‘None,’ I replied.
He leaned back and opened the desk drawer. Looking inside, angling his head, he muttered.’
‘If you’d only answered that question all those years ago, then everything would have been so different. For both of us.’
He seemed to be blaming me for what he had done.
With his head still bent, he said.’
‘I wanted you, this time… as much as the Shoemaker. There’s something I think you ought to know’
He slid the drawer back and forth.
‘Do you remember you once said there’ll be laws one day to get at people like me?’ He glanced up, just to make sure I’d heard him.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That day will come.
‘I think it will, too,’ he said, ‘given how the Party has messed up everything. But that doesn’t change a thing for you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘You called it justice,’ he said, dropping his gaze into the drawer again. ‘You need to understand that you won’t be getting any’
I stared at him, waiting.
‘Justice,’ he said, quietly, drawing out the word. ‘You won’t be getting any’
I stood up, feeling so much bigger than him, his system, his prison, and I said so, but he shut me up with a small gesture… a closing of the thumb and third finger, like when you extinguish a candle. I sat down, suddenly obedient.
‘Have you any idea who betrayed you?’ he asked, smiling.
‘No,’ I replied.
He took a passport out of his coat pocket and slid it across the table.
‘I’ve always given you a choice, Roza,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been fair. I’ve always let you pick the consequences of your actions. So, here’s another choice: if you ever want to bring me to court, then bear this in mind — I don’t want to speak on my own behalf. I’ll rely on my informer, and they can tell the judge what I did to defend my country from agitators and parasites. How, together, we fought and lost. I’ll stand up and be counted, Roza, but not on my own.
And then he told me the name and what they’d been doing for years on end. That was all he had to do. He knew I’d never want to see their story spread all over the papers. That’s when I noticed he’d dressed for the occasion; he’d shaved, combed his hair… for this moment with me in Mokotow Without waiting for a reply, he slowly shut the drawer and walked out of the room, not even bothering to close to the door.
I went home, leaving the passport on the desk. That was his one act of mercy — a chance to get away from where my life had fallen apart. To start another in the West. This was his moment of complete triumph. He knew I wouldn’t take it, because we both knew he’d locked me in Mokotow for ever. He’d even left me with the key. I hold it still, in my hand.
END OF TRANSCRIPTION (4h. 56)
Chapter Thirty
The Polana file named SABINA as Father Nicodem Kaminsky According to his ‘Statement of Intent’, written in 1949 and carefully filed away in the dossier bearing his chosen code-name, he’d been a dedicated communist since reading the Manifesto of Marx and Engels, considering its trenchant paragraphs to be a ‘watershed document in the history of social, political and economic thinking’. Fair enough, thought Anselm; but he’d volunteered his services to the organs of State Security. He’d wanted to do his bit in the struggle between the age-old servants of Capital and the newly woken brotherhood of oppressed Labour. He’d counted the cost of losing; and a price was to be paid for the winning.
‘He wrote it with his own hand,’ observed Anselm, recalling the precise signature. ‘He chose his own words. He knew what securing the win would involve.’
‘And he lost.” observed Sebastian, drily ‘Now he picks up the tab:
Sebastian was lodged at his cramped desk.’ slowly turning the pages of an orange folder. Stripped of their plastic sacks, SABINA’s massive output lay on the floor like columns of paving stones in a builder’s yard. For an hour and a half Sebastian had been leafing through selected volumes, murmuring to himself, occasionally swearing under his breath. Legs crossed in an armchair, Anselm had reviewed Roza’s statement, his gaze shifting on occasion to the night sky and the fallen stars on the streets below.
‘And to think… he’s one of my lot, a Gilbertine,’ said Anselm, ruefully. ‘Where are the Jesuits when you need them?’
Father Kaminsky’s short manifesto revealed that the priest had left his monastery before the war and never returned. His political convictions would not sanction a ‘self-interested’ withdrawal from the crisis. The forging of a new future, built on the disillusionment of yesterday, required ‘uncompromising engagement with the times’. He had committed himself to social action within the concrete circumstances of history.
Anselm berated himself for not having recognised Roza’s guiding hint, now seen as glaring and underlined in red pen. Only once in her entire statement did she explicitly refer to the activity of informers: she’d identified those men of God who’d become men of Brack. And if that wasn’t enough, Anselm’s own deconstruction of Roza’s text had drawn a bright yellow highlighter over the priest’s name. He’d topped the poll of references, in a document crafted to lead its reader to one specific individual.
‘He’s the last person she’d have suspected,’ said Anselm, talking to himself. ‘Why? Because she and her husband had entrusted him with their lives. He’s the last person she’d want to see exposed. Why? Because a bombshell would hit the arches of Saint Klement’s and every other church in the country; because the Shoemaker would find out that his closest confidant had betrayed him from the outset; because Roza was worried that Kaminsky might choose to drown himself rather than face the jeering in the street.’
Sebastian turned a page. One finger moved slowly down a margin.
‘I can imagine Kaminsky squaring historical materialism with his belief in God.” continued Anselm, as if delivering judgment in the Court of Appeal, ‘and I can accept that he dreamed a costly dream, but the sand in the gears is capital. He got paid — ’ at the back of an expenses file Sebastian had found an account of monthly instalments, running, without interruption, between 1949 and 1982 — ‘so what was his motive? The money or the dream? And who could dream dreams after Stalin?.’
Sebastian looked up. ‘Sorry?’
‘Oh nothing, just the idle thoughts of the disenchanted: Anselm dropped Roza’s statement on the floor by his side and knitted his fingers on his chest. ‘Tell me what you’ve learned about my confrere. Since I’m going to wrestle with his conscience I’ll need to know what he’s done, and why.’
Sebastian closed a file, pushing it away as though he’d tasted foreign food. He hadn’t enjoyed himself.
‘Brack became his handler in nineteen fifty,’ said Sebastian, drawing a hand through his tangled hair. He swung round, crossing his feet on the edge of his desk. ‘They met every month for three decades. He informed on friends, associates, priests, bishops, two cardinals and a shooting gallery of dissident thinkers. He moved around, did Kaminsky In high places and low And he told Brack everything he heard. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
The overall effect, laughed Sebastian, mordantly, was a kind of multi-volume encyclopaedia on opposition thinking. Quite apart from entries revealing the informed reflections of ‘ordinary’ citizens.’ the views of almost every major dissident intellectual in Warsaw were represented in the files. Their arguments, neatly laid out and persuasively presented, were frequently penned in Father Kaminsky’s elegant script. Sometimes he’d obtained a Samizdat draft from the author’s own hand, with key passages underlined in red. It’s a howling irony: the SB preserved for posterity the very ideas that had been banned by the Party They’d built up an archive of the books the censor would never have printed. Come on, you’ve got to laugh.
Anselm tried and failed. ‘I’m troubled.’