‘Aren’t you scared of getting stung?’ asked the Prior as Anselm hitched his habit and sat down.
‘Permanently. It comes with the territory’
‘You have other concerns? If it would help, go to the end of them.’ He paused and then added. ‘Why not start with John?’
Anselm couldn’t help but smile. At last the invitation had come to enter the grey area between himself and the Prior. Its shadow had followed him from Larkwood to Warsaw and back again. It lay between them here, among the hives. It fell upon the wild, trampled flowers.
‘I suppose I feel let down,’ conceded Anselm, shifting a little on the bench. ‘Pushed aside when I turned up to help; pulled back once I’d gone away Pushed and pulled when it suited. He might have shared more earlier, willingly rather than leave me to find out later by chance.’
The Prior thought for so long that Anselm thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he spoke, seeming to aim across the clearing, his head angled to one side.
‘You’re disappointed because he never told you about his mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nor about his shame and his longing to change her story and his own?’
‘Yes.’
‘His gamble with a man who called himself the Dentist?’
‘Yes:
This was part of the ground covered by the Prior and John all the years ago, trekking through the woods to Our Lady’s Lake. The Prior wouldn’t say so, of course, but leaving aside Exodus 22, previous knowledge of John’s past was the one explanation for why he’d sent Anselm to Warsaw without a moment’s hesitation. He’d made his mind up (in principle) thirty years earlier, when the chance to call on Anselm had seemed impossible to imagine. But then an archive had turned up in Dresden and Roza had flown to London.
‘Did you ever explain to John why you came to Larkwood?’ asked the Prior from a seeming tangent. ‘Did you tell him why you were leaving behind a way of life he’d shared and understood?’
‘No.’
He’d tried, but his friend’s mind hadn’t engaged with the mesh of Anselm’s words. This, too — he was sure — had been ground covered long ago in the woods. The Prior wasn’t surprised, and he had something to say:
‘Sometimes, Anselm — and especially with the most important parts of our lives — we cannot share who we are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh and spirit… and at certain times we can’t do it. Because, ultimately we cannot give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want to do so that we realise how immense we are… more vast and mysterious than the night sky; and alone.’
Anselm nodded, thrown off balance.
‘John didn’t give you plain facts because you were his friend. He wanted to give you so much more and couldn’t. But when the time came — and he waited patiently in the darkness — he sent you into his troubled past to find him. And now you know more than anyone else; more than you could reduce to words, if asked. This is friendship, Anselm. Knowledge beyond the reach of language. It’s what bound Roza to Father Kaminsky.’
The Prior had lanced a hidden abscess, instantaneously healing Anselm of a resentment that he hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge. He felt peculiarly light in his body and clear-headed with a sharper appreciation of the matters that had lowered his head in the cloister. His head fell now and the Prior, seeming to understand, spoke with a familiar tone of command:
‘Your concerns; go to the end of them.’
There was so much on Anselm’s mind: not just Roza’s mysterious victory over Otto Brack, but the tragedy of half-redeemed lives that peppered the surrounding landscape; Irina in Mokotow, Sebastian exiled, and Aniela smiling for no good purpose, while men like Frenzel lived as though the premiums would never stop coming in (an arrangement, admittedly that was now under close review). But the question that most troubled Anselm was how to understand Otto Brack. What was his relationship with evil?
‘Roza gave me a bit of a slap in the face when the Shoemaker was dying,’ he said, scratching the back of his head. ‘My entire outlook on Brack had been fixed by this inclination — and I can’t get rid of it, even now — that but for certain experiences, Brack would have been just like you and me. He might even be here in Larkwood, causing bite-size trouble. So I started building up this defence, before God and Man, about a damaged childhood, a limping boy who ended up in the hands of Strenk who’d only made things worse by forcing on the wrong sized boots. You know what I mean, it’s the stuff about screws, loose and tight. Damaged will, and all that. Father Nicodem was on board, too, but Roza wouldn’t have it, not completely’
‘What did she say?’
‘That he’d made a free choice. That damaged people can make undamaged choices, and I thought, blast it, you’re right, there’s a freedom in this, a total liberty, and thank God I’m not tied down to the effects of a cat jumping in my pram or someone’s messing around with a flat-head screwdriver. Roza says Brack did what he did because he wanted to. He was a vengeful man who didn’t want to leave his injuries behind. In Strenk he’d found himself another father who told a different kind of bedtime story, a grown-up one, and he wanted to listen so he could learn the words. Like John — like me, put in similar circumstances — he fancied his place in history.’
The Prior made a light cough, as he did when he wasn’t sure about a proposed change in the work rota. He unhooked his wire glasses and began fiddling with the paperclip repair and said, ‘Do you remember, once, you wondered if Brack was simply an evil man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, when you sat with him in the Warsaw Hall, what did you see?’
This was the nub of the problem for Anselm. It was why he’d been lifting up volume two in choir rather than volume three, pulling the red ribbon rather than the blue.
‘He spoke to me,’ began Anselm, scuffing his feet. ‘It was a sort of confession. He wanted to tell the whole world about his crimes, that he was proud of them, in a way for having grasped the nettle. And as I listened, I thought there’s room here for the cat and the screwdriver, sure… and I still do, despite Roza’s point that he’d made a lot of choices… but either way the picture of the man was uniformly dim.’
The Prior waited.
‘But as he was speaking I thought I saw someone else behind his words and actions… it was as though someone decent was trying to break out, to crack the hard surface of who he was. Whether the hardness was due to circumstance or choice didn’t really matter, there was some good in him. Even as he did something wrong he was trying to do something right. And I wondered if events had layers, and people had layers, and that evil might be the obliterating painting on top, but that in time, with the right kind of chemicals — something strong but not so strong to bleach the prosecutor’s hair — we might be able to get it off and find out whatever it is that still lies behind the original canvas with its unimaginable depth of colour.’
This refusal to believe that one layer saturated or transformed the other, his wondering if they could remain distinct was based not on an outbreak of pity, or a desire to reinstate the damaged childhood defence. Rather it was because as Brack had stumbled away he’d been like a man blinded by light. The truth, revealed, had had a coruscating effect on him. Out of his confusion he’d recalled another story, told by Mr Lasky recognising that his life should have been something noble and good.