She wasn’t listening. She stared ahead in a kind of trance, as if she were watching Celina’s film. Deep shadows like heavy paint lay around her eyes. John had never been this close before. He couldn’t help notice the fine hairs on her skin. She appeared at once innocent and fragile despite what she’d seen, despite what had been done to her, despite what she was looking at now.
‘Roza, I have friends… on both sides of the fence.’ John squeezed her arm, trying to get a reaction. It was like holding a bone from the butchers. ‘I can try and find out what went wrong. It’s my job, you know I’ll dig around and find out who-’
‘John.’ She spoke his name like it was a kind of slap to the mouth. Her voice crackled, strangely detached, unwired from the muscles round the lips. Harrowed and still in a stupor, she turned to John as if she’d fallen overboard, water framing her oval face, the hat, jaw and chin; her eyes wide with knowledge… knowledge of a life lived and a coming death. The mouth slowly opened, the skin of the lips seeming to tear across the centre. Her tone was dried out and paper thin. ‘John, promise me you will do and say nothing.’ She seemed to wait for a reply whereas she was trying to stay afloat. ‘Forget about the Shoemaker; forget about the Friends, forget about me: Then, not even noticing his beaten face, she turned away and drowned. She’d gone. There was no point in mentioning a passport.
John tiptoed out of the flat — a sort of reverential act to the body he was leaving behind. He crept down the stairs, hugging the wall.
‘How did she know the Dentist?’
The question echoed in the entrance hall. It tore at John all the way home. Had the Dentist said anything to Roza? Had he told her about CONRAD? Did Roza know what John had been doing? Of his place in the Big Game, his central place? The answers circled lazily like buzzards above carrion, black and distant, wings large and still.
John couldn’t get the key in the lock. Metal rattled against metal with his shaking. He knocked. Celina opened the door. Without looking, she walked back inside, dark against the light.
‘They won’t allow the film,’ she said, slumping on a chair by the dining table. Her eyes were bright and wet, her cheeks horribly black from the run of thick eyeliner. She’d given face paint a go. She’d gone out looking like Nefertiti. Now, she was… something from the Hammer studios. The bandages had been unwound and a curse unleashed.
‘I can’t take it any more, John.’ Her bare feet pointed inwards, her shoulders were low. A pink silk scarf had been wrapped into her hair. ‘My life has been cut into long strips. I want to be whole again. I want to be — ’ she dropped her head into her hands — ‘I don’t want much, I’ve never wanted much. I just want to be happy and free.’
John’s insides turned. He thought they might tip out on to the floor of his flat.
Do I love her? Or is it what she represents? She cleans me. She gives me tomorrow.
He looked at her narrow black jeans. Everyone else wore blue denim bell bottoms. Her toes were curled as if she were clinging on to a perch. He’d seen the nails that morning. They were coloured like a row of Smarties.
The telephone rang.
John made a start. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Celina. Her tears were dripping like rain from a blocked gutter.
The ring seemed to grow louder. Impatient. Angry.
John made a snatch for the phone, sending the console crashing to the ground, the wire tangled round his wrist. He yanked up the receiver and barked out some words — he didn’t know what he said, his eyes were still on Celina.
The announcement came after an offended pause. A few obvious details were confirmed first, but then the nameless functionary read out a text written by some other nameless bureaucrat. John sank to the floor, worked his wrist free and threw the phone as far as the wire would allow.
‘They’ve kicked me out.’
Celina didn’t react at first.
‘I’ve got two days.’
She sat up, turning around, one arm hanging over the back of the chair. She looked like a painting out of the Louvre, something unseen by Ingres, David or any of them. She was classical, offending and timeless.
‘My accreditation has been withdrawn.’ He was leaning back against the wall, hands loose in the gap between his legs. He wanted a beer. He wanted to be happy and free. ‘I’m finished. For collecting materials of an espionage character.’
He told her because it was going to come out. This was a fire he couldn’t hide. Now he was going to get badly burned. The masterpiece wasn’t moving. She was awfully still, terribly sad, agonisingly attentive: the watched and the watcher. He longed, desperately to crawl over to touch every brushstroke, feel every rise and fall in the impossible contours of her face, her arm, her hands, asking himself, ‘Is this real?’, but he daren’t move.
‘I can’t take it any more, John,’ she repeated. The black had reached her lips. The pink silk scarf had come loose and lay along one cheek.
She suspects nothing, thought John, coldly.
‘I’ve had enough,’ she said, with a brutal, hopeless finality.
The phrase turned in John’s mind like a light switch. Instantly he saw something odd. Anselm had used the very same words only recently just before John had come to Warsaw For some inexplicable reason — ostensibly for a jaunt — he’d brought John to a monastery in Suffolk. They’d gone up the bell tower. He’d looked down and said, ‘I’ve had enough.’
‘What of?’
‘Trying to find reasons.
‘For what?’
Anselm had just leaned on the stone ledge, four whopping bells behind his head, looking down at the dots of people on the ground — like Harry Lime in The Third Man, high up on the Ferris wheel in Prater Park. Only Anselm hadn’t got the eyes of a man cynical about the boundaries of pity… he’d been melancholy outreaching, vaguely desperate…
‘You’re not in love, are you?’
There’d be no reply.
‘Who is it? That ballet dancer? Your clerk? No… the jazz singer with the veils? Veil after veil will lift, but there must be veil upon veil behind?’
Anselm had just kept his gaze on the dots and the pink tiled roofs below Obliquely he’d muttered, ‘It’s like a stone in the shoe. Asking why it’s there doesn’t get rid of it. Chasing reasons is like…’
What had Anselm said? John couldn’t remember, damn it, but the message was clear enough: there’s no point in trying to find out why you love something… or someone… you’ve just got to get on with it, regardless of the implications.
‘Come with me,’ John blurted out.
Celina stared back, like Anselm had stared down.
‘Bring your film to London,’ mumbled John. ‘I’ve got friends. We’ll get it out in a diplomatic bag.’ She didn’t react. She just looked at him as if she were grieving. John made it across the floor and took the dangling hand. It was warm, the nails a dark purple, like mussel shells. He kissed each one, feeling the bangles against his forehead. ‘Please come with me.’ His eyes closed and he made a leap into the dark. He let himself fall, no longer resisting, knowing this moment had been coming ever since they’d first met to discuss art and resistance.
‘I love you,’ he said, for the first time.
John dialled 55876. Celina’s passport was organised for the same day Later in the afternoon, he tried to call back. He had to know if the Dentist had spoken to Roza about CONRAD; and he wanted to ask about the file… the file at the heart of their relationship. But it was too late. The line had gone dead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Anselm walked away from Father Kaminsky’s church like Roza had once left Mokotow prison: wondering where to go when he reached the junction. The collapse of his theorising had an immediate and profound effect: a loss of confidence in his judgement and the utility of Roza’s statement which finally showed itself for what it was — altogether useless. There were too many names on the quarterdeck. There was no way to allocate a stronger suspicion to one above another. Standing at the intersection a flood of irritation filled the void left by Father Kaminsky’s innocence: all he could do now was accuse someone. If they were guilty he might reach their conscience; if they were innocent, then they might be enraged enough to point the finger at someone else.