Celina, Anselm’s mind — naturally withdrawing from any display of strong emotion — lay with Roza’s unmoving face: the haunted lilac shadows and the coming of night. She barely moved and she didn’t take her eyes off John. It had turned into a conversation between two broken friends, with Roza watching and waiting. She was like a silent guide, always one step ahead, always observant, always waiting. A deep comprehension flickered and died in Anselm’s mind. He’d barely noticed its outline before it was gone.

Stirring, suddenly he remembered a little trick from his days at the Bar. Not so much a trick as a technique that reflected the depths of the human person; the workings of the conscience. Put the question to the person who has already framed the enquiry: ask them what they asked of someone else. The answer was often surprising. He coughed, lightly.

‘Celina, of all the film-makers in all the studios in Warsaw, why did Brack pick you?’

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