‘Did you read each and every page?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even the blue one?.’
Irina’s finger stopped dead. She slowly straightened her back, appraising Anselm with a surprising but unmistakable coldness.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even the blue one.’
‘But it was blank. There was nothing to read. But that didn’t render it meaningless, did it?’
The clock’s ticking seemed to grow louder.
‘I’m not Marek Frenzel,’ said Anselm. ‘Information isn’t my kind of money Usually, people give me secrets for nothing. They know I won’t spend them. But in this case I came across one by accident. Roza removed that piece of paper from the file — no one knows, except me and you. I’ve said nothing to the powers that be. But I suspect that it’s important… only I don’t know how’
Irina chewed her bottom lip, wondering what to do. Keeping a secret was part of her dignity, the last vestige of self respect: the woman who’d sold out to work amongst the information gatherers had discovered something by herself and she’d kept schtum. To give her a gentle push.’ Anselm said ‘Can’t you tell me about the infirmary?’
Irina’s finger began another circle on the table. ‘Is this why you came here?’
‘No. I came to say that I was profoundly sorry. I didn’t expect to ask you anything about Roza because I didn’t expect to trust you, but I do, entirely’
Watching the circle grow smaller, Irina said, ‘There was more than one infirmary in Mokotow. They were at different ends of the building. The first was for the sick, the second was for mothers.’ She nodded at her hand, assuming Anselm was unbelieving. ‘That’s right, in those days, during the Terror, some women gave birth in prison. They didn’t let you go just because you turned out to be pregnant. They kept you for as long as they wanted. I don’t know if Roza had a child or not. When I worked at the ministry I knew there were registers in the archive that had been brought over from Mokotow in the sixties, but I wasn’t allowed to see them… I was just one of the administrative staff and I didn’t have the clearance. ‘She laughed to herself, sadly ‘In a way, I didn’t care if Roza was one of those secret mothers or not. For me, it was just something important that I would never reveal to Mr Frenzel; and when I looked at Roza’s prison photographs, wondering why we were so different, I just thanked God that while I’d lost everything that Roza had preserved, I’d at least kept my child. The comparison was a kind of comfort… it made sense of my situation in life.’
A certain transparency comes with shared confidence. One can sense things that haven’t yet been said. And when Anselm rose to leave, he vaguely knew the answer to his own question. It had grown at the back of his mind during the soft lulls in conversation, when he’d pitied Irina Orlosky.
‘Who owns this building?’
‘Mr Frenzel.’
Always that ‘Mr’; that appellation controlee of respect.
‘He’s my landlord.” she continued, leading Anselm into the corridor. ‘The whole block has been sold to developers. Everything’s going to change for the better… They’re going to build a football stadium for the opening match of the European Cup.’ there’ll be a metro station for the fans, and an Olympic swimming complex… There’ll be lots of other changes and all for the better. Mr Frenzel calls it his favourite investment because he bought the place with his SB pension.’
She drew back the door chain but Anselm involuntarily paused, looking to his left. The son for whom so much had been sacrificed lay fast asleep or sedated on the floor, one arm around the cushion, his Kalashnikov by a plate of uneaten pizza crusts. He’d lost the battle. He was one of the nameless fallen, known only as Irina’s child. Her voice roused him.
‘Mr Frenzel didn’t take my identity,’ she said, evenly ‘I lost it on the day I entered the ministry building. I can’t get it back… I tried, and it didn’t work out. But if Colonel Brack stands trial… if I really have helped to bring about justice for Roza Mojeska then.’ who knows, maybe I’ll have the right to walk on the same side of the street. That would be nice.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Disgust and melancholy tailed Anselm through the dark, empty streets of Praga. History — always alive in this city — asserted itself once more. It was precisely because the Soviet Army had been camped here during the Uprising across the river that the buildings in Praga had remained standing. This was all that was left of the old Warsaw that Roza would have known. And it was here that Marek Frenzel, the cute investor in people’s mistakes, had made his fortune, bleeding profit from Stalin’s shameful failure to stop the slaughter. The irony was toxic. Hands in his habit pockets, Anselm dwelled upon another history of destruction, that of Roza, and the murmur of her uprising.
Irina may have been undecided, but Anselm was certain: Roza had given birth to a child in Mokotow He hadn’t considered the possibility because he hadn’t known what the blue paper might represent. But now he knew. And, thinking now of her statement, he understood at last why children lived and breathed on every page.
‘Even so, I should have seen it from the pavement,’ he said, out loud. ‘The writing was on the prison wall.’
He recalled the young woman in the Rolling Stones T-shirt. Her emotions had imploded, disappearing comprehensively with shocking speed. At the time he’d simply perceived the incongruity at the heart of Roza’s statement: there was no hint of visceral feeling on the page despite the traumatic events she recounted. Intellectual commitment to the Shoemaker, yes; but no fire in the belly; no stabbing passion.
‘I knew then that your emotional life had remained in Mokotow. And now I understand why you wanted to stay there. It was the place you last saw your child.’
There was another certainty — Anselm looked up to take his bearings, retracing his steps towards the river.’ noting the streets were less dirty the buildings smarter; that the tide of investors was on the way, bringing all sorts of changes for the good, Frenzel riding the wave like a sea slug on wreckage — Roza arrived at the Kolbas alone.
‘You let go,’ he declared, opening his hands with dismay ‘Why? Because you looked into the eyes of someone who, one day, would have to be told about their father; someone who could be spared unnecessary pain. This is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? It’s always about avoiding suffering. Your child’s, Kaminsky’s.’ the Church’s.’ anyone’s, but never yours. You just accept it, for them.’
Roza had accepted adoption. She’d let her child out of prison. She’d let another family take her place: a better, simpler, happier family where people laughed and cried for all the usual reasons, where no one spoke of torture, martyrdom and the magnitude of the Shoemaker. But Roza had still made a big mistake, because shielding other people from suffering isn’t always possible. It’s not always a good idea. Which is why her decision to see Brack in court had become her last obsession.
‘You realised what had always been obvious,’ said Anselm, compassionately, ‘easily missed because you were guided by love; you saw, at last, that you had a debt to your child greater than your loyalty to the Shoemaker and the Church, greater than the claims of any political cause or institution. You faced what you’d run away from; the obligation to bring your husband’s killer to justice, in the name of your child, even if that child never knew it.’
He passed a brooding, abandoned factory, its windows sealed with breeze blocks; he nipped through an arch adjacent to a substantial residence that had been halved, the outline of floors and rooms like scars on the wall, its doorways bricked up. Rotten fruit lay on the pavement and strips of white plastic banding curled up in the gutter. A cheap market had been and gone. The warm smell of decay entered Anselm’s lungs. He increased his speed, trying to escape the sudden recrudescence of the Dentist.
A chess match came to mind.
Anselm had been toying with an unusual sacrifice: a queen for a pawn — something to shock and disturb his abstracted opponent.