Brack came to his feet, head held high, as if waiting for the absent applause to stop. When he heard the hushed silence, he moved instinctively to the podium, as if drawn by a magnet. On arriving, he listened surprised but attentive as his breathing grated through the loudspeakers… by some awful act of forgetfulness the microphone had been left on.
‘What’s private property?’ His voice, amplified, soared over the empty seats of the auditorium. He was getting back to basics. ‘I’ll tell you what my father told me. It’s a fence that someone’s put round a field and everyone else is simple enough to think that the grass on the other side was never theirs. What’s history? It’s the misery of the majority brought in afterwards to do the ploughing for a pittance. Well my father didn’t live to see the day but all the fences had gone. It was time to think again, from scratch. The reconstruction? It wasn’t about where the fences used to be; it was about how we shared the fields. Those of us who survived the war… we had a chance to build something new Something different. Something noble and good. Except, good things are never that simple.’
He scanned the room as if Anselm wasn’t there, drinking in the absent nods and shared indignation. The crowd knew where the speaker was going.
‘Because those old landowners, the old szlachta, would never accept change. They just want to turn up with their maps and title deeds and start rebuilding their interests, putting up the old boundaries — Brack leaned forward, urgent and raucous, stabbing the air, now — ’well someone has to stop them.’
He leaned back, listening to the echo of his realpolitik, nodding significantly.
‘Someone has to have the courage to do difficult things.’
He paused again, his voice resounding.
‘Someone must step forward to meet the demands of the moment.’
Brack turned towards Anselm as if appraising a snake in the grass. He seemed to be wondering if a man concerned about the next world had the slightest idea about how to handle this one, especially when it was in the throes of regeneration. Tentative and guttural, he tried to explain.
‘There’s a time in a child’s life when it’s most vulnerable. Those responsible for its growth must protect it at all costs. They act according to high instinct. Moralities are written afterwards.’ A shaking hand briefly tugged at a lapel, implying a kind of modesty. ‘It is no different with the renewal of society. There is a moment in its growth, just after its birth, when it is weak and defenceless. When those vested interests can creep into the nursery and suffocate the child, the child that will grow to overthrow their kingdom.’
Anselm tried to peer inside the two brown discs that seemed to hover over Brack’s face. His repugnance at the imagery of child protection was slightly overtaken by an almost technical observation: he’d heard two voices, that of Brack’s father talking to a boy about the field and fences; and someone else’s, making a speech about men born for the moment. Anselm thought it was Strenk’s.
‘There are men called to act in defence of tomorrow They must forget themselves.’ Brack’s teeth chafed his bottom lip. ‘They must do what others dare not do, for their sake. They must shoulder the burden. And they do it by terror. A brief wave of terror, to frighten off the agitators and hooligans.’ He looked aside, as if he’d heard a noise offstage — some whispering from the wings. Replying, huskily he became petulant, his voice barely sounding in the loudspeakers:
‘Do you think I wanted to shoot Pavel Mojeska? Do you think I wanted to harm his wife? Do you think I congratulate myself for having accepted those responsibilities?’ Turning back to Anselm and the microphone, he growled his complaint, sneering at the shallow minds of his carping detractors. ‘I say “No, no, no.” But was it necessary? I say “Yes, and again yes, and once more, yes.” I did what had to be done.’ He struggled in his loose brown suit, raising his head to give his shouting some leverage. ‘Because I believed and still believe that what we were trying to bring into the world was better than what was here before. I tried to save the child before they could wring it by the neck. They were the murderers. Yes, they were the criminals. They killed an idea that would have transformed the future… and for what great and noble purpose?’ He dropped his voice, nodding at Anselm as if he were simple like the majority, as if even he, a monk, might yet understand that the grass of the here and now was just as important as the heavens above; that it belonged to him. ‘For what end? To fence off the fields again. To raise another dung heap out of the ashes.’
Anselm wished the table had legs: that the red circle in the deep pile would rise up and put something of substance between him and Otto Brack. He was glad he’d never worked at the Hague, instructed to defend the executioners — the ordinary people who’d let something slip in their consciences, who now baffled the courts with the consequences of whatever it was they’d dropped. How do we comprehend? How then do we judge? Anselm had wanted to understand Brack, the roots of his relationship with evil, and now he was appalled. He’d expected a complex, twisted political philosophy something that just might begin to explain the killing and the torture. But all Brack had rattled off was a bedtime story: a fable about a garden and a quibble about fences, a handy catechesis cribbed from Voltaire, to hold on to while he pulled the trigger, simple propositions of faith that answered all the questions if you thought about it long enough, only there wasn’t time, because an urgent moment in history had called upon men to be great first and think afterwards. He had none of Frenzel’s wily intelligence, who’d learned his doctrine without caring whether it was true or not. Not Brack. He’d believed and cared. He’d never buy a slum in Prada. He’d disapprove. It would disgust him. He had a morality. And this was the man who’d argued with Pavel Mojeska. No wonder he’d said nothing. No wonder Roza had sat beneath a torrent of water. There was nothing anyone could say to challenge Brack’s credo. According to Father Nicodem, this was the man made by Strenk. This is what the Major had constructed with the ruins of a boy who’d lost his family someone ordinary, the apprentice who’d once felt love and gratitude. How to judge him?
‘You spoke about a new-born child,’ said Anselm, thinking it was time to put some uncomfortable questions.
‘Yes, an innocent life.’
‘That needed protecting?’
‘Yes.’
Anselm would have leaned on the table if he could, so instead, he stared at the carpet. ‘You’ve told me why people had to be shot, I was wondering if you might like to explain why Celina had to be-’
‘Don’t be clever with me.’
‘I’m not,’ replied Anselm, mildly ‘It’s just that I follow the steps you took to assuming heavy responsibilities of historic dimensions, but I don’t grasp the scheme to keep Roza quiet afterwards.’
The timbre of the negotiations shifted dramatically.
Brack didn’t change, as such. But it was as though he lifted the tracing paper over a colour print. There was a certain tinting to his voice: it became warmer. The lines around his argument became clearer. The picture, however, remained something out of Breughel’s unearthly imagination.
‘There was no scheme,’ he said, turning again towards the wings. ‘I thought I could make something of her. Here was a new life, unspoiled — ’ a foreign wistfulness came over him; the coarse sentimentality of those without the normal palette of feeling — ‘I thought I could raise her to understand what her parents had tried to destroy to bring something worthwhile out of the father’s death and the mother’s refusal to co-operate… her obstinate…’ The face that swung back to Anselm was a mask of worn out linoleum, the voice hard and dry. ‘But I failed. Celina wouldn’t listen. She turned everything upside down. At school, she wouldn’t even colour in between the lines. She was a lost cause: