The Day of the Lie

Chapter Forty-Nine

Anselm adjusted his earpiece and settled forward, the window over the court reminding him of that terrifying painting by Breughel where Mad Meg leads an army of women to pillage the bowels of hell. Apparently messages had been sent to Barbara Novak and Lidia Zelk, old Friends of the Shoemaker: they were down there somewhere, waiting for Roza to arrive and lead them on. So was Aniela Kolba, who’d changed her mind about keeping away So was Irina Orlosky crouched on the edge of her seat. Madam Czerny bi-focals on the end of her nose, was leafing through a statement, presumably Meg’s, rehearsing a strategy of questions.

Brack was motionless. He sat with horrible stillness, like a careless lord surrounded by frantic peasants, his hands resting on his leather bag. Mr Fischer twirled a pen between his fingers, tugging occasionally at his yellow and green cuffs. He wasn’t worried either. This was a case he could only lose. Then Anselm made a start: slouching by the far wall like a bored demon sat Marek Frenzel, turned out by Burberry He was in trouble, though. Something was stuck between his back teeth.

The court became quiet. The judges were seated on their hi-tech bench, the computer screens flickering. The jury were ready to listen. The usher’s voice called the last witness for the prosecution.

‘Roza Mojeska.’

Almost immediately the ordinary procedure was upturned. When Roza reached the lectern she was offered a chair. She refused and asked, instead, for a table. The request was granted with a kind of puzzled tolerance, an attitude that prevailed while Roza laid out her tatty newspapers as if she were a street vendor near a railway station. And yet, this protracted activity, undertaken slowly lent a curious authority to this Mad Meg. She was setting up her own stand. There were two courts in the room, one facing the other. When Roza had finished her preparations, Madam Czerny blanched hair astray rose slowly, gently swinging her bifocals in one hand.

‘Your name, please.’

‘Roza Mojeska.’

‘Date of birth?’

‘Major Strenk asked that.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Major Strenk. Always names, always dates of birth:

‘I’m afraid we keep records.’

‘Does it really matter?’

The prosecutor had a ready indulgent smile. She was used to difficult witnesses. From long experience she knew how to handle them. ‘Yes. For the court. We note what you say.’

‘So did Major Strenk.’

‘Thank you.

‘You’re nothing like him, of course, and I’m sorry for any comparison. The eighth of March, nineteen twenty-nine:

The concession was entirely formal. Roza had demonstrated — right at the outset — that she was curiously adjacent to the system; that she would respectfully co-operate with its mechanisms; but that she intended to introduce some changes.

‘You were brought up in Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls?’

‘Yes.’

‘You fought in the Uprising of nineteen forty-four?’

‘I did.’

‘Your function?’

‘Ammunition carrier.

Even the judges laughed. It took time for the quiet to return and find its depth.

‘You were deported to the transit camp at Pruszkow?’

‘I was.’

‘From there you heard the explosions as Warsaw was razed to the ground?’

‘I have never forgotten the sound.’

‘You returned to rebuild it?’

‘With my own hands.’

Anselm found Madam Czerny totally intimidating, even when she was being nice. The bleached hair evoked a scouring personality; someone who got the stains off a burnt pan that anyone else would throw in the bin. But Roza was wholly undisturbed. She seemed to be giving the court only what she wanted, even though she had no control over the questions. And so the two women, prosecutor and witness, came by careful, mutually agreed steps to the Shoemaker Operation. In a series of brisk exchanges Roza confirmed her recruitment in 1951, her arrest following that of her husband, and her incarceration in Mokotow prison.

‘Before dealing with the grave events which are the subject of the indictment against this defendant,’ said Madam Czerny addressing more the jury than Roza, ‘I think it may be of assistance to the court if you would explain, in simple terms, what the Shoemaker meant to you. You had never met him. You had only read his words. I ask because your answer will explain not only why you were prepared to face imprisonment but — and of great importance for the purpose of this trial — it will illuminate the motives of Otto Brack, the defendant; for the crimes alleged against him spring more from his quarrel with the Shoemaker than your role as his publisher.’

This was the moment Roza had been waiting for. She appeared to pounce, though she merely gripped the lectern, fingers widely spaced in the manner of an embrace. Anselm had the strongest intimation that the trial within a trial was about to begin, that Roza’s unconventional procedure was now underway She’d said it wouldn’t take that long.

‘It was a matter of hope,’ she said, simply ‘The Shoemaker wrote about hope. You can all come and see me afterwards, if you like, and I’ll show you what he said — ’ she pointed towards the covered table — you can read him for yourself. He named hope so much better than I could. The word occurs on every page of every edition. I’ll give you some examples:

Roza leaned over her stand to find selected copies of Freedom and Independence while Madam Czerny, reduced to a spectator, shifted on her feet: this kind of thing was outside her experience. She was about to intervene when a knowing look from the presiding judge forestalled her. Let the old woman have some latitude, he implied, smoothing a heavy moustache. We can wait. She’ll be easier to lead once she’s had her say.

‘These quotations are all taken from nineteen fifty-one, before I was arrested,’ said Roza, opening three different editions on the lectern. ‘Remember, this was during the Terror. People with a mind of their own didn’t dare to whisper what they were thinking. This is what the Shoemaker said to them: “Hope is among you.”‘ She paused. “‘During a time of Occupation hope is our national sovereignty.”‘ Another pause. ‘And finally my favourite: “Hope is a tree in an open field. All the birds of the air settle in its branches.”‘

Madam Czerny’s deep voice sounded loud enough to scare them off. ‘And now, mindful of those helpful observations, we can turn to the matters set forth in the indictment.’

‘That won’t be necessary.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m afraid the more I’ve listened, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not wide enough.’

The bleached prosecutor settled her glasses on her long nose. Sebastian, hunched at her side, lowered his head. Brack looked towards Roza, implacable but inquiring. The entire room was spellbound by the hiatus. Just as the presiding judge leaned forward to speak, Roza snatched the initiative from his open mouth, underlining the culmination of her evidence.

‘A man can shoot the birds from the trees… and I’ve seen them fall to the ground.’ Her tone had changed colour and pitch; it was dark and low, now ‘He can even rob the nests that are left behind. But this defendant went one step further.’ She turned towards Brack and raised her arm, pointing at him with an open hand. ‘This is the greater crime he must answer for. It includes all the others. He cut into the sap. He cut down the tree itself.’

Brack stared ahead. He didn’t seem to react, though Roza’s accusation had echoed round the room. ‘She was right,’ murmured Anselm to himself. ‘He’s just waiting for his chance to reply’ So this must be the moment: she’s turning a kind of key pulling a kind of trigger.

‘Let us take things a little more slowly and in detail,’ came Madam Czerny’s reassuring, papering-over-the-cracks voice. But there was a shake to the timbre. The deep cadences had gone. She’d picked up Roza’s statement prepared for the trial and Anselm knew what the prosecutor — reeling behind the bluff of calm — was thinking: she had to pull the witness into line, damn quick, and forcefully if necessary; but he also knew that Roza wouldn’t be moving an inch. She wasn’t singing from Madam Czerny’s hymn sheet; Roza had another one. And Anselm knew she hadn’t finished, either, despite what she then said.

‘I have nothing further to say’

Mr Fischer looked up as if the lights had come on at two in the morning. Momentarily he was caught in the glare of unimaginable good luck: a win was careering straight towards him, a win he’d never thought possible. Blinking, recovered, coughing and suave, he came to his feet, oblivious that his client had suddenly begun to move, writhing in his suit.

‘Moved as we all are by the words of the witness, I’m obliged to remark, however, that the crime she identifies — grave though it be — is not known to the law’ He reminded Anselm of the kind of opponent he’d most disliked: denigrating in the robing room and then fussy in their courtesy after a case abruptly turned their way He tugged a cuff into place, gloating. ‘I’d be grateful if those representing the interests of prosecution would clarify — for the avoidance of all doubt — that this lady has indeed completed her evidence. The court will anticipate that in those curious-’

‘I said I had finished,’ replied Roza, speaking for herself. ‘There is nothing more to be said.’

‘In that case,’ began Mr Fischer, tugging the other cuff, ‘I would have thought that the proper way forward — in the interests of justice — is for Madam Czerny to reconsider her position and that of those whom she represents. I’m reluctant to state the obvious to someone as distinguished as my learned colleague, but it would seem there is no lawful basis upon which the continued prosecution of my client can proceed. It is difficult to know precisely…’

Mr Fischer lost his thread because Roza had reached down to her table and picked up another edition of Freedom and Independence. Again, the presiding judge raised a calming hand, his expression as sympathetic as it was sad: he’d recognised what the whole court must know; Roza Mojeska, the survivor of the Terror, had suffered profound, enduring wounds to the mind. She’d lost her grip; she was throwing away her only chance of vindication. He sighed, audibly surrendering the collapse of the trial to the one person responsible. Let her have the last word, he seemed to say.

‘Let me read you the concluding reflections of the Shoemaker,’ said Roza, turning to the inside back page. ‘This is what he said, in late nineteen eighty-two. He hasn’t spoken since. “One day we will win. It is inevitable. But then we must turn to the question of justice. We will have to look back, never forgetting how difficult it was to steer a morally straight course when, in the day to day, we were obliged to live a double life, one in private and the other in public. We will need to recognise that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, bolstered up the system we now accuse. We will have to recall that there was a chasm between thinking and speaking, believing and doing and that not many of us managed to cross the divide without a fall. Each of these painful truths, when recollected, should make passing judgement a delicate exercise. Remember: collaboration had a grading. Let our reprimand be proportionate. Name wrongs and move on.”‘ Roza turned the page, coming to the final paragraph. “‘But what happens when we are obliged to judge someone and, try as we might, we cannot find the shades of grey known to us all? When there is no name to describe the wrong? When we linger in mourning? What are we to do? I have this one final thought: our justice can never be like theirs. It can never be a process without hope. There must always remain the possibility, however slender, that in certain strange circumstances even great crimes can be met with an even stranger mercy.

Roza folded up the paper and laid it with the others on the table.

All eyes in the court were upon her. She was the only person standing, now Madam Czerny and Mr Fischer had resumed their seats, superfluous to the drama in which they’d played a part. Brack glared from the dock, paralysed and unnaturally dark — from rage or confusion or from the choking realisation that the trial was coming to an end. Roza addressed her final words to him.

‘I was going to return your bullet, Otto,’ she explained, conversationally ‘But I’m glad the court took it from me. I’d be worried that when you left here a free man you might use it, and I’d only blame myself.’

Without any further acknowledgement to the court, or even the dismantling of her own — she left the table covered with editions of Freedom and Independence, for anyone who might want a copy — Roza began walking from the hushed room, plastic bag in hand, as if she could, at last, get to the market and catch those two-for-one bargains that weren’t really bargains.

‘I had hopes, too,’ shouted a strangled voice. Brack was upright and wavering; a fist punching at the air. But Roza wasn’t listening; she just kept strolling towards the courtroom entrance, frowning to herself as if she’d forgotten to bring a shopping list. Brack stumbled forward, pushing Mr Fischer aside. ‘I have a story, too, about birds shot from a tree, Yes, tell that to the Shoemaker… come back… I have a right to be heard… I demand it. Come back…’

But Roza had gone: the door had swung shut behind her with a soft thud. The trial was over. Or rather, the two trials had ended. Only Roza had spoken. She’d achieved the inconceivable: she’d condemned a man with mercy.

There was no doubting Roza’s victory — at least in the minds of those who understood her — but no celebration took place; and not because Brack’s technical acquittal was a matter of regret in several quarters. There was no party because Roza did, in fact, go to the market — the biggest in Eastern Europe, on the Praga side of the river. It was just another day it seemed. Sebastian, subdued and defeated, went back to work, leaving Anselm, John and Celina in a crowded bar near the court sipping Zubrowka.

‘Who was that bizarre woman?’ asked Celina. ‘The one that wouldn’t leave?’

‘Some crackpot,’ offered John, who’d only heard the rumpus.

‘Eventually the ushers called the police… it took three of them

…’

Anselm had watched uneasily from on high. As the court had emptied Irina had simply stood there, like someone in the cheap seats who hadn’t understood the play The allusions had gone over her head. People had to push past her while she stared at the empty stage and the vacant chair that Brack had occupied; from which he’d walked a free man. She’d been forcibly escorted from the building.

‘She was a victim,’ said Anselm with a snap.

The memory of Irina’s ejection haunted him: she was the only person left behind in Breughel’s hell. She’d fallen outside of Mad Meg’s raid on the underworld. Anselm had tried to talk to her in the street, but her disappointment had imploded; she’d drifted away unseeing, just like that young woman outside Mokotow He was still thinking of her, dishevelled and disorientated, when the phone rang in his bedroom later that evening. He’d been wondering whether to call round, unannounced, bringing more flowers and a pizza, with something fizzy and sweet for the son.

‘Father, there’s someone here,’ began Krystyna, tentatively For once she wasn’t cheery. ‘They want to know if you’ll hear their confession.’