The Day of the Lie

Chapter Fifty-Five

Spring had come to Larkwood, bringing colour to the fields. The orchards were pink with blossom, flimsy petals detached by the faintest breeze — making Anselm (an occasional and reluctant empiricist) wonder what was the point of blooming at all. He was struck because he found no tragedy in the swift coming and going, the sudden outburst of fragility before the fruit began to grow There was no point, as such, he concluded. It was simply beautiful. Here today gone tomorrow.

The observation, it transpired, had the character of a prophetic warning (though Anselm didn’t quite hear the message). Six weeks after his return to Larkwood, he received a call from a man who’d thumped out Colonel Bogey while marching through the bush.

‘You know, the trombone player,’ said Sylvester, frustrated, holding out the phone.

It took Anselm a few seconds to enter the Watchman’s lost world but then he understood. John’s voice was anything but musical.

‘Celina asked me to call you.’

Anselm listened, hardly speaking, overwhelmed by an incoming tide of sadness — something predictable and curiously inevitable. Roza had asked Celina if she might come to London for a short spell, explained John; they’d said goodbye only the previous week in Warsaw, but that was no matter. Both of them had wept, not wanting another leave-taking, not knowing how to handle letters or phone calls, hesitant about any more time spent apart and what with cheap flights these days and the spare room overlooking the metro line… She’d arrived at Heathrow thin, uncertain of herself; wanting the arm of a flight attendant even before she’d reached baggage control. She’d brought presents, cheap things from the market in Praga, desperate gestures it seemed towards the backlog of gifts never given because of their long separation. Celina had taken her home, to her flat in West Kilburn. On returning to the sitting room after a quiet evening meal — a comfortable time spent talking about an office bore, career hopes and a crack in the ceiling — Celina had found Roza apparently asleep in an armchair. For a long moment she’d stood looking down upon the peaceful face of mauve shadows, struck by a certain majesty, the frail hands open in her lap, the feet in blue woollen stockings, crossed at the ankle… and then she’d noticed that Roza wasn’t breathing. She’d gone. It was as though she’d left her coat behind, laid neatly on the chair. Amongst her few possessions Celina had found a one way ticket: Roza had come to London with that peculiar knowledge of the old.

‘Celina wonders if you’d conduct the ceremony ‘Of course.

‘She’s moved on already Anselm.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’d only just got her daughter back.’

The greater part of Brack’s legacy was now complete.

All the world came to Roza, it seemed. A small crowd gathered at the graveside in Kensal Green: Celina, of course, with John, and their different circles — people who’d never met Roza but who now felt involved in her life and death through an attachment to her daughter; Magda Samovitz with the memory of an orphanage and its caretaker, Mr Lasky; the Kolbas from Warsaw, along with Mateusz Robak and a number of elderly women brought by Sebastian, the pillagers of hell, all mentioned by name in Roza’s testimonial. The Friends formed a line, strangely together, strangely apart, like those two protesters at Brack’s trial holding on to a banner about justice. Even Father Nicodem took extreme measures to be there, dying two days beforehand, setting his spirit free to join the gathering. In the late afternoon, to the rhythm of a psalm of hope, they walked in turn past the mound of moist earth, dropping a flower into the deep shadow by their feet.

As the mourners drifted away Anselm approached Edward Kolba, a stooped figure wearing a charcoal grey trilby This was the wangler; the one who’d learned to live ‘on the left’. Anselm gripped his hand and wouldn’t let go. The old man tugged but Anselm wouldn’t release him. Eventually he lifted his face. Anselm had expected tortured remorse but he found a challenge, glared back with a quivering lip. ‘C’mon finish it,’ he seemed to say It was FELIKS. Anselm let the soft hand drop, seeing resentment in the old man’s eyes — not to him, but Roza, who’d brought the scourge of compromise into his life. ‘You cannot understand,’ his stare implied. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a child at home and a wife in prison. Our married life had just begun. Judge me all you like…’

Anselm didn’t, but he couldn’t say so because they were trapped without a common tongue and Aniela was watching, smiling gratefully at the monk’s attentiveness, assuming neither of them understood the other. It was time to go.

The rest had mourned. And Anselm, left alone by the grave with a fugitive conscience, asked himself if anyone apart from himself had dared to grieve for Otto Brack — not for who he was, but for who he might have been, knowing that there’d only been one person present in the State-run crematorium: a stranger who didn’t speak the language, a troubled monk who’d seen a flicker of green light in a man’s dying eyes.

Anselm returned to his monastery ill at ease. The violent storm that had begun during the Terror had finally blown itself out. And in that particular serenity that follows a cataclysm, Anselm tried to make sense of the devastation, wanting to find the meaningful ending when all those affected could finally applaud the victory of good over evil. In a sense, he’d found it — or at least he thought he had… he couldn’t be certain — but the finding (if that is what it was) had made him feel dirty again, all the more so because he’d glimpsed it in a place he’d least expected to find anything worthwhile. Anselm roamed around the cloister, head down, shuffling his feet. In choir he lost his place, pulling at the wrong ribbon in the wrong book. Taking his thoughts to his bees one morning, he passed beneath the branches of the surrounding aspens to see the Prior sitting on Anselm’s throne, an old pew in the circle of hives.

‘Aren’t you scared of getting stung?’ asked the Prior as Anselm hitched his habit and sat down.

‘Permanently. It comes with the territory’

‘You have other concerns? If it would help, go to the end of them.’ He paused and then added. ‘Why not start with John?’

Anselm couldn’t help but smile. At last the invitation had come to enter the grey area between himself and the Prior. Its shadow had followed him from Larkwood to Warsaw and back again. It lay between them here, among the hives. It fell upon the wild, trampled flowers.

‘I suppose I feel let down,’ conceded Anselm, shifting a little on the bench. ‘Pushed aside when I turned up to help; pulled back once I’d gone away Pushed and pulled when it suited. He might have shared more earlier, willingly rather than leave me to find out later by chance.’

The Prior thought for so long that Anselm thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he spoke, seeming to aim across the clearing, his head angled to one side.

‘You’re disappointed because he never told you about his mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nor about his shame and his longing to change her story and his own?’

‘Yes.’

‘His gamble with a man who called himself the Dentist?’

‘Yes:

This was part of the ground covered by the Prior and John all the years ago, trekking through the woods to Our Lady’s Lake. The Prior wouldn’t say so, of course, but leaving aside Exodus 22, previous knowledge of John’s past was the one explanation for why he’d sent Anselm to Warsaw without a moment’s hesitation. He’d made his mind up (in principle) thirty years earlier, when the chance to call on Anselm had seemed impossible to imagine. But then an archive had turned up in Dresden and Roza had flown to London.

‘Did you ever explain to John why you came to Larkwood?’ asked the Prior from a seeming tangent. ‘Did you tell him why you were leaving behind a way of life he’d shared and understood?’

‘No.’

He’d tried, but his friend’s mind hadn’t engaged with the mesh of Anselm’s words. This, too — he was sure — had been ground covered long ago in the woods. The Prior wasn’t surprised, and he had something to say:

‘Sometimes, Anselm — and especially with the most important parts of our lives — we cannot share who we are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh and spirit… and at certain times we can’t do it. Because, ultimately we cannot give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want to do so that we realise how immense we are… more vast and mysterious than the night sky; and alone.’

Anselm nodded, thrown off balance.

‘John didn’t give you plain facts because you were his friend. He wanted to give you so much more and couldn’t. But when the time came — and he waited patiently in the darkness — he sent you into his troubled past to find him. And now you know more than anyone else; more than you could reduce to words, if asked. This is friendship, Anselm. Knowledge beyond the reach of language. It’s what bound Roza to Father Kaminsky.’

The Prior had lanced a hidden abscess, instantaneously healing Anselm of a resentment that he hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge. He felt peculiarly light in his body and clear-headed with a sharper appreciation of the matters that had lowered his head in the cloister. His head fell now and the Prior, seeming to understand, spoke with a familiar tone of command:

‘Your concerns; go to the end of them.’

There was so much on Anselm’s mind: not just Roza’s mysterious victory over Otto Brack, but the tragedy of half-redeemed lives that peppered the surrounding landscape; Irina in Mokotow, Sebastian exiled, and Aniela smiling for no good purpose, while men like Frenzel lived as though the premiums would never stop coming in (an arrangement, admittedly that was now under close review). But the question that most troubled Anselm was how to understand Otto Brack. What was his relationship with evil?

‘Roza gave me a bit of a slap in the face when the Shoemaker was dying,’ he said, scratching the back of his head. ‘My entire outlook on Brack had been fixed by this inclination — and I can’t get rid of it, even now — that but for certain experiences, Brack would have been just like you and me. He might even be here in Larkwood, causing bite-size trouble. So I started building up this defence, before God and Man, about a damaged childhood, a limping boy who ended up in the hands of Strenk who’d only made things worse by forcing on the wrong sized boots. You know what I mean, it’s the stuff about screws, loose and tight. Damaged will, and all that. Father Nicodem was on board, too, but Roza wouldn’t have it, not completely’

‘What did she say?’

‘That he’d made a free choice. That damaged people can make undamaged choices, and I thought, blast it, you’re right, there’s a freedom in this, a total liberty, and thank God I’m not tied down to the effects of a cat jumping in my pram or someone’s messing around with a flat-head screwdriver. Roza says Brack did what he did because he wanted to. He was a vengeful man who didn’t want to leave his injuries behind. In Strenk he’d found himself another father who told a different kind of bedtime story, a grown-up one, and he wanted to listen so he could learn the words. Like John — like me, put in similar circumstances — he fancied his place in history.’

The Prior made a light cough, as he did when he wasn’t sure about a proposed change in the work rota. He unhooked his wire glasses and began fiddling with the paperclip repair and said, ‘Do you remember, once, you wondered if Brack was simply an evil man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, when you sat with him in the Warsaw Hall, what did you see?’

This was the nub of the problem for Anselm. It was why he’d been lifting up volume two in choir rather than volume three, pulling the red ribbon rather than the blue.

‘He spoke to me,’ began Anselm, scuffing his feet. ‘It was a sort of confession. He wanted to tell the whole world about his crimes, that he was proud of them, in a way for having grasped the nettle. And as I listened, I thought there’s room here for the cat and the screwdriver, sure… and I still do, despite Roza’s point that he’d made a lot of choices… but either way the picture of the man was uniformly dim.’

The Prior waited.

‘But as he was speaking I thought I saw someone else behind his words and actions… it was as though someone decent was trying to break out, to crack the hard surface of who he was. Whether the hardness was due to circumstance or choice didn’t really matter, there was some good in him. Even as he did something wrong he was trying to do something right. And I wondered if events had layers, and people had layers, and that evil might be the obliterating painting on top, but that in time, with the right kind of chemicals — something strong but not so strong to bleach the prosecutor’s hair — we might be able to get it off and find out whatever it is that still lies behind the original canvas with its unimaginable depth of colour.’

This refusal to believe that one layer saturated or transformed the other, his wondering if they could remain distinct was based not on an outbreak of pity, or a desire to reinstate the damaged childhood defence. Rather it was because as Brack had stumbled away he’d been like a man blinded by light. The truth, revealed, had had a coruscating effect on him. Out of his confusion he’d recalled another story, told by Mr Lasky recognising that his life should have been something noble and good.

‘I tried to reach him, just before he died,’ said Anselm. ‘He’d made the briefest of confessions, seconds before he was shot… that he’d always known where he was going and I threw him a few words, not my own, but something to hang on to. I don’t know if he caught hold. Something flared and then a light went out.’

‘This, then, is that the end of your concerns?’ asked the Prior. He bent his glasses into a workable shape and fixed them on to his enquiring face.

‘No,’ replied Anselm. ‘I’m ashamed that I want to look past his actions. I don’t know why I think it matters, but I do.’ Anselm dropped his voice as if he didn’t want to hear himself. ‘Brack, too, had an immensity to dwarf the stars. What happened to it? Could he throw away so much? Is it even possible? Is it even right for me to try and reclaim it on his behalf when, in his shallowness, he destroyed the immensity of others?’

The Prior was squinting now Bees were drifting round the clearing, in their own way rather busy ‘Anselm, do you remember when we were in the woodshed?’

He nodded.

‘I was working and you were watching? You wanted to understand everything.’

Anselm considered the first remark superfluous but he agreed in order to advance matters.

‘Well, I suspect you now understand far more than you want to, far more than is comfortable for any man: The Prior examined Anselm, aiming again. ‘But don’t change. Don’t lose heart. The hunger is part of who you are. It might enable you to help those who can’t be helped. People who deserve no help.’

‘What do you mean?’

The Prior stood up and settled a frown upon Anselm. He coughed lightly again, smuggling his arms into the sleeves of his habit.

‘You’ve always wanted to understand the criminal as much as you’ve longed to help the victim,’ he said, in a low, kindly voice. ‘That’s why I let you go to Warsaw It’s why I’ll always let you help people who’ve fallen between the cracks on the pavement to justice. You look beyond crime and punishment. You’re a lawyer in a habit, a man who asks different kinds of questions, who seeks different kinds of answers. And in that unusual position you’ll always hear things that others could not, should not and will not hear… sometimes from the victim, at others from the criminal, but always from someone who’d never say them to anybody else. You’ll see things, too, in the darkness: He regarded Anselm fondly as if he were somehow important, to him and to Larkwood. ‘This gives you a special kind of opportunity which only comes to those who, understanding that little bit more — who’ve seen behind the screen of guilt — can’t judge so easily and won’t condemn. It means every once in a blue moon you just might be able to say something of importance to the person who is rightly condemned… who can hear it, precisely because it comes from the mouth of someone who understands better than they judge. Maybe you helped Otto Brack, Anselm, when everyone else had failed. You were certainly his last chance.’ The Prior looked at his feet as if he’d drifted off a well-marked path. ‘There are lots of good people out there who defend the widow and the orphan, who bring killers to the courts of justice, and still others who speak up for the Good Thief. But I think there’s room for a troubled maverick who keeps an eye out for the bad one, the prodigal who never came home:

The Prior, having finished, seemed vaguely embarrassed. He nodded a few times and made a sort of wave, and then backed off towards the aspens. He passed through the low branches, head down, his scapular flapping in the breeze.

Anselm remained still for a while, astounded by the paradox. He’d gone to Warsaw as Roza’s public representative and returned as Brack’s private advocate. For the first time since he’d been at Larkwood the totality of his vocation had come together. The two parts of his life, past and present, converged, without the one eclipsing the other, bringing a new kind of focus. He looked around, seeing the enclosure with sharper eyes. He listened to the hum of activity; he smelled the crushed flowers and the flattened pasture. He was whole, though he hadn’t felt any previous fragmentation.

‘Thank you,’ he said, wondering to whom he was the more grateful: Roza for the light or Brack for the darkness. They were both curiously essential gifts to his self-understanding.

He rose, light-headed, resolved to tie up the one remaining loose end. Something from the grey region.