Of course they wouldn’t, thought Anselm. Brack had told Frenzel to name Father Kaminsky as his agent: to link him to a betrayal he could never explain away contaminating all the SABINA files in the SB archive. There and then, in the cemetery, he’d planned for Father Kaminsky’s future condemnation. He’d seen everything with frightening clarity and staggering speed.
They drank tea, Anselm eating the panettone, the old man struggling with the nougat. There used to be a wonderful shop in the Jewish Quarter that made poppyseed cakes bigger than the ones on the plate. A wall had been built twenty feet high. Children were smuggled out and hidden in homes and institutions. Father Kaminsky’s remembrances began to scatter. He moved back and forth in time, ‘they’ variously being the Nazis, the Soviets and the City Council. Brushing crumbs off his lap, he said, suddenly ‘Whoever betrayed Roza is trapped:
Anselm looked over the rim of his teacup.
‘That’s how Brack works. It’s how they made him.’
Anselm didn’t move.
‘Whoever it might be is trapped by their past.’ The old man was nodding his words again. ‘He did it to Roza and he did it to me. When you find them, don’t be too harsh:
The curate brought Anselm to the front door, wanting to know if everything had gone well. The exclusion was still eating away at his curiosity. He was staying with an unconfirmed legend, a man of rumour who wouldn’t tell any tales.
‘What did he say about his childhood?’ asked Anselm, gripping the Sun under one arm while he’d buttoned up his coat. Apparently the sports pages were muscular and without a trace of ambiguity; as for the leader page…
‘Not much, frankly’ The curate made a clucking noise, going over the dross. ‘Just that he’d been happy.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
John didn’t like the Dentist. He’d expected an ascetic, an intellectual with tortured eyes, one of the brains in the SB, whereas he’d been… what? Unconsciously vulgar? He’d wanted to impress, sporting handmade shoes and a stock-broker’s coat from Aquascutum. There’d been something wretched and lazy about his way of walking, as if he’d felt there wasn’t much point to sorting out the mess; as if there wasn’t much point to anything. The Dentist wasn’t what he’d seemed.
John’s shaking hand eventually got the key in the hole. The door yielded and he stepped into the flickering shadows of his flat. A projector clattered on the dining table, a roll of film unwinding from one spool to another. Images of tanks trundled across a sheet pinned to the wall. Soldiers tramped through the snow.
‘You’re late.’ Celina was hunched in the darkness, bent over a writing pad. Her hair was crazy, clipped back. Her glasses caught the sharp light. She was a wild cat in a wild night. John could just see the pencil moving. ‘What kept you? I’ve been worried.’
Do I love her? Or is it what she means to me? What she represents? Am I using her?
He drew back a chair and sat down, the projector whirring between them. ‘I got held up with a story.’
‘It’s always a story’
‘Yep, my life’s a story.’
She was everything he needed. A real dissident. Her father had been a mover in the Club of the Crooked Circle, a shaker in the Band of Vagabonds. He’d been a man of secret societies. An uncle on some side had rotted in a Tsarist prison. An aunt had been deported to Siberia and she’d died walking back. Celina’s mother had dumped the father because he wouldn’t swallow official ideology. She’d wanted the special hampers that came at Christmas for those who towed the line. She’d found a cleaner, sharper mind with access to the special shops where scarce goods could be bought at low prices. They were a family ripped apart by principle.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry. What are you doing?’
‘I’ve got a meeting with the censor tomorrow I’m cutting out the best bits.’
Celina was the non-conformist renegade daughter, kicked out of school and educated underground. She dressed outside known fashion trends. Torn jeans, bright coloured socks, beads and bangles, careless scarves, huge shapeless jumpers. No makeup. Oval, dark framed glasses, windows on to a delicate uncompromising intelligence. She walked on the other side of any drawn line.
‘I’m starving,’ she said, twisting the knob. The riot police with their floppy long white truncheons vanished, swamped in darkness. Celina’s chair creaked; she was leaning back, straining for the light switch. Snap. The white sheet appeared, pinned to the wall and hanging like a shroud.
‘What happened?’ She was standing up, a hand over her mouth, her dyed hair in ordinary disarray Her tone was shocked and quiet. Moving round the table, keeping her hands on its edge, she whispered, ‘What story was this? What happened?’
Do I love you? Is it those untied laces? The jumper with holes? Or is it your past? The allure of the heretic?
‘Tell me what they did?’ She was on her knees, holding his hands. Her nails were painted different colours. There was no pattern or sequence. One of them had minuscule blue dots. She must have used the single hair of a paint brush.
Is there any love in this? Or is it the romance of straying near the fire that burns around your feet? The fire you stoke and bank, mocking their norms and laws and incantations?
‘John, speak to me.
Am I using you to redeem the shame of my past?
Her hand was stroking his swollen jaw Horrified, she touched the dried blood on his lip. John sank off the chair on to his knees and pushed his hands into her tangled hair. His mind and body lost all individuation. He reached out, into the flames, wanting to get inside her skin and bones, her difference, her purity.
He told her he’d been at the Powazki Cemetery when someone got arrested. He’d tried to capture the moment on film and then the brawn had burst out of nowhere. It made you think. ‘They might just be everywhere, do you know what I mean?’ Celina nodded. Maybe they were, she said. Maybe we can’t breathe any air but theirs. They breathe it out, we breathe it in. They’re in our bodies. Their atoms mingle with ours, making new gases and compounds. There’s no escape. They haunt graveyards and kitchens, breathing out their sickness. They climb into your bed and reach over to turn out the light. She spoke with immense disgust, counting up the planned cuts to her film: the removal of scenes she knew the censor wouldn’t like; images of the riot police in action. The ZOMOS, Caesar’s Praetorians.
They stayed up all night watching images flicker across the shroud. After breakfast Celina went to her meeting with the censor, John went to the woman who knew the Dentist.
John knocked. No reply He knocked again. He tried the handle. The door gave way.
Roza was sitting on a dining room chair. She’d pulled it back and sat down without drawing herself towards the table. It made it look as if she were stranded, facing nowhere. She still had her coat and hat on. She wore light blue woollen gloves, the only colour of substance in the room. Her hands were on her knees. John’s eyes shifted to an empty bookcase in one corner, to a drab-looking canape that hugged a wall, to an armchair with the appeal of an unwanted visitor. There wasn’t much else… a lamp stand holding a washed out shade, tassels dangling. John looked again, not quite sure at first: a bullet on a shelf beneath a mirror. He came to Roza’s side.
‘It wasn’t me, Roza,’ he said, sinking to a chair, daring to place his hands on her arms. ‘I promise, I swear, it wasn’t me. I don’t know what they were doing there, I don’t know how they knew, I said nothing to no one, I’d never risk doing or saying anything that might have…’