‘Whose?’
‘Theirs.’
It was a word that seemed to point. He’d identified the opposition en masse. Back then, at the beginning, the ideological conflict had been acute, cleaner, and simpler. Some people’s minds were for the taking. The country had been devastated. Something new had to be built, both psychologically and materially It was a terrible, tragic fresh start. And it was important to get the thinking right for this new purpose and the new future. It was, in fact, an opportunity for everyone to start again. But it was persuasion against imposition; words against violence. The intellectuals known to Father Kaminsky had hoped to infiltrate the system itself and lure away its agents with ideas, with arguments… to poison the entire edifice of oppression by injecting free-flowing words into its bloodstream.
‘You see, we all believed passionately that ideas matter,’ said Father Kaminsky with an old undying fervour. ‘That ideas, properly worked out, bring peace, prosperity, equality of opportunity, justice
… that if we could only get them into the minds of the jailors, then they’d find it harder to turn the key that eventually — maybe not in our lifetimes, but in generations hence — the words would do their work.’
‘And the money?’ asked Anselm, weakly.
‘Paper and ink. A good education doesn’t come cheap. We thought they ought at least to pay the running costs.’
The scale of Anselm’s misconstruction was colossal. Father Kaminsky’s innocence completely demolished his understanding of Brack’s scheme and a good half of Roza’s presumed motivation. All that remained was the vindication of her child. He listened with a kind of humility, embarrassed that he’d condemned a man who’d risked so much for so long.
‘In those days, my handler was a man called Strenk,’ said Father Kaminsky ‘A hardliner with a mind dead to any feeling. Like so many of his kind, he’d separated thought and emotion. All torturers do that. It’s how they make sense of wading in blood, doing what ordinary folk could never stomach; it’s how they step back into ordinary life thinking they’re heroes.’
A few years later Brack took over. Strenk and Brack were like father and son, pupil and master and Brack was being given a chance to show he could drive the car on his own, that he could work the gears.
‘I was in my forties then, and Brack, well, I’d say his mid-twenties.’ A white hand with knotted veins rose to his mouth, touching his pale bottom lip. ‘I remember when I saw him first… this young man, this… apprentice. He was being schooled. They were forming him into their own kind. For a long time I just looked at him… at his eyes, his mouth… wondering what else he might have done with his life, other than this with them.’ The old priest’s gaping eyes burned with compassion. He spoke slowly nodding out the words. ‘He was obsessed with the Shoemaker. He wasn’t trying to please. There was something personal to his drive.’
Father Kaminsky’s meetings were, of course, limited to the report of conversations with suspected persons, but Brack never failed to remind him that he was to keep his ear to the ground, that if he heard one word about the Shoemaker he was to let him know.
‘He was sullen and angry,’ said the old priest, abstractedly ‘My old friend Jozef Lasky used to say “Harm the boy you harm the man and Otto Brack was a man with deep wounds. Whoever was responsible carries a heavy burden… for who Brack became and for what he did.’ His face became eerily still; even his eyes ceased their slow blinking. ‘Have some panettone,’ he resumed, quietly ‘It’s the real thing. From Milan.’
A train rushed along the line, shaking the window in its frame. Anselm found his arms were folded tight as if he were cold. He’d been spellbound by the confused tussle between judgement and mercy.
‘In fifty-one Pavel told me he’d broken a rule.’ Father Kaminsky had stepped away from the first meeting with Brack. His hands became lively on his lap. ‘He’d met a stranger and brought them into the running of the operation. He wouldn’t tell me who it was and I didn’t want to know He was innocent, you see. Impulsive. He was too… good for the dirty kind of fight we were in. He was drawn to the brightness of an ordinary tomorrow I remember now, he said, “A friend is someone who was once a stranger”. What could I do? What could I say? I said we had to find a sleeper, and that’s when I found out he’d broken another rule: he’d got married. I could have wept. Marriage is trust, and trust, in our game, was a weakness. And so I met Roza. She was to be the sleeper, he said. I could have wept again.’
He told Pavel to give her his ring. It’s the worst thing he’d ever said, but Father Kaminsky had an awful foreboding that something was about to go wrong. That Pavel would go out one night and she’d never see him again; that she’d be left with nothing… sacred. Because Pavel had opened the door to someone who hadn’t been picked; he’d shaken the hand of someone who wanted to meet the Shoemaker; he’d made a Friend out of a Stranger.
He’d trusted, thought Anselm, with feeling. He’d wanted to walk in an open field without walls and fences; he’d longed to stroll beneath an open sky without having to look where he was going. Roza had made an identical mistake.
‘The first I knew about the arrests was from Brack.’ Father Kaminsky’s cheeks were nicked here and there from clumsy shaving; a hand touched the healing cuts. ‘He was spitting rage… Pavel had set up a dummy meeting so when Brack moved in, he only caught Pavel and Stefan. Pavel had tried to patch up his mistakes. He’d tested the trust of the stranger. And he paid for it.’
Willingly as did Roza, thought Anselm. He thought of the figure in hiding for whom the sacrifice had been made; this man of vision and determination, kept safe by the dedication of his Friends. How did he bear the outcome?
‘He didn’t.’ Father Kaminsky’s head was shaking slowly right and left, his voice hoarse. ‘He lost the ability to speak. He couldn’t write a single line. Freedom and Independence died with those two young men.
Father Kaminsky was broken, too. He felt responsible because he hadn’t been put against the wall. This is what happens with deep friendship. Everything is shared. And he wanted to share death. But it wasn’t his task, his duty. His job was to survive. But how could he go on? It was as though the lights had gone out in his life. Doggedly he’d carried on working with the SB. He’d ‘informed’, diligently passing on the ideas of a new generation of intellectuals who’d tired of the broken promises for change. This had been his duty, and the reason for being alive: whoever had read those files had received messages of hope. The money? Given to the families of those imprisoned for what they believed.
‘Then, in nineteen eighty-two, Roza came back.’ Father Kaminsky’s wide eyes and open mouth showed the surprise had never faded. ‘I hadn’t seen her for thirty years, and here she was, strong and sure and… forgiving. She had a message for the Shoemaker from the widow of a Friend. The fight goes on, she insisted. Tell him he has no choice, she said; tell him the choice has already been made:
Father Kaminsky looked outside, turning away from remembered emotion. He stayed like that as if waiting for his train to arrive; waiting for the guard to carry his bags and find his seat; waiting for his big trip over the bridge.
Anselm knew the rest: it was a matter of history repeating itself Roza had made the same momentous blunder as Pavel. Eventually they’d both tired of deceit and caution, suspicion and doubt. They’d decided to live as human beings. They’d chosen to live by trust. They’d said, ‘Yes’ when they should have said, ‘No’.
‘When Brack saw me in the cemetery, he knew I was linked to Roza,’ said Father Kaminsky with the look of a man tired of delays.
Anselm was quizzical. It was All Souls. He was a priest. Being there had an innocent explanation.
‘One gesture.’ Father Kaminsky smiled, the jagged cracks in his skin turning supple. ‘After Roza was taken away I turned round and looked… and he saw the expression on my face. He saw how much I cared. The scales in his eyes came crashing down — scales carefully laid one upon the other for decades until he was blind — and I said, “Join us, won’t you? We’re going to win, eventually”, and he came right up close — ’ the old man leaned forward, aping the disbelief and confusion in Brack’s face, his thin arms rigid on the arms of his wheelchair — ‘and he replied, as if he were mourning, “I know you are. But don’t you see? Neither of us will join the celebrations.”‘