The Day of the Lie

Chapter Fifty-Three

The silver Fiat and the blue Citroen moved gingerly along the narrow, pot-holed track. To the left a forest tinged sea green rose gently to a cloudy cobalt sky The empty fields to the right sloped smoothly to a winding silver stream at the base of the valley On the far bank another wood climbed to a ragged May horizon. It was late afternoon.

After a mile or so the track turned a sharp bend. Ahead, clinging to the pitch of the land, stood a walled cluster of ancient buildings, the bell tower rising high as if to reach the kestrel hovering above the enclosure. A row of small windows faced the vast natural silence of the trees. Roza had been given the address. She was with John in the lead car that had been borrowed from Edward, Celina taking instructions at the wheel. Behind trundled Sebastian, with Anselm. These were the Friends, a symbolic group, it seemed, comprising Brack’s victims, his confessor and his prosecutor. As both vehicles passed slowly through the entrance, Anselm had a fleeting premonition.

A premonition that took immediate depth when Anselm saw the Gilbertine monk shambling from beneath an arch. The pectoral cross identified him as the Prior, though — oddly, given the Order’s penchant for rule-breaking — not an especially talkative one. He led the guests in silence down a low-vaulted corridor to a cell backing on to a small garden without borders, an enthusiastic if contradictory blend of indiscriminate planting and fondness for the remnant of an uncut lawn. The room was empty save for five chairs arranged around a bed.

‘He’s dead, I know, and I am dying,’ said Father Nicodem, propped by pillows on either side, his thin arms flat upon the crisp white sheets. ‘Someone has to say something for him, if only to illuminate his responsibility… and my own.

Anselm thought of the kestrel. It was out there, floating and watchful, its wings outstretched above a crazy garden. He listened to the husky voice of the monk who’d returned home to die, keeping his eyes firmly on the pallid, hollow features of the Shoemaker.

Father Nicodem went back to nineteen thirty-nine. It was the only way to situate everything that was to unfold. There were some wishful-thinkers who felt that Hitler wouldn’t dare cross the border and that Stalin’s interest went no further west than the Ukraine. But that was not the lesson of history. The Nazis had already taken Czechoslovakia and the West had done nothing. War was coming and that always meant a carving up of the homeland. With his Prior’s permission the young Father Nicodem, just ordained, left the monastery for Warsaw His garrulousness, his trenchant ideas, his gift for language — increasingly irreconcilable with a life devoted to silence — were to be put to the service of an underground printing operation of Father Nicodem’s invention: for, anticipating defeat, he believed ideas were the one thing that couldn’t be conquered; that words were the sole means to keep alive an autonomous culture.

Single-handedly and by stealth, he obtained all the requisite materials, the most imposing of which was a treadle-operated printing machine. It was hidden behind a false wall in the cellar of a presbytery occupied exclusively by Father Nicodem, a knowing Cardinal (and his successor) ensuring that the young man remained alone in his management of the parish. Old friends stored paper. Others spare parts. Others ink. None were aware of their confreres. One night, out for a walk, he heard by an open window a mother telling her children the story of the shoemaker who destroyed a dragon. He came home and prepared the first edition of Freedom and Independence. This was May 1939, just four months before the Germans and Russians invaded.

‘I had contacts,’ he said, testily sensing the atmosphere of admiration and not wanting it. ‘And one of them — a disaffected Communist — gave me the names of prominent thinkers and activists based in Warsaw In those early days they were very secretive, the membership not widely known… and I decided to print their names, to unmask them, to warn the people that these individuals had a vision and programme that was harmful to our national identity, that they’d bow to Stalin’s will given half the chance. And why shouldn’t I? I believed in free speech, openness, transparency accountability. I still do. Nonetheless, I didn’t know that many of the names on that list had broken with Stalin. I’ve often wondered if that first edition was one of the greater mistakes of my life.’

Father Nicodem didn’t find out why until four years later in 1943. He was sitting in the confessional, dozing. Sinning was on a half-day week during the Occupation. A voice woke him at the grille.

‘My name is Leon Brack.’

Father Kaminsky had never heard of him and, stifling a yawn, he said so — adding, with a wink in his voice, that his concern lay with actions not names.

‘Good:

‘Why?’

‘Because you printed mine. Now I’m a hunted man. A man with a wife and child.’

The German secret police had obtained a copy of Freedom and Independence and had been using it to track down their political enemies. Leon had found refuge with someone who was now part of the paper’s distribution chain; they’d made enquiries and eventually directed him to Father Nicodem.

‘This was the last thing I’d anticipated,’ murmured the old monk. ‘And yet, with hindsight, the risk had always been there. I’d seen the Nazis coming in nineteen thirty-eight. I knew what Hitler thought of the Communists.’

Speaking hastily resolved to nip past a colossal part of his life, Father Nicodem said he’d had other contacts, folk involved in smuggling operations… not of guns or food, but people… children. His hand waved away the details — it wasn’t necessary to say any more because it wasn’t relevant, suffice it to say he was able to organise the hiding of Leon’s son. He’d gone to the house where Leon and his family were hiding to collect the boy.

‘The moment is burned into me,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘The promises, the tears, the whispers. Otto was distraught so he barely noticed me. That night I brought him to my old friend, Jozef Lasky — ’ he settled his hollow eyes upon Roza — ‘which brought him to you.

The family who’d given refuge to the Bracks was Pavel Mojeska’s. For a short while they’d known each other. Looking ahead, Anselm saw the full dimensions of Strenk’s test of loyalty: it hadn’t ended with the abandonment of Roza, he’d required Brack to execute the son of the family who’d saved his life. But that lay in the future. Father Nicodem was still recalling the early slightly simpler days.

‘Having met me, Pavel insisted on joining the operation,’ he explained, still speaking to Roza. ‘He wanted to work on Freedom and Independence. He wanted to meet the Shoemaker. That’s when I realised that Leon had found me too easily that the Shoemaker had to become somebody other than myself; a symbol, an emblem, a figure from a story, a writer that no one could ever find… for these were hard times. I told him the Shoemaker was out of reach… but that he could help me keep him even further away’

Pavel became the sole link between Father Nicodem and a new group of Friends. The myth of the Shoemaker was born. Father Nicodem dropped out of the picture. But on Pavel’s side of the equation, he was always breaking the rules, always trusting someone. Trust was the marrow in his bones. He trusted Stefan Binkowski. He trusted others. And one of those others betrayed him.

Not long after Pavel’s execution the handling of Father Nicodem moved to Brack.

When they first met, nothing registered behind Brack’s eyes. There was no hint of recognition. The distraught boy had gone: the memories of that time had been covered up, painted over. He seemed to look directly at no one; to never quite look at anything in focus. By then he’d been in Strenk’s shoes for several years; he’d grown into them.

‘I tried to win him back,’ said Father Nicodem. ‘I tried to talk to him with what I wrote, but he couldn’t listen. There he was, at the heart of the fight against our ideas, and he couldn’t understand them. The debate we tried to raise wasn’t just with the intellectuals; it was with ordinary people, anyone who cared about the kind of society we were going to reconstruct after the war, whether they accepted Soviet Occupation or not. In a way we faced a great opportunity. Everyone had come together to pick up the pieces, our ways of thinking included. So we were arguing with anyone who could read… from the vendor on a street corner to a minister in a government office… but Otto Brack was beneath all that… They’d placed him underground, out of sight, in a prison to do the kind of thing no reasonable man would ever do. That’s why they put him there. Pavel wasn’t handed over to a man with a mind. They gave him to someone who couldn’t think.’

Isn’t it always that way? thought Anselm. When extremists of any kind want to push for that apocalyptic finishing line, they always call on the people who can’t understand anything more complicated than a fable. And they in turn, protect the citadel mumbling their mantras, convinced that they’ve grasped something the clever ones will never understand. They’re the chosen ones. And they don’t seem to realise that what they do sets them against the noble ideal that gave birth to the story. Brack, proud and blind, defended authoritarian communism at the cost of democratic socialism. The man who would guard the nursery had done his best to kill off the newborn.

‘I’ve called you here for another reason,’ resumed Father Nicodem, after a brief silence. He was tiring. Outside, the wild garden came to light with a shift in the cloud. ‘I want to thank you, Roza, for your fidelity. To Freedom and Independence and to me, though I don’t suppose you ever thought I was the Shoemaker. Now that I’m dying we might as well name what I’ve never wanted to hear — because it’s too painful — but now is the time. You were imprisoned for me. Pavel was shot for me. You both accepted the consequences so that I could write, so that the ideas we all believed in could be published. For sixty years I’ve told myself the price was too high. But I wrote for you both, thinking of you both and all the Friends that I’d never know and would never meet, and-’

‘I’ve known you were the Shoemaker and the printer since nineteen fifty-one,’ said Roza, flatly ‘Your hands were too clean. You sounded the same, out of your mouth and on paper. And I found you still grieving when I came back in nineteen eighty-two. But I came back because I believed in your words. You said what I wanted to say You said what Pavel could no longer say You spoke for us both and all the people who had no voice. You changed how people looked at the world-’

‘I brought Otto Brack to your door, Roza,’ said Father Nicodem, faintly ‘I’m part of his story I helped make Brack into the man that you and Pavel met in Mokotow’

‘I’m afraid you didn’t,’ corrected Roza, as if she were taking away a sticky cake, nice to look at but bad for an old man’s teeth. Remorse, she implied, can be a bit too sweet. ‘You’re getting carried away; you always got carried away’ She leaned forward towards the bed, placing a hand upon Father Nicodem’s frail arm. ‘Thousands of people were executed during the Uprising… in Ochota, in Wola. They left children behind, Pavel among them. They didn’t all go and join the secret service afterwards. For once, you must listen to me, because this time I’m the one with the words you need to hear. Otto Brack made a choice, long before he met Strenk. I was there, in a sewer, beneath Warsaw I went in one direction, and he went in another. He knew what he was doing. No one pushed or pulled. He struck a match and walked away from his father’s humanity… and, in the end, it’s his father’s humanity that returned to condemn him. Not me, not a court in Warsaw… but his father.’

Anselm came to his feet and tiptoed out of the cell. Once in the cool, vaulted corridor he breathed deeply and made for a rounded door that had been left ajar. It opened on to a gravel path between a hedge and a rock garden of strange, mountain flowers, flowers he’d never seen before, again randomly planted. Listening to the crunch of gravel underfoot, Anselm thought of the Shoemaker’s craft and the price paid for the abstract raw materials. Words had always come cheaply at home; how could they cost so much abroad?

Anselm also felt slightly miffed. He’d been to law school and practised at the Bar for years, but he could never have conceived of a trial as fair as Roza’s private prosecution of Otto Brack. She’d taken everything into account, gauging the true weight of Brack’s responsibility And the Nazis had stopped her schooling when she was twelve. How had she done it? Reaching a slight elevation he turned towards the bell tower. The circling kestrel had gone.