Chapter Five

As the taxi pulled away Roza muttered, ‘Powazki.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘The cemetery.’

The driver nodded and took her to the one place that haunted Roza more than the prison. She hadn’t passed through its gates since the evening of her arrest in 1982.

Roza faltered down a darkening lane.

On either side carved figures with bent heads grieved eternally A few candles flickered behind coloured glass. Vases with flowers stood propped by inscriptions. Roza’s hand slipped into her pocket and reached for the ball of crumpled blue paper… but then she remembered: she’d got rid of it, just like the guards got rid of Pavel’s body.

Her husband had no grave. Roza didn’t know what had happened to his corpse. Rumour had it that some of those who’d been shot in Mokotow were thrown into the back of a truck and taken to building sites or the main rubbish dump in Sluzewiec; others were tipped into empty cement sacks and buried without markers in an open field. In her waking dreams, Roza had stormed into a Ministerial office or she’d knocked timidly at the door of some underling. She’d screamed and begged and whimpered and pleaded. Where is he? Where have you put him? All to the air; no one listening, save her conscience.

Roza turned right.

Another man had been shot, too. Roza didn’t even know his name. She’d just seen him being dragged along the floor of the cellar, his two bare feet, angled in, broken or limp. Who was he? Who mourned him? What had happened to his body? Did he lie with Pavel in the foundations of an office block?

Awful questions. Questions that trailed you with a low whine.

Roza turned left.

Time was not a healer. Year after year Roza’s attention would fasten on to the back of someone’s head — the curls at the nape of the neck — and she’d wonder, insanely if it might be Pavel, expecting some magic to have occurred, even though she’d seen his broken face and heard the kick of the gun. Then, as if waking, she’d grasp that he was dead, and off she’d go to that imagined door in the Ministry, full of hell or timidity. It was an endless cycle, rolling across the sand.

Don’t leave us with his story.

Sebastian had brought the law close to Roza and she hadn’t seen it coming. Yes, he’d said he was a lawyer, and he’d pleaded with her about forgotten crimes, but to have him in her flat, to deflect his questions and divert his hopes, had gradually made the law come to life. It was there, dressed in a blue linen jacket with silver buttons. He’d made her feel afresh the pain of justice denied. Year on year Roza had read of men convicted of monstrous crimes against women and children. She’d seen photographs of judges and barristers in their robes, knowing that they would never sit to consider the case against Otto Brack. And now here was a lawyer who wanted to put Brack in a courtroom.

Don’t leave us with his story.

Roza turned right again and came, finally, to a large granite monument. It was the grave of Boleslaw Prus, the writer. This was where she’d been arrested. The light was fading, so she couldn’t quite make out the girl, carved in relief, reaching up to the inscription. But she knew the figure well enough: the thin legs, the pretty dress and the smart shoes. She’d always loved the little buckles by the ankles. Though she was the grey of stone, Roza had seen different colours, materials and textures, changing them every time she came.

You owe it to the children you might have had.

What a devastating phrase.

Speak to the informer.

How could she?

You might as well, because one day someone else will do just that

… someone cleverer than me.

Sebastian’s throwaway remark had nearly knocked Roza off her feet. He was right. The informer’s days of quiet obscurity were coming to an end. It was only a matter of time. Others would come to pore over the archives. And that changed everything for Roza. Why wait until the informer was shattered by exposure? She could get there beforehand and

Give them another reason for living.

Roza clung to herself, feeling cold and lonely All around stray lights flickered like scared moths trapped in a jar. A breeze unsettled the trees. Throughout, Sebastian’s voice repeated that final beguiling command. After a while Roza ceased to follow the words. She held her breath. She was staring at a troubled ghost. He was there, clothed in shadows before her eyes, offering to help while pleading his innocence.

Roza could barely sleep. An overwhelming sense of urgency came crashing into the night hours, sweeping aside the decades of submission, the patient acceptance of defeat. With each passing minute her imagination grew bolder, her resolve all the more firm. By the time dawn light filtered through the worn bedroom curtains she’d devised a simple plan to bring Otto Brack to court. Ironically, it involved handing over all the names she’d refused to disclose when in Mokotow But that time had come. They were all safe, now The epoch of fear and secrets was almost over.

For three days she paced round Warsaw, waiting for the transcript of her narrative to arrive from the IPN. When the post came, on the fourth day, she set to work. First, she carefully checked that the text presented a balanced picture of her life between 1951 and 1982. Second, with a red pen, she inserted all the names she’d left out while making the recording. Third, with a black pen, she deleted convoluted expressions, repetitions and digressions. The result was a crafted manuscript that suited her newfound purpose — something the Shoemaker would have been proud of. Every word had its place. They presented a kind of landscape ordered by signposts, only the most important indicator was missing, its absence serving to point without pointing, identifying the informer without a trace of condemnation. When she’d finished she went straight to the IPN and gave it to Sebastian.

‘I’ve changed my testimony,’ she said quickly standing in the entrance hall. ‘Could you type it up, please?’

‘Sure.’

‘Now, while I’m waiting.’

‘Consider it done.’

Roza stepped outside to pace some more, refusing the offer of coffee, tea or Bison Grass. After what seemed an age, Sebastian returned with a clean copy in a brown envelope.

‘Changed your mind, as well?’ he quipped, seriously.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to do?’

A phrase of the Shoemaker’s came to mind. ‘Raise the dead and shatter the illusions of many’

‘Okay sounds reasonably apocalyptic. That’s fine. And in the meantime, what do you expect from me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Not fine. Tell me what you’re up to.’

She shook her head with approbation. ‘You’d never have survived the fifties. You ask far too many questions.’

With that judgement, she left him bewildered by the leaning tree. On returning home she rang her old friend Magda Samovitz in England, a woman who’d survived the Nazi holocaust only to be hounded out of Warsaw by a Communist pogrom in 1969. Magda had bought a ticket to a new life. For years she’d been sending Roza postcards of Trafalgar Square which bore one simple message: ‘Come and feed the pigeons’. That time, too, had finally arrived.

By the evening of the next day Roza had bought her flight and packed her bags. There was no need for a phrase book. She’d been learning English since 1989. It had been a hobby of sorts. Twenty-four hours later Roza was in the upstairs box bedroom of Magda’s Georgian house in Stockwell, south London, lamenting the absence of a phrase book that would have helped an elderly dissident cope with a different kind of Underground. Once again she couldn’t sleep. Her mind whirred like the air vent back in Warsaw.

Sebastian had been right about something else. He’d seen something obvious to which Roza had been blind; blind because, as a matter of principle, she’d excluded the possibility from the outset. The last thing that Brack expected was that Roza would arrange to meet the informer. That she’d sit down at their table. That the betrayer and the betrayed would somehow find the courage to talk together, deeply of all that lay hidden. That Roza would open up the possibility — for the informer — of another, more authentic existence, a public and private identity based on the truth. This was the landscape that lay beyond Brack’s imagination: that his informer would stomach disclosure of the past and face the dread of an uncharted future. And that defined Roza’s task: to persuade the informer that even now after all these years, the pain of a life in the open was preferable to a numbed existence in the dark.

There was, however, one remaining catch. A relatively large one, too.

There could be no forced entry. The door had to be left unlocked from the inside. Roza would have it no other way. She needed an invitation to enter and sit down, her host knowing full well that the unexpected guest intended to talk about their mutual relationship with Otto Brack. It was a great gamble with great risks… but if this, Roza’s stratagem, worked, Brack would be left defenceless. Once the informer accepted exposure, Roza would be free to accuse her husband’s killer.

Roza switched off her bedroom light, her thoughts and prayers resting with a man she’d first met in 1982. He’d found her through the distribution chain of Freedom and Independence. She’d thought of him looking at the monument to Prus — they’d met there countless times. He’d been a romantic. An outsider. An Englishman of ancient courtesies. He’d been kicked out of the country for getting too close to the fire. His name was John Fielding, a British journalist who’d longed to find the Shoemaker.

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