‘But there’s a bright side, at least for me,’ confessed Anselm. ‘I wanted to help years ago, do you remember, when you came to stay at Larkwood after the accident? I’d planned to dish out some of the stuff I’d read in books or heard in the Chapter Room… anything that might help you deal with your blindness. Things didn’t quite work out that way Which is good, in retrospect, because I had nothing of my own to offer.’
‘The time wasn’t right, Anselm.’
‘I know’
‘But it is now.’
The plane nosed into the mist. Down below, buildings climbed in a kind of rush towards the sky proud and victorious, as if defying the memory of so much devastation. Glass, chrome and steel glinted amongst the flanks of brick and concrete. Leaning on the window, however, Anselm let his mind scurry back to a sort of forbidden universe.
While throwing stones by the lake and sipping coffee at the airport bar, his thoughts — at intervals — had run wild, and he’d been obliged to haul them into line, ashamed of their force and direction. Despite the Prior’s warnings — and like a man drawn to the thrill of a street fight — Anselm was intrigued by Otto Brack and his dangerous world. He appeared to be a man beyond redemption. Anselm wanted to know how he’d got there and why What could have happened in his life that had taught him to use good for evil? What was his story, once the words had been peeled back? The questions seemed indecent, unseemly given the depravity of his actions. But Anselm still wanted to know He reproved himself, closing an eye to the absence of any real conviction.
On leaving Warsaw’s airport, a garrulous taxi driver — singing more than talking, and not requiring any reciprocal commitment — took Anselm to the Warsaw Hilton, a towering edifice devoted to contemporary extravagance and the acute embarrassment of mendicant travellers compelled by circumstance to stay there. The appointment of his room was lavish: burgundy covers, cream sheets and heavy wood furnishings. Vaguely disorientated, he unpacked his bag and placed two battered books on a large desk near a floor-to-ceiling window.
As to the purpose of his stay, John had organised everything. A faxed application to view the Polana file had been processed by return and an appointment made for Anselm to consult its contents. He was expected at ten the following morning at the IPN building, another modern tower whose external lights clung to the walls like limpet mines, ready to explode if anyone’s secret history bumped against them. Anselm could see them now, a mere stone’s throw away resolute against a waning skyline. With a sigh, he sat down, reaching for one of the books: his Psalter, given to him by Sylvester on his first day at the monastery. Recalling the Prior’s injunction to keep step with Larkwood’s rhythms, he mouthed the words for Compline… but found himself whispering questions — of all people — to John’s absent mother. Where did you go? She, too, had a story to tell, beginning with her name. On closing the cover and formally entering his Great Silence, Anselm was instantly sidetracked. Instead of turning off the light and choosing which of the five pillows would be his solace and comfort, he opted for the second volume on the table.
‘It’s out of date,’ John had said, at the Departure Gate, another match between his teeth, ‘but the important stuff never changes.’
Anselm flicked through the guidebook as if it might contain a clue to the mystery of Otto Brack’s character. All at once he stopped, warmed by a sudden melancholy: he’d landed on a passage underlined in pencil… it was a schoolboy code linking numbers to the alphabet, the means by which Anselm and John had noted timings for a raid on the top floor dormitory. Underlined words had been thrown in to distract imagined enemies; it was only the selected letters that had mattered. Anselm smiled. It was as though John, boy and man, had come with him to Warsaw. He studied the paragraph closely looking for more high mischief. EEHGF. 55876.
None the wiser, Anselm gazed over a twinkling, sleepless Warsaw Numberless white and yellow stars seemed to have fallen from the sky, jostling for space on the ground, colliding and blending in the darkness. The IPN building stood tall, still and curiously alone, like a gatecrasher at a cocktail party, someone who’d spoiled the fun with talk of Crime and Punishment. Somewhere inside its walls lay the file on the Shoemaker. Apparently it contained a copy of Roza’s interrogations, carried out during the Stalinist Terror.
Anselm wondered what they’d done to her.
Part Three
Chapter Twelve
A guard kicked away the low stool. Roza collapsed to one side, but the guard caught her by the hair. Swung to her feet, she was thrown from the interrogation room into the corridor of low, yellow light. Another guard appeared walking lazily his dull boots sagging like half fallen socks. Roza backed against the wall, facing the open door. Major Strenk was troubled, examining a fish hook under the glare of a desk lamp. Looking up, as if he’d just remembered something, he nodded at Lieutenant Brack who’d been sitting in the corner.
‘I warned you, Roza,’ said Brack, after carefully shutting the door. ‘You should have listened to me in the sewers.
He gave a nod, just like Major Strenk’s, and the guards dragged Roza, feet trailing, to an iron staircase at the end of the corridor. Three floors down they came to a wet, freezing cellar, the air misting with the rush of their gasps and panting. Ahead, to the left, was a grey iron door.
‘I warned you Roza,’ he said, flicking keys on a big ring. He turned his soured face on to hers. His hair was shaved all around, leaving a high crown of copper metallic bristles. ‘You should have listened.’
He yanked open the door and the guards, slipping and grunting, dragged Roza into a low, dripping room. A single bulb flickered like a fading life. Thick pipes ran the length of the ceiling, water drizzling from bandaged cracks and joints. Heavy globules dripped from a rusty central spout. Beneath it was an open cage. The guards kicked and shoved and then locked her in.
‘I warned you in the sewers, Roza,’ said Brack, as if all this were her fault.
The room became silent, except for the patter of splashing. Suddenly, the twitching light went out. Roza stared at the afterglow, the fast-fading sallow bulb on the wall of her mind. She found a word, but it came as a whisper: ‘Help…’
And then the pipes shuddered and the water exploded above her head.
Roza did not know whether it was night or day when the interrogation began again. She hadn’t been conscious when they took her from the cage. She’d opened her eyes to find herself strapped to a chair by a belt. On seeing her move, the watching guard had stubbed out his cigarette and brought Roza back to Major Strenk and the footstool. Otto was sitting in the corner.
‘Name?’
‘Roza Mojeska… you know already, I’m-’
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-two.’
She breathed out the answers, and Major Strenk wrote them down with a pencil. It had been the same with every interrogation since her arrest six weeks previously Always beginning again as if nothing had gone before. The same wearing questions with a few afterthoughts. Only this last time they’d led to the cage, a first departure from the routine.
‘You say you’re an orphan?’ Major Strenk spoke as if he’d lifted the lid of a dustbin.
‘Yes.’
‘From birth?’ This was an afterthought.
‘Yes.’
‘Misfortune or abandonment?’
‘I don’t know’
‘Do you know anything about your parents?’ His tone of disgust suggested she might not, in fact, have any.
‘No. I like to think that-’
Major Strenk seemed to lower the lid. He’d smelled enough. Dutifully, he went back to work, wanting — again — the names of teachers, staff and all the other children at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. He listened, yawning, checking the replies against his existing list. Not entirely satisfied, he moved on to slowly cover the German Occupation seeking, as ever, names along the way For names gave associations. Associations gave suspects. And suspects were suspect. At no point throughout this quest for other degenerates did Roza so much as glance at Otto, who was watching intently from the corner. She simply left him out of the reckoning, though he too had been at Saint Justyn’s, in hiding during the war. He’d turned up in l943. They’d met in the attic by a window Roza just kept her eyes firmly, perhaps too firmly, upon Major Strenk, recounting her early life as if Otto had never been there. It was a kind of inverted Russian roulette: Otto was taunting her, daring her to pull the trigger and mention his name; and she refused each time, not to save him, but to save herself, for she’d settled on a way to survive this measured annihilation of her humanity.