Celina wondered what would happen next. She was fearful and loath to be dependent on him. ‘Will you find her… this woman?’
‘Me?’ He walked to the chair and shrugged on his overcoat. ‘No, you will.’
‘What?’
‘Who else?’
‘But what can I do?’ Celina was crouched on her chair, looking up.
‘Save him from himself, like I saved you. Do what you don’t want to do, for his good. Forget yourself. Co-operate with me.’
‘But I can’t follow him.’
‘No. And you can’t ask him either.’
‘What then?’
Celina’s father made an impatient sigh, as if to say he’d done enough already ‘Why not see if your boyfriend writes something interesting in his journal? For once the damned thing might serve some good purpose… it’ll keep all three of you out of prison. Find some other way if you like. It’s up to you. I’ll help, but this time you’ve got to pull your weight. You can reach me on five-five-eight-seven-six.’
The fire crackled and spat.
‘Do you see what he was doing? What he did?’ Celina’s voice rose slightly ‘He’d already been to you. He’d already sent you towards Roza. You’d already found her, and so he came to me. I didn’t know, I suspected nothing.’
Roza made the slightest moan, so low and so unobtrusive that in other circumstances it wouldn’t have been noticed. But here, in this vast yet cramped room, it was as though a flagstone had cracked. Something immense was disintegrating within Roza. But there was no collapse. Her eyes were on John, bleeding with emotion.
‘I read your journal.’ Celina’s admission came like a tearing at the mouth. ‘I knew where you’d been and where you were going.’
She’d read it every day worried that time was ebbing away; that her father would come back to arrest them both. She finally learned of a planned meeting by the grave of Prus. Celina was whispering now She’d dialled Brack’s number as if she were lodging a complaint at the passport office. It had been a quick, cold call.
They were silent.
The truth, at last, was out. The informer used by Brack had been his own daughter… but Anselm was running now, following the fizz of the burning fuse, head down, not seeing where he was going. Brack had told Roza the name of the informer and what they’d been doing for years. And that had silenced her… but why? She’d never met Celina. Brack’s delinquent child couldn’t be that significant.
‘You came home beaten by them,’ said Celina, carefully unfolding the tissue. ‘The next day I didn’t go to the censor. I rang my father. We met in the cemetery.’
Celina had sent him back to Prus, to where he’d betrayed her. She’d hit him hard across the face. His head had flown back with the force of the blow, but, on righting himself, he’d hardly seemed present. One calm hand had gone into his drab overcoat and he’d taken out a passport.
‘I threw it on the floor.’ Celina dabbed the corners of her eyes. ‘I wanted my freedom but not thanks to him. Then, when I came home, the phone rang. They’d given you two days. You asked me to come. You made a call for a passport.’ She clutched the tissue as if it were a shred of hope. ‘Was it the embassy?’
‘No.’
‘Five-five-eight-seven-six?’
‘Yes.’
Everything was ready thought Anselm, awed. Everyone had been put into position. Everyone had been moved. Polana was a game of wit and patience for three or more players. Waddington’s couldn’t have dreamed up the goal, the rules or the cost. Brack had won. But only because Celina’s importance was…
‘I couldn’t speak at the trial, John, because it was me who’d got you thrown out of Warsaw’ Celina was looking at her daisy again. ‘I left because I knew I couldn’t remain and keep the lie going, year on year. I’m sorry.
We’d both lost out, she seemed to say Something simple and beautiful had died, without even withering. Celina turned to Roza, her face anguished. Her hands came together. ‘I’m sorry I brought him to you. To this day I don’t know what my father was doing, or why’
Anselm wasn’t entirely sure that Roza was breathing. Her thumb had stopped moving. Her face remained drawn and shadowed; her eyes were open; the stare fixed. John seemed to look back, yet neither was really looking at the other. Why was Roza looking at John?
‘He was saving himself,’ replied Roza from her inner refuge.
‘But from what?’ asked Celina. ‘Why use me to get to John, and John to get to you?’
‘He was frightened.’
‘What of?’
‘The claims of the law My claims, those of my husband… and those of…’
My child. The fuse went phut just as the word burst inside Anselm’s mouth.
He sat, lips apart, as if watching torn clods fall in slow motion to the ground: he recalled what Roza had said in the bright light of what she had not said. There and then an elemental fusion took place in Anselm’s mind between the deeper depth of Roza’s statement and its surface meaning: Roza’s child lay beneath the page on blank blue paper, its name the one name she’d refused to disclose on the surface of the page.
‘I’ve understood, Roza,’ he said. ‘I know what happened in nineteen fifty-three.’
Disclosing certain tragedies can’t be done slowly There can be no cushioning. But Anselm was going to try He reached over and took one of Roza’s hands in his. Watching the tears spill free, he said, deliberately and slowly ‘Celina, Otto Brack is not your father.’
Anselm could feel the impact of his words. They’d crashed into Celina and a stunned hush had bounced back. As if he needed any confirmation, Anselm felt the slightest pressure from Roza’s fingers.
‘He’s not your father,’ repeated Anselm, even more slowly. ‘And your mother never sat in the corner lost in a puzzle, not minding what the day might bring. She minded more than she’ll ever be able to say.
Anselm couldn’t speak any more. The fire snapped and murmured, sending sparks upwards in a spray of light.
Chapter Forty-Three
There were many images and sounds, all seared into Anselm’s memory, which kept him awake that night. His mind became a screen showing nothing but the moments any censor of discretion would have cut and hid away — the parts where the actors broke down while the camera was running; the elements of tragedy best left to inference, for fear they unsettle any respectful observer. Sophocles knew his stuff: Oedipus tore his eyes out off stage; all the audience got was a man with blood streaming down his face. There are certain things you’re just not meant to see.
What was the more harrowing: the moment when Roza, trembling with fear, timidity and courage, took Celina’s hand from his? Or was it the slow, seeping words when Roza — her eyes closed, her head bent in an attitude of veneration and penitence — said, over and over again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’? ‘For what?’ mumbled Celina, confused and overcome. ‘For having failed you, for having let you go, for not being there as you grew and changed, changed so much.’ Anselm had been rigid, choking. Roza had nothing but a frayed string of lost years, and now this, this moment of regret and misery and jubilation with her daughter. So much to explain; so much to understand — with so much more time behind than was left in front. She’d looked so terribly alone, like a passenger who’d been left behind on the platform.
Or was it immediately afterwards when Celina, disorientated, asked about her father — when Roza had to explain in simple, direct words that he was dead, that he’d been shot? By the man who’d taken his place in her life.
‘I tried to find you,’ said Roza. ‘But I’d let you go without a name, to set you free. I didn’t know where you were until Brack told me what he’d done. But in telling me, he knew I couldn’t come to you. I couldn’t bring you the truth, because I knew it would be shattering. It’s taken me all these years to understand that it was your right to know, even if it destroyed who you’d become. You had a right to know who you really are. To know what had been done to you, to me and to your father.’