Klara Fielding
8th March 1925 — 1st July 1953
Anselm read the inscription several times as if more information might suddenly appear on the stone. This was John’s secret. He’d only told Roza. It was why he’d come to Warsaw.
‘A BBC journalist wanted to interview the Shoemaker,’ said Bernard. ‘Roza told Mateusz to arrange a meeting. When the guy arrived, Roza tailed him… and Mateusz tailed Roza. In turn, they came here, before convening at the agreed location as if nothing had happened. Mateusz thought nothing of it until much later, when Roza walked into a trap.’
Bernard had tracked down Klara’s family Not the English one, by marriage — they’d left the country — but the Communist Party members who’d come to Warsaw from Poznan after the war: her parents.
‘They were still fiercely proud of her memory,’ said Bernard, stepping to one side, moving his shadow off the grave. ‘Even though they knew nothing of her work for the state, they clung on to the fact that it was significant. That’s what the man in the dark suit had said at the funeral. He’d come round a week later with her medals, recognition from Warsaw and Moscow of her service to the people… difficult service.’
Anselm did the maths. ‘She was only twenty-eight.’
‘Yes:
‘What happened? She had a husband; she was a young mother.’
John, the child, had only just been born.
‘Suicide.’
Anselm breathed back the word.
‘She hung herself. But not in the garage or her bedroom. She chose an unguarded section of railings around the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Her parents didn’t know that, of course — it would have shattered the myth. And myths, even false ones, can heal if you believe in them.’
Mateusz had also tracked down her friends. She’d been carefree and funny Talented, too, a musician who’d won prizes at home and abroad. She’d been naive, thinking she could marry an English diplomat without attracting the attention of the security service.
‘Not one of these old friends knew she’d been recruited,’ said Bernard, buffing the felt with the back of his hand. ‘All they noticed was that she’d lost her sense of fun. They’d thought it was because of the Englishman, you know, that stiff upper lip and the stiff embassy parties. But then she made a confession of what she’d done, to these people that mattered. She planned to tell her husband, too. A couple of days later she vanished.’
One of those shattered friends, a former love — kindly rejected — hadn’t accepted the police explanation of a road accident. So he’d gone to the undertaker’s with a bottle of vodka and a Molotov cocktail and given him a choice. They’d got smashed making vows of secrecy about the tell-tale bruising to Klara’s neck and the laugh of the ubek who’d unhooked the body from outside his place of work.
‘But how does all this relate to John?’ asked Anselm, moved and sad, his mind drained of curiosity. ‘Did Mateusz ask himself that question? Did you?’
‘Yes, we did.’ Bernard scratched the back of his head again, not especially enjoying the moment he’d waited for since 1982. ‘Your friend told Roza that he’d come to Warsaw to make up for a mistake… that’s what Roza told Mateusz. She’d been overwhelmed by his honesty; she’d wanted to help him; she’d brought him into the struggle. But things looked very different once Roza was back in Mokotow and Mateusz had unearthed the nature of Klara’s mistake. There were only four people who’d known about that planned meeting with the Shoemaker: Father Kaminsky Mateusz, me and…’
Bernard left a sort of gap for Anselm to fill but, not wanting to name his friend, he made a kind of last-ditch loyal defence. He thought of his father sighting the Indians at Little Big Horn. He sensed an impending death and grief.
‘But John has no motive. He’d mapped the failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest and everywhere in between. He told me once of a betrayal — he meant her abandonment of him. He’d never forgiven her…’
Bernard listened, nodding with agreement, following the steps in Anselm’s thinking, not accepting — with immense regret — where they were leading. He stepped back, as if to get some distance from Klara, not wanting her to hear what he was going to say.
‘I’d imagine that for a child, the suicide of a parent could be a sort of betrayal. They weren’t important enough. Something was bigger. But that doesn’t mean they cease to love them, deeply and all they stood for.’
Anselm didn’t respond because he knew it was true.
‘You know, a child can grow to spend their life trying to find what they’ve lost. To reach the person taken away. They can seek out the streets on which that vanished parent walked… to see what they saw, to smell the air they breathed, to feel the same breeze on their skin. And they can do something even more desperate, a gruesome act of necrophilia: they can dig deep into the grave to salvage what their mother or father cared about. To bring those ideas and feelings back to life. To live them out, in the flesh, in mystical union with the person who turned their back upon them. Everything’s forgiven. They’re together again. It’s another kind of suicide. This time the child is dead. Everything they might have thought and felt has been buried in an unmarked grave. They’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, dying so that someone else might live.’
Again Anselm couldn’t speak. He was looking at Klara’s inscription, her life reduced to two dates. No wonder Mr Fielding had been lost for words.
‘We think he came clean to Roza because it gave him the best kind of cover, continued Bernard, in a changed voice; less compassionate, more logical. ‘The remorse of a child salvaging the mistake of his mother — it’s a good story and credible. The mapped failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest? Part of a long and detailed preparation. I think it’s called a legend. When your friend came to Warsaw, it was a homecoming. He’d arrived to finish off what his mother had started:
Sebastian didn’t argue as much as Anselm had expected. Perhaps it was Anselm’s crisp retorts, the impatient authority of a judge in control of his court. Holding the phone some distance from his ear and mouth, he spoke to the Warsaw skyline. No, it wasn’t Father Kaminsky who’d led Brack to Roza and it wasn’t Bernard Kolba. Their innocence had sparkled. Anselm cut short the remonstrations, asking him to check the SB archive for material on Klara Fielding and her son, John. Perhaps they might discuss the outcome the following evening. It had been a long day he’d said, and tomorrow he fancied a spot of aimless sight-seeing.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cooking when you’re blind isn’t as difficult as one might think, but it takes years of practice — at least when it comes to the more demanding recipes, and those heartbreakers, like Yorkshire pudding, which rise, or don’t rise according to a caprice of their own. John had been down the roast dinner road many times and, after almost thirty years, it held no terrors for him. Except for that pudding. It wouldn’t fall into line.
John’s hands were shaking, too, and that didn’t help. The risk of accident hovered in his darkness. Roza had said she’d come round. You’re a fool, thought John. You should have left well alone. Only all was not well.
John felt his way across the kitchen, tapping the edge of the worktop. His hands wandered towards the knife stand and he picked out the second from the left. Mechanically he chopped some garlic, moving fast towards his thumb and finger.
Roza wanted justice.
He’d nearly fallen over when he’d answered the phone and heard that voice. He’d gripped the door frame, leaning his head against the wall. He’d listened, trying to hear the traces of accusation in her rushed explanation — the blind are good at that; they can hear things above the frequency of ordinary sighted folk; but Roza was too good; she was too smart; she was wasn’t giving anything away She just stayed within the conventional waveband, leaving him to pick up the signal. She wanted to know who’d betrayed her. She’d said whoever betrayed her in eighty-two could help her bring Otto Brack to court by facing their past. All they had to do was agree to meet her.