Chapter Fifty

There were no appropriate quiet corners. There were no small rooms available. Every conference facility was booked, even the Warsaw Hall, a 15,000-square-foot auditorium large enough for two thousand delegates. But the place wasn’t occupied for the moment. The management had authorised its use, for an hour or so, with apologies for the lack of intimacy Amused and perplexed at the same time, Anselm followed a suited porter to the lift, up to the second floor of the hotel and through a half open door.

On stepping inside, Anselm froze.

Light fittings like coronets cast a phosphorous glow upon a red carpet patterned on loops like rows of tabletops without their legs. Rank upon rank of seats faced a small wooden podium with a microphone. Just beyond, to one side, sat Otto Brack, waiting to address the plenum. Unmoved and unmoving he watched Anselm’s slow approach to the front row.

‘You were responsible for that fiasco, weren’t you?’ His German was low and hoarse as if he’d been shouting. The glasses, dark in reaction to the light, made his eyes look like deep brown holes in his head. ‘I’m told there’s been a meddling priest who wanted to understand why I shot men and tortured women.

He pointed to a facing seat and Anselm sat down. They were six feet apart, sitting on either side of a circle in the carpet.

‘I never had Frenzel’s loathing for you lot,’ continued Brack. A thin arm moved woodenly in the loose brown suit, shoving aside his colleague’s aversions. ‘I just thought you were too concerned about the next life and interfered too much with this one. There was work to be done. Great work.’

‘What do you want?’ asked Anselm. To his own surprise, he wasn’t afraid. People who link their fate to greatness always appear small.

‘The truth.’

‘You’ve had it.’

‘No, I haven’t; and neither has Roza. She thinks I had some scheme to escape laws written by the victors. There was no scheme. ‘He appraised Anselm through those strange openings in his head.

‘You and I hold two parts of one story. Together they make the truth that the court didn’t hear. Because of your interfering, they didn’t come together. This is what I propose: I’ll explain the crime, if you explain the mercy The result will be the trial I never had. Is it a deal?’

Anselm didn’t have the opportunity to walk away from the negotiating table, because Brack opened up — his pitch low and grating, the phrases cold and prepared — implementing his side of the bargain. Frenzel had evidently said nothing of the file. He’d given his boss a tip-off, a taster, knowing it would send him to the priest; knowing it would flush out an old mistake.

‘Have you ever seen a city reduced to a heap of stones? Have you seen the dead bodies of children floating in a sewer? Have you seen the world you know stamped on and beaten flat?’ Brack rasped his authority. He knew about desolation. He’d seen things that set him apart. When he saw that Damascus wasn’t there any more, he’d heard an unearthly voice. ‘Of course you haven’t. Few have. But I did. I’ve seen it and I’ve felt the ash in my hands afterwards.’ The indignation and self-aggrandisement poured out like the complaint of a servant who’d never been properly thanked. ‘That’s what I faced in forty-five,’ he said, stabbing his leg with a bony finger. ‘I looked around and all I could see was a bare horizon.’

Brack came to his feet, head held high, as if waiting for the absent applause to stop. When he heard the hushed silence, he moved instinctively to the podium, as if drawn by a magnet. On arriving, he listened surprised but attentive as his breathing grated through the loudspeakers… by some awful act of forgetfulness the microphone had been left on.

‘What’s private property?’ His voice, amplified, soared over the empty seats of the auditorium. He was getting back to basics. ‘I’ll tell you what my father told me. It’s a fence that someone’s put round a field and everyone else is simple enough to think that the grass on the other side was never theirs. What’s history? It’s the misery of the majority brought in afterwards to do the ploughing for a pittance. Well my father didn’t live to see the day but all the fences had gone. It was time to think again, from scratch. The reconstruction? It wasn’t about where the fences used to be; it was about how we shared the fields. Those of us who survived the war… we had a chance to build something new Something different. Something noble and good. Except, good things are never that simple.’

He scanned the room as if Anselm wasn’t there, drinking in the absent nods and shared indignation. The crowd knew where the speaker was going.

‘Because those old landowners, the old szlachta, would never accept change. They just want to turn up with their maps and title deeds and start rebuilding their interests, putting up the old boundaries — Brack leaned forward, urgent and raucous, stabbing the air, now — ’well someone has to stop them.’

He leaned back, listening to the echo of his realpolitik, nodding significantly.

‘Someone has to have the courage to do difficult things.’

He paused again, his voice resounding.

‘Someone must step forward to meet the demands of the moment.’

Brack turned towards Anselm as if appraising a snake in the grass. He seemed to be wondering if a man concerned about the next world had the slightest idea about how to handle this one, especially when it was in the throes of regeneration. Tentative and guttural, he tried to explain.

‘There’s a time in a child’s life when it’s most vulnerable. Those responsible for its growth must protect it at all costs. They act according to high instinct. Moralities are written afterwards.’ A shaking hand briefly tugged at a lapel, implying a kind of modesty. ‘It is no different with the renewal of society. There is a moment in its growth, just after its birth, when it is weak and defenceless. When those vested interests can creep into the nursery and suffocate the child, the child that will grow to overthrow their kingdom.’

Anselm tried to peer inside the two brown discs that seemed to hover over Brack’s face. His repugnance at the imagery of child protection was slightly overtaken by an almost technical observation: he’d heard two voices, that of Brack’s father talking to a boy about the field and fences; and someone else’s, making a speech about men born for the moment. Anselm thought it was Strenk’s.

‘There are men called to act in defence of tomorrow They must forget themselves.’ Brack’s teeth chafed his bottom lip. ‘They must do what others dare not do, for their sake. They must shoulder the burden. And they do it by terror. A brief wave of terror, to frighten off the agitators and hooligans.’ He looked aside, as if he’d heard a noise offstage — some whispering from the wings. Replying, huskily he became petulant, his voice barely sounding in the loudspeakers:

‘Do you think I wanted to shoot Pavel Mojeska? Do you think I wanted to harm his wife? Do you think I congratulate myself for having accepted those responsibilities?’ Turning back to Anselm and the microphone, he growled his complaint, sneering at the shallow minds of his carping detractors. ‘I say “No, no, no.” But was it necessary? I say “Yes, and again yes, and once more, yes.” I did what had to be done.’ He struggled in his loose brown suit, raising his head to give his shouting some leverage. ‘Because I believed and still believe that what we were trying to bring into the world was better than what was here before. I tried to save the child before they could wring it by the neck. They were the murderers. Yes, they were the criminals. They killed an idea that would have transformed the future… and for what great and noble purpose?’ He dropped his voice, nodding at Anselm as if he were simple like the majority, as if even he, a monk, might yet understand that the grass of the here and now was just as important as the heavens above; that it belonged to him. ‘For what end? To fence off the fields again. To raise another dung heap out of the ashes.’

Anselm wished the table had legs: that the red circle in the deep pile would rise up and put something of substance between him and Otto Brack. He was glad he’d never worked at the Hague, instructed to defend the executioners — the ordinary people who’d let something slip in their consciences, who now baffled the courts with the consequences of whatever it was they’d dropped. How do we comprehend? How then do we judge? Anselm had wanted to understand Brack, the roots of his relationship with evil, and now he was appalled. He’d expected a complex, twisted political philosophy something that just might begin to explain the killing and the torture. But all Brack had rattled off was a bedtime story: a fable about a garden and a quibble about fences, a handy catechesis cribbed from Voltaire, to hold on to while he pulled the trigger, simple propositions of faith that answered all the questions if you thought about it long enough, only there wasn’t time, because an urgent moment in history had called upon men to be great first and think afterwards. He had none of Frenzel’s wily intelligence, who’d learned his doctrine without caring whether it was true or not. Not Brack. He’d believed and cared. He’d never buy a slum in Prada. He’d disapprove. It would disgust him. He had a morality. And this was the man who’d argued with Pavel Mojeska. No wonder he’d said nothing. No wonder Roza had sat beneath a torrent of water. There was nothing anyone could say to challenge Brack’s credo. According to Father Nicodem, this was the man made by Strenk. This is what the Major had constructed with the ruins of a boy who’d lost his family someone ordinary, the apprentice who’d once felt love and gratitude. How to judge him?

‘You spoke about a new-born child,’ said Anselm, thinking it was time to put some uncomfortable questions.

‘Yes, an innocent life.’

‘That needed protecting?’

‘Yes.’

Anselm would have leaned on the table if he could, so instead, he stared at the carpet. ‘You’ve told me why people had to be shot, I was wondering if you might like to explain why Celina had to be-’

‘Don’t be clever with me.’

‘I’m not,’ replied Anselm, mildly ‘It’s just that I follow the steps you took to assuming heavy responsibilities of historic dimensions, but I don’t grasp the scheme to keep Roza quiet afterwards.’

The timbre of the negotiations shifted dramatically.

Brack didn’t change, as such. But it was as though he lifted the tracing paper over a colour print. There was a certain tinting to his voice: it became warmer. The lines around his argument became clearer. The picture, however, remained something out of Breughel’s unearthly imagination.

‘There was no scheme,’ he said, turning again towards the wings. ‘I thought I could make something of her. Here was a new life, unspoiled — ’ a foreign wistfulness came over him; the coarse sentimentality of those without the normal palette of feeling — ‘I thought I could raise her to understand what her parents had tried to destroy to bring something worthwhile out of the father’s death and the mother’s refusal to co-operate… her obstinate…’ The face that swung back to Anselm was a mask of worn out linoleum, the voice hard and dry. ‘But I failed. Celina wouldn’t listen. She turned everything upside down. At school, she wouldn’t even colour in between the lines. She was a lost cause:

There were too many shades of night in Otto Brack. Anselm couldn’t fully distinguish one atrocity from another. The executioner didn’t see the perversion of the adoption. He’d turned it into a salvific act: he’d brought something out of Pavel and Roza’s tragedy; he’d brought the child out of Egypt into the promise of another land. He was resentful, even now, for the monstrous ingratitude of the child taken from the nursery — only the attack on Celina itself didn’t sound entirely convincing. It was too brisk and short; trite, like a snap rejoinder planned for an unfinished argument.

‘I did everything I could,’ he murmured, gruffly ‘I tried my best.’

Anselm had tried his best, too, and he’d heard enough. Otto Brack had no comprehension whatsoever of the scale and nature of his wrongdoing. He stood on his own dung heap claiming a kind of purity. He’d killed because someone had to do it; and, it being done, like any decent man, he’d pulled out the stops to make up for the consequences. Thank God Roza had managed to silence him. Anselm was about to rise and go when Brack himself stepped back from the microphone. He walked away diffidently one hand rubbing an aching hip; but when he reached the chair he came to a halt, as though recognising that he hadn’t quite finished. Trapped between the chair and the rostrum he started limping to and fro, his head bent. Anselm slowly sank back down, listening to the lowered, murmuring voice.

‘They almost met.’

‘Who?’ asked Anselm, this time strangely afraid.

‘Celina… and her mother.’ Brack, thin and angular, seemed lost. All he’d said till now had been for the court, prepared and crafted, but now he was wandering. He didn’t know what he was saying, or how to say it.

‘What did you do?’ Anselm was almost whispering.

‘I found a journalist… first, 1 linked him up with Roza… then I linked him up with Celina — ’ he’d paused, standing still, his wavering hands moving objects slowly in the air from one place to another — ‘through him, they would have come together. I’d got them passports… all I had to do was throw them out… but Roza wouldn’t go… she thought I was trying to escape the law… that I’d adopted Celina to protect myself… there was no scheme… she couldn’t see that it was better if Celina never knew what had happened.’

‘Why did you get them passports?’ said Anselm very quietly; but the question broke the spell.

The two dark brown holes in Brack’s head were levelled against him once more, as when he’d first entered the hall. He returned to his seat, croaking and angry. ‘Because they were both lost causes:

But Anselm didn’t entirely believe him. He screwed up his eyes: behind the manifest wrongdoing that Polana represented he’d discerned a contradictory image… or at least he thought he had: there were lines drawn in Brack’s behaviour that he didn’t appear to know about. The decision to expel Roza and Celina had another inner logic: a kind of unconscious rebellion against himself and the voices in his head.

Recalling Celina’s feverish account of meeting Brack in John’s apartment, Anselm heard again Brack’s first avowed explanation of his conduct: that he’d been helping John as he’d once helped Celina. From one perspective, that remained true. It also remained true that Brack’s plan to find Roza through a journal entry (written by John, read by Celina and reported to Brack) had, as its chief purpose, the need to warn Roza that she could never seek justice without harming her daughter — which is what he’d told her in Mokotow And it remained true that Brack still hoped to capture the Shoemaker. But there was more to be seen.

Brack had tried to bring Roza and Celina together.

He’d got them passports. He’d planned to expel them, not just because they were ‘lost causes’, but because he knew that if they didn’t get to the West pretty damn fast, long prison sentences would await them both, for they’d never stop resisting the system to which he’d given his life.

He’d planned to expel them together.

And not because eyes other than his own had seen John’s journal — evidence of the offences that would place John and Roza in prison. That had been a lie. Brack had come to John’s flat alone, in his capacity as the Dentist, an identity unknown to Frenzel and the other SB footmen. He’d lied to twist Celina’s arm… to make her betray John

… so that he could bring Roza and Celina back to one another, an outcome that now revealed itself as the inner logic of Polana. Irina Orlosky had said it was the only case that Brack had cared about. He’d even dressed up to make the culminating arrest that would trigger Roza’s departure from Warsaw Only — for all that — Brack didn’t seem to know what he’d been doing. He hadn’t seen the parallel mechanics of his own stratagem. Anselm was now convinced of what he’d discerned behind Brack’s argument and actions: he’d tried to return a stolen daughter to her mother. There’d been a remnant of humanity in Otto Brack: he hadn’t quite managed to stamp out the fire. He’d made a confused bid for reparation.

‘Lost causes, I say’ snapped Brack, coiled in his chair, arms folded tight. ‘The pair of them.’

He seemed to be retracing his steps, wanting to clear up any confusion. He looked worried, vulnerable, knowing he could only repeat himself; that away from the microphone he’d said strange things off the record. He couldn’t retract them; he’d let slip things he didn’t fully grasp himself.

‘Well?’ challenged Brack.

Anselm didn’t reply He let Brack squirm in the made-to-measure suit of a killer, sensing the cloth had always chafed his skin. Anselm stared across the divide, intrigued at that lingering scrap of decency.

It was Celina who’d fanned a heap of dust into flame, bringing sensation back to his life. With her colour and craziness and cheek. After she’d walked out on him, he’d tracked her troubled steps, protecting her from the many dangers of the brave new world, torn between the two, though not acknowledging the tear into his own universe. He’d almost been rescued from moral extinction… by garish nail varnish worn by a girl who wouldn’t stay between the lines. The chance of salvation had risen out of his crimes, but he hadn’t seen it. Then, and now, he had to keep face. He’d once been the man of a moment, the responsibility handed to him by his father. He couldn’t surrender that, not even for the sake of Celina.

‘Well? Speak. Now it’s your turn,’ he barked, ill-tempered and defensive, no longer quite so convincing. ‘I’ve told you about the crimes, now tell me about the mercy.’

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