Or was it the sound of Celina’s breathing, catching like a broken zip, the unsteady movement jamming when she tried to reply? She’d taken Roza’s other hand, tears jolting from her eyes. They’d stood like that, motionless, speechless, their arms a kind of low swing bridge between them. Somehow, they had to cross the immeasurable distance, finding their own balance, all the while terrified of a fall, of some weak plank breaking underfoot.
If Anselm was forced to choose it would have been a quiet moment late next morning, seen by accident from the kitchen window It was the sight of Celina leading Roza through the crisp snow to her car parked beneath Larkwood’s plum trees. They moved cautiously fearing a sudden slip on hidden ice. Celina had one arm around Roza’s shoulder, the other holding her elbow, their heads leaning close together. Anselm had lingered, thinking that Roza had suddenly and dramatically aged. It wasn’t necessarily a dark thought, but he knew she was ready to die.
After Celina’s car had turned out of the gate, its occupants beginning the longest journey of their lives, Anselm, John and Sebastian — boots and coats borrowed where necessary — went for a long walk in the woods. They were white, silent and deep, every branch collared and tied with icicles and snow Feet crunched along hidden paths known only to Anselm; voices rose, gathering in the facts, an occasional outburst of anger echoing through the forest.
They spoke of the criminal Otto Brack.
In 1951, protected by the State, he’d shot two men. Threatened by a widow with future justice, he’d tricked her into letting go of her child as if it were an act of sacrifice. But he’d secretly taken the new life as his own, knowing that in the years to come the widow could never touch him without harming her own child: for who could tell their child that the man they hold as their father is, in fact, his killer?
Then, in 1982, when the possibility of overthrow first reared its head, Brack had organised Operation Polana, its goal to catch the Shoemaker; its secondary purpose to find Roza and tell her what he’d done: to warn her of the cost of justice. To give her a passport. To push her beyond arm’s length.
They spoke of Celina, the child abandoned by the woman who wasn’t her mother.
By using her Brack had secured her eventual silence, in the event that she ever learned of her past. A snide remark from the likes of Frenzel, if he’d ever uncovered the adoption, might have sent her on a quest. At its term she’d have learned that the woman in John’s journal was her mother: a woman she had betrayed. Brack had silenced mother and daughter with reciprocal shame. Even Sophocles, the specialist in unusual parent-child issues, hadn’t thought of that one.
And they spoke of the victim Roza Mojeska.
For thirty years she’d believed that Celina was proximate, if not close, to Brack. That she believed him to be her father. How had she grown? Who had she become? Roza had been paralysed by two conflicting imperatives, each with a moral character: to speak or not to speak; the claims of the truth as against the benefits of ignorance. Ultimately she’d recognised Celina’s rights.
But there was more to it than that.
Brack’s scheme exploited the natural bond between a mother and her child. He knew that Roza would choose silence rather than damage her daughter with information she need not know She’d been trapped by love. But Sebastian had urged her to do the last thing Brack would expect: to give her another reason for living. The challenge had led Roza to realise that shielding her daughter from the truth was many things — pity, compassion, mercy self-sacrifice — but it wasn’t love. So she’d set her hand to the unthinkable task of wounding her own child. But it had to be done with enormous care. As a preliminary, she needed the smallest indication from her daughter that she was prepared to talk about her past and the shadow of her presumed father. For that, Roza needed the gentle touch of an intermediary Which brought them on to her statement — that implement crafted to help her representative.
Frankly as an identification tool, it hadn’t worked. But as an example of moral technology it had the qualities often ascribed to Audi engineering. It ran smoothly to its destination; and so quietly you might not know it had arrived. Vorsprung durch Technik. Roza had placed Celina’s collaboration in its complete context: against the backdrop of the Shoemaker operation, fully described, showing, in effect, that she had done nothing to compromise its aims. Crucially she had not used her name. She’d asked about the film-maker as often as John had asked about the Shoemaker. This had been the one, decisive clue.
They came back to Larkwood chattering with cold, enchanted by the magic of the woods. John and Sebastian left for Cambridge railway station like old friends, a certain complicity between them as Sebastian explained the next steps to be taken upon his return to Warsaw: the obtaining of a witness statement from Roza to be followed by the arrest, charge and prosecution of Otto Brack.
‘You’ll keep me informed?’ asked John.
‘As matters develop:
It was as though John worked at the IPN. The only question was who had the senior position.
As Anselm drove slowly back from the station to Larkwood, minding snow drifts, distracted now and then by the magnificence of blank fields at evening, his thoughts turned to something that hadn’t been explored during that walk in the woods: the mind of Otto Brack.
On the plane out to Warsaw, Anselm had thought about the mystery of the man’s character: how he’d ever come to use good for evil ends. He’d been curious as a man might leaf through a textbook, seeking a simple explanation for why the moral cells broke down. But that was then, on the plane. He now knew what lay in Brack’s dangerous world. He couldn’t contain his meditation or understand its direction. He sought out the Prior, ostensibly to report back on the outcome of the Round Table talks, finding him once more in the woodshed. This time there was no work. Anselm sat on the piano stool, the Prior on the chopping block. He spoke the inimitable phrase:
‘Go to the end of your concerns.
As ever the Prior was inscrutable, not reacting when told of John’s innocence, nor seeking any tribute for being right about John’s intentions in coming to Anselm (he knew about Lebanon Cedars, why they fell and the direction of their grain). His only response was a sharp contraction of the eyebrows when Anselm explained the mechanism and consequences of Brack’s plan. As if they were both seated in its shadow, Anselm moved directly on to the matter that troubled him. It was a kind of fear.
‘I think I’ve been naive.’
‘Never accuse yourself on that score.’
‘No. I’ve been naive about evil, as if it wasn’t there. I’ve always tried to excuse it away you know, defeat it by pretending it’s not what it is. When I was at the Bar, I told myself the only reason one man brutalised another without any regret is because deep down he hadn’t made a free choice… he’d been beaten and starved as a child, he’d gone to the wrong school, made the wrong friends, and in the end, there’d been a screw loose in his free will. Or maybe he believed — sincerely but wrongly — that unrestrained violence was just one of the more unusual ways of doing something good. I still want to hold on to these… difficult routes to mercy.
‘And?’
‘Well, a part of me wants to find the path to Brack’s actions, precisely because what he has done is unconscionable. What happened to him, that he could do such things? Was he abused and deprived or does he just think wrongly? Alternatively is he that which scares me most, and which I’ve dared not consider — a simply evil man, with all the screws intact, none too loose, none too tight, a man who can’t blame his circumstances.’ Anselm hesitated, ashamed. ‘He killed men as if they were animals. He treated women as if they were rags to clean the mess off the floor. And now he turns the pages of a stamp album lamenting the gaps in his collection. And yet I still want to know if there remains in the darkness a narrow route to mercy.